Comments
Comment by g:
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The problem of using “witty” or “clever” analogies to explain science is quite prevalent within the scientific community. too. The specialization of disciplines means that, even within the biomedical sciences, explaining an interaction in thermodynamic terms to a person who is embedded within the cell biology field can be very hard without an analogy. And most of the time the analogy stupifies the meaning, and the dialogue ends with a “so fucking what?!” conclusion.
I think the CERN-LHC thing is mild in comparison. Science writing is so bad these days that I’ve stopped being shocked by its boring and stupid nature. One cannot blame the writers, per se. I think it’s due to a lot of presumptions about the average public understanding about science. So either the perceptions are really bad, and the writing has to fit that. Or, the writers are wrong, we’re all smart and perhaps a few more details would be well received.
Comment by ssp:
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You may well be right about the writing in general and communication between disciplines. It probably boils down to many parts of advanced science not being comprehensible with a single paragraph of explanations – however unpopular that may be.
Yet I think the writers need to take the blame for simply not giving the actual information but giving witty analogies only. If they think they need the analogies to keep the ‘dumb public’ reading, fine. I could simply ignore that. But leaving out the actual numbers means that they omit all the information.
With a longer term perspective this is even worse: If one got the numbers along with the analogies, one could at least start building an ‘intuition’ for them. How many Joule / calories make a big meal? How many make a fast proton? How many Tesla make a strong magnet? Even though people read a lot about particle accelerators in the past week, the opportunity to actually learn anything from that stream of ‘information’ seems to have been lost.
Of course one could blame editors as well, perhaps those do the dumbing down. But I am happier blaming the journalists. Because in my romantic image of the world they will fight for good texts and argue with the editors and eventually leave the editors if they can’t write good texts with them…
But my gut feeling here is not that this is mainly a problem of brilliant journalists seeing their work destroyed by evil editors. To me it mostly looks like mediocre journalists having to write about stuff they neither understand nor care about and simply trying to get a ‘colourful story’ out of that.
Comment by Dave2:
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Actually, mentioning distance in my entry would NOT have made my case clear to you because you were missing the entire point… it had nothing to do with distance, it was all a set-up to make a joke about Sarah Palin. :-)
Comment by ssp:
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At least I would have known what you were talking about. I found most distances in the U.S. very long. So if the natives consider things far apart, I suspect that they are very very far apart. I still like to attach a number of kilometres to that to have a better idea.
(I also suppose that jokes on Republicans are lost on me. But, hey, the lady will be your vice-president. She’s a jerk, a grandmother and a woman and hasn’t left the county so many people should absolutely love her no matter what she does.)
Comment by Dave2:
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And don’t forget that she’s a bible-banging, gun-packing, lying, two-faced redneck… “love her?” I dare say they worship the polluted earth she walks on.
Comment by ssp:
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:)
