http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1

Yes, but there should be no tolerance for obviously, provably wrong arguments. Tax cuts do not reduce the deficit. Global warming is a long term problem. Abstinence only education increases STI transmission rates and teen pregnancy. There has been no long-term, provable effect of conceal and carry on crime rates.

These things shouldn’t be matters of debate. They shouldn’t be things that people are allowed to use to play the refs to push their political agenda. Tit for tat is not an excuse when people are just wrong.

If “truth” means “the objective ways of the world”, then I’d rather see science bloggers and journalists trust the scientific method in uncovering more and more bits of the “truth”, concentrating therefore on applying the method rather than trying to trascend it because they “know” what the “truth” is.

You must be talking about the Forbes/Pepsi school of objectivity.

What if he is not confident he knows who is competent to judge?

Perhaps because the discipline of verification is so personal and so haphazardly communicated, it is also part of one of the great confusions of journalism- the concept of objectivity. The original meaning of this idea is now thoroughly misunderstood, and by and large lost.

When the concept originally evolved, it was not meant to imply that journalists were free of bias. Quite the contrary. The term began to appear as part of journalism after the turn of the century, particularly in the 1920s, out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information- a transparent approach to evidence- precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.

Science journalists have to guide readers through the reasoning, point out examples of good scientific method as well as potential fallacies, fill in background that a newcomer to the area wouldn’t know, to bridge the gap between the technical literature and the non-specialists. They have to apply scientific scepticism and critical thinking for those who do not know how to do it themselves, and in the process teach it by example.

Where there is controversy, they should not make judgements, but neither should they uncritically parrot the conclusions of either or both sides. They should ask each side what their evidence is, and then explain that in terms that the reader can understand and interpret. This deals with the issue of ‘false balance’, because either one side will have no evidence, or explaining it with proper clarity will make their position look so bad they’ll probably withdraw. Good science journalism should look like an essay tutorial on critical thinking; including assumptions and uncertainties, so the current state of knowledge can be understood. If the data supports it and is reported honestly, then the ‘truth’ of the matter will be obvious without needing to be stated.

The job of a science reporter is not to separate ‘true’ from ‘false’, but to enable the reader to come to a scientific judgement (or not) based on the evidence; to understand the science, or as much of it as they can. This isn’t always possible, of course, but where it isn’t, the journalist should definitely not be setting up a scientific authority to simply assert a ‘truth’ in the name of science, or worse, filter out views they cannot themselves evaluate but which they have been assured by trusted ‘experts’ are false. That would itself be opposed to scientific principles.

Science reporters market is those who want the truth reported, so unless they are in the grips of a large magazine they and their pockets should benefit from this as well.

He was able to learn enough that in a double-blind study, in response to essay questions about facts of gravity wave detectors, he beat some professionals.

How is this relevant to the understanding of basic facts? We don’t ask the journalists to become experts on the consensus, but to be able to sort through the results especially when there is no consensus. It is the uncertainty in false positives we want quantified, not the certainty of true positives.

Science is performed by humans and the appropriate discipline for understanding how science is performed is sociology. Collins’ book may open some eyes on scientific objectivity and how truth is determined. He also wrote a book on the arguments and discussions about special and general relativity; eventually I’ll get around to buying a copy and reading it.

Maybe he did report on how facts are determined from measurement and theory, but from the above description it rather sounds like he reports on how consensus is formed.

In which case the relevant discipline likely is economy, since research is “the market of ideas”. It isn’t how persuasive an argument is in “discussions”, it is how well the results sells.

As for understanding how facts are determined from measurement and theory the relevant discipline ought to be “a science of science”. Today this is mostly blocked by the nutty and untestable area of “philosophy of science”, but testable theories like Popper’s falsifiability have started to come out. (And you must love the symmetry in that testability can be recursively and consistently bootstrapped by passing basic tests, while simple induction shows how the 19th century idea of science as induction fails. I certainly do!) And a whole lot of ad hoc heuristics have been published through the years.

Sure such a discipline could have touchstones with sociology, but it is way too early to know of it would turn out. IMO falsifiability seems to predict most of the basic process and its success. In any case it should be important to understand and eventually safe guard (or dare I say “improve”?) the process itself, even if it organically evolves to give good results in most current societies. People are too curious to let this be covered by the “philosophy of science” comfort blanket indefinitely and will get to grips with what the area really entails, I’m sure.

Journalists are paid to be skeptical. One of the best ways to discover the weaknesses in an argument is to talk to someone who disagrees with that argument. This person should be someone who is grounded in the field under discussion and have credible opinions. It’s simplistic to characterize this kind of reporting as “he said, she said.” Indeed, failing to find out the weaknesses in an argument is a far bigger failing than presenting alternative points of view.

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Science is performed by humans and the appropriate discipline for understanding how science is performed is sociology. Collins’ book may open some eyes on scientific objectivity and how truth is determined. He also wrote a book on the arguments and discussions about special and general relativity; eventually I’ll get around to buying a copy and reading it.

One of the interesting observations of the sociologists on science is that the farther away a particular scientist is from a fundamental question, the more assured he is of the facts involved. This is the reverse of what one would expect. But man is a social animal, almost everything we know, we know because someone told us. For example, we trust the people who weigh electrons to give us the right number, few of us have actually run an experiment to accurately measure it.

Everyday journalists, and i would include now bloggers across the spectrum, are, more often than not, struggling to balance their objective responsibilities between those who pay them, those who read them, and verisimilitudes self-realized. “I know X to be true, but the boss and readers really want Y to be true, and i have to say that.” It is much more difficult to do this in science reporting because, eventually, the truth comes out no matter what party (economic or political) is involved. And in this regard, i think tech writers are not sci-journalists, but merely those being paid to say X or Y.

That is not to say that physics is easy, but at least you have a stable and observable system in which you can conduct experiments and build on laws allready proven. Lots of other questions journalists report about do not have that luxory.