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That article is really interesting and something that, as an academic scientist, is pretty obvious. In theory, we have peer-review to keep ourselves honest, but as the article points out (maybe unintentionally), bad science gets through that process (really, as long as the "data" look believable enough and the "experiments" are methodologically sound and the interpretation of the "data" is also reasonable, it's reasonably undetectable to peer-reviewers). There are a lot of problems with the way science happens, and a lot of bad data is never found out, because it can be hard to show, definitively, that it was fabricated or manipulated without someone from the lab in question speaking up about it (which probably doesn't happen enough). At a certain point, though, there's too much information & data, good or otherwise, for any one person to parse. That's sort of why we have journalists: to acquire first-hand accounts and deliver them to a broader audience. The problem really arises when journalists significantly editorialize or disregard conflicting information. The Wakefield paper is a great example of that. Some journalists' cum pundits' gross negligence with regard to the retraction of that paper constitutes misinformation, but has shown to be very difficult to discredit because those actors abuse what we've all agreed is the role of the journalist: to give us valid accounts of actual events. The study discussed in the article you cited even used a real, but heavily criticized (unknown to the participants) scientific study in their experiment. I think the question is "what is the amount of effort that it is reasonable to expect a lay-person to put into the in/validation of information presented to them?" with the caveat that trust is generally earned over time, but once earned, can be abused (and I use the word abuse very purposefully here, because it is a violation of one's relationship in a harmful manner). Should one be expected to more rigorously critique the statement of a trusted peer because of the potential for abuse? |
It's a little counterintuitive, but people don't complain about stuff they don't deal with.