The More You Know, The More You Throw Up in Your Mouth Just a Little Bit

David Brooks' latest column is literally just a summation of summations of a shitload of academic articles, mostly evo-psych stuff. Oh, happy day!

At least now I know that diabetes is correlated with crime and that male chess players are totes aggressive when playing against hawt ladies.

Brooks' ramblings are nothing if a textbook example of the twisted relationship between science and the media.

Brooks can't summarize every "social studies" paper ever. So he's selective. So is the guy that compiles the summaries for him (who incidentally, has some sort of business credentials and a blog at National Affairs). Would you believe it that a lot of the research Brooks cites confirms various oppressive myths about humanity? Would you?

As far as I know, neither Brooks nor Kevin Lewis has a master's degree (in Science!). They don't feel the need read the actual research, let alone question it. Nope, science is truth (when it confirms the truths "we" want to be true) and the media's job is to report those truths (and :cough: only those truths). Why point out that correlation does not imply causation, when there are cool truths to report about hawt ladies and people who have diabetes, amirite?

And why bother to interpret the findings of scientific research (other than to imply that people with diabetes are killers)? In theory, that's what the discussion section of most journal articles is for.

For example, what conclusions did the researchers who found that people retained more information when it was in a hard-to-read font reach, and how might that jibe with hard-to-read fonts being well, hard (or impossible) to read? Clearly, people who didn't read the fonts didn't retain any information. Maybe the researchers discussed this, maybe not. Anyhoo: Wev, science! :jazzhands:

And what, precisely, is "science"? Do all "social scientists" think that all of these studies were "social science", or can we just take Brooks at his word? There are different answers to the issue of what is and isn't science (and why we might care), but doing the evaluations in question involves reading the actual papers.

Incidentally, even if they can comprehend the articles, a good many people can't even afford or otherwise access the scientific journals that print them. The media is where most people learn about science, and they have a responsibility to help the public understand what scientists do, lest they harbor gross misconceptions.

As Brooks says, "A day without social science is like a day without sunshine." Which I was totes enjoying before I ran across his latest garbage nightmare.