Why are academics so snotty about blogging?

Apparently many academics in biology and astronomy discourage blogging because it has no reliability or prestige .

Huh? Well both of these things are true, to some extent, of course; but isn’t this also true of dissemination in traditional peer reviewed scientific journalism too? Even peer reviewed published papers can be bad and maybe even unreliable, as I blogged about before here, though admittedly this is rare. And peer-reviewed publications really don’t usually bring you prestige – I have never for instance been stopped on a plane and been asked for my autograph because of some paper I have published in Angewandte Chemie.

Ok so maybe the criticism of blogging being unreliable is almost understandable, you can blog about anything (as is obvious from this post) and it may not be ‘reliable’, you can blog about aliens in your closet too! But this wouldn’t be unreliable it would just be weird. What the academics surveyed likely mean is that non-scientific ‘science’ might get put on the web and be an unreliable source. On no! Shock, horror, you don’t need a blog to do that, it already happens all of the time in the media.

The ‘no prestige’ argument, though, this is just silly – I guess there are a random few that go into scientific research for ‘prestige’, but I bet not most of us.

I think most of us go into science for a desire to understand, or create, or learn about the world around us or even to teach. The prestige might be a nice side value for some (not me) but is that really why you are a scientist in the first place? Maybe so but I would not think that is true for the majority. And it certainly can’t be for the money.

To my mind, these views are a bit snooty and a bit ,well archaic. The Nature article quite rightly points out, given that most surveyed scientists state they think its important to engage with the public – blogs do make sense.

Personally, I think blogging about science is great – obviously because I do it. But reading science blogs also helps me to look at things in a different way and gather other information in scientific fields I don’t spend much of my day thinking all that much about. On top of this, most bona fide science blogs – such as nature.com blogs and scienceblogs.com, actually include links to the research they are talking about, I can read the original peer-reviewed papers the articles are based on. What’s not to love?

Stop being so snobby fellow academics – embrace the future

Monkeys can’t take their booze

and neither can adolescents…

IT WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN

New Scientist reports in an article Binge Drinking Rots Teenage Brains that if you binge drink as a teen, your stem cells are going to die and you will have lasting damage to your spatial and memory thought functions (space and damn what was I saying?)

They found this out after feeding adolescent monkeys alcohol daily over 11 months and then doing an autopsy on their brains 2 months later.

Is doing an autopsy after 2 months really proof of lasting damage?
I would say no – but hey maybe I am wrong

In this article this research:
…. reinforces the rationale for anti-alcohol policies in the US and elsewhere which aim to raise the age at with people start to drink.

First of all I am not advocating youthful (or any) binge drinking… but this is not really a good direct link… The damage may or may not be lasting from tippling human teens BUT from this article it isn’t clear to me that your brain won’t recover and that the damage is truly lasting. They didn’t give the little monkeys time to shake it off and see how they grew into adulthood

Using these kind of studies to support why kid’s shouldn’t drink, doesn’t work. It never has, its like Nancy Reagan’s just say No campaign – that didn’t work either.

Or the
This is your brain on drugs add in the US from the late 1980′s…

this doesn’t work either -
Why doesn’t it work?

Because usually these kinds of campaigns are either based on some kind of psuedoscience or on faulty scientific reporting. Or worse, as in the present case, it’s based on exaggerating some real scientific results, making them appear to have a much stronger causal link than they actually do.

Its not that I think you shouldn’t campaign against the use of drugs in teens or anyone else for that matter, but at least try to be more realistic about it, and don’t use scientific tactics unless they are reasonably presented. This not only doesn’t help anyone stop binge drinking but it gives scientific evidence a bad name.

Science reported in this fear-mongering kind of way can come back and bite you in the face. Why? Because its over-egging the pudding. And people aren’t stupid – when they find out it isn’t necessarily or completely true, then its easy to reject the scientific bases altogether.

Its easy for people to distrust what scientists say or rather what is reported that scientists say, when there are over-arching conclusions about why something is bad for you. And it doesn’t help to increase scientific literacy, or help stop binge drinking in teenagers or monkeys for that matter.