Dec 02 2009
God and Bad Science in the Gaps of Sloppy Language Use
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again: Not only does science prize accuracy and precision, it absolutely relies upon them. To be scientific means to gather and measure data carefully. But it doesn’t stop there. Diligence and care should go into the analysis and discussion of findings. Error sneaks into the gaps caused by sloppy work. And speaking and writing are part of the work of science.
A couple news releases about recent science findings got me grumping over sloppy language use. The first was this paradoxically titled piece: Loneliness can be contagious.
Here’s the science, weak as it is (but that’s another story):
Before relationships are severed, people on the periphery transmit feelings of loneliness to their remaining friends, who also become lonely. [bold added]
How are these feelings “transmitted,” and how did the researchers make the determination that they are?
For the study, the team examined records of the Framingham Heart Study, which has studied people in Framingham, Mass. since 1948. The original group, including more than 5,209 people, was originally studied for the risks of cardiovascular disease.
By constructing graphs that charted the subjects’ friendship histories and information about their reports of loneliness, researchers were able to establish a pattern of loneliness that spread as people reported fewer close friends. The data showed that lonely people “infected” the people around them with loneliness, and those people moved to the edges of social circles.[bold added]
I don’t know. Seems to me that from the particular source of data the reseachers have taken the liberty of describing a likely passive process in active terms. Infect. Transmit. Contagious.
This analogy comes to mind: You put an ice cube into a glass of water. Does the cold then transmit itself into the liquid? No. If we want to be accurate, that’s a incorrect way of looking at it. Rather than cold spreading, heat dissipates. Cold is a lack of something, and this lack can’t spread.
Similarly, I believe, loneliness is, in part, a lack of something: social involvement. Of course, feelings are an integral part of loneliness as well. While feelings can be transmitted, the social aspect of loneliness cannot. Is it important to make that distinction? I think so. And while feelings of loneliness might play a causal role in social isolation, and vice-versa, the research data itself did not clearly distangle the two variables, so one could be said to cause the other. For all we know a third variable may have preceded and caused both the feelings and the diminished social activity.
The second piece, Study: Believers’ inferences about God’s beliefs are uniquely egocentric, supported a hunch of mine. The first sentence says it.
Religious people tend to use their own beliefs as a guide in thinking about what God believes, but are less constrained when reasoning about other people’s beliefs, according to new study published in the Nov. 30 early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.[bold added]
Seems like an interesting study. But I must take exception with the use of conventional language — sloppy, misleading language — in the writing. See if you can spot the problem in the article’s concluding sentence:
But the research in no way denies the possibility that God’s presumed beliefs also may provide guidance in situations where people are uncertain of their own beliefs, the co-authors noted. [bold added]
Um, shouldn’t the “presumed” go before “God,” for one?
I consider that bad science writing because it indirectly gives legitimacy to a number of assumptions completely unsupported by any kind of scientific evidence: That there is a god; that this agent has been identified properly enough to deserve the capitalized form of the word: God. Oh, that god! Yes, let’s pretend all believers have the same conception of God.
No, let’s not. That would be unscientific.
Wonderful post. I absolutely agree about the importance of precise and accurate word choice, and find myself getting so very frustrated by sloppy/ambiguous writing, scientific or otherwise.