Hard Reading

(Anime image Scientist Twilight (Chibi) from Dark Berry Art at DeviantArt)

A friend asked how I can even think of a topic to write about so often. Someone else accused me of getting my ideas from the “cult” of scientists and researchers that she sees me following on Twitter. I tried to explain that whatever science learns is not the same as baseless ideas promoted by a cult.

Maybe I need to say more clearly why I’m here, what I’m trying to produce for you and where my writing comes from. It’s only fair for you to know what you’re getting.

I’m not an influencer. Becoming one would require me to choose a distinct focus for my topics, which would probably lead me to repeat myself more and start needing to include more fluff just to get the volume of posts that I would need. I would have to promote my writings aggressively. To make noticeable money, the most direct route would be to pitch to business and shrug off any ideas that could only be helpful for people.

The world wide web is already chock full of fluff, self-promotion and noise. I would rather try to write little bits that at least a few people might find worth the few minutes they spend reading. Sometimes it can be business oriented. Sometimes it can be oriented toward people more than business.

Now let’s move on to the questions behind today’s post.

Where Do My Topics Come From?

Topics come from anywhere. A remark someone makes on BBC Radio 4 in the morning. A conversation with a friend. Something that happens in the course of a day. An article in an online newspaper. A book I read. Going for a walk, usually with the dogs. A tidbit that flies by in Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter (although it remains to be seen whether Twitter will survive).

Often my posts are only my perspective on a topic. On those days my posts are only worth what you think my opinion is worth. Heaven knows I have plenty of opinions.

When a topic involves science or technology, it’s a different matter.

What About Science and Technology?

I read scientific and technical articles and papers. That used to be something I did partly for fun and partly to find out more about subjects especially pertinent to my life. Since the start of the pandemic, that has changed. Not much of it is just for fun any more. Nobody has infinite capacity to read as much as they want. When I put time and energy into reading “papers” now, the span of what I read about has become narrower. There isn’t enough time for as broad a span as I would prefer.

If you aren’t a scientist yourself, you may be thinking you couldn’t possibly understand articles in science journals. That isn’t true. I’m not a scientist either. Originally I wanted to be, but I ended up in engineering, IT and consultancy instead. It doesn’t make research papers beyond my reach. So why can I read them when so many other non-scientists can’t? Am I terribly special?

No. I practiced reading them.

That’s the key. Reading those “papers” is a skill like any other. You aren’t likely to hit a baseball very reliably the first few times you swing a baseball bat, but you can get better at it by practicing. The same goes for practically anything. Cooking, painting, carpentry, writing, photography, anything. NASA blew up many rockets before building one that could reliably fly to orbit.

My mother can attest that I was a curious kid. Like the rest of my family, I read everything I could get my hands on, but I had a particular desire to know the way things work. My parents got World Book encyclopedia, thinking it was easier to understand than Britannica which my grandparents had in an old edition. I methodically went through from A to Z, turning the pages and stopping to read any entries that caught my interest. Weird, huh?

Maybe not as weird as you think. The first friend I ever had went through the entire Webster’s dictionary, as did her sisters. Her family didn’t have an encyclopedia at home.

Then my parents subscribed to Science News for me. It was a thin weekly magazine that summarized in plain English highlights of some of the most recently published scientific papers. It wasn’t limited to any particular field within science. It covered the gamut. Most weeks, I read it cover to cover. I kept that subscription for decades until after I moved to the UK.

In the seventh grade, during a visit to my father’s ship while it was docked at Ostrica, I had ages to myself in his quarters while he showed my mother around the ship. I went through some of his Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. Those are easy reads, already familiar. Whenever he brought some home, I read them.

Then I got into another stack of magazines I had never seen before, Scientific American. That’s what I was struggling with when my parents came into the room. Because I was trying to read it, my parents got me a subscription to it.

Scientific American was simultaneously fascinating and over my head. My father mentioned it was expensive, so I felt honor-bound to read it when it began arriving every month with my name on it, but it was full of terms I didn’t know. What were degrees Kelvin? That wasn’t in the dictionary or the encyclopedia yet. Every time I tried to read the magazine, I could only understand part of what each article said. I accumulated a long list of questions. Ye gods, that magazine was hard reading!

Eventually I started finding answers. I learned what degrees Kelvin were, and more. The articles began to make more sense.

In the tenth grade, my biology teacher occasionally wheeled in a cart piled high with old issues of Scientific American. She would tell us to choose one, pick an article in it and write a report about the article. My classmates hunted through the assortment searching for an article they could grasp well enough to write a report about it.

I chose whatever article caught my interest, confident that I would be able to understand it and write my report.

That’s what practice does.

In adulthood, I got sick and doctors weren’t doing much good for me. Sometimes they were harmful. I went to libraries and looked for scientific papers that might help me solve my own puzzle. I delved into Science magazine, the multidisciplinary scientific journal Nature, the British Medical Journal, anything that could help me figure out what was wrong and whether I could do anything about it. These are a large step up from Scientific American. They can be seriously hard reading. Even now, there are often elements of an article in such journals that I don’t fully comprehend.

That’s okay because I have practice at how to go about this. I absorb the parts I do understand. Then, among the parts that give me brain strain, I decide which elements to dig into and study until I can make sense of what’s in front of me. This worked in my teens and it still works now.

How That Feeds What I Write

If you have been following me here in Substack, you’ve seen how that feeds the posts based on such “hard reading.” The best example is what happened when I came across the UK biobank brain scan study. The high level meaning came through easily, but it bothered me that I didn’t know what the neurological terms for the damaged areas of the brain implied. Exactly how would people be affected by the damage?

Answering that question required looking for articles and papers about each area of the brain the study pointed out as injured.

The result was my table listing the damaged areas, giving a brief description of what they do, and offering at least one link to a web page I found that explained it in reasonably clear language. (Aside: It’s good manners to give back for what you get. When I put a link to that post in Twitter, a doctor responded that he began using the table in his clinical assessments. No doctor can know everything about all the specialties.)

The process usually isn’t as involved as that example, which took a couple of weeks to pull together for one post last February. However, the process is the same regardless of the size of the topic.

When I write after pulling together a pile of information, I try to make it clear in my post which parts of what I say come directly from the facts and which are my opinions after looking at those facts. If I ever leave that distinction muddy, it isn’t deliberate and you are welcome to point it out in a comment on the post.

Science and Cults

Science is a way of investigating the universe to learn more about what it is and the way it works. Science is not infallible. It is a process done by people. Their biases and circumstances sometimes bleed into the way they interpret the outcome of their research. As in any other field, some scientists are brilliant and some are, well, the bottom of their class. In other words, sometimes scientists are wrong. But when they are wrong, sooner or later someone else disproves the mistake and provides a correction.

Science is not a cult. Blind beliefs impervious to facts are the stuff of cults. You can’t dislodge a blind belief. You can dislodge and correct a mistake made in science. It isn’t necessarily easy, but you can.

Back to the accusation that I follow a cult of scientists in Twitter… I do follow some scientists there. I dislike Twitter, but I’ve discovered a number of good epidemiologists, virologists, doctors, researchers and public health experts use Twitter to share links to what they regard as the best newly released studies.

It isn’t humanly possible to read all the studies published every month. I can go through a reasonable proportion of the studies pointed to by the people I follow. If a study does not look like its methodology is sound, I don’t bother to read any further. (Being able to consider methodology is another skill that comes with practice reading studies.) The handful of sources I follow have a good record for pointing me to valid science, so having to set a study aside doesn’t happen alarmingly often.

If my opinions in the science-based posts sound like echoes of those people, it isn’t because I swallowed their opinions hook, line and sinker the way a cult follower does. It’s because we are looking at the same information. The facts say what the facts say.

Sometimes It’s Just Opinion

That said, it takes time and effort to put together posts based on recent studies. I may be able to do that a few times a week after I retire. I’m not retired. My posts here have to be done in my personal time. As a result, you get a mixture. The busier I am, the more likely you are to get posts that are my musings on a subject and not as many posts that drill into or pull together results of studies. I hope you find both types of post worthwhile in their separate ways.

Postscript: None of the links in this post are affiliate links.