Cached from a weblog entry dated July 22, 2006--
http://koantum.wordpress.com/2006/07/22/dare-to-be-stupid/

Excerpts from the Columbia Journalism Review at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism:

Weird Science—Why editors must dare to be dumb

By K.C. Cole
(A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, K.C. Cole teaches science journalism at the University of Southern California. Her latest book is Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos.)

Like many beat reporters, science journalists spend a great deal of time educating their editors about the peculiarities of their fields, and by and large those exchanges are not only illuminating but ultimately lead to better stories. But there’s one place we hit a wall.

No, it’s not that editors aren’t smart enough to understand science. Actually, it’s the opposite: they’re too accustomed to being smart, and thus can’t deal with the fact that they don’t understand it. And because they’re uncomfortable feeling confused, readers are left in the dark about a universe of research that eludes easy explanation.

I was discussing this problem recently with a colleague who had been beating his head against the wall for months trying to get a story about a mysterious “dark force” in cosmology past editors at The New Yorker: “They kept saying they didn’t understand it!” he complained. Well, of course they didn’t understand it. Nobody understands it. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting.

In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.

In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”…

It’s essential to know not only what scientists know, but also what they know they don’t know. This is an unfamiliar concept to editors used to dealing with politics or sports…

The best editors understand all this. As for the rest, perhaps Weird Al said it best: sometimes you just need to “dare to be stupid.”