Valetta, Malta
Why Don’t People Trust Science/Scientists?
Scientists typically write and speak to each other. The general public believes that there is a level of precision to scientific communication that does not really exist. Instead there are convenient shortcuts that scientists understand and appreciate that get lost in translation to the public. Let’s explore some of those shortcuts.
Marketing Research Findings to Boost their Importance: Most research is designed to discover basic biological processes. Neurons are the fundamental cell that is the basis for communication within the brain. An experiment may be designed to discover the array of patterns of these nerve cells. The description of these physical patterns may have important significance for how the brain functions or what goes wrong in a diseased brain. But at the end of the day, the description of the experiment and its findings would be boring to most people (including scientists). Instead of an objective description of the experiment, labels are applied to the research to give a real-life context for the findings…essentially to bolster the appeal of the research.
Here is a title from a scientific paper: Environmental Enrichment and Cafeteria Diet Attenuate the Response to Chronic Variable Stress in Rats. Rats fed a boring pellet diet and kept in a plastic cage had less of a reaction to stress than did rats given toys to play with and got chocolate, cookies and peanut butter in addition to their pellets. The stress? Depending on the day, they were tilted, put in a small enclosure, exposed to a flashing light, plopped in warm or cold water, or had a cage with another rat placed by them. Notice there is an element of framing the scenario. This sounds like a normal rat life rather than one boosted by the experiment. It is the control rats that really are the experimental group. They live in a boring cage, with boring food, and as a result respond more to stress. If the authors had a title for the same experiment that said an impoverished existence makes rats more vulnerable to stress, the response would have been along the lines of “no duh”. So researchers can frame the same experiment in different ways to get different reactions to the same outcomes. Seems a little shady.
Playing the Guessing Game: Scientists usually do not try to be deceptive and are often cautious in the face of limited information. At the same time science is an iterative process. Hypotheses and interpretations will necessarily change the more we learn. Another term for hypothesis or interpretation is guess. We are always guessing what the biological world is like. So we have measurables (data) and guesses (hypotheses). Climate change is a measurable reality. What caused the climate change is our guess.
People have been very frustrated with Dr. Fauci through all of COVID, partly because of his changing narrative. Why does his position keep changing? He must not know what he is doing. Why should we listen to him? Dr. Fauci is an expert who knows precisely what he was doing. He was making guesses about the current state of the virus and guessing about the future based on the information at hand. As that information expanded and he learned more from it, his guesses became more refined and even contradicted his prior guesses. He was being a good scientist. The ignorant approach was the political one in which judgements were made based on limited information, but then people refused to change their position in the face of contradictory evidence.
As scientists we are unfortunately not always objective. We bring our biases with us and can allow them to compromise our best guesses. Perhaps that is simply being human. For us all to be good scientists we must accept challenges to our hypotheses (guesses), a process called hypothesis testing. We like it when new information supports those guesses, i.e. hypothesis confirmation. Unfortunately, hypothesis testing, and not hypothesis confirmation, is how we learn and create new information in the world.
Pathologizing the Normal
Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in women has been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association since the publication of the 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This disorder is based either on a long-term history of low sexual desire or a gradual decline. To be characterized as a disorder, the low…
Are Females Aggressive? Did You Attend High School?
The commonly held notion of sex differences in aggression among mammals, that is males are more aggressive than females, is a convenient myth. It is derived from a culture in which overt, physical aggression is suppressed in girls from birth, while encouraging the same behaviors in boys. The counter argument to this social rearing hypothesis…
Getting Started
If Seinfeld was a show about nothing then I suppose this can be a blog about nothing. We are all part of a cast of characters that encompasses the world of biology. Our world. We are all scientists as science is the process of discovery. We have all spent our lives discovering the world around…
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The Science of Sex and Aggression 