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Adam Mastroianni's avatar

Author of that irritating and tiresome paper here!

I of course agree that your paper should be accurate. Accuracy means honesty, and honesty is just naturally interesting, and often funny.

You’d think it would be otherwise, but in my other life I teach improv comedy, and this is one of the surprising things you learn. (The foundational text of improv is called Truth in Comedy.) People are boring when they try to be funny; they are way funnier when they just say the things that come to mind. That’s how people make each other laugh all the time in normal conversation.

Often papers are boring for the same reason: they are trying to lie to you. They want to pretend they know what’s going on, or that nothing went wrong, or that their results are extremely important. Many papers are founded on the lie that the authors care deeply about what they’re writing, and they aren’t desperately trying to publish a paper, any paper, so they can get a job. (I have written such a paper myself!) Lying takes up a lot of space, and it is incredibly tedious both to write and to read.

When we wrote in our paper that we forgot why we ran one of the studies, for instance, that was just true. We didn’t plan it that way, and tried to avoid admitting it until we decided to be honest instead. I know that makes me look dumb, but oh well! I’d rather be an honest fool than a venerable liar.

(This is also why we posted all the data, code, materials, preregistrations, etc. if we made mistakes, why hide them? We *want* to know if we made mistakes, so we can fix them!)

Humans are naturally interested in all sorts of niche and complicated scientific questions. I think that’s one of the best things about humans. I don’t believe that some corners of science are simply boring, and that anyone studying them must resign themselves to having a bad time, or that boring yourself and others is somehow a noble and necessary part of science. I think this is an unfortunate result of forcing people to suppress their natural curiosity, whether that happens in school, or whether people do it to themselves when their curiosity gets in the way of their career.

Of course people can try to force their papers to be interesting by following bad advice like the stuff these marine biologists provided. I’ll bet you that the papers that result are far more tedious than they would be if the authors were simply honest.

In short, when people say “tell a good story,” they really mean “lie,” and that’s both obviously wrong and it won’t work anyway. I say: be completely honest, and a good story will result. It just may not be the one you thought you’d tell.

(Sorry you didn’t like the jokes. Can’t please everyone! 🙂)

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Dave's avatar

I write legal briefs for a living. When I read a scientific study that sounds like I wrote it, I immediately dismiss the findings because I know how easy it is to backfill and reach the result you wanted all along.

That there are people out there saying scientists should write more like lawyers is troubling. Many Covid studies already read like legal briefs. We need a lot less of this science-ganda, not more. I would go so far as to say that scientists thinking, speaking, and writing like advocates for some cause or policy, as opposed to neutral arbiters of a messy reality, is one of the gravest threats facing society. Having activists produce our foundational knowledge is like driving while wearing kaleidoscope glasses.

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