高水平的驳斥

bigsnail · 发表于 2012-8-4 09:48

本帖最后由 bigsnail 于 2012-8-4 10:50 编辑

饶毅致《自然》杂志总编的信。
就像当年傅莹在英国《星期日电讯报》上发文一样，要争取到话语权、影响别人的认识，就得多一点这样的人。
总体上中国对外宣传还是以自己的思维方式，效果不彰。

http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2237-598917.html

致《自然》杂志总编的信：有关叶诗文的新闻报道  精选

英文原信附后，大意如下：

斐尔,
   你可能因Ewen Callaway对叶诗文的报道而被email狂炸，过去二十小时，给你
email的人里面小部分也给我来信。
   如果你奇怪《自然》非本质部分一篇报道为何带来这么大的反应，你应该高兴
中文读者比世界其他读者更看重你们的新闻报道，与科学相关的（即使关系很小）也可
能重于《纽约时报》，中文媒体报道用你们的新闻也远多于一般西方媒体用你们的新闻。
   Callaway报道最好也是草率、最差是种族偏见：1)最初的副标题暗示叶可能舞
弊; 2)Callaway用了两件事实说明叶惊人地异常，而两件都错了; 3)Callaway没咨询意
见不同的专家，导致报道不平衡，低于公平报道的最低标准。所以，Callaway至少不负
责任，可能太快就暗示中国运动员容易舞弊。他肯定没有达到新闻报道的通常标准。
   我很高兴看到在我草拟此信的过程中，《自然》可能意识到了原副标题的偏见
，将之由“成绩追踪记录有助于抓体育舞弊者”更正为“成绩追踪记录有助于驱散疑问
”。舞弊的前设改为疑问。
   Callaway报道用的两个“事实”让叶诗文看起来比真实的要更“异常”：说她
比自己在2012年7月的记录要快7秒，说她在最后五十米比男子冠军Ryan Lochte还要快
，而后者是男子第二快的世界纪录。
   第一个“事实”错了，第二个误导。1)叶比自己只快5秒，而此前她的记录创于
2011年、不是2012年，这位16岁运动员用了一年而不是少于4周刷新自己。2)叶只在混
合泳400米中最后自由泳一段比Lochte快，而非整个400米。Lochte在400米是世界第二
快的记录，叶在400米丝毫不能接近他（慢了二十多秒)。叶只是自由泳最强，而在前
300米落后于好些女选手。虽然Lochte在400米很快，他在最后50米的自由泳慢于五、六
位男选手。叶最后五十米自由泳也慢于那些男子。所以，叶只在她自己的强项而他的弱
项快于Lochte。如果Callaway多做的功课，他就难以用这些“事实”来使“问题”醒目
。如果Callaway多查询，他就能发现其他游泳运动员也曾在十几岁发育阶段显著提高记
录。这些事实更正后，Callaway的报道就没基础。
还有好些事实，可以让一般读者更理解叶诗文的成绩，我不在此赘述。可以参见《附件
1》，wikipedia对叶的成就有一个相当快而公平的描述。署名的《自然》报道应该优于
Wikipedia。Callaway报道与Wikipedia条目的差别也显示该记者未采访已经公开提出不
同意见的专家。
你应该收到了"XXX"博士的一封email。他在发表多篇《自然》和《自然神经科学》的
第一作者论文后，获得"XX"学院的博士，并因此获有声誉的奖学金到"XX"大
学做独立的博士后。万一他给你的email埋在你收到的成百上千邮件中，我将其拷贝为
《附件2》。他email给了我、要我看看此事。
Callaway在线报道下面有很多跟帖讨论。有些学生以为有些很有道理（且有实质内容）
的讨论被删了，他们寄给了我。我选Lai Jiang的一份为《附件3》，Zhenxi Zhang的为
《附件4》。你们可以看到学生和一些更有经历的《自然》读者不高兴是有依据的，而
这些被Callaway忽略。
英国人常常忘记、而现代华人不易忘记，世界上很多人以为鸦片战争是中国人卖鸦片给
英国人。我自己6月份（这确是2012年）又经历一次，我和一位老朋友（麻省理工学院
教授）在香港开会时，发现她竟然也是这么认为。
英国人的国际形象好，部分原因是你们的科学和科学家：当全世界中学生都要从教科书
学牛顿和达尔文，英国赢得了世界的尊重。《自然》应该以这些伟大（且客观）的科学
家建立的传统和声誉为自豪。他们其中有些曾在《自然》发表过论文，才有《自然》的
今天。你们如果采取措施修复你们的新闻记者造成的损害，可以加强你们的声誉。
英国人从来没因鸦片战争对我们道歉，即使在1997年离开香港时也未显示丝毫悔意。而
香港是英国在鸦片战争后强迫我们割让的土地。所以，记忆是犹新的，而不仅是1840年
代的残余。如果《自然》拒绝承认此报道不公平，可能很难“驱散”英国至上的“疑问
”（借用《自然》对叶报道的词汇）。
中国人受形象不佳的牵累。我们也知道我们还有很多感到羞耻的未解决的问题，包括舞
弊。越来越多的中国人能接受合理与平衡的批评，我们在伦敦奥运会为我们羽毛球的问
题公开道歉就是证据。但我们对缺依据、有偏见的批评还很敏感。叶诗文不过是个16岁
的年轻人，本该为自己职业生涯的成就而庆贺。当已知她通过了奥运会赛前、赛中多次
测试，而毫无证据指责她的时候，却有很多媒体，特别是《自然》这样的刊物，的渲染
而导致负面舆论多于正面，当然令人深感不平。
我希望你们能澄清记录，发表平衡Callaway报道的意见。

毅
北京大学生命科学学院神经生物学教授饶毅

附件1 Wikipedia对叶诗文的总结
附件2 伯克利加州大学王立明的email
附件3 Lai Jiang在Callaway报道后的意见
附件 4 Zhenxi Zhang在Callaway报道后的意见

原文（2012年8月4日1:57am发送）
Dear Phil,
   You might have been bombarded with emails about Ewen Callaway’s
report on the Chinese Olympic gold medalist Ye Shiwen. Over the last 20
hours, I have received emails from a small fraction of those who had emailed
you.
   If you wonder why a piece in a non-essential section of Nature have
brought you so much response, you should be happy to know that Chinese
readers place much more weight in Nature news reports than the rest of the
world does. If an event is related to science (even tangentially) and Nature
publishes a news report, many Chinese readers treat the Nature report more
seriously than New York Times. Chinese news media also use Nature news
pieces much more than the regular Western news media would.
   The Callaway report was sloppy at the best and racially biased at the
worst: 1) the original subtitle implied cheating on Ye’s part, setting a
negative tone for the report; 2) Callaway presented two facts to establish
that Ye was strikingly anomalous, but both “facts” were wrong; 3) Callaway
did not check with experts whose opinions did not supported the doping
explanation, and thus did not provide a balance report that is the minimal
standard of fair reporting. Therefore, Callaway is at least irresponsible,
and could have jumped too quickly to imply that Chinese athletes were prone
to cheating. He has certainly not held onto the usual standard of news
reporting.
   I am glad that, while I was drafting this letter, Nature may have
already noticed the bias in the original subtitle and corrected it by
changing it from “Performance profiling could help to catch cheaters in
sports” to “Performance profiling could help to dispel doubts”. A
presumption of cheating has changed to doubts.
   The Callaway report presented two “facts” which made Ye Shiwen seem
more “anomalous” than she really was by stating: that she was 7 seconds
faster than herself in the same event in July 2012, and that, in the last 50
meters, she was faster than Ryan Lochte, the gold medalist of the same
event for men, with the second fastest record.
   The first “fact” was wrong, while the second was misleading. 1) Ye
was only ~5 seconds faster than her own record in July, 2011, giving the 16
year old a full year rather than less than 4 weeks to improve her own record
. 2) Ye was faster than Lochte only in the freestyle, not for the entire 400
meters. Lochte’s time was the second fastest for the entire 400 meters,
for which Ye was not even close (she was more than 20 seconds slower than
Lochte in 400 meters). Ye was only at her best in freestyle and trailed
behind other women in the same event in the first 300 meters of the
individual medley. While Lochte was the fastest in 400 meters, he was slower
than 5 or 6 men in the last 50 meters of freestyle. Ye was slower than
those other men. Thus, Ye was only faster than Lochte in a style that was
her strength and his weakness. Had Callaway done a bit more home work, then
he would have had a hard time to use these “facts” to highlight the “
problem”. Had Callaway done double-checking, he would have found that other
swimmers had significantly improved their own records when they were in the
teens. Corrections of these facts would have changed the basis for the
Callaway report.
There are more facts that would have made the performance of Ye Shiwen more
understandable to the general readership, which I will not go into details
here. See Attachment 1 for an amazingly quick and well-balanced description
of Ye’s performance by Wikipedia. Signed reports in Nature should have been
better than Wikipedia. The contrast between the Callaway report and the
Wikipedia item shows that the reporter did not interview experts who had
publicly voiced different opinions.
You should have received an email from Dr.XXX, who obtained a PhD
from xxx after publishing first author papers in Nature and Nature
Neuroscience. He was awarded a prestigious fellowship for an independent
postdoc at xxx. In case his email has been buried among the hundreds
you have received, I am copying it here as Attachment 2. He had sent a copy
of his email to me and asked me to look at the issue.
There are many online posts below the Callaway report. Some students think
that a few very reasonable (and substantive) posts have been deleted. They
have sent these to me and I am including one authored by Lai Jiang as
Attachment 3 and another by Zhenxi Zhang as Attachment 4. You can see that
the anger of students and more established scientists who read Nature was
supported by facts neglected by Callaway.
One point the British often forget, but the modern Chinese do not, is that
many in the world wrongly think that the Opium Wars occurred because the
Chinese sold opium to the British. I had personally experienced this in June
(2012) when a long time friend of mine at MIT thought that way while she
and I were in Hong Kong attending a meeting.
The British have a good international image, partly because of your science
and your scientists: when every middle school student has to know Newton and
Darwin in textbooks, the entire Britain wins the respect of the world.
Nature should be proud of the tradition and prestige built by the great (and
objective) scientists, some of whom have published in Nature to make Nature
what it is today. Your prestige will be strengthened when you take steps to
repair the damage caused by your news reporters.
The British have never apologized to us about the Opium Wars and did not
show slight remorse when leaving Hong Kong in 1997 which the British forced
us to cede after the British won the Opium Wars. So the memory is rather
fresh, not just lingering from the 1840s. If Nature refuses to admit that
this report was not balanced, it will be difficult to “dispel doubts”
about British supremacy.
The Chinese suffer from a poor image. We also know that we have many
unsolved problems that we are ashamed of, including cheating. More and more
Chinese are receptive to legitimate and balanced criticism, as evidenced by
our public apology for our faults at the badminton games during the London
Olympic. But we are sensitive to ill-founded criticism with apparent biases.
Ye Shiwen is only a 16 year old and should have enjoyed her moment of
professional achievement. When she is known to have passed multiple tests
before and during the London Olympic and there is no evidence to accuse her,
it is certainly unjustified when the negative opinions were highly
publicized but the positive ones were not, especially in a journal like
Nature.
I hope that you will set record straight and publish opinions that balance
the Callaway report.

Yi

Yi Rao, Ph.D.
Professor of Neurobiology, Peking University School of Life Sciences
Beijing, China

mable · 发表于 2012-8-5 00:23

好文，这个才是教授，不是叫兽。

街角的彼岸花 · 发表于 2012-8-5 04:01

高水平·········

FrankSoccer · 发表于 2012-8-5 07:18

原文发表在哪里， Nature News？

bliss99 · 发表于 2012-8-5 19:54

Callaway报道是种族偏见!!!

bigsnail · 发表于 2012-8-6 20:16

FrankSoccer 发表于 2012-8-5 08:18
2 [ S* S$ f0 s7 \6 X1 j原文发表在哪里， Nature News？

原文是公开信。

小胜 http://2012.sina.com.cn/cn/aq/2012-08-07/054745942.shtml

FrankSoccer · 发表于 2012-8-6 20:23

bigsnail 发表于 2012-8-6 21:16 # L3 @8 W2 m' P+ e& S9 ^ ~
原文是公开信。( j& E# e% w& L# m/ z$ w- H. @

, u. r" F( C* x. b M. a0 S小胜 http://2012.sina.com.cn/cn/aq/2012-08-07/054745942.shtml

谢谢。好像那个什么杂志已经道歉了。

最好不相见 · 发表于 2012-8-7 08:01

bigsnail · 发表于 2012-8-14 00:55

其实比饶毅更牛的回复是 Upenn 的 LAI JIANG
如果是中国长大的，英语能到这种程度真是很不简单。

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/rappegroup/htdocs/People/LJ.html

FROM LAI JIANG, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania

It is a shame to see Nature — which nearly all scientists, including myself
, regard as one of the most prestigious and influential physical-science
magazines — publish a thinly veiled biased article like this. Granted, this
is not a peer-reviewed scientific article and did not go through the
scrutiny of picking referees. But to serve as a channel for the general
populace to be in touch with and appreciate science, the authors and editors
should at least present the readers with facts within the proper context,
which they blatantly failed to do.

First, to identify Ye’s performance increase, Ewen Callaway compared her
Olympic 400-metre IM time with her performance at the World Championships in
2011 (4:28.43 and 4:35.15, respectively) and concluded that she had an “
anomalous” improvement of around 7 seconds (6.72 s). In fact, her previous
personal best was 4:33.79 at the Asian Games in 2010. This leads to an
improvement of 5.38 seconds. In a sporting event in which 0.1 s can be the
difference between the gold and silver medal, I see no reason for 5.38 s to
be treated as 7 s.

Second, as previously pointed out, Ye is only 16 years old and her body is
still developing. Bettering oneself by 5 seconds over two years may seem
impossible for an adult swimmer, but it certainly happens among youngsters.
An interview with Australian gold medallist Ian Thorpe revealed that his 400
-metre freestyle time improved by 5 seconds between the ages of 15 and 16.
For regular people, including Callaway, it may be hard to imagine what an
elite swimmer can achieve as he or she matures and undergoes scientific and
persistent training. But jumping to the conclusion that it is “anomalous”
based on ‘Oh that’s so tough I cannot imagine it is real’ is hardly sound.

Third, to compare Ryan Lochte’s last 50 metres to Ye’s is a textbook
example of ‘cherry-picking’ your data. Yes, Lochte was slower than Ye in
the last 50 metres, but Lochte had a huge lead in the first 300 metres, so
he chose not to push himself too hard and to conserve his energy for later
events (whether this conforms to the Olympic spirit and the ‘use one’s
best efforts to win a match’ requirement that the Badminton World
Federation recently invoked to disqualify four badminton pairs is another
topic worth discussing, though probably not in Nature). Ye, on the other
hand, was trailing behind after the first 300 metres and relied on freestyle
, in which she has an edge, to win the race. Failing to mention this
strategic difference, as well as the fact that Lochte is 23.25 seconds
faster (4:05.18) than Ye overall, creates the illusion that a woman swam
faster than the best man in the same sport, which sounds impossible. Putting
aside the gender argument, I believe this is still a leading question that
implies to the reader that there is something fishy going on.

Fourth is another example of cherry-picking. In the same event, there are
four male swimmers who swam faster than both Lochter (29.10 s) and Ye (28.93
s) in the final 50 metres: Kosuke Hagino (28.52 s), Michael Phelps (28.44 s
), Yuya Horihata (27.87 s) and Thomas Fraser-Holmes (28.35 s). As it turns
out, if we are just talking about the last 50 metres in a 400-metre IM,
Lochter is not the example I would have used if I were the author. What kind
of scientific rigorousness is Callaway trying to demonstrate here? Is it
logical that if Lochter is the champion, we should assume that he leads in
every split? That would be a terrible way to teach the public how science
works.

Fifth is the issue I oppose the most. Callaway quotes Ross Tucker and
implies that a drug test cannot rule out the possibility of doping. Is this
kind of agnosticism what Nature really wants to teach its readers? By that
standard, I estimate that at least half of the peer-reviewed scientific
papers in Nature should be retracted. How can one convince the editors and
reviewers that their proposed theory works for every possible case? One
cannot. One chooses to apply the theory to typical examples and to
demonstrate that in (hopefully) all scenarios considered, the theory works
to a degree, and that that should warrant publication until a counterexample
is found. I could imagine that Callaway has a sceptical mind, which is
crucial to scientific thinking, but that would be put to better use if he
wrote a peer-reviewed paper that discussed the odds of Ye doping on a highly
advanced, non-detectable drug that the Chinese have come up with in the
past 4 years (they obviously did not have it in Beijing, otherwise why not
use it and woo the audience at home?), based on data and rational derivation
. This article, however, can be interpreted as saying that all athletes are
doping and the authorities are just not good enough to catch them. That may
be true, logically, but definitely will not make the case if there is ever a
hearing by the governing body for water sports, FINA, to determine if Ye
has doped. To ask whether it is possible to obtain a false negative in a
drug test looks like a rigged question to me. Of course it is possible:
other than the athlete taking a drug that the test is not designed to detect
, anyone who has taken quantum 101 will tell you that everything is
probabilistic in nature, and so there is a probability that the drug in an
athlete’s system could tunnel out right at the moment of the test. A slight
chance it may be, but should we disregard all test results because of it?
Let’s be practical and reasonable, and accept that the World Anti-Doping
agency (WADA) is competent at its job. Ye’s urine sample will be stored for
eight years after the contest for future testing as technology advances.
Innocent until proven guilty, shouldn’t it be?

Sixth, and the last point I would like to make, is that the out-of-
competition drug test is already in effect, which Callaway failed to mention
. As noted in the president of WADA’s press release, drug testing for
Olympians began at least six months before the opening of the London
Olympics. Furthermore, 107 athletes have been banned from this Olympics for
doping. That may be the reason that “everyone will pass at the Olympic
games. Hardly anyone fails in competition testing” — those who did dope
have already been caught and sanctioned. Callaway is free to suggest that a
player could have doped beforehand and fooled the test at the game, but this
possibility is certainly ruled out for Ye.

Over all, even though Callaway did not falsify any data, he did (
intentionally or not) cherry-pick data that, in my view, are far too
suggestive to be fair and unbiased. If you want to cover a story of a
suspected doping from a scientific point of view, be impartial and provide
all the facts for the reader to judge. You are entitled to your
interpretation of the facts, and the expression thereof in your piece,
explicitly or otherwise, but showing only evidence that favours your
argument is hardly good science or journalism. Such an article in a journal
such as Nature is not an appropriate example of how scientific research or
reporting should be done.

ayakao · 发表于 2012-8-14 08:37

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