https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/science-isnt-storytelling?utm_source=%2Fbrowse%2Fstaff-picks&utm_medium=reader2
And in conclusion, that’s why you should agree that science isn’t storytelling. Thanks for reading the Science Fictions Substack.
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Oh, sorry - did you find that a little jarring? I started this article with its conclusion! That’s because I’ve just read an editorial—first published last year but currently getting some attention on Twitter—from the journal Marine Life Science and Technology, which offers just this advice to scientists: they should write their scientific papers backwards.
The editorial—entitled “Finding Your Scientific Story By Writing Backwards”—argues that a scientific paper needs to have “take-home messages”. These are the big points that conclude the “scientific story” told by the paper - a story which, developed correctly, will “increase the impact of your work and the likelihood of it being accepted in highly rated journals”.
The editorial goes on to draw an analogy between a scientific paper and a joke - they both need a punchline. “In fact”, the editorial-writers argue,
many comedians start writing their jokes with a punchline in mind—or at least a rough version of it—and then craft the setup… In other words, the joke is constructed backwards from the punchline, even though that’s not how you tell it. A scientific story is no different.
Having suggested that their ideal scientific paper is “no different” from a joke, the authors provide a diagram of how you should go about writing your scientific paper. The left-hand column is the standard way of structuring a paper, and the middle column is their suggestion for how you should do it:
Fig.1 from Montagnes et al. (2022).
“Write up only the Results that relate to your conclusions”; “write up only the Methods that relate to your results”; and write the Conclusion first and the Introduction section last. This, as was noted on Twitter, is a recipe for bad studies: it encourages the cherry-picking of results that went your way and the hiding of those that didn’t. It encourages Hypothesising After the Results are Known (HARKing), the kind of miniature historical revisionism where you rewrite your plan for the study to fit its outcome, rather than saying whether the results supported or went against your original hypothesis. We know how easily these practices can distort the scientific record and give us false-positive, nonsense results.
Having a pre-existing conclusion—a “take-home message”—in mind is one of the most reality-distorting influences on our thinking. Just look at how it affects political and social debates, where people defend their previous position (say, “the Conservative/Labour Party is correct”; “my favourite online guru can’t have meant that”) against even the most obvious disconfirming evidence.
Scientists are far from immune to this. Consider:
These mean that the mere idea of putting the conclusions up-front, or focusing on take-home messages, should be considered completely radioactive in science. Scientists need to be Odysseus, tying himself to the mast to resist the siren’s call. They need to be Gandalf, being offered the One Ring and exclaiming “DON’T TEMPT ME, FRODO” (and both the Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings really are stories, by the way, unlike scientific studies).
The idea of “telling a story” in a scientific study puts a premium on the aesthetics of results, as noted in one of my favourite ever papers, by Roger Giner-Sorolla: