Chinese Whispers

Ben Goldacre: There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well ... [and] until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon.

Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely – since they’ll be the ones interested in reading the stuff – people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it’s edited by a whole team of people who don’t understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given “science communication” chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

amoebic vodka: As for scientists taking responsiblilty for communicating science to the public, we have to ask why? In most cases companies and government bodies don’t expect the people responsible for decision making and doing the job to talk to the media. They employ spokespeople or entire PR departments to do that for them.

MostlySunny: What you have quite rightly highlighted in your column is the powerful effect the
media has on society in shaping popular “opinion” and “morality”. The media defines for society “good”, “bad”, “right” and “wrong”.

John A: I have often read both scientific papers and the newspaper reports and have found that the reporter has completely misunderstood the paper and even added conclusions that just didn't hold. If a factually false and conceptually misleading article is written concisely and clearly is that good science reporting?

Disseminating knowledge from the scientific community to a scientifically undereducated public requires effort on the part of all those involved. Scientists communicate all the time at conferences, in papers and indeed to anyone who shows the remotest interest (as many have learned to their cost at parties). It is the media's job to inform and educate the public, not the front-line scientist's. If the media is incapable of understanding scientists and unwilling to employ those who can, it is lazy and unfair to demand that scientists should come to them while they remain resolutely fixed.

amoebic vodka: We disagree that it is the job of the media to educate and inform. it is the job of the media to sell more copies, get more viewers or whatever it is the company in question needs to make money. In most cases this means the purpose of the media is to entertain (the exception perhaps being the BBC).
It’s not just science, the media misinterpretation of statistics in particular affects other subjects too. The annual ‘exams are getting easier’ stories for example.

Debate taken from 'Bad Science' blog, see here

Implicit here is the idea that advanced artists (and Lenins and Maos) see things ordinary people cannot, and therefore have a right to lead - or at least to special autonomy. So: "Avant-gardism is grounded in the dangerous notion that there exists an elite class possessing enlightened consciousness."

This is blunder number two, and it leads to the hoarding, rather than sharing, of information; to obfuscation and dissimulation, rather than openness and transparency; and to the deliberate blockage of autonomy and mutual self-empowerment.

[Gene Ray]
Art Schools Burning & Other Songs of Love and War, Chap. IV, para. 12

Scientists are generally a complex bunch who are extremely introverted but also love talking about their work to anyone who is interested. That's the problem. The 'public' aren't interested unless there's a 'sexy' conclusion or headline that can be given in the 20 second slot they'll allocate you on the evening news - at a workshop I attended (entitled something like 'communicating with a non-science audience and the media') I was told this about my own research by someone who used to be the editor of the financial times, and someone who used to be the news editor for Radio 4 (our supposed 'high brow' radio station)and apparently a well known presenter of Watchdog in the 80s.

The man from radio 4 was putting words into my mouth and drawing false conclusions from my work within 30 seconds.

Not sure about any 'deliberate blockage of autonomy' - maybe we don't communicate because we can't, in the conventional channels anyway. At least, we are blocked from communicating by a select few who choose what is and what is not interesting..

Further, there's the adjunct issue that everyone has different brains which are expert in different areas and interested in different areas. I have great difficulty digesting any engineering papers - this prevents me from bulding bridges and complex metal structures, but do I really want to anyway? The issue there is co-operation and collaboration. We can't do it all ourselves, so we need community to capitalise on those who are experts in those areas to help us fulfil our own goals.

[Debbora]

Adorno is allergic to the power-relations involved in propaganda and commercialism. For him, to countenance using something as imbalanced as the mass media to put over a "progressive message" is to agree with manipulation, setting up the artist in a hierarchy above the audience.

'Theodor Adorno and Mass Culture' 

In 2004 Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy's presidential address to The American Sociological Association called for a public sociology. Burawoy considers the point that sociology has a role to play in the public domain and suggests that the academic sociologist should be more involved in public debate.

One of the main differences between the role of the critical sociologist and public intellectual is the ability to have a relationship with popular media resources outside the academic realm.

'Pierre Bourdieu'
Wikipedia

When Mr. Smith enters the board room of his company, he is expected to limit his thinking narrowly to the specific purposes of the company or to those of that part of the company which he "represents."

Mercifully it is not entirely possible for him to do this and some company decisions are influenced by considerations which spring from wider and wiser parts of the mind. But ideally, Mr. Smith is expected to act as a pure, uncorrected consciousness - a dehumanized creature.

[Gregory Bateson]
'The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation', Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.452

A lot of the internal processes of these organisations, are devoted to the propagation or diffusion of the same ideas across thousands of different offices and organisations. Thus policies acquire an inertia, as more and more actors buy into them and further these policies in their own small ways.

It is very hard to sell many people at once on complicated ideas, and so there is inevitably an emphasis on simplicity and an absence of strategy. The ideal policy in this environment will be one where more of a given action is good and demanded, and less of a given action is bad and to be abhorred.

[eugyppius]
'Government by Vampire Zombie Squid', eugyppius: a plague chronicle

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The Medicalisation of Everyday Life

Glossy magazines told stories about couples with relationship problems who went to their GP, and the GP didn’t understand their problem (the first paragraph of any medical story in the media). Then they went to the specialist, and he didn’t help either. But then they went to a private clinic. Here they did blood tests - hormone profiles, esoteric imaging studies of clitoral bloodflow - and then they understood. The solution was in a pill, but that was only half the story, and the diagnosis was almost more important: she had a mechanical problem. Rarely was there a mention of any other factors, that she was feeling tired from overwork, that he was exhausted from being a new father, or finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that his wife was now the milky mother of his children, and no longer the nubile sex vixen he first snogged on the floor of the student union building to the sound of Don’t You Want Me? by the Human League in 1983.

This is because we don’t want to talk about these issues, any more than we want to talk about social inequality, the disintegration of local communities, the breakdown of the family, the impact of employment uncertainty, changing expectations and notions of personhood, or any of the other complex, difficult factors that play into the apparent rise of antisocial behaviour in schools.

This wishful deafness to the clamour of reality reaches its purest form in our newfound obsession with food, as if it was the most important lifestyle risk factor for ill health, as if every technical detail should be devoured and acted on, for the promise of eternal zest. From the Daily Mail’s ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into ones that either cause or cure cancer, to daytime television’s obsession with the healing power of this week’s magic berry, there is no end to this material. Should you believe it? No. I have demonstrated time and again how these claims are flawed in their own specific cases. But something more interesting is being ignored in the background.

The World Health Organisation’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health reported this week, and it contained some chilling figures. Life expectancy in the poorest area of Glasgow - Calton - is 28 years less than in Lenzie, a middle-class area just eight miles away. That is a lot less life, and it isn’t just because the people in Lenzie are careful to eat goji berries for extra antioxidants, and a handful of brazil nuts every day, thus ensuring they’re not deficient in selenium, as per nutritionists’ advice.

People die at different rates because of a complex nexus of interlocking social and political issues including work life, employment status, social stability, family support, housing, smoking, drugs, and possibly diet, although the evidence on that, frankly, is pretty thin, and you certainly wouldn’t start there.

But we do, because it’s such a delicious fantasy, because it’s commodifiable and pushed by expert PR agencies, and in some respects this is one of the most destructive features of the whole nutritionist project, graphically exemplified by figures such as Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. Food has become a distraction from the real causes of ill health, and also, in some respects, a manifesto of rightwing individualism. You are what you eat, and people die young because they deserve it. You hear it from people as they walk past the local council estate and point at a mother feeding her child crisps: “Well, when you look at what they feed them,” they say, “it’s got to be diet, hasn’t it?” They choose death, through ignorance and laziness, but you choose life, fresh fish, olive oil, and that’s why you’re healthy. You’re going to see 80. You deserve it. Not like them.

Genuine public-health interventions to address the social and lifestyle causes of disease are far less lucrative, and far less of a spectacle, than anything a lifestyle magazine editor or television commissioner would dare to touch.

There is no glamour in “enabling environments” that naturally promote exercise, or urban planning measures that prioritise cyclists, pedestrians and public transport over the car. There are no votes, it seems, in reducing the ever-increasing inequality between senior executive and shop-floor pay. When do you ever hear about elegant ideas like “walking school buses”? Somewhere near you, a softly spoken public-health official has probably tried to interest your local paper in a story on them; presumably the latest urgent food-fad news left no space.

We love this stuff. It isn’t done to us, we invite it, and we buy it, because we want to live in a simple universe of rules with justice, easy answers and predictable consequences. We want pills to solve complex social problems like school performance. We want berries to stop us from dying and to delineate the difference between us and the lumpen peasants around us. We want nice simple stories that make sense of the world and if you make us think about anything else more complicated, we will open our mouths, let out a bubble or two, and float off - bored and entirely unphased - to huddle at the other end of our shiny little fishbowl eating goji berries.

[Ben Goldacre]
Bad Science, extract can be found here

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This is about people feeling like they’re out of control, and people’s reaction to unalterable fate. It’s about superstition, really.

People who work in professions where they believe they have no control over the outcome tend to be the most superstitious. Examples include coal miners, who perform all kinds of rituals before going underground, because the mine might explode. They see this as outside of their ability to do anything about it. Sports people are also very superstitious and again, this is because they believe they have no control over the outcome of the game.

If we believe we believe we have no control over an outcome, we tend to be superstitious. If we have no firm foundation of belief, we go a little crazy. All you have to do to control people is confuse them a little bit, and, as they flap about searching for truth, guide them where you want them to go.

What all the health scares have actually done is confused people into believing they have no control over their lives or their own well-being. And THAT’s why they believe popping pills can cure everything, including “syndromes” that don’t actually exist. In past societies, they might have performed a rain dance, or made a poultice out of eggs, chicken feathers and tar. Now we take a gelatine-coated pill. But there’s no real difference.

In some ways, medical doctors are guilty of propagating this. Doctors make no effort to explain WHY a pill works. Most doctors don’t even explain what they’re prescribing. Instead, from the patient’s point of view, they’re given a magical ticket, that they present to a shaman (a chemist), who then gives them magical food they must swallow that clears up their strep throat or make them stop feeling so depressed. They may as well touch wood every hour, or take a pill full of fish oil…

Doctors should work harder to explain what they’re doing, even if the patient is resistant (and I realise that most are) That should be part of a diagnosis session—an essential element of bedside manner. “You must understand what I am telling you.”

Once that’s done, people will be more resistant to quack cures, and made-up illnesses, because they will feel they are in control.

This is the big difference between now and 50 years ago. 50 years ago we felt we knew what was what. If you had a cold, you drank lemon and whiskey, and stayed in bed. You walked daily and ate an apple a day because “it’s good for the constitution”. We had a definite idea of what was good for us, even if sometimes it was off the mark. Nowadays we have no concrete idea of what’s good for us. One report says wine will slowly kills us. Another says that a glass a day will stop us dying of a heart attack. One report says fast food will kill us. Another says that a Big Mac a week is actually good for us. MMR jab? Good for our kids. Bad for our kids. Confusion reigns. Doctors sit idly by, smug in their ivory towers, with their head in order, and baffled as to why everybody elses’ head isn’t in order.

The bigger picture is about the nature of humanity, and how we respond to knowledge (and the lack of it). This is perhaps one of the biggest issues of our time as we have more and more knowledge, thanks partially to the Internet, but also thanks to the fact we’re living in a sci-fi universe when pretty much everything is possible.

[John Smith]
http://www.badscience.net/2008/09/the-medicalisation-of-everyday-life/

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Open Source

In the art world there is so much emphasis on originality. Artists buy right into that, and even though they are always influenced by other people they try pretending that they are not. The galleries promote this idea and encourage "signature styles", rarification and the star/celebrity system. I can see why the galleries would like that way of doing business because it allows them to inflate prices and make demand, but for artists there is no real benefit.

It just suppresses the true way that people develop their work through adapting and hybridizing and creates an environment where artists feel like they have to protect and make secret their process rather than sharing it freely and feeling good about doing that, which I think would be much more healthy both for individuals and as a system.

[Harrell Fletcher]

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alternatively if you are a commentatory person and think this is even slightly useful then do lift bits of it. i am a pretty procrastinatory campaigning hobbyist journalist so what other people regard as plagiarism often feels like a massively positive outcome to me.

[Ben Goldacre]
Bad Science (blog): http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/a-characteristically-amateurish-and-socially-inappropriate-approach-to-pitching-an-article/

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As writers we choose our words from the selection given to us, and arrange them as best we can in order to convey a message. Some people are deemed to convey their messages more effectively than others; and some see an opportunity in this ability, and attempt to gain from the fact that they can convey messages effectively.

Regardless of the way in which we stack the blocks, it remains that the blocks are not ours.

With this in mind, I will freely use a combination of words that another has used before me if I think that doing so will help me to more effectively convey a message.

My chief concern is with conveying a message in the most effective way possible. To put it another way; my chief concern is with uncovering Truth. Everything is second to this.

Outside the concerns of commerce and the immature ego, ownership means little. It has no constructive value. It is unfortunate that we live in a society that seems to value these concerns more than Truth.

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