Why Editors must dare to be dumb
- From: "whitesickle@xxxxxxx" <whitesickle@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 17:39:36 -0500 (EST)
Voices
Weird Science
Why editors must dare to be dumb
By K.C. Cole
Like many beat reporters, science journalists spend a great deal of
time educating their editors about the peculiarities of their fields,
and by and large those exchanges are not only illuminating but
ultimately lead to better stories. But there's one place we hit a
wall.
No, it's not that editors aren't smart enough to understand
science. Actually, it's the opposite: they're too accustomed to
being smart, and thus can't deal with the fact that they don't
understand it. And because they're uncomfortable feeling confused,
readers are left in the dark about a universe of research that eludes
easy explanation.
I was discussing this problem recently with a colleague who had been
beating his head against the wall for months trying to get a story
about a mysterious "dark force" in cosmology past editors at The
New Yorker: "They kept saying they didn't understand it!" he
complained. Well, of course they didn't understand it. Nobody
understands it. That's precisely what makes it so interesting.
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness
to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A
mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young
mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said,
even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just
trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb
and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become
established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They
don't want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can't really blame either scientists or editors for
backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. "By its
very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of
ignorance," is how one cosmologist put it. "Many who have visited
it have been cut and bloodied by the experience."
All the more reason it's so refreshing that readers of science
stories don't seem to mind a bit of confusion - even when the
subject matter is difficult or counterintuitive: ten-dimensional space,
for example, or fossils of foot-long "bugs" that crawled out of the
sea 480 million years ago. Every science writer I know has had the
experience of readers coming up to them and saying: "Gee, that was
fascinating; I didn't understand it, but I've been thinking about
it all day." Readers often inquire about books where they can read
further on a subject, or even primary sources.
Editors, however, seem to absorb difficulty differently. If they
don't understand something, they often think it can't be right -
or that it's not worth writing about. Either the writers aren't
being clear (which, of course, may be the case), or the scientists
don't know what they're talking about (in some cases, a given).
Why the difference? My theory is that editors of newspapers and other
major periodicals are not just ordinary folk. They tend to be very
accomplished people. They're used to being the smartest guys in the
room. So science makes them squirm. And because they can't bear to
feel dumb, science coverage suffers.
So what is it about science that makes them uneasy? Surely it is more
than the obvious fact that it's hard to understand things that
aren't (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to
understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have
been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some
sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know
they're correct because they've been tested so thoroughly in so
many ways. But they still don't make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat,
and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand
what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a
nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe
doesn't care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn't speak our
language, so there's no reason it should "make sense."
That's why science depends on evidence.
In fact, this is one place in which the intelligent-design people have
a point. It is unfathomable that complex life forms evolved in tiny
increments over time through random mutation and natural selection -
that our ancestors are bacteria and our siblings are fish.
We know it happened nonetheless because we have multiple lines of
evidence: the fossil record, DNA, morphology, embryology and so on. (We
even see evolution in action right in front of our noses. If we
couldn't, we wouldn't be worrying about bird flu.) But to pretend
evolution "makes sense" in some ordinary way does our readers a
disservice (and too often leads journalists to neglect to mention the
evidence at all).
Science muddles our minds in many other ways as well. For example, much
of it deals with essentially invisible things. I once had a hard time
convincing an editor of the reality of curved space-time (Einstein's
extremely well-tested explanation of gravity) because, she said, "You
can't see it." Actually, you can see it - among other ways,
through gravitational "lenses" that bend light just the way the
lens in a camera does.
Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that
these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and
quantified.
It's essential to know not only what scientists know, but also what
they know they don't know. This is an unfamiliar concept to editors
used to dealing with politics or sports.
And then there's the fact that data are always to a certain extent
ambiguous. Translating the behavior of retroviruses or superconductors
into words takes a lot of interpreting - even for scientists. There
may be more than one correct answer. Or no description in lay language
may be able to do justice to the subject at hand.
For all these reasons and more, good science journalists know that if
they're not dealing with subject matter that makes them dizzy,
they're probably not doing their jobs.
The best editors understand all this. As for the rest, perhaps Weird Al
said it best: sometimes you just need to "dare to be stupid."
A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, K.C. Cole teaches
science journalism at the University of Southern California. Her latest
book is Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos.
.
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