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”.