story, study, lesson: some notes on this approach to science writing
In a blog post by Christopher Chabris (I got to this blog because I was following up on his critical review of Imagine in the NYT) he states that much of popular science writing follows this format of : story, study, lesson. And, that it is widely and wildly successful. I think I don't like it though . . . or maybe just not certain forms of it.
Chabris names two books that do NOT do this: Black Swam (which I've read) and Thinking Fast and Slow (which I have not). But to this list I might add (if I get what he means by not following this format), David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity). These kinds of science books I find much more appealing because they force you to understand a complex idea. Where does one find more of these?
Quoting Chabris:
"A danger of story-study-lesson, however, is that the link between the story and the lesson might seem to be stronger than it is, merely because it involves some kind of scientific study. The study could be designed well or poorly; it could be relevant or irrelevant; it could be a robustly replicated or preliminary experiment; and its results could be interpreted reasonably or unreasonably. On such distinctions hangs the validity of the author’s conclusions.
This seems especially applicable and problematic in social science books that do seem to try to suggest that a research study that can be interpreted as supporting the author's position is proof that the author's position is correct, which is very often not at all the case. Not that the author is NOT correct, but the research study selected is not proof that the author is, if that isn't too many negatives. . . Is this sloppy writing on the writer's part? Sloppy research? Or is it a misunderstanding of research? Some authors, like Mary Roach, it seems, and also the book Pound Foolish (I haven't read anything else by that author so I don't want to generalize to all her work) do seem to believe that there story and their study prove their lesson, when in most cases they simply do not."
Chabris' criticism seems to be applicable to a wide range of non-fiction arguments in book form (and maybe not in book form as well--I don't know). So, why are they published? Why are they reviewed so often, in so many places? Why are people who know or seem to know so little about how research works writing whole books using that same research to support their argument? The short answer is, they sell, I guess. But perhaps the more important question is, why?
Andrew Zolii (from Chabris' blog, 2/22/13) suggests this tendency results more from, to quote:
We live in a media moment that massively encourages and rewards the pulling of proverbial rabbits out of hats—storytelling that culminates in a counterintuitive fact about human beings and their nature. It's sort of "Sudoku storytelling", in which the reader is presented with a confusing storyline, and the author presents a rubric and reassembles the elements in a way that snaps the pieces into place in a clean and satisfying way. This kind of writing gives the reader a little positive jolt, a sense that they've been let in on some secret wisdom that decodes part of the human condition.
Suggesting that the problem may have more to do with giving the reader what he/she wants (quick, pithy and shocking but ultimately satisfyingly simple arguments). As teachers, how do we overcome the desire for simplicity and encourage the desire for complexity, ambiguity, holding multiple possibilities in the air at the same time? Is it true that as the world becomes more complex, we seek simpler explanations? (Ironically, after reading Zolli's post above I looked up Zolli's book, Resilience, and found on Amazon the same criticisms that Chabris makes of Lehrer. Is the problem less one of what the reader wants, although that certainly seems part of it, and more that it's what the writer can do?)
Let's seek out the complex answer to the question why so many bad science books?
1. They sell
2. Readers want them (see #1)
3. They do not require a lot of work
4. Readers do not have to do much work to read them (see #1 and 2)
5. Complex ideas like resilience do not have simple answers so they ONLY way to write about them is reductively (is that a word?).
6. Complex ideas like resilience have NO answers but people are interested in them so we do our "best" (that seems like a poor excuse though because our best could be acknowledging the limitations in our explanations and not suggesting that we've discovered something new).
7. The authors writing the books don't know much about science
What else?
Chabris names two books that do NOT do this: Black Swam (which I've read) and Thinking Fast and Slow (which I have not). But to this list I might add (if I get what he means by not following this format), David Deutsch's Beginning of Infinity). These kinds of science books I find much more appealing because they force you to understand a complex idea. Where does one find more of these?
Quoting Chabris:
"A danger of story-study-lesson, however, is that the link between the story and the lesson might seem to be stronger than it is, merely because it involves some kind of scientific study. The study could be designed well or poorly; it could be relevant or irrelevant; it could be a robustly replicated or preliminary experiment; and its results could be interpreted reasonably or unreasonably. On such distinctions hangs the validity of the author’s conclusions.
This seems especially applicable and problematic in social science books that do seem to try to suggest that a research study that can be interpreted as supporting the author's position is proof that the author's position is correct, which is very often not at all the case. Not that the author is NOT correct, but the research study selected is not proof that the author is, if that isn't too many negatives. . . Is this sloppy writing on the writer's part? Sloppy research? Or is it a misunderstanding of research? Some authors, like Mary Roach, it seems, and also the book Pound Foolish (I haven't read anything else by that author so I don't want to generalize to all her work) do seem to believe that there story and their study prove their lesson, when in most cases they simply do not."
Chabris' criticism seems to be applicable to a wide range of non-fiction arguments in book form (and maybe not in book form as well--I don't know). So, why are they published? Why are they reviewed so often, in so many places? Why are people who know or seem to know so little about how research works writing whole books using that same research to support their argument? The short answer is, they sell, I guess. But perhaps the more important question is, why?
Andrew Zolii (from Chabris' blog, 2/22/13) suggests this tendency results more from, to quote:
We live in a media moment that massively encourages and rewards the pulling of proverbial rabbits out of hats—storytelling that culminates in a counterintuitive fact about human beings and their nature. It's sort of "Sudoku storytelling", in which the reader is presented with a confusing storyline, and the author presents a rubric and reassembles the elements in a way that snaps the pieces into place in a clean and satisfying way. This kind of writing gives the reader a little positive jolt, a sense that they've been let in on some secret wisdom that decodes part of the human condition.
Suggesting that the problem may have more to do with giving the reader what he/she wants (quick, pithy and shocking but ultimately satisfyingly simple arguments). As teachers, how do we overcome the desire for simplicity and encourage the desire for complexity, ambiguity, holding multiple possibilities in the air at the same time? Is it true that as the world becomes more complex, we seek simpler explanations? (Ironically, after reading Zolli's post above I looked up Zolli's book, Resilience, and found on Amazon the same criticisms that Chabris makes of Lehrer. Is the problem less one of what the reader wants, although that certainly seems part of it, and more that it's what the writer can do?)
Let's seek out the complex answer to the question why so many bad science books?
1. They sell
2. Readers want them (see #1)
3. They do not require a lot of work
4. Readers do not have to do much work to read them (see #1 and 2)
5. Complex ideas like resilience do not have simple answers so they ONLY way to write about them is reductively (is that a word?).
6. Complex ideas like resilience have NO answers but people are interested in them so we do our "best" (that seems like a poor excuse though because our best could be acknowledging the limitations in our explanations and not suggesting that we've discovered something new).
7. The authors writing the books don't know much about science
What else?
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