Palko points to a ten-year-old post on 3-D printing. Here he is back in 2013:
We’re talking about people (particularly journalists) who have an emotional, gee-whiz reaction to technology without really thinking seriously about the functionality.
[They] can be spotted by a few defining characteristics: a remarkable ability to be impressed by the unimpressive; a focus on shiny, sexy toys; a tendency to report on technologies that really aren’t that close as being just around the corner; a recurring amnesia about the slow development of similar technologies; general obliviousness to questions about implementation and demand . . .
He gives the following quotes, again from 2013:
Now, I think in a few years, we can print clothing, and then you can have clothing without sizes, but you have the size that fits you.
WOHLERS: You lose a finger, you print out a new one.
CHACE: Yeah, like, actual body parts, printing out new fingers using your cells.
WOHLERS: Bones and bladders and eventually kidneys and so forth.
Wohlers is identified as an “analyst”; Chace is the credulous reporter (NPR, of course).
Where’s it happening?
Outlandish tech hype is not new. The difference, as I see it, that back in the old day it would be in fringe publications such as Popular Mechanics or those newsletters my uncle was subscribing to back in the 1970s telling him to invest in gold and prepare for the coming apocalypse. Since then it’s moved to the mainstream: the NYT promoting a cancer cure that’s, ummm, now 23 years behind schedule, Axios promoting the nonsensical Los Angeles tunnel, the American Psychological Association promoting ESP, and of course NPR giving its endorsement to just about every bit of science and tech hype that’s thrown at them, from himmicanes and air rage to 3D-printed fingers and the collected work of Brian Wansink.
We talked about this a couple years ago, the way that junk science has become professionalized. Instead of high-school dropouts writing bestsellers on ancient astronauts and fringe academics setting up low-budget research institutes, it’s now being pushed by fully-plugged-in academics and superstar journalists at the New Yorker and NPR.
My earlier post, Junk Science Then and Now, was all about science. This post is new in that we’re talking about technology. But it seems like the same thing to me. In the domain of iffy science, the Uri Gellers in their cheap suits and carnival patter became superseded by the fast-talking credentialed performers of the Wansink variety, and in the world of technology, all those grandpas tinkering in their garages with perpetual motion machines and 200 mpg car engines got driven out by hyperloops and theranoses and all the rest.
The white-collar-ization of the world
From a cultural perspective, the whole thing seems sad to me, part of the white-collar-ization of the world. And, yes, I recognize I’m part of this with my MIT and Harvard degrees. It’s just too bad, that now even the grifters and delusional true believers have big-budget operations. Mom-and-pop craft producers such as that ancient-astronauts guy just don’t have a chance anymore. Even when they do pop up on Youtube or Twitter or whatever, they quickly get absorbed into the big-budget credentialed world of the Stanford covid minimizers or whatever. Maybe it doesn’t help that so many in the news media have credentials from exclusive universities.
About 10 years ago I was listening to NPR and they had a computer expert “explaining” what a ddos was. I happened to know and was really shocked to the core by the calm and articulate pure ignorance of the topic I heard.
Getting your news about the world from these sources is no better than asking chatGPT. Michael Crichton called out tendancy to fall for this stuff the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
“calm and articulate pure ignorance” is so depressingly accurate. I guess the “calm and articulate” part is NPR’s big differentiator; otherwise it’s just every “science” podcast. NYT is just the pure ignorance part now; they dispensed with writers and copy editors a long time ago and, other than specialty sections like Food and Book Review, they’re basically a blog now. I don’t even know where to get factual news anymore.
> But it seems like the same thing to me.
Maybe it’s just a bad reflex, but I’m always skeptical about the identification of trends in such matters without quantified data with clear definitions.
The “replication crisis” being a case in point: yes, we’ve come to realize that much of published research can’t be replicated, that not infrequently that failure to replicate indicates fatal flaws, that highly problematic (or fatally flawed) statistical practices are fairly commonplace, that there’s a shocking amount of overt fraud, that there’s a clear problem with perverse incentives and with a positive results bias, etc. But (1) does our increased awareness reflect an upward trend in such phenomena and (2) is the net effect of all these phenomena negative (or on a negative tend) or just a manifestation of an unavoidable law that everything by definition is sub-optimal?
“Kids today,” I suspect, has been around as long as there have been kids.
I think it’s part of our cognitive nature to see trends in data where they might not exist.
It’s important to recognize that being qualified has a specific meaning. Degrees from top-level universities in fields differing from the highly technical areas they write about are of no relevance to the accuracy of their reporting. One major newspaper had a continuing column on Covid written by a sociologist who had once written “Research shows that even a cotton mask dramatically reduces the number of virus particles emitted from our mouths—by as much as 99 percent.” The reference cited was not a test of cotton masks at all, but of a damp cloth held in front of the mouth, and it specifically denied the study had assessed the transmission of viruses: “We did not assess the relative roles of droplets generated during speech, droplet nuclei, and aerosols in the transmission of viruses. Our aim was to provide visual evidence of speech-generated droplets and to qualitatively describe the effect of a damp cloth cover over the mouth to curb the emission of droplets.” As we have seen over and over, amateurs often make rookie mistakes that not only shape public opinion, they shape public policy, often with tragic results.
well put. The atlantic article needs to be corrected.
An NPR show that would actually be informative: Every week, they go back through their own archives and find a nice nugget of “calm and articulate pure ignorance”, along with all the glowing credentials rattled off in host’s star-struck introduction. Then they spend the rest of the hour getting into the truth of the topic (maybe shine a bit of light on the un-polished, non-famous researchers who smelled the fraud all along). A few episodes of this, and (I like to think) the NPR audience’s skepticism would be pricked every time they hear, “Our guest today is a Harvard something something who has been invited to speak all over the world about…”
Yes!
I would tune in for that! That would be worth donating for.
If you want to learn about blue-collar, small-town research into fringe topics in the USA today please spend a Saturday with the History Channel on in the background or read Sharon A. Hill’s book. I think you see the credentialed, university-based kind but not the more unpolished and popular kind because you are an academic and you hear about things in your subculture.
It seems to me that you disagree with Andrew’s view that ‘Mom-and-pop craft producers such as that ancient-astronauts guy just don’t have a chance anymore.’ As I have not read the book you mention, nor do I watch the History Channel, I cannot give my own opinion on the merits of your examples. But allow me to share my experience of the difference between blue-collar and white-collar research: In my experience, it’s a question of the visibility of the effect, which is related to the choice of topic, the size of the effect, and confounding factors. The visibility of an effect is largely determined by its magnitude and ‘how muddy the water is’ (i.e. confounding factors). Especially confounding factors are research field-related. That is why there is little blue collar research on cancer treatment drugs that I have heard of. (Note that I do not consider the ‘research’ of charlatans and conspiracy theorists to be research in this context). Finally, to stick with my cancer drug example, some research is just super expensive.
For these reasons, I agree with Andrew’s hyperbole that blue-collar research is largely crowded out by white-collar research + white-collar junk science in US national media.
Raphael: You sound like you come from one of the statistical sciences and are confident of its authority within US culture. I am begging you to look at which types of nonsense get the mass of the US public excited. I think you will find its a lot cruder and a lot less anchored at universities. The cases that get discussed on this blog are the ones which look the most like mainstream, sound research (eg. they are by Dr. so-and-so at the university of such-and-such in the journal of something or other, not the Pine Bend Paranormal Society telegram channel). Biomedical nonsense leans on the studies by MDs and PhDs more than many kinds of nonsense, but even then, I think you will find that the actual messages that persuade parents not to give their children the MMR vaccination or sick people to take dubious treatments are emotional and informal.
The History Channel is national media. It is very big.
Thanks for clarifying, I missed the point your were making about the History Channel in the earlier comment – but, you’re right. There’s a lot of that stuff out there on every channel – and the “fair and balanced” self deception doesn’t help.
Thanks for clarifying – I misread your earlier comment “If you want to learn … .” I’ll keep skipping the History Channel, but I think you are right about the prevalence of media nonsense.
You’re right, I tend to underestimate things I don’t engage with – like HC. I admit I shouldn’t have generalised from the media I consume to all media – ironically the very thing you pointed out in your original post. Thanks for pointing that out!
“We’re talking about people…who have an emotional, gee-whiz reaction…without really thinking seriously…”
What??? Dude man! Hype is patriotic! Straight-up science isn’t like the straight up gasoline at the AM-PM: straight up science is more expensive and does less! Straight up science is, well, b-o-r-i-n-g. Why go through all that editing and correcting and hemming and hawing over a bunch of thinking and reason that will ultimately put people to sleep? Just go straight to the cool beans!
And Palko, lets face it: you can’t communicate The Truth to people who have fallen asleep reading your paper. By keeping people awake and interested, a little hype allows the media to do their true duty – to slide a little truth in there, like a doggy pill in the middle of a delicious sticky gob of Ken-L-Ration! Yum!
The good news is soon MORE PEOPLE THAN EVAH are going to have access to the internet, where they can get some Real Truth from the Patriotic Media!! For only $5000 ea, the US is about to connect the least literate 8.5 million people in the country to the internet!!! Think of the Amazing Benefits of giving $500 computers and $5000 internet connections to people who can’t spell their names!! Wow!!! No doubt this will CREATE A REVOLUTION IN KNOWLEDGE!!
And I’m afraid you are wrong about 3-D printers! Just wait until our Illiterate Creatives can access You Tube videos on how to print hand guns!! The creativity of millions is about to be unleashed!!
About those 3D printed handguns, the future is now: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ghost-guns-canada-1.6884071.
David Rorvik was ahead of his time.
Mark:
Believe it or not, I immediately recognized the name David Rorvik and remembered the book you were referring to. I read the newspaper pretty much every day in the late 70s. But I didn’t know anything about Rorvik except that he’d written that cloning book. So I went on to wikipedia, and . . . wow:
And then he wrote the presumably-a-hoax cloning book that gave him brief fame. So yeah, ahead of his time. Also interesting how he’d been publishing hyped-up medical science claims for awhile and also receiving awards: so, not an academic himself in the model of today’s hypesters, but well connected with Ivy League and NYT.
Seriously, I do think there is a good (sort of) reason why junk science so easily prevails over careful legitimate research – one that does not require denigrating the masses or the media. Research in so many fields has become so complex that the masses tune it out (along the lines chipmunk suggests above, but without the diatribe). Having a good credential and telling a simple, and likely hyped and inaccurate, story provides something for people that don’t have the background and patience to read 100 pages of research with supplementary appendices, with figures and tables separate from the text, and with so many caveats and qualifiers that you come away not being able to say anything for sure: do minimum wages really increase unemployment, does less sleep really lead to bad health outcomes, does drinking coffee help or hurt life expectancy?
I’m not condoning lack of education – indeed, I think education is the only “cure” for reducing the influence of these fringes. But I think legitimate science bears some of the responsibility. Every one of these 100 page papers filled with excessive detail leaves an opening for a simplified and misleading “expert” with a credential to get an audience.
I once replied to a tweet.
The tweet (roughly): “To have a functional democracy, we really need to teach statistics in high school so people can understand policy issues.”
My reply: “Then we’re f***ed. Probability and statistics are too hard for most people.”
Damn. I was really hoping the hype would live up to reality and they would just print me a kidney from my own stem cells like they said they could.
PS Since the day I went into kidney failure in 1981, doctors have been telling me that they were on the verge of a breakthrough in transplantation. The immunsuppresives got better, but the transformation has been incremental, as one would expect.
Although I agree with many of the sentiments in Andrew’s post, I would like to point out that some journalists who cover science often do an excellent job. William Broad of the NYT comes to mind. https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-j-broad. I could name several other journalists whose coverage of science stories appears pretty good to me. Their work does not trigger the Gell-Man reaction in me.
Bob76
Also, critical inquiry and getting second opinions take time, and many journalists are not given that time (including time to become familiar with an area like “psychology research” or “electric cars”). If employers assign someone whose math education ended in 9th grade to handle a statistics story, or want journalists to read the abstract, interview the lead author, and write the story the same day, the bad journalism which results is the employer’s fault.
If you looked within specialty automotive journalism you could find Edward W. Niedermeyer pointing out the many reasons to be skeptical of Tesla’s promises of riches and wonders just around the corner.
When our head librarian set up a “3D Printing Room” while cutting back on books/journals/databases…that’s when i knew she was a complete lost cause