How can Gregg Easterbrook be publishing a science column in Slate? Brad DeLong explains it all.
The fact that Easterbook’s writing is “lively” and “provocative” and that he is a member of the appropriate social networks is sufficient reason to publish him as a “science writer.”
I can see where “lively” and “provocative” are necessary pre-conditions for getting a column in a popular magazine, but are they sufficient? No. Would they hire someone for a gossip column who had never heard of Scarlet Johansson or Brad Pitt? There is this phenomenon called “expertise” that ought to be part of the equation.
That being in the right clique is part of the prerequisite is unfortunate, but is a common part of human reality. The interesting thing, though, is that picking Easterbrook tells us something about the social circles in which Slate management seems to circulate—and that is that they are disjunct from the social circles that include competent scientists and science writers.
The fact that this has an effect not just on how good their operations are at delivering accurate information but also on how the scientifically-literate regard their operations as a whole–I don’t think that’s something that enters Weisberg’s (or Foer’s) mind at all.
Exactly. Although it could be that that’s a smart (in a short-sighted, counter-intuitive way) decision: the scientifically literate are clearly a minority in this country, so maybe one way to market ‘science’ to that profitable majority of boobs is to hire a boob to write it. That is, if you think your job is not to tell people what they ought to know, but rather to repeat to them what they think they already know.
Perhaps if there were more boobs in science, the number of the scientifically literate would increase.
That being in the right clique is part of the prerequisite is unfortunate, but is a common part of human reality.
I don’t think this is a sufficient explanation. Gregg Easterbrook stands out among science journalists as spectacularly bad–most science journalists actually do a pretty good job. In fact, after college I looked into trying to be one and learned that most at the very least have specific science journalism training, and many have graduate degrees (if not PhD’s) in their areas of expertise.
In other words, Gregg Easterbrook should raise serious concerns about the editorship of any publication that employs him, to the point that all their writers are considered suspect. If we know they can’t be bothered to hire someone credible in a field where there are plenty of smart, knowledgeable people–or even to fire someone once he has utterly shredded his credibility–why should we trust the people they hire to write about any other topic?
Perhaps you could pass along Seed’s take on Smolin to show Salon how to do it properly.
Germane to this issue:
SF writer Greg Egan takes New Scientist to task for “a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers”. Quoting a couple paragraphs:
I don’t think Easterbrook is that bad. There is a lot of what he writes that I really agree with for instance:
For at least a decade, it’s been clear that the space shuttle program is a clunker. Nonetheless, NASA’s funding remains heavy on the shuttle and the space station, while usually slighting science.
At this point, the shuttle exists almost solely to service the space station, while the station exists almost solely to give the space shuttle a destination to fly to.
from It’s the Earth, Stupid
The insurance industry is “feeling the unmistakable economic impact of global warming,” Al Gore declares in his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
But maybe there’s another reason losses keep rising–namely, that property keeps becoming worth more. With each passing year, hurricanes that strike the United States are striking a nation of ever-more-affluent people who build ever-more properties in coastal areas. No wonder the destruction keeps getting worse. Every year there’s more to destroy!
The scientific case for greenhouse reform gets stronger all the time; to show that higher weather-related insurance losses are mainly a consequence of rising property values, rising population, and the rush for coastal real estate does not disprove an artificial greenhouse effect.
from Bigger Smash
And of course his review of Smolin’s book about string theory which I thought was a fair review.
In regards to the space program, I especially like how Easterbrook pinpoints one of the big problems. Manned flight is sexy, it’s what the president wanted to do send people, men to mars, men back to the moon, but what is science, REAL science are those unmanned probes.
How is Easterbrook spectacularly bad? Remember that even if you have a scientists who is a leader in astrophysics, he won’t necessarily be qualified to talk about advances in human medicine. Science as a whole has become so specialized that even the brightest people must approach vast fields of science from a layman’s perspetive, so I don’t see it as a strike against him if he used to be a sports writer.
Suppose you had, I don’t know, Brian Green, the author of the “Elegant Universe”, one of the most amazing and best books on physics, a string theory specialist, suppose you had him for slate’s science writer post, if he were to approach the science of global warming, the politics of space travel, or avian flu, he would have to begin studying it from a layman’s perspective.
Maybe I’m ignorant, and he’s no good, but so far the stuff Easterbrook has written seems like good science writing to me.
eric taylor wrote as follows:
Not necessarily. He might have to begin at a layman’s starting point (essentially zero knowledge), but he would have the tools acquired during his education and hands-on experience as a scientist. These include a familiarity with mathematics, general notions of how experiments are designed, Carl Sagan’s baloney detection kit, and even a sense of “scientific politics” — the problems of funding, what different ways of publishing a result mean, and so forth. Any scientist working in any field brushes against these to some extent, I believe. Consequently, although Brian Greene might know nothing about evo-devo or PZ Myers might come up shallow in quantum field theory, each has an improved ability for self-education.
The obvious remedy is that PZ Myers should take over Easterbrook’s football column. It makes just as much sense.
Science as a whole has become so specialized that even the brightest people must approach vast fields of science from a layman’s perspetive, so I don’t see it as a strike against him if he used to be a sports writer.
Nice strawman.
I used to be a baby who pooped my pants. But I grew up.
What Easterbrook “used to be” isn’t the problem. It’s just amusing to know that there is an explanation for his crappy “science” baloney: he’s more or less clueless.
How is Easterbrook spectacularly bad?
Follow the links, grasshopper.
Some of my favorite science writers don’t have degrees in the field. And we get manuscripts from accomplished scientists all the time that are, sadly, nearly unusable. So, Easterbrook aside (would I sound like less of a professional if I admit that none of his recent work immediately comes to mind?) I’d have to say that being an expert is no guarantee that you’re able to generate copy that a publication such as New Scientist or Seed can use.
On the other hand, there have been more than a few occasions that my own scientific background has allowed me to detect errors in pieces I’m editing or even just galleys I happen to see lying around.
Let’s just put it this way: if fact-checking a regular news piece is difficult, fact-checking a science news piece is even harder. Both Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer have in the past readily admitted that their blogs are a great place to hear about the errors they’ve made in their work.
Follow the links, grasshopper.
I did and still don’t get why you think Easterbrook is especially bad at scientific writing for the layperson.
perhaps I’m just very stupid. Can you point out just a few examples which struck you as writing of his which was especially unscientific and wrong? Thanks.
perhaps I’m just very stupid
Maybe.
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/166/story_16639_1.html
Quite honestly, any science writer who can’t tell the difference between Intelligent Design and Evolution on the _scientific merits_ of the theories is out of his depth.
Never mind theat it took him until 2006 to “come around” to the realization that Anthropogenic global warming is actually happening. But yet even after writing about carbon credits in that article, he still bashes Gore an “An Inconvenient Truth” for moral failings for flying all over the nation, despite Gore making the tour ofr the movie carbon neutral though those very same carbon credits.
Quite frankly, Easterbrook falls for the common political, trick of giving both sides of a debate equal merit without actually attempting to research those claims.
Ah, now I see what the fuss is about. Thanks Left Wing Fox. I had tried clicking on some links that pharyngula posted and the delong link but nobody explained to me WHY easterbrook had problems as a science writer in detail.
So he believes that
But today the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with everyone from the Supreme Court to establishment media holding that students should hear only Darwin’s side of the debate. This situation is just as preposterous as the situation in Tennessee in 1925–and just as bad for freedom of thought. Once you weren’t supposed to question God. Now you’re not supposed to question the head of the biology department.
Ok that’s pretty bad.
And pretending that global warming wasn’t an issue until 2006 is bad too.
Quite frankly, Easterbrook falls for the common political, trick of giving both sides of a debate equal merit without actually attempting to research those claims.
Yes, I can see it from those two links. The weird thing is, I actually didn’t notice this type of bias in his slate articles, which is the only stuff I have read from him.
And frankly I did like how Easterbrook gave Al Gore the what for. I mean there’s no question that global warming is a big serious problem but being alarmist about it is as bad as when you had those anti-drug commercials on tv on the war on drugs. If you’re too alarmist, nobody will believe you if your worst case scenario predictions don’t come true.
I also hate how Al Gore pretends he’s not running for president. He has, what we call in poker terms, a “tell” — every time he runs for office Al Gore shaves his beard off.
Anyway, thanks very much for those links, I certainly have a different (and unfortunately much worse) opinion of Easterbrook now.
Gregg Easterbrook has just been inducted into the reDiscovery Institute Hall of Fame.
Read about it here:
http://www.re-discovery.org/active_1.html
All readers of this post are invited to the Induction Ceremony in Tacoma. Jack Shafer will attend.
perhaps I’m just very stupid. Can you point out just a few examples which struck you as writing of his which was especially unscientific and wrong? Thanks.
In TNR he once wrote:
So… yeah.
Eric, in your Easterbrook passage on Gore, would it have hurt him to acknowledge that there are multiple studies linking global warming with higher strength, though not higher frequency, hurricanes? Higher strength hurricanes obviously lead directly to greater losses for insurers.
well, the single most important thing which predicates hurricane strength are local effects and cyclic effects. Globam warming fortunately is one of the lower order effects.
So last year there were a lot of hurricanes for a variety of factors, it was a peak of cyclic effects, and this year, we see an el nino weakening them. No doubt global warming strengthens hurricanes to some degree but that amount is just swamped by all these other effects.
This year has one of the weaker years of hurricanes, and you know it doesn’t disprove global warming at all. So, I mean, you can’t say that we’ll see higher strength hurricanes every year because of global warming because it just isn’t true. I can’t remember the weather models for the next decade, but what if the models predict less hurricanes and weaker ones than usual, I mean, why not just say the truth straight up. Hurricanes are affected by global warming but it’s a relatively weak effect, so you won’t notice it every year.
Gore’s film says panic watch out everyone’s gonna die from the hurricanes, when do we panic? Panic now! I mean don’t get me wrong, I would vote for him again if he runs in ’08, I just don’t like him because everything he does is for some sort of political gain, but all politicians are like that.
Easterbrook is 100% right in that the #1 contributor to greater losses for hurricanes is the fact that there are more people on the coast and we just have a lot more stuff. The first order of business is to understand that mother nature does not screw around, if we want to build our houses on the coast we should be prepared to take losses in the long term. All it takes is a dozen years of peaceful hurricane seasons, and everything we learned from Katrina will be forgotten and we’ll build all up and down the coast and just cross the fingers and hope nothing happens.
All you have to do is look back at the 1811 and 1812 New Madrid earthquakes to understand just how true it is that the single best predictor for loss of life and property is not how big a disaster is but how many people and buildings are there and how unprepared everyone is. There were four massive earthquakes then richter scale 7.5 and above, yet we had minimal loss of life and property. But if the same thing were to happen today?
Exactly. Although it could be that that’s a smart (in a short-sighted, counter-intuitive way) decision: the scientifically literate are clearly a minority in this country, so maybe one way to market ‘science’ to that profitable majority of boobs is to hire a boob to write it. That is, if you think your job is not to tell people what they ought to know, but rather to repeat to them what they think they already know.
In light of the above, see this column.
In regards to the space program, I especially like how Easterbrook pinpoints one of the big problems. Manned flight is sexy, it’s what the president wanted to do send people, men to mars, men back to the moon, but what is science, REAL science are those unmanned probes.
Hmm. How about all the stuff they do in between launching the latest piece of military garbage into orbit or *could* do if they had bothered to spend money on better space stations or more moon missions, instead of an oversized monstrocity that they couldn’t get anyone but the military to pay for, so had to build to do 50 contradictory and prohibitively expensive tasks, instead of 5 reasonably inexpensive ones? Fact is, the shuttle was the mouse built to committee specifications, which ended up turning out to be an elephant when they got done. Had the priorities been directed at research and space habitation, instead of hand delivering spy satallites, while letting every other project get sidelined, we would probably have people *now* paying large sums of money to rent 2-3 “suites” on a real station for their vacations (if not far more than that). Instead, we have what you always get when one group, who has all the cash, demands that you do X, Y and Z for them, and that if you want to do A-W, you had better take a number.
The problem isn’t Bush’s unrealistic and brain dead goals for the spave program, the problem is that, from the stand point of the stuff that NASA *originally* intended, we are now just trying to catch back up to what we could already do when they cancelled the rest of the Apollo missions and we don’t have either the massive influx of money that is needed or the drive from the clown suggesting we go forward, to bridge the gap.
Erm ….
Sawyer’s claims are genuine, and there is no conservation-violation.
There are other articles, and I suggest EVERYBODY look at them, because, IF the engineering can be improved (Really cold, rigid walls to the chamber) then this is a really important development.
… also referred to in JBIS – a real, relativistic e/m thruster.
[ References……New Scientist, 9 September issue, Space Chronicle edition of JBIS, vol 58, p.26 and ….]
http://www.e4engineering.com/Articles/295931/Microwave%20engine%20gets%20a%20boost.htm
http://www.shelleys.demon.co.uk/fdec02em.htm
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/09/08/1874074.htm
]
So, if Shawyer can boost the Q from 50, 000 by 4 orders of magnitude, by using liquid-Nitrogen superconductors for cooling, and without the assembly shattering, he will be getting kilograms of lift ……..
Think of it as a relatavistic hydraulick jack, hmmm …. ?