I think the biggest ones are being able to put studies into context and convey accurately how much confidence people should have in them.
I often see people hype up early-stage drug candidates as breakthroughs without conveying that they’ll go through much more testing to confirm their efficacy & safety.
I think that’s a shame because it gives people a misleading picture of what’s actually likely to work, might lead to disappointment later on & pessimism in science more broadly, and also means hearing about the wrong things—there often are great breakthroughs that have demonstrably worked in late-stage research or been verified by other teams, but people don’t hear about them. It’s strange as well because I think it’s those later stage findings that are most useful to policymakers or people using them in their own lives, rather than early studies in a handful of mice.
Advice is much harder! I often talk to my friends and family about things I’m working on and take notes on things they find difficult to understand, or common questions they have, and I try to incorporate those in what I’m writing. I’d also suggest keeping up with researchers or methods in the field people are writing about—I don’t think people need to do a PhD in statistics or methods in order to write about science, but it helps a lot to understand some of the common types of study designs and their limitations, and have an understanding of the replication crisis and think about potential red flags when reading research papers.
I think the biggest ones are being able to put studies into context and convey accurately how much confidence people should have in them.
I often see people hype up early-stage drug candidates as breakthroughs without conveying that they’ll go through much more testing to confirm their efficacy & safety.
I think that’s a shame because it gives people a misleading picture of what’s actually likely to work, might lead to disappointment later on & pessimism in science more broadly, and also means hearing about the wrong things—there often are great breakthroughs that have demonstrably worked in late-stage research or been verified by other teams, but people don’t hear about them. It’s strange as well because I think it’s those later stage findings that are most useful to policymakers or people using them in their own lives, rather than early studies in a handful of mice.
Advice is much harder! I often talk to my friends and family about things I’m working on and take notes on things they find difficult to understand, or common questions they have, and I try to incorporate those in what I’m writing. I’d also suggest keeping up with researchers or methods in the field people are writing about—I don’t think people need to do a PhD in statistics or methods in order to write about science, but it helps a lot to understand some of the common types of study designs and their limitations, and have an understanding of the replication crisis and think about potential red flags when reading research papers.