I'm nominating this article for the Rosen Prize in explanatory writing. Rules for awarding the prize combine three factors: clarity in explanation, yes, but also underlying complexity of the thing being explained, AND urgency of the subject to the public.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ …
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In an ideal world, we would just call this very good "journalism"…
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My experience is that almost no science journalist writing for the general public does this; read a hundred+ papers and judge methods/findings. They are not given the space or the mission to do this. They interview a few experts which is a haphazard method; experts don't agree.
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I've described what she is doing as the equivalent of art criticism but for science (as she notes crucially requires judging & discarding methods)
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I don't think you'll find a single word, and it's great to see your distinction on "translating". Is curating + connecting + distilling + adding context, which results in something with greater value for the public discourse (and hopefully change!) than the sum of its parts.
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Thank you! And I'm not saying I'm the only person on the planet who can do this, not at all whatsoever, but regular journalists almost never have the training (need to be able to read stats/methods at a minimum) AND a lot of time in their hands AND the freedom to make claims.
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I think you got it right with synthesis. It's like doing an academic literature review, but your output is in a different genre.
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Definitely a version of it. I happened to have read/taught a lot on certain aspects of pandemics but some of the domains are not in my usual field. That's where the time advantage comes in; I read the papers like a maniac these days and have a job that allows me to do that.
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You keep doing what you do. You are making great contributions, even if it's technically outside your field. Although I think that your many years of work on how messages can diffuse in crowds gives you a solid foundation for studying how a virus does the same. So keep it up.
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We need a better word for "desiloization," which isn't even a word.
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Yeah don't have a word for it. Pandemic hit, looked around and jumped in because it was missing and I had the space and the support to try to fill that gap.
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