If any of those reading this are in the business of writing news articles, then, please:
If you want to tell me about a scientist's report being something fake he cooked up (for fame or because someone paid him to say it or whatever), then first tell me what, scientifically, is or might be wrong with the report, and then tell me about his background and financial incentives and stuff.
I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first, so that the reader can stop at any part in the article and come away with a good overall picture of whatever the article talks about. The thesis of the article seems to be that there's something wrong with this scientist's study... yet this author seems to have thought it was fine for a reader to walk away having read the ad hominem attacks against the scientist, but not the actual description of what might be wrong with his study. I was rather disconcerted to see this in a major news outlet like CNN; I thought that only happened in Ayn Rand novels.
The gist of this article was not that the original report was "something fake" the scientist "cooked up". It was that the scientist received funding from an interested party that he failed to disclose.
While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the credibility of the scientist.
Except of course when the scientist is paid by a government agency and concludes that the government needs more power - then the funding or employment situation is irrelevant.
You make a very good point. However your point is not politically correct therefore it is being buries. Have an upvote.
I find the fact that people who make valid points that don't happen to be in lock step with party ideology are buried on this site very tragic and it has significantly reduced my interest in participating in this site.
Particularly ironic is that the ideological downvoting always seems to come from the left/socialist wing, yet this is ostensibly a capitalist/startup oriented site.
He's not being downvoted for being un-PC, he's being downvoted for being reflexively paranoid, in a style that resists falsification and contributes nothing to the discussion.
The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
For example, suppose my thesis is, "Running the Miller-Rabin test with a=2 is sufficient to determine primality for all numbers up to 2047." If my argument is, "I have verified this myself", then my argument depends entirely on the reader's trust in me. If my argument is, "Here is a C program that tests all numbers up to 2047; its output shows no exceptions", then my argument depends on the assumptions that a) this C program works as intended and b) when run, this program produces the desired output.
In the second case, (a) can be verified by someone who understands the Miller-Rabin test and can understand C code, and (b) can be verified by anyone with a (trusted) C compiler. These things are not particularly hard to do for an expert (or amateur) in the field. So, even if you don't know anything about the Miller-Rabin test or about C, you can find other people who do, and they will be able to tell you whether my argument is correct; my own credibility is useless for evaluating my argument unless you are too lazy to find yourself a trustworthy mathematician-programmer. And journalists are certainly not lazy in this respect--they interview experts all the time, and do so in this article.
The credibility of the scientist is irrelevant until you find a part in his argument that depends on his credibility. Like a part where he carries out an experiment that requires careful controlling to be accurate, and you have reason to think he is sloppy (inherently or deliberately). Or where he collects a bunch of data and you have reason to think it might be inaccurate (again, due to clumsiness or malice). Here, it seems to be (and I quote from the story--two pages in, I might mention):
"Dr. Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the health group at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that while the Bromenshenk/Army study is interesting, it fails to ask the underlying question "Why are colonies dying? Is it because they're getting weak? People who have HIV don't die of HIV. They die of other diseases they get because their immune systems are knocked off, making them more susceptible." In other words, pesticides could weaken the bees -- and then the virus/fungus combination finishes them off. That notion, however, is not explored in the new study."
There are some mutterings about pesticides maybe killing bees earlier, but it's not clear--wasn't to me, anyway--what this has to do with alleged problems in the author's study. But this is the part where we (finally) see what part of the study depends on his credibility. It is the sort of implied conclusion that the fungus/virus combination is the end of the story, that this fungus and virus just proliferated somehow and the solution is to get rid of them. The flaw, or rather the incomplete part of the study, is that pesticides might somehow make it easier for the virus/fungus to infect the bees, and this possibility isn't given the attention it should get; thus, we see how the author's strong connections with a company that makes pesticides might lead him to keep his mouth shut about it. (Which, I might opine, is not much of a flaw--it says that the author merely didn't go far enough.)
It is not true that, "in the real world", facts that would call a scientist's credibility into question are necessarily significant in evaluating his study. It is only true if there are parts of the study that depend critically on his credibility; and once you've found these parts, you can isolate them and check them yourself (or go ask experts to check them), and either prove the study wrong or validate it.
If you say this is a minor distinction, I say, no, quite the contrary. I think it's important to realize exactly what can and what can't be invalidated by attacks on someone's credibility: it puts a limit on the potential power of character assassination, which should comfort scientists who know they wouldn't have the stomach or resources to resist a campaign against them, and should reduce the power of people with the resources to conduct or threaten such a campaign.
Also, it gives a way for scientists who do have questionable reputations or backgrounds to proceed: present their reports in such a way that there are no parts that fundamentally require faith in the author to believe. A good way to do this is to carefully and generically document everything that you do, so that any other expert in the field could perform the steps himself and verify them. (Come to think of it, this is actually ideal operating practice for any scientist. To take it for granted that a scientist's lack of credibility invalidates his study is actually a grave insult to every scientist who takes pains to produce well-documented and reproducible studies.) We saw how this could be done in the Miller-Rabin test example, where I took "some unspecified calculation I presumably performed" and replaced it with "a C program that anyone should be able to run".
Anyway, for the standards of a news article, it would suffice to mention the questionable, credibility-dependent parts and then explain why we shouldn't take him at his word. It does not suffice to spend a couple of pages attacking him and then mention, halfway through the article, "Oh BTW this is why his credibility makes a difference." It feels very dishonest to me.
I stand by what I said. Personal attacks can be justified, but justify them before you conduct them, dammit. Especially in a news article, where the order of presentation should reflect the order of importance of each point.
By the way, I'm going to run a blanket attack on anyone who responds, "That's all fine and good, but in the real world...". It implies, quite directly, that the speaker's words do not apply to the real world, when usually the speaker intended precisely for them to apply to the real world. In other words, it is a blanket dismissal of everything the speaker said. It might be an expert telling off an annoying novice: "You're completely wrong and I'm not going to bother telling you why."
More commonly--and I'm sure this is how the author of the parent meant it--it's intended as a sort of sympathetic, "Yeah, I wish it were that way too [optionally, "I thought like that when I was idealistic and young"], but, well, you know, the real world is just never as clean and perfect as that." Implied: "The world is a dirty and flawed place, and we who live in it just have to get used to it. And there's not much point in trying to understand it, else I would have explained something instead of merely contradicting you." I think this is profoundly contemptuous of man's ability to understand the world, not to mention pessimistic, and I absolutely reject it.
Maybe you don't mean to imply any of those things. But just bear in mind--I don't think you can argue with this--that it is a way of saying, however politely or sympathetically, "You're completely wrong." With all the implications that go with it; for example, if it is said in response to a serious statement or question, and there is no explanation of why one is completely wrong, then it is pretty dismissive and may be rude or condescending.
> The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
Unless you personally have invested the time and effort needed to evaluate his research, you're stuck listening to the people who have. And unless they're all saying the same thing, you have to look at credentials, reputation, and motivation to decide who to believe. While these factors don't affect the quality of his thesis, they do affect it's believability to the rest of us.
Hmm.. I do have to amend my statement. Evidently, Bayer was caught with their pants down in Europe and Japan after their non-certified-edible GM rice was found in our food supply for export.
I feel that your criticism is off base. The author of the story was right to focus only on the facts: specifically, the scientist's funding sources and the pattern of behavior that occurred with regards to funding and testimony.
Wisely, the author does not overreach the facts and try to call shenanigans on the science per se. Nor should he, unless he knows of a scientific experiment that has been done demonstrating what you are claiming.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude. It allows for the possibility that the scientist does questionable science but that his conclusions might be proven correct by others, even. This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
That pattern of behavior is treated unfairly, though. He argued for one theory, did a study, and then published a paper with a very different direction. That's how it's supposed to work. You change your mind as the facts come in. The article treats this as a betrayal.
That is how the pattern is supposed to work (opinion informed by data), I agree. However, credibility can be called into question by the appearance of impropriety. Perhaps one could say that the appearance of impropriety increases the prior likelihood of actual impropriety, but it's not black and white.
This article is serving as a counterbalance to a NYT article that failed to disclose this author's relationship with industry. That is usually a prominent disclosure; I've had to be very clear about my funding in every paper I've submitted, and if it's of high interest to those in the field, one can imagine that the public has an interest in this knowledge as well.
I really felt that this was an article written to draw attention to the scientist's funding, and I don't think it was done badly. When doctors fail to disclose funding in situations like this, they rightly get slammed. This strikes me as no different.
Like I said, it is quite possible that this scientist's conclusions are correct, but it is always important to have independent validation, where independent != funded by the company that benefits from your stated results.
Another important point is that it sounds like the scientist's own company would also benefit extensively from the bee problem being disease rather than pesticides. As you say, this may not invalidate his results but it does mean they probably need further scrutiny.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude....This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
Insinuation being a subset of implication, I have no problem with your preference for a minimally different word choice, but confess that I am surprised that you would go to the effort to actually post that :-)
From a scientific perspective, failing to disclose that you're being funded by the company you're report exonerates is wrong. Research has shown that funding sources are strongly correlated the results of scientific papers in controversial areas, so this is arguably the single most important fact in the article.
More specifically the article did specifically identify a major flaw in the report: it didn't look at the chemical aspects as well, so couldn't draw conclusions about the contributions of different causes.
Comments
If any of those reading this are in the business of writing news articles, then, please:
If you want to tell me about a scientist's report being something fake he cooked up (for fame or because someone paid him to say it or whatever), then first tell me what, scientifically, is or might be wrong with the report, and then tell me about his background and financial incentives and stuff.
I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first, so that the reader can stop at any part in the article and come away with a good overall picture of whatever the article talks about. The thesis of the article seems to be that there's something wrong with this scientist's study... yet this author seems to have thought it was fine for a reader to walk away having read the ad hominem attacks against the scientist, but not the actual description of what might be wrong with his study. I was rather disconcerted to see this in a major news outlet like CNN; I thought that only happened in Ayn Rand novels.
The gist of this article was not that the original report was "something fake" the scientist "cooked up". It was that the scientist received funding from an interested party that he failed to disclose.
While it is true that in the realm of pure logical discourse this fact is irrelevant to the argumentative structure of the original paper, in the real world it is a significant fact that legitimately questions the credibility of the scientist.
Except of course when the scientist is paid by a government agency and concludes that the government needs more power - then the funding or employment situation is irrelevant.
You make a very good point. However your point is not politically correct therefore it is being buries. Have an upvote.
I find the fact that people who make valid points that don't happen to be in lock step with party ideology are buried on this site very tragic and it has significantly reduced my interest in participating in this site.
Particularly ironic is that the ideological downvoting always seems to come from the left/socialist wing, yet this is ostensibly a capitalist/startup oriented site.
He's not being downvoted for being un-PC, he's being downvoted for being reflexively paranoid, in a style that resists falsification and contributes nothing to the discussion.
Straw man.
The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
For example, suppose my thesis is, "Running the Miller-Rabin test with a=2 is sufficient to determine primality for all numbers up to 2047." If my argument is, "I have verified this myself", then my argument depends entirely on the reader's trust in me. If my argument is, "Here is a C program that tests all numbers up to 2047; its output shows no exceptions", then my argument depends on the assumptions that a) this C program works as intended and b) when run, this program produces the desired output.
In the second case, (a) can be verified by someone who understands the Miller-Rabin test and can understand C code, and (b) can be verified by anyone with a (trusted) C compiler. These things are not particularly hard to do for an expert (or amateur) in the field. So, even if you don't know anything about the Miller-Rabin test or about C, you can find other people who do, and they will be able to tell you whether my argument is correct; my own credibility is useless for evaluating my argument unless you are too lazy to find yourself a trustworthy mathematician-programmer. And journalists are certainly not lazy in this respect--they interview experts all the time, and do so in this article.
The credibility of the scientist is irrelevant until you find a part in his argument that depends on his credibility. Like a part where he carries out an experiment that requires careful controlling to be accurate, and you have reason to think he is sloppy (inherently or deliberately). Or where he collects a bunch of data and you have reason to think it might be inaccurate (again, due to clumsiness or malice). Here, it seems to be (and I quote from the story--two pages in, I might mention):
"Dr. Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist with the health group at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that while the Bromenshenk/Army study is interesting, it fails to ask the underlying question "Why are colonies dying? Is it because they're getting weak? People who have HIV don't die of HIV. They die of other diseases they get because their immune systems are knocked off, making them more susceptible." In other words, pesticides could weaken the bees -- and then the virus/fungus combination finishes them off. That notion, however, is not explored in the new study."
There are some mutterings about pesticides maybe killing bees earlier, but it's not clear--wasn't to me, anyway--what this has to do with alleged problems in the author's study. But this is the part where we (finally) see what part of the study depends on his credibility. It is the sort of implied conclusion that the fungus/virus combination is the end of the story, that this fungus and virus just proliferated somehow and the solution is to get rid of them. The flaw, or rather the incomplete part of the study, is that pesticides might somehow make it easier for the virus/fungus to infect the bees, and this possibility isn't given the attention it should get; thus, we see how the author's strong connections with a company that makes pesticides might lead him to keep his mouth shut about it. (Which, I might opine, is not much of a flaw--it says that the author merely didn't go far enough.)
It is not true that, "in the real world", facts that would call a scientist's credibility into question are necessarily significant in evaluating his study. It is only true if there are parts of the study that depend critically on his credibility; and once you've found these parts, you can isolate them and check them yourself (or go ask experts to check them), and either prove the study wrong or validate it.
If you say this is a minor distinction, I say, no, quite the contrary. I think it's important to realize exactly what can and what can't be invalidated by attacks on someone's credibility: it puts a limit on the potential power of character assassination, which should comfort scientists who know they wouldn't have the stomach or resources to resist a campaign against them, and should reduce the power of people with the resources to conduct or threaten such a campaign.
Also, it gives a way for scientists who do have questionable reputations or backgrounds to proceed: present their reports in such a way that there are no parts that fundamentally require faith in the author to believe. A good way to do this is to carefully and generically document everything that you do, so that any other expert in the field could perform the steps himself and verify them. (Come to think of it, this is actually ideal operating practice for any scientist. To take it for granted that a scientist's lack of credibility invalidates his study is actually a grave insult to every scientist who takes pains to produce well-documented and reproducible studies.) We saw how this could be done in the Miller-Rabin test example, where I took "some unspecified calculation I presumably performed" and replaced it with "a C program that anyone should be able to run".
Anyway, for the standards of a news article, it would suffice to mention the questionable, credibility-dependent parts and then explain why we shouldn't take him at his word. It does not suffice to spend a couple of pages attacking him and then mention, halfway through the article, "Oh BTW this is why his credibility makes a difference." It feels very dishonest to me.
I stand by what I said. Personal attacks can be justified, but justify them before you conduct them, dammit. Especially in a news article, where the order of presentation should reflect the order of importance of each point.
By the way, I'm going to run a blanket attack on anyone who responds, "That's all fine and good, but in the real world...". It implies, quite directly, that the speaker's words do not apply to the real world, when usually the speaker intended precisely for them to apply to the real world. In other words, it is a blanket dismissal of everything the speaker said. It might be an expert telling off an annoying novice: "You're completely wrong and I'm not going to bother telling you why."
More commonly--and I'm sure this is how the author of the parent meant it--it's intended as a sort of sympathetic, "Yeah, I wish it were that way too [optionally, "I thought like that when I was idealistic and young"], but, well, you know, the real world is just never as clean and perfect as that." Implied: "The world is a dirty and flawed place, and we who live in it just have to get used to it. And there's not much point in trying to understand it, else I would have explained something instead of merely contradicting you." I think this is profoundly contemptuous of man's ability to understand the world, not to mention pessimistic, and I absolutely reject it.
Maybe you don't mean to imply any of those things. But just bear in mind--I don't think you can argue with this--that it is a way of saying, however politely or sympathetically, "You're completely wrong." With all the implications that go with it; for example, if it is said in response to a serious statement or question, and there is no explanation of why one is completely wrong, then it is pretty dismissive and may be rude or condescending.
> The credibility of the author is relevant to the author's argument/results/conclusions to the extent that the argument depends on points whose plausibility requires faith in the author's honesty and ability.
Unless you personally have invested the time and effort needed to evaluate his research, you're stuck listening to the people who have. And unless they're all saying the same thing, you have to look at credentials, reputation, and motivation to decide who to believe. While these factors don't affect the quality of his thesis, they do affect it's believability to the rest of us.
In the real world.
> I believe it's supposed to be good news-article-writing style to put the most important facts and overview first.
The way I read the article, the most important fact was that he was paid by Bayer.
I'm not surprised in the least. Bayer has a huge cropscience division, and bees are integral to them selling crops and seed.
Seems more like an oversight than "nefarious pan-government cum dystopian corporate plot".
Hmm.. I do have to amend my statement. Evidently, Bayer was caught with their pants down in Europe and Japan after their non-certified-edible GM rice was found in our food supply for export.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_1605.cfm
So the jury could still be out: Is Bayer corrupting science to lead away from the idea of GM food is causing bee deaths? Ugly, to say the least.
I feel that your criticism is off base. The author of the story was right to focus only on the facts: specifically, the scientist's funding sources and the pattern of behavior that occurred with regards to funding and testimony.
Wisely, the author does not overreach the facts and try to call shenanigans on the science per se. Nor should he, unless he knows of a scientific experiment that has been done demonstrating what you are claiming.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude. It allows for the possibility that the scientist does questionable science but that his conclusions might be proven correct by others, even. This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
That pattern of behavior is treated unfairly, though. He argued for one theory, did a study, and then published a paper with a very different direction. That's how it's supposed to work. You change your mind as the facts come in. The article treats this as a betrayal.
That is how the pattern is supposed to work (opinion informed by data), I agree. However, credibility can be called into question by the appearance of impropriety. Perhaps one could say that the appearance of impropriety increases the prior likelihood of actual impropriety, but it's not black and white.
This article is serving as a counterbalance to a NYT article that failed to disclose this author's relationship with industry. That is usually a prominent disclosure; I've had to be very clear about my funding in every paper I've submitted, and if it's of high interest to those in the field, one can imagine that the public has an interest in this knowledge as well.
I really felt that this was an article written to draw attention to the scientist's funding, and I don't think it was done badly. When doctors fail to disclose funding in situations like this, they rightly get slammed. This strikes me as no different.
Like I said, it is quite possible that this scientist's conclusions are correct, but it is always important to have independent validation, where independent != funded by the company that benefits from your stated results.
Another important point is that it sounds like the scientist's own company would also benefit extensively from the bee problem being disease rather than pesticides. As you say, this may not invalidate his results but it does mean they probably need further scrutiny.
Yes, the implication is that the scientist is not to be trusted and that, by connection, his work should not be. But that is intentionally left to the reader to conclude....This is very good investigative scientific journalism.
Really? It just sounds to me like insinuation.
Insinuation being a subset of implication, I have no problem with your preference for a minimally different word choice, but confess that I am surprised that you would go to the effort to actually post that :-)
From a scientific perspective, failing to disclose that you're being funded by the company you're report exonerates is wrong. Research has shown that funding sources are strongly correlated the results of scientific papers in controversial areas, so this is arguably the single most important fact in the article.
More specifically the article did specifically identify a major flaw in the report: it didn't look at the chemical aspects as well, so couldn't draw conclusions about the contributions of different causes.
In general people love to hear (essentially gossip) about other people much more than scientific stuff.
But that would require work, and besides which, it would give the scientist the opportunity respond to criticism.
It's much easier this way.