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dumnezero t1_jdvjc7d wrote

Very meta.

>A new study examined comments given on the Reddit forum “r/science” to discover how commenters express negative attitudes towards science. Results showed that these views are most often expressed by describing scientists as corruptible, poor communicators, and misleading. Commenters particularly negatively evaluated social sciences, especially psychology, calling it pseudoscientific. The study was published in the Public Understanding of Science.

...

Batchelor, Jordan. "Just another clickbait title: A corpus-driven investigation of negative attitudes toward science on Reddit." Public Underst. Sci., 12 Jan. 2023, p. 09636625221146453, doi:10.1177/09636625221146453.

>The public understanding of science has produced a large body of research about general attitudes toward science. However, most studies of science attitudes have been carried out via surveys or in experimental conditions, and few make use of the growing contexts of online science communication to investigate attitudes without researcher intervention. This study adopted corpus-based discourse analysis to investigate the negative attitudes held toward science by users of the social media website Reddit, specifically the forum r/science.

>A large corpus of comments made to r/science was collected and mined for keywords. Analysis of keywords identified several sources of negative attitudes, such as claims that scientists can be corruptible, poor communicators, and misleading. Research methodologies were negatively evaluated on the basis of small sample sizes. Other commenters negatively evaluated social science research, especially psychology, as being pseudoscientific, and several commenters described science journalism as untrustworthy or sensationalized.

And the mods should've removed all of those. Press that Nuke button, mods.

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marilern1987 t1_jdw7b2r wrote

The problem is that there isn’t anything wrong with most of the studies, but HOW they are interpreted

A lot of things I see in this subreddit are legit - but the average person doesn’t always interpret it correctly.

For example: this past weekend, the article about birth control and breast cancer. Look at the comments on that post - a lot of the comments on that post failed to read the article, or interpret the results correctly. Meanwhile, birth control has been a known carcinogen for people with certain genetic makeups since 2007, but a lot of the comments were like “guess we’re screwed either way…”

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hellomondays t1_je0j6h2 wrote

Yeah, a lot of critical comments boil down to reading the abstract (at best) then not understanding the methodology section of a paper or being even aware of what limitations are or what the research question is and just saying something reductive and irrelevant about sample sizes or correlation fallacies.

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NewDad907 t1_jdxbv3o wrote

To be fair, some of the best scientists are the worst communicators.

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Darwins_Dog t1_jdxufis wrote

They're not usually writing for a public audience either, which doesn't help.

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iamfondofpigs t1_jdy1b1p wrote

Author Jordan Batchelor:

> Analysis of keywords identified several sources of negative attitudes, such as claims that scientists can be corruptible, poor communicators, and misleading. Research methodologies were negatively evaluated on the basis of small sample sizes. Other commenters negatively evaluated social science research, especially psychology, as being pseudoscientific, and several commenters described science journalism as untrustworthy or sensationalized.

/u/dumbnezero:

> And the mods should've removed all of those. Press that Nuke button, mods.

I am not so certain.

  • "Corruptible": Conflict of interest is relevant and should be pointed out.
  • "Poor communicators": This accusation can be a jumping-off point for a commenter to clarify the authors' intent.
  • "Misleading": Always good to point out when an author makes a claim that is not supported by their own data.
  • "Small sample sizes": This is the one where I most agree with Batchelor. Commenters often slam down this criticism without thinking about its relevance. Still, scientists often make the opposite mistake of overvaluing statistical significance.
  • "Negatively evaluated social science": Many articles that get posted here under the social science tag are closer to political commentary than social science.
  • "Described science journalism as untrustworthy or sensationalized": This is straightforwardly true, though. The majority of the time I read science journalism, and then go on to read the actual research paper, the science journalism article makes stronger claims than the research paper itself.

No doubt, there are good and bad ways to comment on these problems. I'd like to see what words and phrases Batchelor actually looked for in the corpus, and I'd like some examples of what Batchelor considers to be unreasonable comments. I can't access the actual article, though. My normal search methods failed. And my, ahem, other methods failed as well.

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boooooooooo_cowboys t1_jdycwfd wrote

>"Misleading": Always good to point out when an author makes a claim that is not supported by their own data.

Be honest…how often do you see redditors actually engaging with the original article and giving valid critiques of the authors interpretations vs spitting out their knee jerk reaction to the headline? I’ve seen an awful lot of “poor communication” and “misleading” complaints that could have been cleared up by actually reading the article.

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Trill-I-Am t1_jdy1xv5 wrote

Accusations are net negative even if they instigate good discussion

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iamfondofpigs t1_jdy6hem wrote

Not sure what you mean. If I am to take you literally, what I'm hearing is, "/r/science would be a better subreddit if all critical comments were deleted."

I don't believe this is what you meant, but perhaps you could clarify?

When I use the word "accusation," I mean, "A claim that someone has done something wrong." This could be an accusation of malicious fraud; it could also be an accusation that someone has mistakenly used an inappropriate statistical test.

Is there a particular class of accusations that you think are harmful? Perhaps your definition of "accusation" is different from mine?

Would be interested to hear.

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YouAreGenuinelyDumb t1_je1cgf9 wrote

I disagree. It would go against the principles of the scientific method to remove all criticism just because it sometimes is unwarranted. I’m pretty sure every scientist has made many of these complaints at some point in their lives.

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TargetDroid t1_jdw4n79 wrote

So, you think banishing all critique will convince people that scientists aren’t corrupt or politicized, eh?

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dumnezero t1_jdw8wrb wrote

Yes, comments on reddit are unreliable. Here, a bit less so, but still mostly worthless.

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xxScienceLuvva69xx t1_jdx8gtq wrote

This comment is the problem exemplified, a snappy vast oversimplification that misses the point entirely. How did you read all of that abstract,think what you wrote was a suitable summary AND miss the irony in doing that??

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TargetDroid t1_jdx95b3 wrote

Are you talking about my comment? I have to presume you must be responding to the comment to which I was responding (and have therefore misplaced your comment as though it were a response to mine), but alas… perhaps not?

−5

xxScienceLuvva69xx t1_jdxd0fs wrote

>Are you talking about my comment?

Alas, I am responding to your comment.

Your presumption that I am responding to the comment to which you were responding is, alas in vein.

I am not responding to the comment to which you were responding, but to your comment (and have not therefore misplaced my comment as it is indeed a response to yours).

... Alas.

(Alas).

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