Science reporters are getting the picture

Enrico Schaar points me to two news articles: What psychology’s crisis means for the future of science by Brian Resnick and These doctors want to fix a huge problem with drug trials. Why isn’t anyone listening? by Julia Belluz.

I don’t really have anything to add here beyond what I’ve blogged on these topics before. (I mean, sure, I could laugh at this quote, “The average person cannot evaluate a scientific finding for themselves any more easily than they can represent themselves in court or perform surgery on their own appendix,” which came from a psychology professor who is notorious for claiming that the replication rate in psychology is “statistically indistinguishable from 100%”—but I won’t go there.)

No, I just wanted to express pleasure that journalists are seeing the big picture here. At this point there’s a large cohort of science writers who’ve moved beyond the “Malcolm Gladwell” or “Freakonomics” model of scientist-as-hero, or the “David Brooks” model of believing anything that confirms your political views, or even the controversy-in-the-lab model, to a clearer view of science as a collective enterprise. We really do seem to be moving forward, even in the past five or ten years. Science reporters are no longer stenographers; they are active citizens of the scientific community.

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