Truthiness of irrelevant detail in explanations from neuroscience to mathematical models

Truthiness is the truth that comes from the gut, not books. Truthiness is preferring propositions that one wishes to be true over those known to be true. Truthiness is a wonderful commentary on the state of politics and media by a fictional character determined to be the best at feeling the news at us. Truthiness is a one word summary of emotivism.

Truthiness is a lot of things, but all of them feel far from the hard objective truths of science.

Right?

Maybe an ideal non-existent non-human Platonic capital-S Science, but at least science as practiced — if not all conceivable versions of it — is very much intertwined with politics and media. Both internal to the scientific community: how will I secure the next grant? who should I cite to please my reviewers? how will I sell this to get others reading? And external: how can we secure more funding for science? how can we better incorporate science into schools? how can we influence policy decisions? I do not want to suggest that this tangle is (all) bad, but just that it exists and is prevalent. Thus, critiques of politics and media are relevant to a scientific symposium in much the same way as they are relevant to a late-night comedy show.

I want to discuss an aspect of truthiness in science: making an explanation feel more scientific or more convincing through irrelevant detail. The two domains I will touch on is neuroscience and mathematical modeling. The first because in neuroscience I’ve been acquainted with the literature on irrelevant detail in explanations and because neuroscientific explanations have a profound effect on how we perceive mental health. The second because it is the sort of misrepresentation I fear of committing the most in my own work. I also think the second domain should matter more to the working scientist; while irrelevant neurological detail is mostly misleading to the neuroscience-naive general public, irrelevant mathematical detail can be misleading, I feel, to the mathematically-naive scientists — a non-negligible demographic.