Science and Certainty

Fox News has a long-standing reputation for twisting words, injecting judgments, and stretching meanings. People who get most of their news from Fox get some pretty strange notions, and one wonders how well they can distinguish fact from less-than-fact. Consider the opening of a recent story about the rumblings under Alaska's Mount Redoubt:

Mount Redoubt volcano in Alaska could erupt within days to weeks, say scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, amazing the rest of us with their certainty.

"Amazing us" sounds like commentary, not reporting, to me, but worse yet, the intro casts the scientists as making claims with "certainty", which, of course, we know they do not.

As of this writing, Mount Redoubt stands at Volcano Alert Level Orange. For Alaskan volcanos, this means

"Volcano is exhibiting heightened or escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption, timeframe uncertain, OR eruption is underway with no or minor volcanic-ash emissions."

In other words, following standard rules for scientific predictions, "volcano warning systems are based on a probability of an eruption or hazard" which they determine through observation, evaluation of past data and fit of the data to current models of volcanic behavior.

In my view, injecting commentary into news stories, may serve to make the subject of the stories seem controversial, extreme, threatening or ridiculous, when the factual details of the story do not by themselves suggest such evaluations.

In this case, I think Fox suffers from a strong projection bias, attributing their need for certainty in an uncertain world onto the scientists predicting volcanic activity. The scientists have no horse in the race, so to speak (in other words, they don't consider any outcome as more desirable than any other). Fox, on the other hand, has a vested interest in titillating and agitating their readers. So they use words that imply that the *scientists* consider their predictions to amount to certainty, when we know that they do not. Instead, it seems likely that Fox writers and readers strongly prefer certainty and attribute that preference to everyone else.

In a way, they want to have it both ways. They prefer certainty, but do not believe that science can provide certainty, and yet they project their preference for certainty onto scientists, but do so, apparently, to belittle their predictions, which do not in fact include certainty.

See what I mean about twisted meanings?