It’s the Thought that Counts

Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” What a great image. While I’m not sure that I agree with him, I do think that a similar thing could be truthfully said about popular science. Writing about science is often just as effective as dancing about architecture, although it’s hardly a stupid thing to want to do well.

I used to enjoy reading, listening to, or watching reports on science for a general audience. That was back when I was still part of the general audience. Once I began to study physics at the university level, I realized how empty most of those reports really are. The conventional wisdom says that they have to be, since most people don’t have enough background knowledge to process most of the content. You can’t talk about Lorentz invariant quantities, since most of your audience thinks a matrix is a place without spoons, and will tell you to just relax if you mention a tensor. Obviously you can’t get that technical.

Still, I really can’t stand seeing all those books that claim to explain some scientific concept “with no equations at all!” or “made simple for everyone” or some similar promise. There are lots of them. Even Einstein wrote one on relativity subtitled “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Yeah, right. Einstein was a great writer and a clear thinker and all that, but maybe it’s okay to admit that your audience is not really “anyone” and “everyone.” It would be nice if everyone really could understand relativity, but either not everyone can understand it, or you’re not really explaining relativity (you’re just dancing about architecture, as it were).

I’m all for improving science literacy. Don’t get me wrong. I just think that science literacy would be better served by being willing to communicate how complex the scientific process is, rather than smoothing everything over and pretending no math was involved. If all you know about string theory is the animation of a donut and coffee cup morphing into each other (illustrating their topological equivalence), as was shown over and over and over again in that PBS Nova special, it’s hard to imagine why string theory is hard. What are string theorists doing all day? Staring at coffee cups and playing cellos? Of course it’s not worth funding them — being in academia is easy street! …Even if people intellectually acknowledge that math is involved in science, the sugar-coated version of science presented in popular media still downplays the reality of the scientific method: it’s a long process of theory, experiment, data analysis, comparison with theory, and back-to-the-drawing-board. Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.

I don’t blame the science reporters for this. Some of them have almost no science background themselves, and are presenting the analogies and handwaving that felt like an effective explanation when they heard it. Most of the reporters that do have science background have editors who don’t. Nevertheless, in an ideal world I would hope that science writers stop billing their works as math-free, and stop asking Nobel Prize-winners to explain their research in a mere sentence or two. Dumbing down the reporting doesn’t help us appreciate the intelligence behind what’s reported on.

Tags: intelligence, journalism, science

Bob Woodward’s new book, A War Within, is out, and is generating headlines with the report that the Bush administration spied on many in the Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Maliki.  (With Maliki, it was apparently successful enough to “know everything he says.”)  I really think the inclusion of this piece of information was a substantial failure of discretion on Woodward’s part.  Of course we were spying on the Iraqi government.  It would have been negligent not to spy on them.  There were death squads working for the Interior Ministry, and some people seem offended that we didn’t just trust them on principle.  It’s offensive, they say, that we were spying on an ally.

This reaction is incredibly naive.  Almost every country on earth has an intelligence program, and they all spy on each other, including their allies.  The US, for example, gets spied on by Israel and spies on France.  It’s not all bad — if your ally has a spy in your government, they know your promises to them aren’t lies, and there’s a lot more trust all around.  Good or bad, though, it’s business as usual.  No government is really particularly surprised or offended by it.  Their populations are, though, so the government has to act as if it’s a horrible surprise.

And this is exactly why I don’t think Woodward should have published what he did.  It angers Iraqis and damages the chance of success there.  (It should be noted that “success” in this case isn’t just something that’s good for the US, but pretty uncontroversially good for everyone.)  It’s harmful, but has no particular value to public discourse.  The spying isn’t controversial amongst anyone with the power to do anything about it.

There is, of course, a more complicated issue here.  The information in question was probably classified.  Clearly Woodward has a legal right to print it, but the person who told him the info was probably breaking the law.  In an investigation, Woodward could be called to testify and imprisoned if he didn’t reveal his sources.  Would it be proper to undertake these investigations and punishments?  Would it be better if they weren’t legally available?

The real problem with the shield law debate is that intuitions vary so much based on the information in question.  If the government has a secret program to burn down the houses of everyone who voted against the incumbent party, and you know it, you should leak it.  No one will disagree with this, and you’d probably have a parade thrown in your honor.  If instead you leak technical diagrams of US military weaponry, and the Washington Post publishes them on the front page, no one would support the Post, and everyone would support an investigation to find the leak.  The dilemma, of course, is that any law punishes someone for leaking (or printing) classified information applies equally well in both cases.  You can’t write an “unless it was good” exception.

In the end, I’m inclined to accept the status quo here.  It’s very unusual for reporters to be supboenaed and their ability to report stays intact.  (I disagree with those who want Woodward fired/subpoenaed/whatever.  I don’t think he should have printed this, but he has some very good stuff about why violence is decreasing in Iraq, and to have some subjective, unpredictable standard is going to silence a lot of good reporting.)  There is, though, some risk.  When you leak something idiotic, like the identity of a CIA agent, there is definitely some danger of jail time.  I feel uncomfortable depending so heavily on prosecutorial discretion, which can easily be political, but I don’t see any better alternative here.

Tags: bob woodward, iraq, journalism, spying

I was prompted by this post to ponder the phenomenon of commentators with conservative agendas using the phrase “Democrat Party” instead of saying “Democratic.” This practice is very annoying, largely because it’s so slight as to go almost unnoticed. I remember misspeaking in this way as a child, and hearing my friends do it too — after all, if there are Democrats in the plural, just as there are Republicans, one might naively assume that it’s the Democrat Party just as there is the Republican one. Surely, though, if you’re on a nationally broadcast news network you should be better educated in your political terminology than my elementary school friends and I were.

It’s not about being uneducated, though; it’s a deliberate attempt on the part of Republicans to substitute a morally worse term where a better one stood. This Media Matters report describes the recent rise of the tactic, along with many examples from different news sources. This technique has been in practice for over a century, notably in the 1930s to criticize the decidedly undemocratic political machines run by members of the Democratic Party.

It’s very similar to the tactic of saying “Darwinist” or “evolutionist” instead of saying “evolutionary biologist,” or really, just “biologist.” That drives me batty, not only because it incorrectly portrays biologists as obsessed with a particular doctrine which they refuse to question, but also because it’s so hypocritical for creationists to try to call someone out on following religion-like dogma as though doing so is problematic. In the case of evolutionary biology, “Darwinist” actually sounds negative, though in this case “Democrat” sounds pretty neutral (apart from the tone of voice it’s spoken with). Nevertheless, democratic is an adjective we use in American society almost synonymously with good. Democratic institutions, democratic elections, democratic leadership. This is with a small d, but surely if all the international news coverage we see is about how our democratic allies are faring, and the US’s efforts to support and protect democratic institutions and supervise democratic elections abroad, surely we’d want to vote for a Democratic government right here at home! So don’t call it the Democratic Party — it sounds too much like calling them the Just and Fair Party, or the Nice, Happy Party.

At least in the other cases, an actual point is or was being made. in the 1930s, politicians and reporters were saying, “Political bosses aren’t democratic!” and they were right. Creationists are saying, “It’s unscientific to cling to one ideology as though it’s absolute truth!” and they have a point too, albeit a misdirected one. If you hear or read a commentator saying “Democrat Party” today, though, they don’t have any particular problem they’re trying to call to your attention. It’s nothing more than an insult and a petty attempt to remove any positive connotations we might have with “the Democratic Party.” It’s easy to let this slip by as you watch the news or read the paper, but if you catch it, be aware of the subtle trick people are attempting to play on you. We should decide for ourselves what we think about political parties, rather than letting strategists and spin doctors do it by subliminal suggestion.

Tags: journalism, politics

I was reading this Slate article today about why the press should skip the conventions, and found it emblematic of a mindset within the media that I find incredibly counterproductive.  The news media routinely define something as “making news” if it makes clear some piece of information that was previously totally unknown.  The focus is placed on getting these bits of information — sometimes big, secret government surveillance programs, sometimes minor gaffes made by some candidate — and being the first to print/air them.

A lot of this is good — getting information out there is a key job of the press.  However, it does tend to displace other types of coverage.  Analysis, of course, gets pushed aside quite quickly.  It’s hard to get in-depth focus on the issues.  There’s one article in each newspaper about each candidate’s energy plan, written at the time they give their major speech about it.  Then, aside from some finer points where there’s actually new information coming out or related events occurring, nothing is mentioned again.  Of course, to reporters covering the campaigns 24/7, there’s nothing new to say — Obama is for solar credits but McCain opposes them, just like yesterday — but the majority of the country is unaware of these views.  They don’t read every article that comes out, and revisiting an old story that most of your audience didn’t see or doesn’t remember could interest them a lot more (and is a lot more important) than a minor comment that could, if read the right way, be a tiny clue about the eventual VP pick.

It’s of course not just analysis that gets left behind, but old stories in general.  The Reverend Wright scandal got blanket coverage for days, but Obama’s past drug use barely ever gets mentioned.  Maybe I’m crazy, but the latter seems at least as worrying as the former.  Clinton’s questionable real estate and futures dealings never got mentioned.  I’m pretty sure almost no one in the public knows that McCain is very likely an adulterer, and the Keating Five scandal is completely absent from the coverage.  This effect also shows up with stories that were simply never secret.  Everyone deeply involved in politics always knew that for a while McCain’s entire presidential campaign was run by lobbyists on donated time, but not much got written about it, because it was already well-known.  As a result, it remains almost completely unknown amongst the public at large.

This is, of course, an even bigger issue on the general policy and information front than it is with regard to political debates.  At least with political issues, one candidate can give a speech or run an ad on some old but unreported problem with the other candidate, and that speech or ad is “news” enough to generate some coverage of the issue.  Other important issues get no attention at all.  US education, particularly in math and science, is awful.  Business leaders have talked about moving operations overseas because there are no qualified workers in the US.  This gets almost no coverage, despite being much more important to our geopolitical standing than the conflict in Georgia.  Those secret surveillance programs that are so dutifully unearthed are then ignored as nothing gets done about them, because after that first bout of stories, they’re no longer news.

It should be said that this is true not just of newspapers and television, but blogs as well.  Newspapers want citations in other outlets to raise their stature and give them free advertising.  Bloggers want incoming links.  None of that is easily obtained through a good article on the Keating Five scandal, but it happens instantly if you get a leak that maybe Obama is announcing his VP before the Olympics.

I’m not really sure what could be done about this, but it’s pretty clearly hurting the quality of debate in the country.  Just look at a television interview with one of the VP candidates.  A huge percentage of the interview is spent trying to get them to say something about whether they’re being vetted or picked or to make the seem too eager or not eager enough to get the job.  The answers are all perfectly predictable.  It’s just the off-chance that someone says something they shouldn’t that gets attention, but it gets so much attention that we ignore tons of chances to ask meaningful questions of the important people that are doing the interviews.

It’s also the reason that so many in the media are so opposed to convention coverage.  Sure, there’s nothing “new” happening.  We know who will be nominated, and who will speak, and so forth.  But it’s a part of the national debate.  It should be covered for the same reason that the debates should be covered — not because anyone’s saying anything they haven’t said before, but because it’s important enough to be worth a bit of repeating and focus.  Add some fact-checking by the media, and you have the potential for a very healthy democratic process.

Tags: journalism, politics