Most people who live in Western society are not scientists and have little to no scientific background. Yet we are all continuously confronted with science; whether it's about climate change, health, space exploration, social pscyhology, etc. Most news outlets have journalists on the payroll who translate those scientific findings into a language most of us can understand, but that does that actually make it easier to read science? Not only is stuff lost in translation, but scientific journalism relies a lot on some understanding of how science works, an understanding most readers will not have.

The problem with scientific literacy is particularly salient in the area of personal health and diets. Every day there is a new study that suggests that alcohol is either the cure for everything or should be avoided completely. As a lay person, it is basically impossible to get from the news what you should and shouldn't eat. And there is good reason for this, because while studies can suggest trends, every individual has his or her own dietary needs. Just because something works for one, ten, or a hundred people, offers no guarantees that it will work for you.

So if you read about health and food, how should you do that? I thought the following Guardian column can provide a nice illustration. My take-away as a non-dietician is that saturated fat and cholesterol is bad, and that you should ignore people like Nina Teicholz who claim that eating fatty products is actually good for you. A keto diet, meaning a diet high in fat, is clearly the worst thing you could ever do, and people like Jordan Peterson who propose an all meat diet are lunatics who should be put away.

Now, I am not here to say which one is right. Again, I'm not a dietician, I'm a linguist. But that also means I'm a scientist, and I can recognize bias in the debate when I see it.

So what is wrong with the column? Let's start with the obvious: it is a column. That means it is not written to be an objective discussion of a field of research, but an opinion piece. Indeed, the author, Sarah Boseley, has written a book herself on why obesity is a problem. That obviously does not mean she's not right, in fact, it means she is an expert in the field and should have something interesting to tell. But that obviously would apply to the people who's work she argues against. This is not about information, it's about persuasion.

But that's not the real problem. The way in which she frames the debate is as one between a fringe group of science denying idiots and the scientists who've worked for decades in the field and who you should listen to. But this is clearly not a valid argument. She notes that much of the work published about why fat is good, is published in small journals, whereas her camp publishes in the top journals. But all that shows is that her side has control fo the debate, and has for decades.

As much as we scientists may wish to believe we're above bias, we're not. Challenging the status quo is hard, if not impossible, if you haven't already made a name for yourself. There are plenty of examples in the history of science where new and revolutionary ideas were oppressed for decades, before it turns out that the scholars who made the claim were right all along. As long as papers have to be reviewed by the scholars who represent the status quo, and as long as those people decide what is good science, it's going to be hard to get published in major journals.

She also makes another error in this, in that it assumes big journals are better than small journals. Academics are fighting tooth and nail to get right of the ludicrous system of impact factors. When a journal has a high impact factor, when papers in that journal get cited a lot, that must mean it's a good journal. But impact factors don't provide that much information. It's an average. Even in the top journals of science like Nature many papers may receive few to no citations. And papers in small journals may have a far more significant impact. Just because something is published in a big journal, does not mean it's good science—unfortunately.

So to properly understand her column, you need to know how science works. Most people don't, and that's fine, because why would they?! But journalists then shouldn't assume that they do. Now aside from the scientific methodology, there's the issue of the actual science. A large part of her column revolves around cholesterol and whether LDL is bad. For decades science has linked it to heart disease, and saturated fat causes the liver to produce LDL. Sounds simple enough, but cholesterol is more complex than that and should be analyzed on more micro level; dealing with the different molecular structures. But that's way too technical for a general audience. How it all works is thus ignored in service of the larger point. Again, that does not mean it's wrong, but it means you get a limited picture.

As a non-scientists, you don't know these things. Even people who have finished an undergraduate degree have a hard time reading science critically, and they will trip over these problems. And of course, none of what I write here means Ms Boseley and the scientists she is defending is wrong. But the entire point of that 'small group of dissident scientists' as Boseley calls them, is that established science has been going about it wrong. So instead of seeing that as a critique of those other scientists, it's a natural state of a scientific debate, irrespective of who's right and wrong.

This brings us to a bigger problem: who to trust? Should we start ignoring climate change, because a scientist here and there claims that it's all a hoax? Clearly not. There is good reason for established science to be established science: evidence has confirmed it time and again. But as a non-scientist you need to be aware that much is lost in translation between the science and the more lay articles. The only thing you can do is try to be as informed as possible and keep an open mind. Which is basically what scientists (are supposed to) do as well.

If you’ve payed attention to the news, you could currently be fooled into thinking Academia is about to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. A small group of, let’s be kind and call them scholars, submitted a bunch of hoax papers in the past couple of years, some of which even got published. These studies focused particularly on issues of gender and race equality, and were in line with sometimes more extreme progressive positions. To them, as well as many right-leaning media, this was again proof that the so-called grievance studies were ideologically biased and deeply corrupt, and that gender studies, race studies, yes the whole discipline of sociology needs to be defunded and dismantled.
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Now I haven’t read the papers—there’s a lot of them and I have better things to do with my time. (And I seriously doubt the nay-sayers have.) But quite frankly, one does not to read the articles to understand that the world is not moving towards a dystopic future of children indoctrinated and forced into believing they should identify as a non-binary gender, which would lead to the end of the family as the cornerstone of Western civilization.

Simply put, all these hoax studies show is that peer review cannot control for real or made-up research, but it can still control for quality research within accepted disciplines. Of the many studies that were submitted, most were either rejected, or given a revise and resubmit. The latter may seem like the articles were considered promising, but as any scholar know, R&R does not guarantee acceptance in the second or even third round. It can signify that there is still major work to be done, and articles can easily be rejected even when they’ve been resubmitted.

The fact that reviewers were kind in their critique is also meaningless; we expect others to review in a supportive way, as we would do ourselves. Research is a collaborative, not an individual project. We’re a community, and we should act as part of that community. And I know that there are reviewers that can be overly harsh, but the fact is that I’ve never seen a review that was cruel, hostile, or in any way rude. So it’s no surprise that even hoax papers receive fair reviews.
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As a researcher who is asked to review a paper, there are a number of questions you have to answer, primarily among them (1) does the research make a useful contribution to the field? and (2) is the research methodologically sound? If both conditions are met, then you have to write either a really bad paper for it to be rejected outright, or you have to submit to a journal that accepts very few papers. But in neither case do we gain any insight into the supposed ideological bias of the field.

​The problem is that these so-called scholars wrote up what they considered ideologically progressive articles and theories. As any undergrad who’s taken a basic methods course knows, that doesn’t prove the field is ideologically progressive, because you’re not actually controlling for that variable. All they’ve shown is that a scary large number of hoax papers (25%) found their way into actual publication. And while that is obviously bad, and we should try to find ways to do better, that happens in every field. In fact, it’s in fields like Medicine where the real problems still lie: that’s where we find the biggest frauds and cheats in Academia, not the Social Sciences.

In a sense, we’re simply dealing with a matter of Confirmation Bias. These authors already “knew” that these fields were biased, and so they went out to find evidence that would support that hypothesis. But again, that’s plainly bad research. A good scholar knows that his or her ideas and theories will cloud his or her analysis of the data. So one should not look for confirmation—also, that brings us to the issue of the white swan, seeing ten does not mean all swans are white—but falsification.

​And the fact is that they might actually have a good point. We do not want any field to be ideologically biased. We know that academia is largely left-leaning, particularly in the social sciences and humanities where there are ten liberals for any conservative. If fields like gender and race studies have a significant impact on society, then we obviously don’t want research in those fields biased towards certain theories. Science makes progress through debate and critique, not propaganda. And so we might indeed discss the value any field of research has for society and whether it should be funded by a government or public institute.

People cry foul when any industry, whether it’s food, tobacco, or finance, is given the right to evaluate and sanction itself. We need to hold academia to the same standard. But we need to do that in a constructive manner, and so we cannot rely on the opinion of ideologically driven scholars alone, whether they be liberal or conservative. If a field is worth funding, the people in it should be able to explain that to the funders, the public. And if they disagree, then maybe we have to rethink what type of research we are willing to fund through tax-payer money.