Life would be easier for many scientists if the general public would get past the stereotype that all science is just about "surprise" and novelty and completely unknown things and that studies don't matter if they match your lived experience 😭 there is massive need to document well known things into the scientific record and establish specific evidence examples for them in ways that will be legible and useful for policy, public action, etc....!
The framing of all scientific findings as "SURPRISE! SCIENTISTS DISCOVER X" is so driven by media headline writing! Yes sometimes this is a lovely human version of discovery, the "oh my goodness new species we never imagined" type of thing. But so often it distorts the true work of iteratively building a shared scientific knowledge base for humanity.
Also it is terrible when a great study gets rejected by reviewers for "lack of novelty". Centering novelty above all really leads to problems
Also like, if you're not in a field not all scientific progress is apparent to you from the headline and the bullet point. This is hard technical work folks and why are we so bad at allowing for the fact that much is lost in translation? So many of my friends have worked on "useless" basic science that turned out to inform huge medical advances later but no one is ever like "sorry I made fun of the fact that you studied flies and told the govt to defund you"
@grimalkina I agree it’s a tough one, especially when there’s a lot of money to be had in lowering public trust in scholarship and many (overworked) scientists are dis-incentivized to engage with (or respect) the public.
My work on this is public engagement and the protection of scholars at risk, but even work on both fronts feels very insufficient given the kind of money and power on the side of merchants of doubt
@grimalkina unfortunately, the novelty/surprise framing is also deeply integrated into funding, award, and promotion structures too.
Note: I remember being pretty surprised to see in this analysis of scientific articles and news stories that on average, journalists actually tend to temper rather than exaggerate scientific findings. I would love to see a more in-depth analysis
@grimalkina Even better is when well-meaning people take a relatively common term in your field, conflate it with an older, incorrect term and highlight that the original, incorrect idea came from some old bigot.
Thus guaranteeing that a significant number of people may ignore any discussion of common goods market failures because "everyone knows that's racist pseudoscience".
And there goes the prime rationale for the EPA. I wish it was a deliberate plot, I'd actually be impressed.
@UncivilServant yah we really do persist and survive long enough in these fields to suddenly be called the very things we had to fight tooth and nail to survive
Yes.
Still, good scientific studies can sharpen and refine our knowledge, even when we think we have it all sussed out. We fool ourselves quite often. And miss things.
@JeffGrigg@grimalkina
Yes, we should all question what we think we know. There is always nuance we've overlooked. There are boundaries beyond which our "truth" does not hold.
@grimalkina do academic journals also have a play in this? I'd assume they'd have less incentive to publish or fund studies that juts confirm existing sentiment.
@plainoldcheese right on, that's what I allude to by reviewers in the next comment. It's tough because in many ways of course we have an obligation to produce new knowledge but there is such a tension in what gets counted and valued as discovery
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