Why Polemic Science
Issues?
More scientific papers than ever are being published (Larsen and Von ins
2010), and in cases of public interest, often contradict each other. For
example, foods high in Antioxidants have grown in popularity after
initial studies and articles promising that they would reduce the risk
of cancer. More recent studies have found that instead, they might cause
cancer (Moyner 2015). This preponderance of conflicting information
means that there are too many studies for a layman to easily judge.
Thus, according to Luhman’s theory, we rely on social systems to process
complexity and give us a simpler picture of the world. By looking at
polemical science debates, we can analyze a dynamic and changing system.
For these reasons, I chose to look at science issues.
The categories I chose, Artificial Intelligence, Global Warming,
Genetically Modified Organisms, the CRISPR gene editing tool, and the
debate over Vaccines were categories that interested me. I have been
building a crude Artificial Intelligence throughout the year and was
introduced to debates over Artificial Intelligence. The debate over
Global Warming and Vaccines has come to the forefront in my home
country, the United States, after a recent election and seemed
pertinent. An interest in the debate over Genetically Modified Organisms
and CRISPR stems from growing up in a family of geneticists.
Instruments
To collect and analyze Reddit comments, I wrote a script in the Python
computing language. Reddit, which is open source, offers a service
called PRAW written in Python, which allows for the easy mining of
threadsand comments. I, therefore, used Python for this project. Another
computer language- R, provides stronger statistical analysis tools, and
a more straightforward implementation of Yule’s I score, but seeing that
I could measure it on Python and also use the PRAW kit, I decided to use
Python when writing my program “SuperYule”.