Every year Edge asks a question of experts in a wide variety of disciplines and the title of this post was last years question. I figured I'd highlighted one issue that the seemed to present itself in a number of the answers. Michael Norton, a professor as Harvard Business School answered Science By (Social) Media. There he noted the following:
First, it is not clear that the best science is the science that gets known best. In one study that examined media coverage of research presented at a major scientific conference, fully 25% that appeared in the media never appeared in a scientific journal. .... Second, as the science that laypeople encounter is mediated more and more by the media, the biases of those media outlets—presumed and actual—will likely call into question the objectivity of the science that appears in those outlets, and of the scientists who conducted the research.
Climatologist Gavin Schmidt talked of The Disconnect Between News And Understanding:
But much of what is needed to understand a situation is not new. Instead, deeper knowledge of the context is needed to inform an understanding of why the present events have come to pass. The present situation in Afganistan makes no sense at all without an appreciation of the culture and history of the region. The latest pronoucement of a future climate impact makes no sense unless you understand how we know anything about how the climate system operates and how it has changed already. Understanding the forces driving the Arab Spring requires a background in the breakup of the Ottoman empire and the responses to the colonial adventurism that followed. Unfortunately this context is not in the least bit newsworthy.
In parallel with the above others noted increasing compartmentalization of knowledge, leading to a lack of understanding across areas. I'd tend to put a significant fraction of feminist research into the wilful blindness cateogry - to quote psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen's answer:
No one denies the important role that experience and learning play in language development. What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary.
There was also what one respondent dubbed Presentism, with scientists losing old research:
The very way in which science is practiced, for instance, rewards short-term memory combined with a sense that the present exists for the sake of the future. Ten-year-old scientific papers are now ancient—after all, over a million new papers are published each year. As a result, some groundbreaking work from the 1920s in, say, zoology, lies forgotten, and produced in new labs as if it had never been done before. Almost everything is archived; but nothing can be found unless one knows to look for it. Many may be reinventing the wheel, unaware that the historical permafrost is full of treasures.
All told to try to get through all of the responses will take quite a while but there's a fair number of interesting nuggets hidden in there.
