Problem with popular science consumption: A case study

[For Turkish speaking friends, a similar discussion in Evrim Ağacı’s video: ]

I recently had a long debate with my long time friend and collaborator Ugur Engin Deniz on the topic of bad science reporting. After setting a few points clear in our discussion, I wanted to document them for future reuse, because this topic comes way too often, and it is an important part of our lives.

The discussion was triggered by a highly problematic news article of a website called Physics-Astronomy, on an interesting theoretical study.

I had several complaints about the news report, and its reception in social media.

1- About the actual study:

“Non-singular and Cyclic Universe from the Modified GUP” where “GUP” stands for “generalized uncertainty principle”. This is a study by a few respectable theorists, who have been in this business for a while. The new study is an increment to a long course of studies, in collaboration with different individuals over time. The starting point of the theoretical study here is the modification of the well-known uncertainty principle: DxDp > h which is here modified to DxDp > h + kp^2 where k is a coefficient so so so small that it only affects the physics way below the “planck scale”. The physics of the singularity is indeed the physics beyond the planck scale, in very very small spatial dimensions (and super huge momenta). Also, it happens to be the area that we are quite far from our reach experimentally. Experimental physicist are working hard to push our knowledge of physics to smaller and smaller scales, but the topic of the discussion here is much farther than the challenge we are dealing with at the moment. Beyond that, is our imagination, and mathematical skills, to put those imaginations into a language that can be shared. This is the job of the theorists: They are writing the mathematical poems of alternative realities, each of which we aim to check against reality one day. Some poems rhyme better, in the language that we have invented so far. Not having a singularity in the model is such a rhyming verse. But that’s only elegant until we learn so much about reality that our language changes.

I congratulate my fellow theorists, for the hard work they put into this draft, and thank them for sharing it in an open manner with the rest of the world. I personally may not be quipped with the skills to spot any mistakes in the flow of the argumentation, I leave it to the peer-review committee, however I do appreciate the effort to describe the argumentation clearly. Please do read the manuscript, even if you have difficulty, try to understand the flow of ideas:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00560

2- About science

The four authors of the study that we mention are not the only people working on this topic, and theirs is not the only model guessing how the very early universe was. I’m guessing that thousands of physicists are right now trying to invent new creative ways of setting a mathematical framework that can help to talk about these phenomena, and there are many studies being published every instant. They all have as much value as the labor that went into them, no scientific study (if within some certain intellectual ethics) is more precious than others. We need to question the conclusion-based hierarchy imposed on the value of these studies, by media and other sources of pressure, and observe its severe damage on science and society.

For the sake of keeping focused, I’m cutting the discussion short here, but let me promise that this discussion will be followed up with volumes of work, by me and numbers of concerned scientists…

(A good watch: John Oliver summarizes the problem in a good way, not to be regarded as the complete criticism of course.)

3- About the popular science page in question

First of all, let’s go over the inaccurate statements, then we can criticise the overall attitude.

a- Title says “The scientists claim to have discovered” : This is not true, the authors of the manuscript have no claim on any discovery. In general, theorists do not discover things.

b- The article says the study is published in Nature, and links to the arXiv preprint. arXiv and Nature are very different things. The study is not (so far) published in Nature (which implies a peer-review of the study, enhancing its reliability), it is posted on arXiv, which is an open platform for sharing preprints, without any peer-review. This little inaccuracy in the article changes its quality as news by a serious amount.

Now, let’s get to the point:

Just go to the main page of Physics-Astronomy and scroll through the titles. In each title, you can see the extra effort to catch attention:

“New survey reveals we were very wrong about the number of galaxies in the universe” : No, we were not very wrong, because we were never so certain to being with. You are just trying to dramatize it.

“Voyager 2 may have been hacked as it entered deep space” : It is not hacked, such digital malfunctions are daily life of applied scientists. (The article later cites, through telegraph .co .uk, Hartwig Hausdorf, a UFO expert, by referring to as “some researchers”)

“Latest patent for the ‘impossible’ EM Drive has just been made public – and it’s wild” : Do you really need to tell the audience what they should conclude already from the title? And if you’re not gonna explain what is “impossible” and what is “wild” about it later in the article, why are you using those words in your title?

… and all the other articles …

In conclusion, the Physics-Astronomy page is nothing but a clickbait market, its purpose is to capture maximum attention, with no concern about the consequences on the public understanding of science. This attitude harms science, for the reasons briefly mentioned in (2).

4- What to do?

The above discussion holds for a lot of science reporting media outlets, and, unfortunately, the attitude of result glorification extends even back to the public interfaces of scientific institutes themselves, and even the scientists trying to publish results. It is easy to complain about it, but very challenging to replace with an alternative science culture. So challenging that many times it discourages the scientific people to give up, and accept the media as it is, trying to believe that “it is better than nothing”.

My long debate with Ugur Engin was on this last point – I was claiming it is “worse than nothing”, that it is pure damage. This is a bit of the subjective part, and I’m open to a wider range of attitude regarding this point. We can share these news, try to get attention to the papers, but we really need to question every part of the process without compromise.

The news media will be always like this, by construction. Social media was marketed as an alternative to this (as was many other forms of media when they were first introduced), however it’s nothing different. Any content creator will be more concerned about the content being first and foremost achieved through them, by quantities, rather than (with the cost of) the quality of the content.

The solution I find so far is a change on the audience side, not on the media side. We need to work hard (agitate, educate, organize) in public spaces, workshops, social circles, to create a culture that fact-checks (a popular term these days – surely to be corrupted soon!), that searches, researches and actively seeks the knowledge rather than consumes the products of media. The universe is interesting, with its elements, its history, its fate. So is the humankind, the biological life, the technological evolution, the social structures and constructs. Go seek your questions and let them guide you.

Don’t let the answers precede your questions.

*It is an obligation to write a clickbait criticism by using a clickbait. Not the first one to do it, not the last…

This work is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.