Pop-science as dangerous for science as conspiracy videos for the truth

What is pop-science?

I don't think I need to introduce conspiracy theories in various forms, but let's define a pop-science type medium. It can be a video, a documentary, a book, an article or even a post or short from a "pop-scientist", so the form isn't important, but what is is how it's delivered. It bring you easy to understand truths, fact relations and very often a story that goes around it with vague sources that are narrated to make it appealing and easy to consume. This deeply differentiates it from a study you may find in scientific journal that requires often blind testing, sources and proving applying the scientific method. Method that, because of it's limitations cannot provide reliably all the answers. Pop-science servers as dilution of scientific findings, delivered in a easy to understand way - like a content creator explaining relationship of melanin on skin color - never providing sources, how it was confirmed or what were the other correlations that were ruled out. If it's a new finding audience is unable to question that, because there isn't any context to question - just information "melanin => skin color". If it's additionally narrated in a social setting like a mixed raced person inspired to find out why they looked like they do, it delivers us a story that humans love to hear and will remember much better than plain scientific fact. As a trivia fact, this is perfectly fine, but we have to be aware that people make their decisions based on their best knowledge, and a fact without full context may lead them astray.

Where's public media at?

There are also unfortunate scientific media narrations, simplifying studies into pop-facts like the one that happened with vaccine's safety and efficacy. When outlets like BBC claimed almost miracle nature of vaccine, I actually went are read the summary of the studies by the vaccine providers and they were quite open about side effects and it's efficacy. Rift between what media presented at the beginning and the fact that there are side effects that can be common, gave chance conspiracy theorists to "prove" their claimed theory as if it was "5G mind control chips". Because how loud they shouted and their previous theories were in a fraction supported, even people that didn't believed them started to doubt. The only reason for a chance of this happening was media misrepresenting the original studies, trying to put a nice narration and encourage vaccination.

Conspiracy documentary vs. pop-science documentary

I started to watch Forks Over Knives which I in spirit deem generally truthful (so not actual truth in my opinion, just a valid guidance) and something got my attention. At the beginning they started to spit some facts, like mortality due to cardiovascular disease during the German occupation of Norway. The claim there is that without access to meat and dairy, suddenly Norwegians got healthier. They present a nice graph and interesting story. The questions I would normally have are very simple: are we sure there weren't other reasons why this stats are there, like lack of medical staff or not possible to establish clear reason why someone passed? There are also no sources for the stats in the video and how they were collected. Some phenomena can be simply attributed to poorly done statistics and even if we measure correctly - correlation isn't causation. It stuck with me that I have so many questions for something that was presented for just over 2.5% of the whole documentary, and since it's a story: can you support facts presented further down the line with something that you have so much doubt about?

My only experience with conspiracy documentaries are from my sociology class, when a teacher showed us, 15 year old kids, a 9/11 conspiracy movie, as "something to think about". The other case was a religion class with similar material about made by US fringe catholic groups about other religions, demonizing them. Personally I think this behavior of showing manipulated videos to kids should be criminalized. Naturally, videos were very visual with loads of random facts without any sources. You could disprove most of these just by googling them, but some were not possible to disprove as they were a simple lies without any source or a cherry picked truths supporting the narrative.

Let's start with what they have in common:

• both weave a story - they want to present their facts as accessible truths that make easy story to understand and follow, there are no jumps just one conclusion after another
• no hard sources - they can claim published paper in journal and various numbers of participant's in studies, but they don't put anywhere basic sources for the conclusion
• simplifying, for accessibility sake - the truths that are not easily understood by the layman are simplified to point they're false, which means it could support story while claiming a lie
  
• lots of diagrams, charts, values on various scale - this makes any claim more scientific looking, which lulls an average person into a conclusion that it's based on study or on some document
• compare to soccer fields and weights of elephants - comparisons dumbed down for accessibility sake, diluting facts even more and presenting easy to digest trivia

Now how they differ? Is pop-science coming from respected authorities? Maybe funded by respected public media?

That's the issue. They barely differ at all. While purpose of false information is to just sow doubt, purpose of pop-science could be as life changing as saving you from a serious disease, but the details here really matter.

Antidote for pop-science?

I personally, would go all in in solving this, especially in the environment of so many false claims everywhere. There can't be any half-measures. Good information can always do the following:

• Sources! Present source of claim as part of the video narration (or a citation for text), name of the study and the institute. Present it's reliability, especially if there was already some criticism for the study. Links as text and even QR codes should be present on screen with specific pages or chapters of study that supports that.
  
• Point to the truth. Nothing is so easy to explain it in minute or two - point to a better resource for in-depth info. Medium presented can't be all it is that provides the information.
• Provide social context. Some studies are done with specific perception in mind. As a stark example - you will find clearly racist studies proving all kinds of claims that could be outrageous these days.
  
• Present your own bias and background. Everyone has one - say it out loud. Everyone has preconceived notions and presenting them is providing more about perspective the document was created with.
  
• Give all the context you can. Whenever I see a health documentary, there is always someone jogging in the morning, in a mild weather and in a nice US neighborhood - imagine how non-applicable this is for person working night shifts in Svalbard.
  
• Living, breathing document - there can't be a final version of the claims made and also it's important to present when the claims were thought to be valid. It's important to make sure that person looking at it 5 years from now it at least aware that it might be outdated.
• Less story, more facts. Story elements could be useful as a flourish, but this is main vehicle for any conspiracy stuff - nice story with wrong facts.
  

Are these ridiculous expectation that makes already hard word insanely complex? Yes, but do you think presenting information, so it's barely distinguishable from a conspiracy document, is really worth it?