Google is not a synonym for knowledge


So you want to be a science communicator. You need to read this article on becoming a science writer. Here’s a short list of tips:

  • Obtain the highest education possible and dismiss the notion to not pursue formal schooling and, instead, “learn on the job.” The latter is damaging advice, usually given by people without specialized education, or by those who benefit from your unpreparedness. If you actually get the job, you will always “learn the praxis” while on it. But you will never compensate, “on the job,” for the formal education you missed. Science, math and technology are not taught in the streets.
  • Read by far more topics than you can write about; develop a sense for science.
  • Travel internationally to scientific meetings and try to understand the cultural contexts in which science is done elsewhere; this could be difficult since we all see the planet through parochial preconceptions. However, modern science is done collaboratively and international partnerships are ubiquitous. Writing from home will keep your mind at home.
  • Write about science itself, rather than people in science. Do not celebritize individuals, but grant credit to all who deserve it.
  • Do not become enticed by the ivory-tower institutions as the sole source of science stories to report; that will turn you into a snob writer.
  • And remember that a good science tale should be good by itself, no matter its origin, but only a good story teller would make it shine.

I had some reservations about that first point — the amateur or citizen scientist can be a good contributor. But the good ones have a lot of discipline and drive and focus, and get a specialized education unconventionally, so it’s actually an important point.

What is a total disaster, though, are all the people who think they can master a subject via a combination of Google and Wikipedia. You absolutely can not. You can get quick bits of information, but you don’t acquire this abstract thing called knowledge: you need the depth you get from reading books and soaking in the details of the literature, so that you can make connections and grasp the broader context.

The rest is good advice. I’m putting this on my list of things to hand out to the students in my fall term writing course.

Comments

  1. says

    After working three years for a boss who thought that Google University makes him an expert on everything, I can only agree with the article.

    Google and Wikipedia are great for dusting off or refreshing forgotten knowledge, and of course for keeping up-to-date(ish) and broadening the horizons, but they do not substitute education. Thunderf00t has made a good point about this in one of his older videos (before he went full Monty) “buying a book about nuclear physics does not make you a nuclear physicist”.

    It is a prolem in private sector too. I had a prolonged debate with my HR manager about how our company is doing this backwards. Instead of letting new people to get educated for some specific jobs that require specialised knowledge (like statistical evaluations or 3D measurement or the use of some highly specialised software) my employer relies on people learning “on the job” instead of paying for them to get the few days to few weeks course. At best they get some watered down course from other coleagues, who are of course mostly crappy teachers because teaching is a specialised skill on its own.

    I was not able to get my point across. My explanation that workhours lost due to workers strugling with their work or doing it wrong way without knowing they are doing it wrong (because that is how they were taugth by other self-educated people who taught themselves by trial-and-error) costs in effectivity more than the measely money they would have to spend for a course fell on deaf ears.

    I noted the results of this dire culture especially when using statistics in so called Six Sigma – I had met a Black Belt who thought Martingale system really beats online roulette, because he did not in fact understand some fundamental principles of probability and statistics.

    The “funny” thing is, this is in Germany where usually a paper certificate is worth something. But the managers who decide about how to spend money are mostly US American and the whole corporate culture has been shaped by US American thinking for years. So “learning by doing” could be our motto.

  2. says

    I would add “Unless you are intimately familiar with an aspect of the field, cross-check your work with people who are. Nothing blows a hole in your credibility like getting something wrong, and having it sit on the internet forever.”

  3. says

    my employer relies on people learning “on the job”

    In my field, one thing that comes up fairly often is, “If we train people, what if they just use their improved knowledge as a way of getting a job somewhere else?” To which I usually reply: “What if you don’t train your people and they stay ignorant and never leave?”

  4. ck, the Irate Lump says

    Honestly, it has to be a balance between formal education and on-the-job. Often it’s even worse when the employer expects that you have all the training necessary to complete all tasks for the job and provides no on-the-job training for anything.

  5. says

    “Write about science itself, rather than people in science. Do not celebritize individuals, but grant credit to all who deserve it.”

    While I think this is generally a good idea, it shouldn’t be elevated to a rule. Sometimes the interesting part is the scientists involved. Ed Yong, for instance, usually keeps the scientists in the the background, but some of his better pieces have been profiles of scientists. I’m particularly interested in stories about scientists who overcome great odds or exemplify problems in the culture of science. A good example is here. Another is Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook, which interweaves the personal relationships of Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, who revolutionized toxicology, with the science of poison to tell a more compelling story than either on their own.

  6. hotspurphd says

    Another example ,at least for me, of the profile being better a book on the science is Walter Isaacon’s “Steve Jobs” is so much more interesting than his most recent book, “The IInnovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution”. The first was fascinating and I can hardly get through the latter.

  7. Anders Kehlet says

    What is a total disaster, though, are all the people who think they can master a subject via a combination of Google and Wikipedia. You absolutely can not. You can get quick bits of information, but you don’t acquire this abstract thing called knowledge: you need the depth you get from reading books and soaking in the details of the literature, so that you can make connections and grasp the broader context.

    Some of that literature is online and can be found via Google and Wikipedia. Just saying.

    Also, in the general case you’re just flat out wrong. As someone who’s been teaching myself programming for the past 10+ years Google and the Wiki have been invaluable. I also think your “quick bits of information” comment is insulting towards the people who spend a great deal of their time producing quality content for free.

    The problem is with people who suck at learning, not the tools they use.

    (I feel like I should remark upon the snobbishness of implying that only knowledge you’ve paid for is genuine, but I know you didn’t mean it that way.)

  8. anthrosciguy says

    Anders, a lot depends on the subject. I’d expect the ratio of good to bad info online, and ease of finding the good and differentiating from the bad, would be higher for things like programming. For things like human evolution (and the fringe ideas therein I’ve spent time critiquing) it’s a lot harder to wade through.

    A lot of things to do with humans, like diet as one example, have loads of bad info online, and you have to slog through an incredible amount of BS to try to find good info. And you have to be able to differentiate between the two.

  9. iggles says

    Anders Kehlet @7

    I agree with the general principle of what you’re saying – a diligent, critical reader can get much more from a ‘wikieducation’ than a credulous naif operating via motivated reasoning (see: anti-vaxxers) – but some subjects are much better suited to independent learning than others. Computer programming is probably the ideal subject for learning over the internet, since you’re on the computer anyway, and any errors in your learning are readily apparent in your practice: e.g., if you make a coding mistake, the code just fails. In this way, your errors are self-correcting, and they don’t stand as great a risk of multiplying undetected until you get to the point of believing in full-blown nonsense. Scientific learning requires more conscious scrutiny for you to detect the errors in your understanding, which is why we need peer review to advance our knowledge of (say) the Golgi apparatus, but not to write an online minigame.

    Also – I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure computer programming has a lot less room than science for bias or political agendas contaminating the learning experience.

  10. wzrd1 says

    First, I’ll say that I heartily recommend Wikipedia for in depth information – from the citations, not the articles.
    I’m also the miserable prick that slaps a citation needed flag all over poorly cited articles and even some well cited articles. Make a claim, provide a citation.
    I’ve been in classes where the use of Wikipedia was expressly forbidden as an information source for assignments, I used it anyway, but used the citations for my research and as a starting point for further research. After all, one paper will have citations for other papers.
    Google is a lousy source for many topics, as the noise to signal ratio is atrocious. But, Google Scholar has the converse, massive signal to very little noise.

    Sources are tools, use the correct tool for the correct task and one’s efforts are rewarded. Use the incorrect tool for a task, one’s path is fraught with errors and problems, creating a condition where the arrival at actual comprehension is impossible.

  11. jacksprocket says

    The problem is less Google and Wikipedia than JSTOR and the like. It’s a scandal that four hundred years after Henry Oldenburg, and twenty years into the Internet, information is still being rationed by organisations whose premise is to drip- feed everybody’s property for big doses of cash.

  12. Rob Grigjanis says

    wzrd1 @10:

    I heartily recommend Wikipedia for in depth information – from the citations, not the articles.

    For many fields, you need a deep background to get anything from the citations. So yeah, the “information” is there, but you’re not generally going to get a good grasp of a subject by following citations from a Wikipedia article.

  13. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Also – I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure computer programming has a lot less room than science for bias or political agendas contaminating the learning experience.

    Ever hear of GamerGate?

  14. iggles says

    Nerd @ 13

    Well, yeah. But if a GamerGater writes an article on how to code for CSS, does that bias then corrupt the learner’s understanding of CSS? I doubt it.

  15. Holms says

    #5 Jeff
    While I think this is generally a good idea, it shouldn’t be elevated to a rule.

    None of these are rules, rather they are recommendations.

  16. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Well, yeah. But if a GamerGater writes an article on how to code for CSS, does that bias then corrupt the learner’s understanding of CSS? I doubt it.

    No, just his implementation of it. Stop compartmentalizing, and look at the total picture. If what you produce is biased, you didn’t learn some important lessons along the way.

  17. iggles says

    Nerd, I don’t understand why you’re picking at me. Of course bias is a problem in all its forms. I’m not interested in making excuses for computer programmers and I don’t have any love for pathetic GamerGaters. My point is that the teaching of a discipline like computer programming is less vulnerable to the instructor’s bias(es) than the sciences because the principles are rather concrete. Either your program works, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you must reassess.

    In the same vein, your high school math teacher could be a 9/11 truther, a holocaust denier, and a scientologist all in one, but it wouldn’t have an impact on his ability to teach quadratic functions. If that person was your history teacher, however, it would discredit the entire course.

  18. Artor says

    My mentor in carpentry used to tell me, “Every tool in your toolbox is a hammer. Except your screwdriver. That’s a chisel.” Google and Wikipedia are that hammer and screwdriver. Sure, you can make them work to get the results you want…sort of. But they aren’t the specialized tool you need to do the job right. You can cobble something recognizable together using blunt instruments, but to do quality work, you’ll need quality resources.

  19. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Of course bias is a problem in all its forms.

    That was my point.

    My point is that the teaching of a discipline like computer programming is less vulnerable to the instructor’s bias(es) than the sciences because the principles are rather concrete.

    No, I taught general/organic chemistry for many years. I also minored in mathematics, and learned computer programming almost fifty years ago. Same amount of biases in chemistry, mathematics, and computer programming. None, except for you what you did with it.

  20. iggles says

    No, I taught general/organic chemistry for many years. I also minored in mathematics, and learned computer programming almost fifty years ago. Same amount of biases in chemistry, mathematics, and computer programming. None, except for you what you did with it.

    Ok, fair enough. But maybe you could elaborate on how those biases would actually skew an independent learner’s knowledge of how to program?

    Also, I am still confused about where, exactly, this miscommunication happened between us. Remember, the context for your inital disagreement was this comment, here (emphasis added):

    Anders Kehlet @7

    I agree with the general principle of what you’re saying – a diligent, critical reader can get much more from a ‘wikieducation’ than a credulous naif operating via motivated reasoning (see: anti-vaxxers) – but some subjects are much better suited to independent learning than others. Computer programming is probably the ideal subject for learning over the internet, since you’re on the computer anyway, and any errors in your learning are readily apparent in your practice: e.g., if you make a coding mistake, the code just fails. In this way, your errors are self-correcting, and they don’t stand as great a risk of multiplying undetected until you get to the point of believing in full-blown nonsense. Scientific learning requires more conscious scrutiny for you to detect the errors in your understanding, which is why we need peer review to advance our knowledge of (say) the Golgi apparatus, but not to write an online minigame.

    Also – I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure computer programming has a lot less room than science for bias or political agendas contaminating the learning experience.

    I mean ok, if you pick out the last statement in that comment and ignore the context of everything that preceded it, I can see where you’d get the idea that I was trying to argue that the authors of online programming tutorials are less biased individuals than teachers in other fields. But that isn’t what I was trying to say, and I think only the most deliberately uncharitable reading of my comments would even lead you to that conclusion in the first place. I don’t get your hostility. If I said something confusing, or wrong, you could just ask me to clarify, or you could disagree with me without being so disproportionately aggressive.

  21. wzrd1 says

    @iggles, you’ve not gone through some of the tangle code I’ve gone through in my day. Or had to deal with memory leaks in some of that software.
    Wonders, such as jumping to a subroutine, then jumping back, rather than returning from it, not clearing memory of no longer used variables, etc.

  22. says

    #15 Holms
    None of these are rules, rather they are recommendations.

    But the rest (save the first, as PZ says) should be rules, or at least much closer to it. I find it hard to imagine a good science writer who is parochial or only cares about science from elite institutions, but there are plenty of good science writers who have written scientist-centric stories.

  23. transgenderisomer says

    To Nerd of Redhead, there is absolutely more bias in the sciences than in computer programming. I have been a software engineer for Microsoft for almost three decades now, and before that I double majored in physics and mathematics at MIT, where I also worked as a research assistant.

  24. wzrd1 says

    Oh, geeze, now we hear from a programmer who thinks that generating a non-maskable interrupt is a good way to log onto an operating system. Odd that no other OS requires that feat. ;)

    You’ve been around long enough then to recall this one: Windows has detected a change in your mouse position and needs to restart in order to register the change.

    On a more serious note, there are indeed biases in programming, little endian, bit endian, small modules, monolithic and on and on. Those aren’t styles of programming, but very, very specific philosophies in how to do things.
    For the record, I’m currently typing this on an OS X box, previously, I was on a Windows 7 Enterprise box and responding from it, other times, I was on a Linux box. Each to its specified task.
    Linux and OS X for Unix network utilities, OS X for graphical tasks and Windows for office and work. I can secure and indeed have secured each OS, although tonight’s Windows box is secured by corporate.
    As a user of pretty much every current OS around, as such, I pick on each one of them. Hence, I pick on Tantrum Torvalds, Windoze, BehindBSD, etc.
    Because, a philosophy in programming has its own biases.

  25. wcorvi says

    I think the only course in J-school now is how to download the stock photos that have replaced headlines. The local paper had an article on a traffic accident, but the stock photo had foliage that is impossible in our state – think Saguaro Cacti in the background.
    .
    I heard the other day that Siri and Google should replace all the memorization in high school so the students can go on to deep philosophical arguments.
    .
    I’m thinking about how calculators were supposed to free up students so they can go on to learn differential equations. But now they can’t even add single-digit integers, even WITH a calculator.
    .
    If arithmetic is too hard, you can pretty much forget calculus. Soon they won’t learn anything at all. And I can hardly wait for that to spread to college, too.

  26. wzrd1 says

    @wcorvi, I recall the controversy over “the new math”, I recall a tornado of concerns over new notions.
    I have some fixed notions, I also have learned to adjust and learn.
    As I was born in late 1961, perhaps, we have a difference of opinion. Personally, I enjoy my wife’s opinion. Perhaps, you’dn prefer an adversarial opinion, someone space borne.
    Alas, we have Earth.
    And mathematics.

  27. says

    I can think of few times in, say, the last ten years, that I’ve heard or read either of the phrases ‘amateur scientist’ or ‘citizen scientist’, except in reference, not to a conceptual persona or type, but to a specific person in the news or similar. The latter especially (‘citizen scientist’) is extremely rare by my reading.

    The first time I heard the utterance of that phrase in a very long time was a week or two ago when Keolu Fox (predoctoral fellow, UW) speak about making ‘…genome sequencing technology development…immersive and collaborative, activating and empowering indigenous communities as citizen scientists’.

    The expression made me sit up and take notice then, as it does now. I am noting the coincidence.

  28. khms says

    I’ve seen people use Google-found resources to learn new stuff and produce quality code. (I’d like to count myself as an example, in fact, but I’m obviously biased.)

    I’ve also seen people use Google-found resources to produce crappy, slow, resource-hungry code with crappy user interfaces.

    I think one of the important differences is background knowledge, such as a basic sense of what a compiler does and how your nice programming language constructs are actually made to work (experience from the days when computers were much simpler can really help here), and a sense of what it takes to make big projects actually work (following, say, the Linux kernel and/or gcc mailing lists for any length of time can give you a sense of that) … as for what makes a good user interface, sorry, I have some basic ideas, but I know that I’m not the person to ask. Don’t know how you learn that – sometimes I think nobody does.

    Academic knowledge also helps. However, as far as I can tell, mostly as background knowledge, and some of the above things you don’t seem to learn there unless you make a career in academia – students are rarely involved in any larger or longer-running projects with actual users.

    One thing that helps in general is a sense about what kind of information is reliable, and what isn’t – not only with Google and Wikipedia. Probably the only way you get that is through experience, but you need to already know that this is important to know when you start – and you need to know at least some minimal reliable information and mostly-reliable sources to even start to know what you are looking for.[*] Style is a large part of it, but you also need to look at the wider context. And of course, once you have background knowledge, you can test against that as well – just remember that your background knowledge might be wrong, too, in any given respect. It happens.

    [*] Incidentally, this kind of thing is why even intelligent creationists seem to have trouble breaking out of their bubble. If your starting working model is badly wrong, all the information necessary to correct it looks itself wrong to you.

  29. deep6 says

    Speaking about the tech side of STEM only, as others have done, as I have no formal education in the hard sciences beyond a few required math and science classes here and there, one thing I’ve found is that at every company where I’ve had to write code, I’ve also had to do my own technical writing (e.g. documentation for clients and internal interested parties.) Technical writing is a *skill set* distinct from the knowledge needed to build a website or query a database or troubleshoot laptop problems or set up a load balancer. I’d much rather be able to hand off my notes and do a bunch of demos for a certified, trained technical writer and let that person do the work of data visualization, defining terms and organizing documentation meant to mitigate risk and transfer knowledge.

    At the ripe old age of 39 I just graduated this May with an M.S. in Computer Information Systems from BU. The university even gave me an award. It took me 4 years, taking prerequisites for enrollment and one class a semester due to working full-time. Not one class available to me focused on technical writing.

    I haven’t experienced any strong “political” or “agenda” pressure in the academic or private industry tech world, apart from what I see as a complete disregard for the accessibility concerns of some impaired tech users. But it’s not like Bill Donohue and James Dobson are spamming their mailing list members to write their congressperson about the evils of overriding functions or denormalized table design. There’s no culture of silence preventing instruction on what Unix is. As artificial intelligence moves more into the mainstream I do expect this disinterest in politicizing IT to change but we’re not there yet.

    I do differentiate between politics and philosophy. Tech workers and academics are some of the most strongly philosophical and even ideological people I know. They take strident positions on almost every specialty within IT, ranging from what operating systems are best, to debates over wireless networking standards, to how to properly name variables in a VBA program. There are topics like encryption and privacy standards, net neutrality, censorship, pirated media, consumer and corporate responsibility for the environmental impact of raw materials mining and tech waste disposal, etc. that bridge the political/philosophical gap, but I would argue the effects of those issues are even more strongly felt by the users of technology than its makers.

    I have encountered mild sexism in the tech industry — and I do say mild, as I think I’ve had a pretty lucky run of it so far. The biggest issue I encounter is massive snobbery over formal training/education vs workplace-only experience vs entrepreneurial autodidacts. AFAIC, if you’re learning and you have decent people skills, we cool. But the groups have their problems. The autodidacts act like if you’re not learning everything and you’re on some structured school or job project then you’re not being innovative enough and you don’t show true passion for IT. The workplace experience-only folks act jealous of the formally educated and rip them for having only theoretical understanding but lacking practical skill sets, as well as criticize everyone for having spent insufficient time dedicated to a single topic to make them a worthy hire. And the academic folks see the others as people who write jury-rigged and copy/pasted code. They find the “get it done” attitude of the others to assume those groups don’t care about best practices. These attitudes have caused major tension for me in my relationships with supervisors, through the hiring process, and in technical interviews. The Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow message boards are riddled with judgment about this stuff. No bueno.

  30. Anders Kehlet says

    @iggles

    Also – I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure computer programming has a lot less room than science for bias or political agendas contaminating the learning experience.

    OOP skeptics would beg to differ. xD