Humanities
I got this story from tdj (who posted it here). He liked it for other reasons (a quote from the piece's author K.C. Cole) but I think that if you replace the references to "editors" with "humanities majors" throughout the piece, it provides a good sense of something real in how the two communities work intellectually.
(I also find it refreshing after a day of people not getting the philosophy of science straight and making really dumb comments!)
Source: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/4/cole.asp
Weird Science
Why editors must dare to be dumb
By K.C. ColeLike many beat reporters, science journalists spend a great deal of time educating their editors about the peculiarities of their fields, and by and large those exchanges are not only illuminating but ultimately lead to better stories. But there’s one place we hit a wall.
No, it’s not that editors aren’t smart enough to understand science. Actually, it’s the opposite: they’re too accustomed to being smart, and thus can’t deal with the fact that they don’t understand it. And because they’re uncomfortable feeling confused, readers are left in the dark about a universe of research that eludes easy explanation.
I was discussing this problem recently with a colleague who had been beating his head against the wall for months trying to get a story about a mysterious “dark force” in cosmology past editors at The New Yorker: “They kept saying they didn’t understand it!” he complained. Well, of course they didn’t understand it. Nobody understands it. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting.
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
All the more reason it’s so refreshing that readers of science stories don’t seem to mind a bit of confusion - even when the subject matter is difficult or counterintuitive: ten-dimensional space, for example, or fossils for foot-long “bugs” that crawled out of the sea 480 million years ago. Every science writer I know has had the experience of readers coming up to them and saying: “Gee, that was fascinating; I didn’t understand it, but I’ve been thinking about it all day.” Readers often inquire about books where they can read further on a subject, or even primary sources.
Editors, however, seem to absorb difficulty differently. If they don’t understand something, they often think it can’t be right - or that it’s not worth writing about. Either the writers aren’t being clear (which, of course, may be the case), or the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about (in some cases, a given).
Why the difference? My theory is that editors of newspapers and other major periodicals are not just ordinary folk. They tend to be very accomplished people. They’re used to being the smartest guys in the room. So science makes them squirm. And because they can’t bear to feel dumb, science coverage suffers.
So what is it about science that makes them uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
In fact, this is one place in which the intelligent-design people have a point. It is unfathomable that complex life forms evolved in tiny increments over time through random mutation and natural selection - that our ancestors are bacteria and our siblings are fish.
We know it happened nonetheless because we have multiple lines of evidence: the fossil record, DNA, morphology, embryology and so on. (We even see evolution in action right in front of our noses. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be worrying about bird flu.) But to pretend evolution “makes sense” in some ordinary way does our readers a disservice (and too often leads journalists to neglect to mention the evidence at all).
Science muddles our minds in many other ways as well. For example, much of it deals with essentially invisible things. I once had a hard time convincing an editor of the reality of curved space-time (Einstein’s extremely well-tested explanation of gravity) because, she said, “You can’t see it.” Actually, you can see it - among other ways, through gravitational “lenses” that bend light just the way the lens in a camera does.
Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
It’s essential to know not only what scientists know, but also what they know they don’t know. This is an unfamiliar concept to editors used to dealing with politics or sports.
And then there’s the fact that data are always to a certain extent ambiguous. Translating the behavior of retroviruses or superconductors into words takes a lot of interpreting - even for scientists. There may be more than one correct answer. Or no description in lay language may be able to do justice to the subject at hand.
For all these reasons and more, good science journalists know that if they’re not dealing with subject matter that makes them dizzy, they’re probably not doing their jobs.
The best editors understand all this. As for the rest, perhaps Weird Al said it best: sometimes you just need to "dare to be stupid."
A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, K.C. Cole teaches science journalism at the University of Southern California. Her latest book is Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos.
(I also find it refreshing after a day of people not getting the philosophy of science straight and making really dumb comments!)
Source: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/4/cole.asp
Weird Science
Why editors must dare to be dumb
By K.C. ColeLike many beat reporters, science journalists spend a great deal of time educating their editors about the peculiarities of their fields, and by and large those exchanges are not only illuminating but ultimately lead to better stories. But there’s one place we hit a wall.
No, it’s not that editors aren’t smart enough to understand science. Actually, it’s the opposite: they’re too accustomed to being smart, and thus can’t deal with the fact that they don’t understand it. And because they’re uncomfortable feeling confused, readers are left in the dark about a universe of research that eludes easy explanation.
I was discussing this problem recently with a colleague who had been beating his head against the wall for months trying to get a story about a mysterious “dark force” in cosmology past editors at The New Yorker: “They kept saying they didn’t understand it!” he complained. Well, of course they didn’t understand it. Nobody understands it. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting.
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
All the more reason it’s so refreshing that readers of science stories don’t seem to mind a bit of confusion - even when the subject matter is difficult or counterintuitive: ten-dimensional space, for example, or fossils for foot-long “bugs” that crawled out of the sea 480 million years ago. Every science writer I know has had the experience of readers coming up to them and saying: “Gee, that was fascinating; I didn’t understand it, but I’ve been thinking about it all day.” Readers often inquire about books where they can read further on a subject, or even primary sources.
Editors, however, seem to absorb difficulty differently. If they don’t understand something, they often think it can’t be right - or that it’s not worth writing about. Either the writers aren’t being clear (which, of course, may be the case), or the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about (in some cases, a given).
Why the difference? My theory is that editors of newspapers and other major periodicals are not just ordinary folk. They tend to be very accomplished people. They’re used to being the smartest guys in the room. So science makes them squirm. And because they can’t bear to feel dumb, science coverage suffers.
So what is it about science that makes them uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
In fact, this is one place in which the intelligent-design people have a point. It is unfathomable that complex life forms evolved in tiny increments over time through random mutation and natural selection - that our ancestors are bacteria and our siblings are fish.
We know it happened nonetheless because we have multiple lines of evidence: the fossil record, DNA, morphology, embryology and so on. (We even see evolution in action right in front of our noses. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be worrying about bird flu.) But to pretend evolution “makes sense” in some ordinary way does our readers a disservice (and too often leads journalists to neglect to mention the evidence at all).
Science muddles our minds in many other ways as well. For example, much of it deals with essentially invisible things. I once had a hard time convincing an editor of the reality of curved space-time (Einstein’s extremely well-tested explanation of gravity) because, she said, “You can’t see it.” Actually, you can see it - among other ways, through gravitational “lenses” that bend light just the way the lens in a camera does.
Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
It’s essential to know not only what scientists know, but also what they know they don’t know. This is an unfamiliar concept to editors used to dealing with politics or sports.
And then there’s the fact that data are always to a certain extent ambiguous. Translating the behavior of retroviruses or superconductors into words takes a lot of interpreting - even for scientists. There may be more than one correct answer. Or no description in lay language may be able to do justice to the subject at hand.
For all these reasons and more, good science journalists know that if they’re not dealing with subject matter that makes them dizzy, they’re probably not doing their jobs.
The best editors understand all this. As for the rest, perhaps Weird Al said it best: sometimes you just need to "dare to be stupid."
A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, K.C. Cole teaches science journalism at the University of Southern California. Her latest book is Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos.