Amanda Martinez, a writer for The Atlantic and others, advised attendees that her favorite writing “accorded me the basic human dignity of allowing me to draw my own conclusions.”
I really like that way of putting it, and this is something we tried hard to do with Red State Blue State, to put the information and our reasoning right there in front of the reader, rather than hiding behind a bunch of statistically-significant regression coefficients.
This is related to the idea of presenting research findings quantitatively (which, I think, lends itself to clearer statements of uncertainty and variation) rather than qualitatively (which seems to come out more deterministically, as “X causes Y” or “when A happens, B happens”).
The above quote comes from a conference of students organized by Nathan Sanders, who writes:
Thanks so much for posting an announcement about the Communicating Science workshop (ComSciCon) back in January! With the help of your blog, we received more than 700 applications nationwide for only 50 attendee spots.
I thought you may be interested in some follow-up on the event – it went off this past weekend and was a great success!
The most exciting outcome for me has been the spawning of new sites extending the goal of Astrobites, to digest the scientific literature and help undergraduates engage in research, to other fields of science. Within hours of our our “technical session” describing how we run Astrobites, a new website for the geological sciences went up (http://geoscibites.com/), and I’m eagerly anticipating sites for particle physics, ecology, and possibly a STEM Education research-bites.
If you know graduate students who might be interested in making the statistics literature more accessible to young researchers, please send them my way! We would love to help and can lend resources.
Is yours a quite liberal translation of Martinez’s awkward sentence or something you know she wanted to say?
Basic human dignity of allowing you to draw your own conclusions? Is there some writing out there not allowing you this “basic dignity (?)”?
I can think of a clearer sentence (if this is what she wanted to say, who knows): my favorite writing is when a non-technical reader can (basically) understand what is going on.
Simone:
1. I think it still counts as a direct quote, not a “liberal translation,” if all I do is change “me” and “my” to “you” and “your” to match the pronouns. Of course I could have put “you” and “your” in brackets but that would be silly. The meaning is clear.
2. Yes, lots of writing does not allow the reader this basic human dignity! Think of all the science writing that pulls out some study and just gives the headline claim, with no sense of the data underlying the claim, no sense of uncertainty. In Red State Blue State we put a lot of effort into showing the data patterns wherever possible. Bill James did this too, in his classic Baseball Abstracts: he didn’t just give his conclusions, he described the motivation behind his analyses as well as exactly what he did.
I am with you Andrew, science writing for the general public, which often include specialists in other disciplines, often does not give a sense of the uncertainty, trade-offs, compromises, “degrees of freedom” behind or coming from the analyses. I was mostly concerned by the “basic human dignity” reference, but I certainly agree with the message.