All I can say is, this is interesting. Given my shaky opinions about the public understanding science I should be predicting a lot of doom and gloom about rampant misinterpretations by lay folk. But maybe this will help things.
I don't actually think it'll change much; PubMed has been a public source of medical abstracts for a long time. I think very few people will use it, but those people might include high school students doing assignments for a science class, and having Real Research Writeups (TM) available to them can only be a good thing. And just on principle it seems that public research ought to be public knowledge.
At least they might be exposed to counterstudies. The media loves to latch on to any new preliminary finding and tout it as the newest scientific proven fact. And then, if it gets discredited, they often find that boring and don't report on it. Plus, they so often twist data that I doubt it'd be any worse than right now.
I love psychology, and it constantly irritates me. I'm tired of people thinking Freud and Skinner is what modern psychology looks like or sums up the field of psychology. I'm tired of people thinking they only use 10% of their brain (although I admit, some people do make stronger cases for that one than other people). And I'm tired of people thinking that they know how people work, because it's intuitively obvious. And I'm really, really tired of people thinking that because they work in some particular way, that everyone must and that what works for them is what everyone should do. I can't see how access to actual information can make the situation much worse, and maybe it'll make it better.
I admit, there are huge sections of psychology that I do not know. But at least I know that.
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Date: 2006-05-08 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 03:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 09:53 pm (UTC)I love psychology, and it constantly irritates me. I'm tired of people thinking Freud and Skinner is what modern psychology looks like or sums up the field of psychology. I'm tired of people thinking they only use 10% of their brain (although I admit, some people do make stronger cases for that one than other people). And I'm tired of people thinking that they know how people work, because it's intuitively obvious. And I'm really, really tired of people thinking that because they work in some particular way, that everyone must and that what works for them is what everyone should do. I can't see how access to actual information can make the situation much worse, and maybe it'll make it better.
I admit, there are huge sections of psychology that I do not know. But at least I know that.