![]() I don't think our prospects for evaluating scientific credibility are quite that bad. In an era where media outlets are more likely to cut the science desk than expand it, pinning our hopes on legions of science-Ph.D.-earning reporters on the science beat might be a bad idea. Alternatively, if the public looked to science journalists not just to communicate the knowledge claims various scientists are putting forward but also to do some evaluative work on our behalf - sorting out credible claims and credible scientists from the crowd - we might imagine that good science journalism demands extensive scientific training (and that we probably need a separate science reporter for each specialized area of science to be covered). If only a trained scientist could evaluate the credibility of scientific claims (and then perhaps only in the particular scientific field in which one was trained), this might reduce science journalism to a mere matter of publishing press releases, or of reporting on scientists' social events, sense of style, and the like. ![]() This raises an interesting question for science journalism, not so much about what role it should play as what role it could play. ![]() (It's reasonable to ask what the right mixture of trust and skepticism would be in particular circumstances, but there's not a handy formula with which to calculate this.)Īre we in a position where, outside our own narrow area of expertise, we either have to commit to agnosticism or take someone else's word for things? If we're not able to directly evaluate the data, does that mean we have no good way to evaluate the credibility of the scientist pointing to the data to make a claim? This is not a problem unique to non-scientists, though - once scientists reach the end of the tether of their expertise, they end up having to approach the knowledge claims of scientists in other fields with some mixture of trust and skepticism. Recently, we've noted that a public composed mostly of non-scientists may find itself asked to trust scientists, in large part because members of that public are not usually in a position to make all their own scientific knowledge. ![]()
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