[HN Gopher] Why does science news suck so much?
___________________________________________________________________
Why does science news suck so much?
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 217 points
Date : 2022-06-19 08:49 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (backreaction.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (backreaction.blogspot.com)
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| In her video, she claims that linking to studies is the proper
| way to present news.
|
| Then she quotes a study and doesn't link to it in the video
| description. She doesn't link to this post either.
|
| I like the videos she makes explaining scientific concepts but
| her criticism videos tend to miss the mark with me.
| einpoklum wrote:
| *edit:* Recalled the quote, thanks raphlinus
|
| This reminds me of the "Gell-mann amnesia effect":
|
| http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ220W/WhySpeculate.pdf
| Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved.
| You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-
| Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I
| once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a
| famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to
| the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
| Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You
| open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.
| In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the
| article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding
| of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong
| it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and
| effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories.
| Paper's full of them. In any case, you read
| with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a
| story, and then turn the page to national or international
| affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was
| somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you
| just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
| raphlinus wrote:
| If you're not able to remember, it seems like you're suffering
| from some form of amnesia. You know who wrote about amnesia in
| this context? Murray Gell-Mann, that's who!
| [deleted]
| bannedbybros wrote:
| kosyblysk666 wrote:
| mrfusion wrote:
| FYI it's actually all news. It's just that you know some science
| and recognize it more there.
| graycat wrote:
| > Why does science news suck so much?
|
| Gee, back some weeks ago at
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927
|
| I presented my opinion:
|
| "... the worst bottleneck in civilization, bad documentation of
| computer hard/software, ... "
|
| And my opinion would be similar on nearly all less important
| topics, that is, not really _bottlenecks_ for civilization.
|
| Long my usual summary view has been that the MSM (mainstream
| media) has some traditions: Create _narratives_ as in E. Bernays.
| Repeat those narratives as in Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. J.
| Goebbels and his famous
|
| "If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it.".
|
| Then have the media outlets gang up, pile on, form a mob, and
| repeat the most recently selected narratives over and over. Do
| this with deceptive "click bait" headlines to get eyeballs for ad
| revenue and, maybe, to push some specific political agenda. A
| little more generally, have the writing borrow from formula
| fiction and _belle lettre_ , that is, with my view of such
| _literature_ , create VEFEEE -- vicarious escapist fantasy
| experience emotional entertainment.
|
| The technique is to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below
| the belt, always below the shoulders, nearly never between the
| ears.
|
| Missing are, say, the standards of common high school term papers
| with careful quotes of credible, hopefully primary references,
| etc.
|
| Also usually missing is a goal of providing objective, credible
| information as needed by an informed electorate or credible
| information for any purpose, science, cooking, parenting,
| software development, much more in careers, finance, ....
|
| Also nearly totally missing is credible, meaningful presentations
| of quantitative data, e.g., statistical hypothesis tests with
| stated probabilities of Type I and Type II errors. Actually, far
| simpler than hypothesis tests, the media commonly is unable even
| to report percentages carefully. E.g., instead we get some
|
| "up 7.60%"
|
| without since when, measured how, by whom, reported where? And,
| why is this not just some case of _cherry picking_? What about
| corrections for inflation? What about over more points in time
| than just two? What about causes?
|
| While generally I'm outraged at the writing and content in the
| media, apparently some people like it. So, my condemnations have
| to be just my own opinions.
|
| E.g., my standard remark about the NYT and WaPo is that
|
| "On paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are
| useless for wrapping dead fish heads."
|
| but lots of people like the NYT and WaPo and disagree with me.
|
| Maybe due to bad writing lots of old media outlets are losing
| readers and, thus, ad revenues and are on the way to massive
| change or just out of business, now to be replaced by _new_ media
| on the Internet, media that gets to save on ink and paper. Maybe.
| I can wish but can 't be very confident.
|
| Let's give the Internet and its _new_ media a few more years and
| see if some greater variety of content sprouts up from the
| landscape.
| phlogisticfugu wrote:
| except https://www.sciencenews.org/ doesn't suck. They're just
| not on YouTube
| freediver wrote:
| Unfortunately, maybe only if you can get to the journalism
| itself through shoe ads first (which is what takes 1/3 of my
| screen when I open an article on climate change).
| Jaruzel wrote:
| And they have an RSS feed. Nice. Added to my reader! Thx.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > It seems to be written for an audience which doesn't know the
| first thing about science.
|
| I don't think it's limited to being a for issue. The by and
| source (i.e., publisher / editor) as have an impact on quality.
| verisimi wrote:
| Is it because so much science is now theoretical or niche, with
| little practical application?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I think the focus on 'practical application' is an attempt to
| analyze the problem of the challenge of communicating science,
| but it's a red herring. What's the practical application of
| discovering Pluto or black holes? Walking on the moon - maybe
| in decades, but now it has no practical effect.
| bobthechef wrote:
| knapcio wrote:
| I would risk to say that nowadays any news suck which implies
| that it's not a problem of science but journalism in general.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and
| also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research
| connects to a persons lived experience.
|
| Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The
| attention economy is destroying everything of substance,
| because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard
| consume.
| knapcio wrote:
| I don't disagree that it may be worse in case of science but
| just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and
| science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one
| of the areas where pure capitalism doesn't work well.
| hnhg wrote:
| It's also not a new phenomenon. Watch this BBC documentary
| that covers the history of news reporting and it goes back
| to the early days:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0
| gonzo41 wrote:
| yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit
| for the 4th estate. For something that is required so
| essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we
| don't publicly fund more news.
|
| I remember when all the news papers were folding up around
| the early naughts, there was talk about making them all
| non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But
| that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.
| influxmoment wrote:
| It probably always sucked but it was our only source of
| information before so we didn't know better
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| True but news media also knew less more slowly because
| everyday people on the ground had no way to make stories
| public through cell phone or a video on social media. And
| before the 24 hour news cycle, there was less expectation for
| the most immediate reporting.
| tgv wrote:
| Or not. They had a lot more resources before everybody
| started leeching the newspapers' contents, and offering free
| escapism. Yes, the internet is certainly to blame for the
| decline in journalism.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| People have been saying the same about journalism for
| decades, long before the Internet.
| mattkrause wrote:
| As a counterpoint, I'm a scientist whose work occasionally gets
| media attention.
|
| I was definitely worried about my name being featured in the
| middle of absolute nonsense, but the experience has usually been
| good: very few of the journalists completely missed the mark. The
| "tone" didn't always match what I was trying to get across, but
| it was usually close to someone in the field's attitude.
|
| There were some minor errors and a lot of them come from a
| surprising source: many journals believe it's unethical to show
| "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes _anyone_
| outside the newsroom. Some scientific terms have nuances that
| aren 't immediately obvious to people outside the field. For
| example, mine distinguishes between "inhibition" of neural
| activity, which involves specific molecular mechanisms (GABA,
| mostly) and suppressing it, which could be anything. This
| distinction probably isn't obvious to even attentive "general"
| fact-checker.
| s0rce wrote:
| My experience when my work was covered is that the articles are
| generally decent, but the titles or initial claims are
| overblown ("clickbait"). I was often directly contacted by more
| reputable organizations to comment and explain and they didn't
| simply regurgitate the press-release. There were many many
| websites that are just carbon copies of press releases, most of
| which I had never heard of previously and didn't really
| understand their purpose.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| _many journals believe it 's unethical to show "copy" (the
| complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the
| newsroom_
|
| It seems like you didn't quite complete this thought. It sounds
| like your point is that inaccuracies creep in because the
| journalists won't give a chance to vet an article's accuracy to
| the people who have the expertise to do so?
| openknot wrote:
| I'm not the same commenter, but I completely agree from
| previous experience in journalism. Many journalists who write
| about research findings are in the same publications who
| publish general news (e.g. national politics). So, many
| science journalists are held to newsroom policies where they
| can't share drafts with sources before publication, to avoid
| bias. This is highly relevant for sharing drafts with a
| politician, but much less relevant for sharing articles with
| a scientist.
|
| Some newsrooms do have exceptions for scientific expertise,
| or have wiggle room saying that experts can verify whether
| quotes or sections of the article are accurate, versus the
| whole draft. This is a decent compromise if a publication
| allows it, though I'm personally in favor of having a more
| trusting relationship between journalists and scientists for
| typical articles on research findings (unless the article is
| investigative).
|
| Well-funded magazines (e.g. The New Yorker) also get around
| this by having fact-checkers with strong scientific
| backgrounds. This is probably the best solution for editorial
| independence that avoids sharing drafts, but there's not a
| lot of money in media and writing as-is, so it's not a
| realistic solution for the vast majority of publications
| (especially when even big magazines have been cutting funding
| for their fact-checking teams, shifting more responsibility
| to the editors/journalists for accuracy).
| foreigner wrote:
| It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news
| is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of
| expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some
| field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as
| bad as the news in your area of expertise.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| It's true! If you happen to be an expert hacker, you realize
| that Hacker News is pretty horrible too.
| padolsey wrote:
| > We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise.
|
| This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia",
| that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the
| whole story. There are different incentives at play.
| Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes
| storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article
| mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the
| research domain. It is in universities' interests to present
| research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are
| incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream
| consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes
| it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is
| completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight.
| Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood
| to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in
| general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world
| events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political
| reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications
| are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because
| consequences and causalities are hard.
|
| I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news =
| ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than
| others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-
| by-domain basis.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes
| storytellers, and other times just mediators.
|
| You didn't mention their 2 biggest modern functions:
| sometimes professional activists who deliberately use their
| position to promote their world view, and sometimes operating
| as presstitutes who use their positions to earn their 30
| pieces of silver for manipulating the public to support their
| own destruction.
| raphlinus wrote:
| I think the operative trope is more Sturgeon's Law than Gell-
| Mann Amnesia. I had a period where I was reading obsessively
| about Covid, including reading papers and listing to TWiV
| (which is very informative but requires a massive time
| commitment). What I found is that the _best_ of the science
| journalists (Helen Branswell, Jon Cohen, Kai Kupferschmidt,
| Amy Maxmen, Ed Jong) were excellent, writing with a deep
| understanding of the subject material and providing useful
| context. The median news story was just awful, and the WSJ
| and NYT opinion pages were for the most part a dumpster fire
| ( "There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave'" is a masterpiece,
| chef's kiss).
|
| I've _generally_ found the same thing is true in other
| domains. Seek out writers who know their stuff. They exist,
| they 're just not consistently the most popular.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Any form of communication is lossy
|
| The only differentiator is to what degree. Gell-man amnesia
| is stating that all news has a high degree of it, not exactly
| equal amounts.
| pvg wrote:
| _and has a name - "gell-man amnesia_
|
| It's actually better when stated without this 'name' like in
| the GP because then its weird nihilism and tropey-ness is
| more obvious. "Gell-Mann Amnesia" elevates a funny warmup bit
| Chrichton did in a talk once to something that sounds
| sophisticated and scientific.
| dimal wrote:
| I've been ignoring most news since about mid January. My
| thought was that if it's important enough, I'll find out
| eventually, and I'll reduce the amount of information noise
| going into my brain. That's turned out to be true. But another
| unexpected effect was that it's become much easier to spot bad
| news outside of my expertise. I'm center-left, and find it
| pretty easy to pick out nonsense from the right, but looking at
| centrist and left wing news now (even "good" sources) is
| horrifying. What passes for reason is astounding. I think that
| without the daily firehouse of bias reinforcement, it's really
| helped me to see that, yeah, all news is really really
| terrible, and probably does more harm than good.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| But it's hard to know whether or not this is true. There's no
| obvious reason to suppose that journalism is doing equally
| badly in all fields.
|
| I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and
| they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what
| they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or
| worse than what I am.
|
| And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more
| interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes
| sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad
| as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much
| more effort in there.
|
| (Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I
| think it's bad for different reasons.)
| Gimpei wrote:
| I think this is true to some extent. The fundamental problem is
| that the majority of journalists are generalists with training
| mostly in writing. This may have worked in the past, but the
| world has become very specialized. Generalized knowledge with a
| hermeneutical approach to discovery just doesn't cut it. Media
| organizations seem to have realized this when it comes to law
| where many analysts are now lawyers, and in medicine to a
| certain extent as well. But not in the social or hard sciences.
| amelius wrote:
| The good news is that we're about to have AI that can make
| anybody a geat writer, including any researcher whose
| reporting the general public finds boring and
| incomprehensible.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| I believe that, when I see it.
|
| What I expect, is more wordy gibberish, that gives the
| impression of high level writing, but is not.
| notahacker wrote:
| Nah, we've got AI that avoids the need for a researcher
| because instead of taking time to read the material you can
| use it as inputs to a neural network and get a near-instant
| response in the form of paraphrases of the key points and
| other statements which aren't true but involve enough
| relevant terms in syntactically correct English to get past
| a subeditor...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I see "all news bad, don't trust media" so often on this site
| that I'm beginning to question if there is a motive.
| Veen wrote:
| Perhaps the motive is that we want to see better science
| reporting and are dismayed when the media fails to do its job
| of producing accurate and informative journalism.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| In fact, _every_ point raised by her equally applies to any
| kind of news. She basically gave a good summary of why news
| sucks in general.
| areoform wrote:
| Good investigative journalism is usually quite the opposite.
| Some of my favorite pieces have times, dates, who, what, where
| etc and are firmly rooted in data.
|
| There's also a new sub-field that explores topics through data
| and they're usually quite excellent.
|
| Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it's
| difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite
| example is the article series about illegal plutonium
| experiments by the US Government on civilians where they
| injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children
| with plutonium just to see what would happen.
|
| The articles forced disclosure from the US Govt. in the form of
| an executive order and led to the book, The Plutonium Files
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files
|
| > The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps
| until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of
| policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing
| with human radiation experiments, _as a result of Welsome 's
| work_. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the
| president's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments,
| and _it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome 's
| book_. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which
| said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those
| who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October
| 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case,
| when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere.
|
| You should be able to read it here,
| https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/86870...
|
| Another great example is the assassination of the head of
| Iran's nuclear program by the NYT,
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc...
|
| It's a beautiful example of great journalism.
|
| If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and
| were about events that had happened in the past. It's much more
| difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the
| "all news is bad" perception comes from.
|
| News can be great. Given enough time and research.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| > "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
| You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know
| well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You
| read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no
| understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the
| article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--
| reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause
| rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
|
| > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the
| multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national
| or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the
| newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the
| baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you
| know."
|
| https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
| noduerme wrote:
| I always found it funny that the example used to illustrate
| the effect is 'Palestine'.
| atoav wrote:
| > it's that all news is that bad.
|
| I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are
| alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are
| fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple
| enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what
| you have learned forever.
|
| But science is different for sure and the journalism on it
| sucks because getting to the point where you even understand
| the problem might require _years_ of preparation. And the
| journalist might not have had those years, despite them having
| to explain it in a _simpler_ way to an audience which might
| even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic
| might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare
| for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding
| edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at
| times for them (understandably so).
|
| Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very
| simple fashion requires _more_ proficiency in that subject, not
| less.
| Closi wrote:
| Weather news is ok if you are outside the weather industry -
| but to those in the industry the forecasts are simplistic and
| biased, and the news doesn't generally cover developments in
| forecasting technology or technique. The broader topic of
| climate in popular news is known to be a total shit show
| however (not just science, also policy etc).
|
| For what it's worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles
| around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to
| wild stabs in the dark.
| areoform wrote:
| Which ones were the best, in your opinion?
| Clubber wrote:
| >Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright
|
| I'd venture to say weather news is also alarmist and
| therefore bad, particularly during severe weather events and
| hyping up hurricane news.
| Peritract wrote:
| > But science is different for sure and the journalism on it
| sucks because getting to the point where you even understand
| the problem might require years of preparation.
|
| This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume
| this about their own fields, not realising that it actually
| applies to most of them.
| ghaff wrote:
| "Terrible" reportage can indeed mean getting quotes wrong
| and basic established facts incorrect.
|
| But it also covers simplifying things for a (somewhat
| educated) lay audience, making decisions about what to
| include and exclude, and including perspectives that some
| experts may take issue with.
|
| Certainly, it would be nice if many journalists had a
| better background in what they're writing about. But it's
| also a case that experts can have unreasonable expectations
| about the depth and nuance of something written for the
| more or less general public.
| mattkrause wrote:
| I think the nature of science reporting exacerbates it.
|
| The "Science Section" of your local paper covers an
| absolutely massive range of topics: astronomy one week,
| zoology the next, and everything in between. Nobody--
| literally nobody--has the breadth of expertise to do all of
| those fields justice.
|
| The rest of the paper has a more consistent focus. If you
| covered last year's debate over gun control, that
| background carries over to this week's debate. The players
| change slowly too--some of the folks in Congress have been
| there for decades.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Until weather reporting became mostly automated, most news
| agencies had a policy of never reporting a chance of rain as
| being less than 20%. If it was 8%, it was always rounded up
| to 20%. If you remember seeing "20% of rain" excessively most
| of your life, this is why. Some of them still do this,
| especially with on the air reports by a human.
| dtech wrote:
| That actually sounds like good practice, due to humans not
| having good intuition about chance.
|
| Most people will interpret "8% of rain" as "it's not going
| to rain", and then be mad at the "inaccurate" weather
| report if it rains the next day.
| solardev wrote:
| I dunno if that's strictly true. Many fields can be reasonably
| covered with some minimal training. The hard sciences, though,
| are constantly changing so much that even practitioners in the
| same field of science can barely keep up in peer review... much
| less scientists from other disciplines, and much less poorly-
| paid journalists without dedicated science training. And these
| days, so many of the findings are subtle and perhaps somewhat
| interesting in a purely scientific sense, but have to be hyped
| up in marketing dept PRs to make the general news cycle at all.
|
| The issue compounds when poorly trained, poorly paid
| journalists interview scientists and then misreport and
| misquote their findings, leading to a loss of a trust, the next
| interview being less detailed, etc. It's a vicious cycle of
| dumbing down and hyping up, all to fit our clickbait-sized
| attention spans.
|
| Is there an easy way around it? I doubt it. You're essentially
| reporting bleeding-edge findings from leading PhDs flailing
| under a publish-or-perish model, to an audience who mostly has
| not touched science since middle school (if even then). People
| don't even know why they should CARE about science, much less
| what your margins of error and P-values are, etc.
| feet wrote:
| Maybe reporters just shouldn't be reporting on every little
| paper but rather universities should have a media department
| with scientists that handles press releases so they don't
| suck ass
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Having seen the PR disasters from CERN, I'd say we need
| less PR releases.
| feet wrote:
| Yea because those were undoubtedly worse than your
| average scientific reporting from whatever Times?
| Honestly, come on
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| The problem is that they caused that reporting. No PR
| about superluminal neutrinos, no hysterical reporting
| about them. This would have given the community time to
| find the bad connection which caused the bad data.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'm sure that would go down well, I mean what better way to
| make enemies at your university than by publishing critical
| reviews of your colleagues work in a public press release.
| A better idea would be to have the anonymous peer reviews
| published as an addendum to each paper, that would be fun.
| Also highlight whether or not the work was published in a
| 'private club' journal with lax standards or not. Maybe
| interview the lab techs as anonymous sources to see what
| kind of standards the lab really operates with? Do some
| investigative journalism? Cue furious PIs demanding the
| entire media relations department be fired...
|
| University media relations departments are just not going
| to to point out flaws in the work of their own PI-led
| research groups, they're in the business of fluffing their
| reputations, because that means they might get more
| students, more grants, more positive media coverage, etc.
| It's a business these days, isn't it? Corporate PR
| professionals are running that show more often than not.
| feet wrote:
| I agree with essentially everything you say, although I
| would hope we could figure out a way to structure our
| research organizations to prevent that sort of bias but
| having a dedicated scientific reporting organization of
| some kind that does serious due diligence I think could
| definitely work
| crispyambulance wrote:
| It's true, many of the problems Sabine Hossenfelder cited about
| science news apply just as well to news about any topic.
|
| But is the news categorically "bad"? No.
|
| Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists,
| stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a
| downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But
| journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news
| articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be
| reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on
| with those topics.
|
| Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or
| have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one
| simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect
| the general public to spend the time and effort to read them.
|
| There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives,
| but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine
| for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't
| fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening
| and satisfy some curiosity.
| [deleted]
| nathias wrote:
| very good points, especially about focus on 'consensus' which
| seems to be a consequence of US reception of global warming but
| has become a standard in discourse about science ...
| nioj wrote:
| Reminds me of this satire piece:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/s...
| andreyk wrote:
| I can add my cents wrt AI coverage.
|
| First, remember the rule that 'most of everything sucks'. Is
| science coverage especially worse than politics, economy, etc.?
| Not sure.
|
| Secondly, over the years there have been more and more reporters
| who specialize in writing about AI, and whose articles are
| generally of very high quality.
|
| It's not as bad as it used to be, and I'd argue it's better than
| most people thing.
|
| Some context: I co-run the Last Week in AI newsletter and
| podcast, so I am exposed to a loooot of AI coverage.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Sabine Hossenfelder is a great source to follow (and author of
| books to read).
|
| One of the absolute _worst_ things about the pandemic was the
| deluge of garbage articles about COVID, like the ones she 's
| talking about. "Someone somewhere found a correlation of X with
| Y!!!" gets reported as if it were Nobel-worthy.
|
| "Did it used to be different?" No, science reporting has always
| been garbage. But in the before times, the mainstream news still
| reported garbage, but there was less of it to report, and you
| could easily find quality reporting if you looked for it.
|
| Now there are many more "experts" vying for press time, and the
| press is able to disseminate their garbage much more effectively.
| begueradj wrote:
| Maybe the beginning of the solution is to start by hosting your
| science articles on a paid domain, with a short and easy to
| remember name. Once you do that, you can maybe start complaining.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| I'm getting a bit tired of Sabine to be quite honest...
|
| Maybe it's time for her to go back to sciencing instead of
| creating youtube videos?
| indymike wrote:
| Science is really hard to make into news for three reasons:
|
| 1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not
| (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100
| years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It
| takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from
| how interesting the article might be.
|
| 2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in
| understanding add up over time, but really are hard to get
| excited about individually. Once in a while we get a huge leap,
| but most of the time, it's "we got a few more digits of pi
| calculated". It's really hard to extrapolate these tiny changes
| into anything that the average reader will even notice in their
| lifetime.
|
| 3. Ultimately, science has to compete for attention with wars,
| politics, sport, local, finance (ok, might be as boring as most
| science, but at least people are literally invested).
|
| So, it's hard. BTW - the author of the article does a great job
| making science more interesting. Would love to see more writers
| cover the subject at the level Sabine Hassenfelder does.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| On your first point about uncertainty, I think both scientists
| and non-scientists struggle with how to have a meaningful
| conversation where real world decisions and policies have to be
| made in the face of material uncertainty.
|
| I generally see two ways of dealing with this on the ley side,
| which is to either ignore it altogether or to write if the
| finding or result completely. Neither is really appropriate and
| I think it's due to humans not being well wired to appreciate
| how uncertain _everything_ that we don 't have uncertainty
| parameters for actually is. Establishing a probable interval
| doesn't actually affect the probability of a thing.
|
| On the academic side, the problem is that most academic are
| cowards. They see a disproportionate cost to being wrong, and
| culturally, are trained to always be able to give a 'right'
| answer, even if that answer is useless. Theres a kind of
| automoton language that is used by researchers that allows them
| to escape any real consequences that might extend from having
| an opinion. It's a kind of aloofness that pretends that the
| science is happening in some kind of white tower vacuum of pure
| intellectualism. And they aren't wrong from a social
| perspective, in that academia will enforce a serious cost to
| them for being wrong.
|
| To sum up, my broader point is that both journalists and
| academics tiptoe around and hide behind uncertainty far too
| much. Any issue worth having a conversation on is one where
| decisions will need to be made inspite of uncertainty. As well,
| everything is uncertain, and just because we haven't/ can't get
| an uncertainty on something, it shouldn't give you more
| confidence than something we can establish an uncertainty for.
| mikkergp wrote:
| While I don't disagree with anything you said, I think it's
| more a supply and demand thing. Many(most?) people seem to
| value certainty over truth, in fact some people seem to think
| one is an indicator of the other and uncertainty is a form of
| weakness.
| concinds wrote:
| There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article:
|
| 1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the
| mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the
| psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math
| either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting?
| McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if
| you understand _those_ arguments, practically no journalist would
| want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong,
| when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments.
|
| 2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science
| journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific
| literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific
| consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving
| people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to
| people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for
| political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to
| believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the
| ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies
| in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the
| opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that
| takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative
| 'truth'.
|
| Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is
| getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People
| apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex
| systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught
| enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power
| laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're
| doing[2], how can journalists keep up?
|
| [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-
| pseudoscientific-...
|
| [1]: https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-
| and-...
|
| [2]:
| https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/153423172385190707...
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to the argument but Taleb's writing is
| horrendous. He doesn't explain things well at all, seems to
| mainly criticize strawman datasets, and primarily engages in ad
| hominems against anyone that doesn't agree with him.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Taleb's piece is great, thanks for posting!
| omershapira wrote:
| Among my TV jobs, I was a science reporter in a highly rated news
| show in Israel. Younger, more educated audience, relatively long
| attention spans and all.
|
| Because the EP trusted my judgement, Science items on that show
| had 4 minutes max, which was very generous, considering that news
| items can be given 1:40-2:00 on 8pm news and 2:30 for late-night.
|
| During those 4 minutes, every box of daily journalism still had
| to be checked:
|
| * Is it clear?
|
| * Does it explain why it's news?
|
| * Is it informing people of an ongoing event they're familiar
| with?
|
| * If it's entirely new, are they given enough context to make
| independent judgement?
|
| Unfortunately, scientific content rarely checks these boxes. If
| you want to explain the LIGO gravitational waves discovery or the
| Higgs Boson discovery, you can't give enough background for the
| user to feel informed other than "scientists believe this is
| significant" - so it's only fit for print. If you want to explain
| a new discovery in 4 minutes, it better come with a demo, that
| demo better be rendered/filmed like a product video, or people
| lose interest.
|
| So the science you end up covering is either from highly funded
| labs (think labs in Harvard and MIT that have DOD/industry
| sponsorship), or venture-funded companies with whitepapers and
| cool demos.
|
| If you're lucky, you have a relationship with the labs, and you
| get to serve as their informal media adviser. I often met with
| professors for coffee to teach them to make press kits for their
| papers.
|
| As a researcher, if you do market your paper, you run the risk of
| the press distorting it, as OP said.
|
| tl;dr: science is slow and rigorous. News defers rigor to the
| extent permitted by law. Incentives follow.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I'd argue you get what you pay for. That's why I donate money and
| subscribe to a number of news sources I like, e.g. ars technica
| and the Guardian.
| in3d wrote:
| Not too be overly negative but Hossenfelder herself is a good
| example. She posted many authoritative-sounding videos about
| topics where she has little knowledge and it shows quickly. She's
| a walking illustration of Gell-Mann amnesia. But clicks are good
| for her business, just as they're good for the business of
| newspapers.
| mort96 wrote:
| Examples to substantiate this accusation would be good.
| wiredearp wrote:
| It says in the article that there are
|
| > ... stories about how the increasing temperatures from
| climate change kill people in heat waves, but fail to mention
| that the same increasing temperatures also save lives because
| fewer people freeze to death. Yeah, I don't trust any of
| these sources.
|
| This is not sourced, but then again it is also not science.
| vkou wrote:
| Does it? I'm not sure it sucks any more than regular news.
| Perhaps we just hold it to a higher standard.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Because we have more bloggers than journalists these days. And
| the latter have to compete with the former for likes and
| eyeballs.
| ekianjo wrote:
| You could remove science from the title and it would still make
| sense.
| [deleted]
| rayiner wrote:
| There is a saying: "those who can do, do, and those who can't do,
| teach." Maybe it would be fair to augment that with, "those who
| don't understand a subject well enough to do or teach, report."
|
| The problem is particularly bad in science journalism, but exists
| across the board. Financial journalism is really the only area
| I've seen where the journalists tend to have real backgrounds in
| the subject. And unsurprisingly financial journalism stands head
| and shoulders above other journalistic fields.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| That is because there is actually audience willing to pay for
| the quality content. We really should solve how to pay for
| content problem. Subscription is not cutting it, but per
| article seems to be abandoned. Add driven drives everything to
| crap.
|
| Couple of years ago I was joking that Jezebel and
| EverydayFeminism dies because NYTimes became them with better
| spellcheck. Unfortunately not a joke anymore.
| tensor wrote:
| This is an arrogant and toxic saying. Let's not repeat it let
| alone add to it please.
| rayiner wrote:
| But is it true or not? That's what matters right?
| tptacek wrote:
| It's obviously not true. Teaching is a distinct skill (it's
| probably a large basket of distinct skills). People having
| varying aptitudes for it. Common sense tells you that the
| cliche can't possibly be true. George Bernard Shaw put
| those words deliberately into the mouth of a character you
| in particular would find absolutely insufferable.
| pen2l wrote:
| To go even further, I find a saying attributed to
| Aristotle to be quite true: "Those who know, do. Those
| that understand, teach."
|
| I find that true experts are able to explain subject
| matter in their domain _simply_ , they can ably distill
| complicated issues to their essence lest their pupil be
| bogged down in unnecessary side-details. I used to think
| Raymond Hettinger was just an awesome teacher because he
| could make certain programming tasks seem like things a
| 3rd grader could do with ease, then I discovered he's a
| big force behind the creation of py and he just sees and
| presents things at a very fundamental level.
| tptacek wrote:
| Seems pretty unlikely that Aristotle said anything like
| that; all these epigrams are kind of silly, in that
| they're all stemming from something _a fictional
| character_ said (or wrote) in a play.
|
| But I agree, it's cringe-y to see people try to dunk on
| teachers like this. There are good teachers and bad
| teachers like there are good and bad everythings; if
| you've had a good teacher for something before, it's hard
| for me to imagine that you'd take Shaw's character
| seriously with the "those who can" stuff.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _George Bernard Shaw put those words deliberately into
| the mouth of a character you in particular would find
| absolutely insufferable._
|
| Akin to Shakespeare having the evil Dick the Butcher
| saying, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the
| lawyers."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyer
| s
| loeg wrote:
| No, it's not true.
| zaphar wrote:
| Someone made a statement of opinion without supporting
| evidence. You followed that up with another statement of
| opinion without supporting evidence. As a result no consensus
| was reached and this entire exchange went no where.
|
| Why do you think it was an arrogant and toxic statement? Do
| you disagree that financial journalism is better? Do you
| think finance journalism itself is toxic? Do you have
| evidence that a belief such as "finance jounalism is
| generally more excellent than others" is toxic in some way?
| the_only_law wrote:
| They're referring the first sentence, with the cliche
| phrase. I personally don't make it seriously, because half
| the "doers" I've met can hardly do shit.
| tehchromic wrote:
| The big news in Science (big S for the institution of) is the
| existential crises of the Anthropocene, the art and technology of
| sustainably occupying planet e, radically transforming human
| culture around primary support for the ecological planetary
| biosphere vs the old dominionist paradigm of human centered
| everything, and the fight to preserve the biological wealth of
| the planet against the inexorable onslaught of mass consumption
| and exploit, especially as it impacts global systems like
| atmospheric and ocean chemistry, threatening habitability of the
| surface. This news is very exciting!
|
| I think one can only call science news boring if one clings to
| merely the old idea of science as a simple methodology for
| validating laws/truth of reality rather than appreciating that
| Science is the institution of cultural realism and the modern
| religion to which we all subscribe, so much so that we take it
| for granted. This is the problem with "science news", is that
| it's news performed under the presumption that the methodology of
| scientific practice needs to be more explicit for it to be
| effective news. This is only true for folks who accept
| superficial obeisance towards science as significant equivalence
| for factuality.
| zefei wrote:
| It's just that science is easy to verify for the people that know
| how. If you are actual expect of any other topics (thus can
| verify if their news is any good), you'll find the news for those
| topics is at best as bad as for science, if not much worse. News
| cannot be 100% faithful to the material it covers, and the more
| you understand about the topics, the more discrepancy you can
| see.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your comment that science is 'easy to
| verify' - how would any of us verify that the LHC actually
| found the Higgs boson a few years ago? (10 year anniversary
| coming up on July 4th)
| Izkata wrote:
| You're missing the "for the people that know how".
|
| I agree with GP: Most news is bad, but people can really only
| tell when it bumps up against something they know. News on
| science just has a bonus where research gets published
| separate from the news, and so even people outside the field
| can compare the two and point out exactly where the news is
| wrong.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news
| website. Most journalists had no science background, and were
| pressured into writing 4 articles a day.
|
| The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied
| press releases with no critical thinking. They believed
| everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.
|
| I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and
| economical situation of the media industry.
| walrus01 wrote:
| > I don't blame the journalists,
|
| writing and publishing four articles a day with only cursory
| review/editorial oversight, if any, isn't journalism at all,
| it's a content mill
| bsenftner wrote:
| The behavior we see due to the private ownership of media and
| news publishers betrays the colossal failure it is for the
| public and nations at large to have our society's self-
| reporting undermined by profit motives. News and media need to
| be treated as protected speech, with more formalization and
| more regulation. Leaving the governance of our society's self
| reporting to greedy Capitalists is a clear and active recipe
| for doublespeak and fascism.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| The profit motive does a poor job of handling the
| externalities journalism should be addressing. But govt
| control of the media landscape to the degree you're talking
| about can easily hamstring the important adversarial function
| journalism has vis-a-vis govt.
|
| It's a very hard problem, and there are no obvious or pat
| solutions.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Not government control, more regulation in the form of
| transparencies towards what gets reported and what does
| not, protections for investigative news journalists and
| whistleblowers, and no more masquerading entertainment as
| news journalism. Just as cigarettes have warnings about
| lung health, Fox News should have warnings about "not
| journalism, entertainment and the political opinion of
| Robert Murdoch".
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| On the contrary, letting the government determine what comes
| through the media is the recipe for fascism. As evidence,
| consider that the first thing that any authoritarian regime
| does is to take control of the media.
|
| The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours
| is to consider what the impact of it will be when your
| political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable
| with Donald Trump (or really, anyone of his faction) having
| this power?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of
| course letting any one power source control society's self
| conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that
| regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and
| that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and
| the rights of those collecting information for news
| reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists"
| to give their lives to report the truth the public needs to
| understand how far our lack of regulation has allowed
| things to become.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Who said "government control"? I said more regulation.
|
| You do realize government control and regulation are
| synonymous, right?
| bsenftner wrote:
| Yes, they are, and in practice regulations exist not
| because some evil bureaucrat wants to oppress free
| enterprise; regulations exist because one or more parties
| abused a freedom to the degree their behavior's impacts
| harmed others enough for laws to be written.
| permo-w wrote:
| the news industry needs public investment from all angles.
| right now the incentives are completely wrong
| refurb wrote:
| I mean we have public broadcasters like Canada's CBC and they
| still do the same thing.
|
| Why?
|
| Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody
| reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for
| it.
|
| The real answer is: the public doesn't want science reporting
| unless it's punchy, simple and exciting.
| bawolff wrote:
| I would say quanta magazine is a counterexample
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Also: Nautilus
|
| https://nautil.us/
| openknot wrote:
| Nautilus is actually an example that supports how in-
| depth science reporting can be difficult to monetize. I
| really like many of their articles in the publication,
| but there was a major incident a while back when they
| were severely (many months, even longer than a year)
| behind on paying their writers.
|
| I actually happened to meet a writer who had this happen
| to them, but this incident was also publicized in an open
| letter (source: https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-
| freelancers-at-nautilus-..., with discussion about this
| on Twitter at:
| https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/941051077922869248).
| This happened in 2017, and I'm not sure how long it took
| to get resolved.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| That's very sad. There is go fund me and crows funding
| for all kinds of weird causes and 50k isn't such a huge
| amount either.
|
| The future seems bleak.
|
| ETA: Oh!! The link re: the Twitter thread is gnarly! I
| hope this got resolved and the freelancers got something
| out of this.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| How do they finance themselves?
| evanpw wrote:
| A finance billionaire with a background in math and
| physics (Jim Simons)
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Sorry, but news organizations aren't out there doing what
| the public wants. Most of them are doing what will get
| attention. That is very different. The public doesn't want
| to have to give them attention, but when they say things
| like "X cures cancer" or "X is a threat to your children"
| it makes people listen. When the article turns out to be
| nothing, a small fraction of the people you fooled turn off
| your channel forever, and the rest just say "this was a
| waste" and go on to read the next piece of clickbait.
|
| This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be
| accountability. However, there is none. Even when the
| stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today
| recently.
|
| What the public wants and what tricks people into giving
| you attention are different things. Journalists today go
| for the latter, which is why we have all of these
| "alternative" news sources now.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _This behavior needs to be called out and there needs
| to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when
| the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA
| Today recently._
|
| I'd love a browser extension that shows me a crowd-
| sourced batting average for the author of any article I'm
| reading online. Something that tells me _" Oh, you're
| reading an article written by journalist Joe Schmoe? Joe
| has previously written 400 breathless articles about
| scientists discovering space aliens"_
|
| I know I know, technical solution to a social problem.
| And curating these crowdsourced article tags and
| statistics would probably be an intractable nightmare. It
| probably can't hurt much to try though. I think the
| fundamental problem is there are too many journalists for
| many individual journalists to develop a reputation in
| the minds of readers. I read several hundred, maybe a few
| thousand articles a year, but I could only tell you the
| names of a handful of journalists at best. There must be
| some way for technology to help bridge this gap.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| The idea sounds good, but I don't think it could work in
| the real world. The result wouldn't be people endorsing
| the _quality_ of an article, but rather whether the
| article weighs on their political side of an issue
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I've heard of newsguard and ground news. Both are biased
| in favor of "reputable" sources who should have been
| punished for fake news and haven't (USA Today, NY Times).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sometimes it's not about what the public wants, but what it
| needs.
| ekianjo wrote:
| what do you know about the public needs?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't claim to, but I do think it's pretty trivial to
| demonstrate that what one wants and what one needs is not
| necessarily the same.
| refurb wrote:
| Do you force the public to read it? Or just live with the
| fact you get dozens of views for news that took hours and
| thousands of dollars to create.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something,
| then that's surely better than filling millions of
| peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?
| refurb wrote:
| Sure it better.
|
| But instead of making dozens of people learning something
| you paid for school lunches for 200 students each month?
|
| It's a limit pot of tax payer money and it needs to be
| used on the highest impact things.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| How can you tell what has impact, though? What's the
| point in paying for school lunches for kids who have no
| interest in learning?
| refurb wrote:
| The impact is they aren't malnourished? Seems like a good
| goal.
|
| Edit: we prioritize feeding people over giving them
| educational science articles; seems appropriate
| feet wrote:
| Something that should be noted here is that our brains
| won't work properly without adequate nutrition. Our
| neurons require plenty of potassium to operate and other
| minerals such as magnesium and zinc. On top of that
| essential fatty acids and amino acids are super important
| for making neurotransmitters
|
| All of this gets ignored because the poors deserve it or
| some stupid nonsense thrown around by the people with
| money and power
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Many things are noble goals. Why is one to be preferred
| over another?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's easier to talk about feeding children to ignore
| stuff like out of control military acquisition or
| allowing oil companies to pillage public lands for
| peanuts.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The question is, given a sum of money and a goal to
| further the education of the people, what is the best way
| of spending that money.
|
| What other people are doing that is wrong is rarely
| particularly useful to think about when working toward a
| goal of your own.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _What 's the point in paying for school lunches for
| kids who have no interest in learning?_
|
| Because the state requires them to be there anyway, so
| it's the state's responsibility to ensure they are well
| fed? Academic performance has no bearing on whether
| somebody deserves food.
| ben_w wrote:
| Even with your cynicism -- and from your argument, why
| send them to school at all? -- food is so cheap that
| paying for everyone's school meals (even if they could
| afford it without help or hate learning) is a _really_
| cheap way to help those that are interested but can't
| afford to eat well.
|
| Let me use UK costs as an example, to show how cheap
| school lunches are compared to all the other aspects of
| education, because I don't know the USA well enough: If I
| assume PS2/school lunch (mine were PS1, but that was the
| 90s), and if the school year is still 39 weeks, that's
| PS390/year, or PS11,700 per year for a class of 30,
| compared to a qualified teacher's _starting_ salary of
| PS25,714 (head teachers go up to PS125,098 in London),
| and then you need to add the cost of books, and
| consumables, and the building itself, and insurance, and
| support staff (HR, caretakers, supply teachers).
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's the difference between the government justifying the
| funding and politicians (who control the budget) justifying
| funding. The government could easily justify funding as its
| own in-house journalism team that processes raw scientific
| publications into information usable by various government
| agencies. Politicians, instead, pander to voters with their
| cost/benefit metrics.
| yunohn wrote:
| > I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and
| economical situation of the media industry.
|
| Why wouldn't you blame people who voluntarily took a job
| writing science articles while having zero credentials? They
| could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on
| science specifically.
| openknot wrote:
| I once went to a journalism conference, and there was a panel
| where a professional science journalist strongly pushed for
| the view along the lines of, "you don't need a science
| background to be a science writer," instead of encouraging
| aspiring journalists to study the relevant background over
| the years.
|
| I'm sure a view against credentials isn't shared by all
| journalists (for example, many publications do require a
| relevant background), but that experience was personally
| disheartening because it seemed to be supported in the room.
|
| I was also disheartened by the focus on self-marketing and
| self-promotion in general over doing quality, accurate
| journalism, and a much bigger focus on having a good
| "narrative" and writing engagingly versus having a discussion
| on ethics. To some extent, I get it, because the advice
| likely works in helping someone succeed in their career. But
| there are clearly problems in science news related to
| precision and accuracy, and not much drive in many
| publications to fix it.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital
| advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large)
| don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which
| means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news
| but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to
| be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by
| people who are judged by views and reach and other eyeball
| metrics. We don't really want news anymore. We want our
| preconceived notions affirmed (we like to be "right") and we
| want to be entertained. Unfortunately, we get what we've asked
| for.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want
| to pay good journalism.
|
| It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value
| of a single article is too small to charge money for. A
| single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me.
| There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a
| cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the
| amount transacted.
|
| I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not
| ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription
| fee to every site I come across that might have a decently
| written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being
| the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to
| readers.
| caenorst wrote:
| > I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every
| site I come across that might have a decently written
| article once in a while.
|
| What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I
| think one of the argument is that you would see more of
| those decent articles if people were more enclined to
| follow a subscription model where the journal is
| accountable to its customers.
| openknot wrote:
| >"you would see more of those decent articles if people
| were more inclined to follow a subscription model where
| the journal is accountable to its customers."
|
| I think this argument holds up. For example, publications
| like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be
| very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with
| unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too
| bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were
| hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly,
| versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.
|
| Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are,
| but I found myself struggling to justify such a
| subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-
| tainment. The publications that can more easily get
| people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people
| make more money or find career success, which is why
| industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and
| more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend
| to be more financially successful.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it
| is largely because of their donor/patron model.
|
| This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the
| top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the
| bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't
| often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a
| correlation with manner of funding.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| NPR used to be my main news source until around 2016.
| Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning
| donors), they put out a lot of important stories that
| criticized both sides of the aisle. Then they got a serious
| case of TDS.
| hourago wrote:
| > Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-
| leaning donors)
|
| Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need
| trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics
| don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the
| status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices
| win by default, noise instead of news helps to create
| apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.
| mike_hock wrote:
| I agree except for the implication that it used to be
| different.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| There's a bunch of millionaires who have broken off from
| legacy news to make written and/or podcast style news
| content. We're willing to pay for quality work, but the
| legacy news isn't creating it.
| bsenftner wrote:
| It is not "largely our own fault", this situation has been
| engineered by the billionaires and the rest of the media and
| political power brokers specifically to create anxiety and
| confusion in the general public. Perfect preparation for
| eternal political divisions and whatever distracting whims
| they choose: War in Russia? Celebrity divorce! Planet on
| fire? Race on commercializing space! How's about an official
| Olympics digital coin and NFT series? Why not?
| timr wrote:
| NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few
| years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem
| (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of
| the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also
| fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus
| is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks
| suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter.
|
| I say this as someone _on_ that side of the political
| spectrum.
| zenithd wrote:
| openknot wrote:
| >"Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously
| like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter."
|
| That's probably where the journalists find people to
| interview, likely because a large majority of journalists
| are active on Twitter.
|
| This definitely isn't the only place, because there are
| free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source:
| https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting
| journalists to researchers. Many universities also have
| their own expert directories set up, and journalists can
| also find papers and contact their authors.
|
| However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far
| less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this
| may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people
| who market their research more on Twitter may be more
| likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital
| advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large)
| don 't want to pay good journalism._
|
| I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press
| departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded
| by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni
| donations, etc..)
| caenorst wrote:
| This is not a proof. In logic, you can't say A and C => D
| is wrong just because B and C => D is wrong.
|
| An example, "My uncle became blind because of diabetes",
| similar answer: "I don't buy it, my father is diabetic and
| never got blind". Doesn't work.
|
| In other words, the reason why scientific journalism in
| non-university press could be bad for various different
| reason than university press.
| robonerd wrote:
| Well first off, this is an informal discussion. Secondly:
|
| > _It is ALL about click bait to drive digital
| advertising_
|
| (Emphasis my own.) Science reporting is still crap even
| when it isn't funded by advertising, so there's obviously
| more going on than the funding model making things shit.
| The BBC and CBC both have crappy science reporting too,
| as do university press departments. These counter-
| examples refute the claim which was stated too strongly
| (I do think advertising plays some role in it, but
| obviously not all.)
| seoaeu wrote:
| University press departments are (indirectly) funded by
| grant agencies. Thus, it is strongly in their interests to
| convey to those agencies that their institution is doing
| groundbreaking work.
| [deleted]
| quest88 wrote:
| IMO: People that write well are not jumping at the chance
| to write science articles for universities. Writing is hard
| and science is hard, and being passionate about both is
| rare.
| native_samples wrote:
| It's not that rare, but the problem is that a lot of
| people who are outsiders, yet who truly understand
| science and then write about it, often end up becoming
| quite sceptical of it. Just like how journalists who
| understand politics end up sceptical. The difference is,
| journalists holding politicians to account is well
| understood to be a critical part of democracy, but for
| science it's the opposite. If journalists start asking
| tough questions they're immediately evicted from the best
| known institutions because scientists (academics) have
| done a great job of convincing those in power that
| doubting scientists in any way is immoral and dangerous.
|
| So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which
| those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get
| removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste
| university press releases.
|
| In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the
| population because they can sense that nobody is
| challenging the "experts".
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to
| the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this
| that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality
| studies.
| openknot wrote:
| Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com)
| and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article
| about her in Nature:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are
| good for this, though they aren't really traditional
| media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York
| Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on
| science topics sometimes too.
| openknot wrote:
| You would be surprised. Universities pay substantially
| better than newspapers (likely with better job security),
| and writing jobs are typically hard to find and low-
| paying in general. Many former experienced journalists
| end up working at university press departments because of
| the better working conditions.
|
| From an enjoyment side, writing is hard, but for a lot of
| people, it's much easier than research. There are fewer
| credentials needed for a career in science journalism
| versus scientific research (a Bachelor's only versus a
| PhD for many senior scientist positions). I know a lot of
| people who have a natural skill at writing who decided to
| major in a science field for one reason or another,
| performed okay-ish at their courses, and tried to get
| back to writing work.
|
| The end result is also similar writing for a
| magazine/newspaper versus a university. A university may
| have higher standards for accuracy and precision
| (especially if an interviewed scientist wants to review
| it, while a newspaper/magazine may have a policy to avoid
| sharing drafts to avoid bias in the article). However,
| higher-end magazines (like the New Yorker) have more
| prestige. There is also far less room at universities for
| dissent (e.g. presenting an opposing scientific view or
| publishing investigative work).
| beloch wrote:
| >"Another problem with sources is that science news also
| frequently just repeats press releases without actually saying
| where they got their information from. It's a problem because
| university press releases aren't exactly unbiased."
|
| This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases
| usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even
| someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3
| or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually _understand_ the papers
| that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a
| background in optics is better situated than most to understand
| an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they 're still
| going to have to bang their heads against several walls to
| figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying
| from a press release doesn't.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And those press releases are often written by university PR
| offices without a clear understanding of the research they're
| promoting, and the articles repeating those press releases
| frequently get copied poorly by _other_ science publications.
| It 's a game of telephone all the way down.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I've thought about doing news well on a small scale for a long
| time. Who wants to write freelance for me and how much do you
| want?
| wafriedemann wrote:
| News are irrelevant for your life. Period. That's why the news
| industry is the way it is. And that's why it is of no concern
| wether it is this way or not. The biggest benefit you can get is
| not to consume any news. Changing news has none.
| permo-w wrote:
| this is largely a reaction to the old stereotypical attitude
| towards science: i.e. nerdy and uncool and for boring people.
| news sources - in some ways admirably - have tried to make it
| more interesting for the general public. they've achieved this,
| but at a pretty high cost, which are the points laid out in this
| article.
|
| considering the size of the scientific community (i.e. people who
| could tell you what a confidence interval is) vs the size of the
| general news-reading population, I'd suggest that the likely
| alternative to a lot of the science reporting referred to in the
| article is not better science reporting, but less of it overall.
| sadly, these companies are simply meeting a demand from a
| relatively uneducated population a large proportion of whom's
| brains will switch off at the sight of the words "confidence
| interval"
|
| my suggested solution to this is more public investment in the
| news industry. more grants for independent journalism
| james-redwood wrote:
| www.quantamagazine.org www.nature.com
|
| It doesn't suck. People don't know where to look.
| robonerd wrote:
| Even Nature has a sensationalism bias; that's why they're so
| well known. They like to publish papers with the most punch.
| blhack wrote:
| Because people use "news" articles as a type of fashion. A fancy
| watch isnt' better at telling time, but it _does_ signal both an
| alliance to a certain ideology, and the ability to display that
| alliance.
|
| Rolex isn't optimizing for time accuracy anymore, they're
| optimizing for that type of social signaling.
|
| Similarly, science journalism (and really, all journalism) isn't
| optimizing for dissemination of information, they're optimizing
| themselves as a fashion/signal.
| setuid9001 wrote:
| I would also argue that science sucks in it's current state as
| well. It's all about Hirsch-Index. Looking as scientific and
| complicated as possible, so other scientist want to quote you and
| the Hirsch-Index rises. Also if numbers don't fit, they will be
| made fit. Fake or not doesn't really matter because no one will
| ever read it anyways. See the auto generating tools for papers
| and positive submission of them. This is by all means not the
| case for all scientist. There are lots of good, talented people
| there. But they get overshadowed by the previous mentioned.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem:
| media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic
| scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has
| to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and
| government have a list of so-called experts that they want the
| journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media
| corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalists who will just
| repeat whatever they're told. This suits the interests of
| pharmaceutical corporations ('buy our wonderful new Vioxx drug!
| don't ask us about flaws in clinical trial design!), financial
| fraudsters ('our expert economists say get an adjustable rate
| loan! it's the way of the future!), and similar types.
|
| Here's a similar discussion from a decade ago, a rather defensive
| piece from a journalist:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-sci...
|
| Corporate media is, more often than not, just a mouthpiece for
| state and corporate propaganda, and the types of journalists who
| succeed in that environment are just pliable weathervanes who do
| what their editors tell them to do, and the editors do what the
| owners tell them to do, and hey, meet the Washington Post owned
| by Jeff Bezos whose AWS got a $600 million CIA contract for web
| services, so no more investigative journalism like Top Secret
| America, please!
|
| As far as the main points Hossenfelder raises, i.e. basic
| concepts like original sources, range of uncertainties, margins
| of error, unquestioning reliance on press releases, alternative
| hypothesis, understanding of how mathematical models of physical
| phenomena are tested against observational data - well, that
| might force the public to think about what they're reading.
| That's not the job of the corporate media, they're not there to
| encourage critical thinking - they're there to take complex
| topics, simplify them to the point where a small child could
| understand them, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. That's the
| essence of propaganda tactics.
| samhuk wrote:
| Are you implying that, historically, journalists either 1) had
| some basic education in what they are reporting about, or 2)
| actually wanted to educate themselves in what they are
| reporting about, and that today, increasingly, journalists
| don't or don't want to do either 1) or 2)?
|
| That is, at it's core, saying that journalists are, on average,
| getting more and more stupid.
|
| This seems a bit strange and unsubstantiated, but could very
| well be true. What would cause a gradual decrease in the
| intelligence of humanity's journalists?
|
| Or are things like science just getting more complex (more
| specialized) that an average journalists requires "too much"
| time to educate themselves about. That would then mean they
| aren't getting less intelligent, per se...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| My point is that media owners and their pet editors don't
| want competent science journalists, they want compliant
| stenographers who will go to their assigned experts and
| repeat what they say. They don't want stories that will
| encourage their readers to engage in critical thinking.
|
| There are plenty of people who could do competent science
| (and other) journalism if that was the standard they were
| held to. Such work can still be found here and there, in
| specialty journals (Science and Nature news reports are often
| quite good), but it's increasingly rare in corporate media
| for the above reasons.
| [deleted]
| cm42 wrote:
| "It seems to be written for an audience which doesn't know the
| first thing about science. But I wonder, is it just me who finds
| this annoying?"
|
| Nope, and that's basically the root cause: it's designed to get
| clicks and shares from people who Believe (rather than
| Understand) Science(tm)
| rexreed wrote:
| Tech news / "journalism" is even worse.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Same reason most news suck.
|
| Journalists aren't subject matter experts and by definition will
| not understand the full depth of the scientific publication.
|
| And most won't even try to. They're happy to write their twitter-
| ized clickbaity headline and move on to the next article.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public,
| and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone
| qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. They're
| not necessarily even going to be in your country.
|
| I'm a physicist by background and even when active in academia it
| was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub
| fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I did
| theoretical and computational physics research and understanding
| leaps forward in for e.g. experimental hardware would have got
| blank stares from me. For a journalist, who may have been out of
| academia for some time, a large amount just gets taken on trust
| from what the academics themselves say, because you haven't got a
| hope of understanding the fine points of the research.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm also starting to think that most of the low hanging simple
| ideas are done already, so what is left is exceedingly
| technical and field specific ideas. Either these aren't very
| interesting for general public or explaining them is difficult.
|
| Not to forget push for media by most institutions on anything
| that could garner positive press.
| wrycoder wrote:
| That's what Lord Kelvin thought. Then Roentgen discovered
| X-rays.
| Ekaros wrote:
| So how many such findings per year we are currently
| producing?
| ben_w wrote:
| Judging by the output of the scientists I follow on
| YouTube because they also explain things for outsiders
| (and that I only subscribe to a few specific domains of
| science), at least dozens.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| there is a lot of space between fields as it is hard
| enough to do one.
| wrycoder wrote:
| About once a century is all you need.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I have no problem reading most scientific papers I encounter,
| at least to a certain level. I almost never check the numbers,
| and can skim over things that I just don't understand - a
| luxury of not needing to understand every detail
| professionally.
|
| I'm not trying to one-up you; I'm sure you have far more
| capacity to understand papers in adjacent subfields to yours,
| and probably in other fields. I'm wondering what the difference
| is between our experiences.
|
| I find scientific papers easier to read than most news articles
| - much more clear, informed (of course), they ask and address
| much better questions - and generally don't skip the obvious
| ones that I think of. The graphics in papers are so much better
| than in news articles, I wonder where scientists get such good
| training in visual presentation. Mostly I read papers in
| Nature, Science, or more highly-cited ones I find through
| Google Scholar. Maybe that population skews toward better
| writing.
| freework wrote:
| > it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely
| related sub fields, and that was with working experience in
| that area.
|
| I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is
| because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set
| up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose
| your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled
| from publication, then thats the same as having never published
| anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to
| survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels
| criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to
| write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in
| such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't find them hard to understand, at least to a certain
| depth of understanding - but deep enough that I get a lot of
| value out of them, far more than news articles.
|
| On the other hand, Avicenna claimed to have read Aristotle's
| _Metaphysics_ 40 times before Avicenna could understand it.
| So it 's not a new problem!
| vapemaster wrote:
| > If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from
| publication, then thats the same as having never published
| anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to
| survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels
| criticism as much as possible.
|
| Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing
| works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you
| get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And
| retractions are actually exceedingly rare.
|
| In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a
| great way to get more citations, the real publication
| currency in academia...
| freework wrote:
| > you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it
| retracted if there was scientific malfeasance.
|
| Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for
| something other than to point out some kind of scientific
| malfeasance?
|
| If the paper is written in such a hard to understand
| manner, then its not possible to make any response at all.
| That's the point.
| timr wrote:
| > Why would somebody criticize a scientific paper for
| something other than to point out some kind of scientific
| malfeasance?
|
| Because most papers are not actively deceptive, they're
| just _wrong._ Or if not just wrong, they 've got some
| critical error. Even great papers. Most people don't seem
| to get this.
|
| Out of every paper I've read in my life (easily in the
| thousands now), the number that I think are/were
| unquestionable I can count on one hand, and have fingers
| left over. Case in point: once I made the mistake of
| pulling the "source paper" on Okazaki fragments (a Nobel-
| caliber discovery on a core part of DNA replication) for
| a seminar I was teaching in biochemistry. I thought it
| would be neat to go back to the source material for such
| an important discovery.
|
| What I didn't realize is that the original paper
| was...let's just say that it wasn't really conclusive. It
| didn't take long for my students to rip it apart, and I
| was chastened. I _should_ have gone into it with the
| attitude that I was going to show them how hard and messy
| real science is. Instead, I feel like I made them believe
| that their textbook was wrong!
|
| Science is Hard. Even stuff that is considered Nobel-
| worthy after years of post-hoc examination is rarely
| definitive when it first gets published. These
| "reporters" who rush out and breathlessly write a
| fawning/sensational/scary article about something after
| they half-read an abstract on arXiv, but question
| _nothing_ within the article itself, are tremendous
| hacks.
| [deleted]
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way
| that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes
| it obvious it's gibberish.
|
| I am not sure where these weird beliefs come from. Scientific
| papers are difficult to understand because it's incredibly
| difficult to explain things that have never been explained
| before [1]. I encourage anyone who has the above view to
| spend two years solving a difficult scientific problem, and
| then do a comprehensive summary in 10ish pages.
|
| A more direct criticism of the above comment is that
| publication pressure is a very post-world war 2 thing. But
| you can pull random papers from earlier and find many of them
| extremely difficult to understand. Here is the 2nd most cited
| paper by Pauli from 1939 [2]. Try understanding what it truly
| says. This is one of the smartest humans to ever exist.
|
| [1] To your knowledge at least. People who write bad papers,
| or do stuff similar to what has been done before often do it
| because they don't understand the work of others fully.
|
| [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1
| 939...
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not
| straightforward._
|
| Not straightforward for the university press department? What
| could be more straightforward? Tell the university press
| writers to go talk to the university researchers they're
| writing about. If the researchers refuse to cooperate, then
| don't write the press release!
| physicsguy wrote:
| No, as in - even if you don't want to take the scientist's
| word for it, finding someone who is able to make an informed
| comment about whether the work is actually any good or not is
| really hard.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Heh - ask another faculty member.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| I agree..especially with your first sentence. I still read
| encyclopedias and DK publications meant to explain science for
| kids. I learnt a lot of science concepts from encyclopedias as
| a child.
|
| I find that today children's education of scientific concepts
| is cartoonised and made into 'fun'. These kids grow up to write
| about science as entertainment.
|
| Any form of education should be challenging. Not fun. I am very
| taken aback and strongly disapprove of the American tendency to
| inject 'fun' into everything.
|
| Example: learning Math should bring joy..not fun. If learning
| science and math is about 'fun', when the next fun thing comes
| along..learning would be abandoned.
|
| I also believe that learning should keep one hungry and wanting
| more. In that.. it has to be a goal that is always a tad
| difficult to reach. America fails badly here. I can't speak for
| other countries.
|
| India and Europe where I have spent time do a better job in
| this regard, but my opinion about these places are dated.
| pvaldes wrote:
| You have a point. Replacing the stupid message "science is
| fun, (thus scientists are here to entertain us)" by "science
| is important (so scientists are here to solve our problems)"
| would be a drastic improvement.
|
| If we don't have better science news is direct consequence of
| the disrespect or even deliberate mocking shown for science
| in the last decades by prominent politicians.
|
| Deliberate dehumanization or mocking of scientists by
| journalists is also a really old problem; A piece of news
| titled: "'politicians' say that X is true" would be redone
| immediately and replaced with the name of the politicians
| saying that. For science, not having the right of linking
| your name to your hard work until the four paragraph is the
| norm.
|
| And this if you have luck, I know the case of a scientist
| that was asked to be interviewed for a newspaper about their
| career. She thanked him for their patience, time and free
| advice, calling him egghead in the newspaper.
|
| Another problem is the infamous formatting all scientific
| news to pulp format with variants of "scientists are
| perplexed!" at the end (just to tickle your audience with the
| implicit message that "they are not smarter than us"). When
| people is bombed constantly with "science can't explain it",
| "researchers are puzzled", etc, the trust in science is
| seriously damaged. And then we have people acting
| irrationally in the middle of a pandemic, just to make a
| point.
| swayvil wrote:
| Haphazard methodology. Profit driven. I think that covers it.
|
| If we want to deliver the scientific gospel to the laymen we need
| some kind of rigorous technical writing thing.
|
| Unless entertainment is literally our method and profit is
| literally our aim. Is it?
| [deleted]
| noduerme wrote:
| It's like this. (Not that it needs to be stated. We all know
| this.) The Delta Airline pilot union today put out a terse, two
| paragraph letter to the public, blaming the airline for their
| forced overtime and subsequent flight delays. There were
| _hundreds_ of news articles about this, all of which strung out
| the lead into several paragraphs and doled out a few sentences of
| this bland letter. Most of them did not link to the actual
| letter. By reading the articles you would notice a few things:
|
| 1. They were all written by barely sentient hominids, or possibly
| AIs who were tasked at 4am with turning a very short letter into
| a clickbait story
|
| 2. None of these hominids had actually read the letter in a
| linear way
|
| 3. None of them had the slightest reason to think you would read
| all the way to the end of the article they were writing.
|
| Take this form of 'journalism' and apply it to anything about
| black holes, quantum physics, strawberry ultra harvest moons,
| yesterday's Wordle, inflation, riots, covid, etc. and you
| basically have the recipe for (a) a severely bewildered
| population and (b) an extremely frustrated small group of people
| trying to hack through all this bullshit to obtain some idea of
| what, if anything, is actually going on.
|
| Oh. That reminds me. This was good:
|
| https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that...
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| Thanks for submitting that link. It was a very interesting
| perspective although I doubt that the author (or Bourdieu, or
| both) really understands the nature of the Art MarketS (with a
| capital S to emphasize that it is not just one market but
| several, with similarities and differences).
|
| Eg, in the text it is presented as if the actual producer
| (artist) is somehow involved in the value adding while in most
| Art markets I know of the production is really removed from the
| actual value chain and the market is largely a market that adds
| value starting on the second sale, ie. after the producer has
| lost touch with the value chain. Also, Art as such was really
| tangential to the subject matter of Media and Journalism.
|
| So, that part of the article could have been left out, as it
| brings no extra clarity - especially as the main point was not
| really about market value for the product (neither Journalism
| nor Art) but instead market value for the producer (either
| "Artist" or "Liberal Arts Graduate" on a totally different
| market: The Job Market.
|
| Still, it was an interesting read, and it did add another piece
| to the puzzle of "understanding some of the reasons we as a
| civilization are steadily losing our grip on reality" (here, I
| assume that "we" and "civilization" is lacking the unstated
| specifier "USA/American")
| [deleted]
| drewcoo wrote:
| Science news sucks because their audience is a science-illiterate
| public that doesn't really want to learn but feels it knows
| enough to make important decisions. To be eye-catching (ad-
| attractive) enough for widespread broadcast it needs to have
| human interest angles and show "both sides" (as if there are 2)
| and not alienate that ad-clicking audience.
|
| No matter how good the advice to reporters is, no matter how
| closely they follow that advice, science news will still suck.
| [deleted]
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I think part of the reason is because there's a disconnect
| between science and the rest of society. Science doesn't work in
| 2 week sprints or fiscal quarters or election cycles. It's not
| something that can be scheduled or forecasted. It's slow and
| error-prone and there may just not be anything newsworthy for
| several years at a time.
| cortic wrote:
| like to add;
|
| 11. Don't conflate correlation with causation.
| spinaltap wrote:
| Well lady, too bad, you have a conflict of interest with the news
| writers. What you care about is the news, what they care about is
| how much traffic they get.
| hatware wrote:
| I don't know where folks decided that if science is involved,
| corruption isn't possible.
|
| Science is the new religion.
| 6510 wrote:
| Odd that no one mentioned SEO?
|
| Linking to anything in your article is bad, if people click on it
| they are not clicking on advertisements.
|
| If its a page not often linked to by high profile websites _you_
| are endorsing it.
|
| The target page (journal publication) might not be available to
| the crawler. It could be poorly formatted from a search engines
| perspective.
|
| But if it isn't paywalled the article about the publication is
| pretty much a less specific duplicate of the page you've linked
| to. Which one to rank higher? The duplicate or the original?
| Extra points if you copy the illustrations too.
|
| Ah, you've been using the big words now have you? These big
| unusual words must be important to the context of the article.
| The average casual reader most likely prefers English.
|
| You put a date at the top of your article? That means it is
| important today but less important on every day that follows.
|
| I'm sure I'm missing 20 other relevant "optimizations".
|
| edit: Try imagine what happens with the news website if it is
| dropped from the index because it doesn't follow the SEO
| guidelines. Is there any hope?
| kurupt213 wrote:
| the real question is why aren't they just publishing the abstract
| with a doi link
| Helithumper wrote:
| Is is just me, or is this article missing links that it should
| have?
|
| > Exactly 5 million on exactly that day? Probably not. But if not
| exactly, then just how large is the uncertainty? Here's an
| example for how to do it right, from the economist, with a
| central estimate and an upper and lower estimate.
|
| Where is the economist example? It's not linked or quoted or
| anything.
|
| > Here's an example for how not to do it from the Guardian. This
| work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This
| isn't helpful. Here's the same paper covered by the BBC. This one
| has a link. That's how you do it.
|
| The BBC Example isn't even linked (which I find hilarious bc the
| sentence is describing the BBC not linking the paper). I don't
| know what BBC example the author is discussing.
|
| > An example is this story from 2019 about a paper which proposed
| to use certain types of rocks as natural particle detectors to
| search for dark matter.
|
| What story? It's not linked....
|
| Reading back to the top this appears to be a transcript, however
| it doesn't make much sense that only some of these parts are
| linked and as a result the transcript (for whatever reason)
| randomly includes links.
| cycomanic wrote:
| The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the
| same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A
| punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For
| example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at
| scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have
| several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is
| not some very good points in there (e.g. put your dates at the
| top, cite your sources...)
|
| As a side note, I hate how her channel has become something which
| exemplifies much of what I dislike about the now typical youtube
| channels: Top ten lists, grossly overstated titles, "give me your
| opinion in the comments", the awful generic CGI backgrounds ...
|
| The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same
| reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.
| [deleted]
| wrycoder wrote:
| She also mugs for the thumbnail, like so many others. This
| seems unique to YouTube.
| jahnu wrote:
| I feel differently about her work. I think she is doing the
| less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising
| what is just not correct out there. She spends time deflating
| amazing claims. The medium of YouTube is not conducive to
| lengthy expositions and is definitely not academic grade but it
| shouldn't be! She is making pithy responses to headline
| grabbing sensational mainstream hype reporting. There is an
| audience for that and she caters to it. You don't like her
| aesthetic, fine. That's a valid opinion but it doesn't
| invalidate her work or make her the equivalent of what she is
| criticising. Headlines are to grab attention and sorry but
| that's a fact for YouTube, trade books and even peer reviewed
| papers. The content is what ultimately should be judged and her
| content is high quality for what it aims to be. Want academic
| level peer reviewed literature? Go read a paper, text book or
| take a course.
|
| We need more Sabines not fewer.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The issue for me with her videos is that she mixes two very
| different kinds of criticism.
|
| The first is criticism of things that are clearly wrong, such
| as the aforementioned science journalism. This is a good
| public service, I agree.
|
| The second is criticism of other physicists' ideas. i.e. her
| personal opinions and professional disagreements with other
| physicists.
|
| She doesn't delineate the two clearly enough to her audience,
| so some of her viewers may come away thinking that views that
| are held by physicists who are her peers, are in the same
| bucket as junk pop science articles. Just read the comments
| on her videos, they are full of "physics is a scam" type
| people who feel vindicated.
| jahnu wrote:
| I really don't think it's her problem to fix that the
| crazies latch on to it. I have no problem getting when she
| is offering a view or criticising consensus. And to be
| honest it seems you don't either.
| cycomanic wrote:
| On top of that, in her more recent videos I get a weird
| feeling of her leaving some things purposefully ambiguous
| for that audience.
|
| For example in the video to this article she was using a
| lot of climate science examples, which will be interpreted
| in a certain way by the "science is a scam" crowd. I'm not
| sure she is doing this on purpose (I have the impression
| she strongly believes in climate change), accidentally or
| if I'm just oversensitive to some things.
| tene wrote:
| I think it's normal and expected that people who are
| skeptical are looking for people who will take their
| questions and concerns seriously.
|
| I am very personally convinced of anthropogenic climate
| change and that it's a serious risk for humanity. I still
| believe that it's important to take people's questions
| seriously, and to respect that people who aren't
| convinced have been making their best attempt at
| understanding the world. For these people, biased stories
| that don't put numbers in context are seen as deceptive,
| and I think that perception is legitimate. The only way
| to actually meaningfully reach them is to credibly
| demonstrate that you're actually checking the evidence
| that disagrees with your conclusion.
| jahnu wrote:
| She absolutely 100% accepts human caused climate change
| is happening and is a big problem
| yakubin wrote:
| _> The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy
| expositions_
|
| I've actually found a couple channels on YT specialising in
| lengthy reviews/essays, which I find very good. Off the top
| of my head:
|
| 1. Whitelight[1] - game reviews/critiques/analyses.
| Particularly worthy of note are the Assassin's Creed Unity[2]
| (1.5h), Batman Arkham City[3] (3h 10min) and Watch Dogs[4]
| (1h 15min) reviews.
|
| 2. MauLer[5] - critiques of mostly Star Wars, but sometimes
| also other mainstream films. The ongoing series of TFA
| critiques has 4 parts so far (there is going to be at least 6
| total), each part taking anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.
|
| I also feel that I'm forgetting some, which I don't watch
| regularly, but periodically am reminded about their existence
| and then after a long break spend several days watching, to
| then forget about them again.
|
| But the channels I listed aren't fringe. Quite the contrary,
| they're quite popular. I think it's also interesting that one
| of, if not the most popular Vsauce video is the one about the
| Banach-Tarski paradox[6], which is almost 30 minutes long.
| His other videos also show this trend, where the long-form
| ones seem to get more views in general.
|
| And those are just essays/reviews/etc. There is a whole genre
| of podcasts on youtube dedicated to 3-4h in-depth interviews.
| Everybody knows a whole bunch of them, therefore I don't even
| need to list any examples here to support that.
|
| So it seems that YouTube is a pretty good place for long-form
| in-depth exploration of whatever topic (as long as you don't
| say "fuck", "murder" or show a human body).
|
| [1]: <https://www.youtube.com/c/Whitelight>
|
| [2]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dOporS8IY>
|
| [3]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3U1TL5yBm4>
|
| [4]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2G6zc5pKo>
|
| [5]: <https://www.youtube.com/c/MauLerYoutube>
|
| [6]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA>
| jahnu wrote:
| Good point well made.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I sort of agree and disagree with you. I think generally you
| are correct we do need more Sabines not fewer.
|
| However, I disagree that what she does is the "less popular
| and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just
| not correct out there". The sort of takedowns she does are
| quite popular and very easy to do. However, my criticism is
| that quite a few of them are superficial and fall essentially
| into the same traps that she criticises, i.e. the actual
| topic is much too complex to either present or take down
| without a more comprehensive in-depth discussion (which would
| be much less popular).
|
| Now this is still somewhat ok if she's the expert on the
| topic she is talking about as she has the expertise to know
| how good/bad the simplifications she makes are. However,
| recently she has started weighing in on topics where she not
| an expert at all: diesel fuel, antibiotic resistance, light
| pollution to name just 3 from the front page of her youtube
| channel. In this case things become quite problematic,
| because she is simplifying things that she might not have a
| full grasp of herself but still talks about like an expert.
| jahnu wrote:
| I hear you and respect your point of view. I just have
| different tolerances it seems.
| diognesofsinope wrote:
| > The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the
| same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.
|
| Can we all stop blaming 'economics'. Economics says people are
| largely self-interested, selfish and maximize their own utility
| (happiness-whatever).
|
| It's not 'economics', it's people. Labor unions are also
| maximizing their revenue.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Economics says
|
| You mean, "many Economists with a simplistic, reductionist
| view of human societies' behavior say".
| feet wrote:
| You're assuming that the entire field of economics isn't
| bullshit
| tomrod wrote:
| Yes, the processes of incentives driving outcomes is
| economics.
| [deleted]
| kortex wrote:
| > Top ten lists
|
| I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest
| was "top players in quantum computing"
|
| > awful generic CGI backgrounds
|
| That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel.
| Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is
| more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
|
| > give me your opinion in the comments
|
| Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
|
| Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science
| reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
| cycomanic wrote:
| >> Top ten lists
|
| > I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the
| closest was "top players in quantum computing"
|
| The whole premise of the video of this article is "I give you
| the ten reasons why I think science suck". Sure it's not in
| the title (which is even more polarizing), but it's still a
| top ten list.
|
| >> awful generic CGI backgrounds
|
| > That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel.
| Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is
| more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking
| head.
|
| She could just be sitting at her desk though, but I agree
| this is more aesthetics and it would have not grated me if it
| wasn't for the other things
|
| >> give me your opinion in the comments
|
| > Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
|
| That's exactly my point. I don't necessarily blame her, but
| am more lamenting the fact that all videos seem to have to
| become like this, if a creator wants to make a living on
| youtube.
|
| > Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science
| reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
|
| I'm not sure, her work is definitely not on par with quanta
| magazine for example.
| rob_c wrote:
| Thank you for saying it
| random_upvoter wrote:
| All news sucks that much, it just so happens that you know enough
| of the subject to recognize the suckage.
| [deleted]
| pixodaros wrote:
| Journalists can be pretty good at reporting local events and
| uncovering the relationships between local people ("this
| property developer's husband made a big loan to that town
| councilor before the councilor suddenly changed his vote to
| approve a development"). Where they almost always fail is
| analysis and domain knowledge. Gell-Mann amnesia describes the
| failures of technical reporting.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Because there isn't enough proper progress within the field of
| science so the media have to create news in order to have
| something to write about.
| musk8tor wrote:
| Because the fix is already in, it's not science, it's fundraising
| to do what you're told to do.
| voxadam wrote:
| This reminds me of a How Science Journalism Works by
| CurryFriedSquid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSMRp1ARUc
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Well all news sucks lately. We are not paying for news but for
| infotainment.
| Noughmad wrote:
| Simple answer: because you know enough about science to recognize
| how bad the news articles are.
|
| If you knew a lot about ice cream, you would be asking why ice
| cream news suck. All news suck.
| rob_c wrote:
| The article is simply glossing over the fact that a lot of
| "science news" is lies to make it sound like someone just
| invented the warp drive to sell stories. It's because the
| education system around us is so bad that if they mentioned half
| of these things (or heaven forbid basic stats) on the news people
| would either switch off or decry you as a modern day witch...
| posterboy wrote:
| In short, I guess, reporting scales with the complexity of the
| field, contrast war reports, and "science" is a very big field at
| that, and by the way it's self referential when reports report
| and analyse reports.
|
| PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in
| Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is
| highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as
| definition space)
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I subscribed to Nature magazine, and I don't see that it ,,sucks
| so much''. The answer is simple: you get what you pay for.
|
| Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any
| specific area of science...some of my favourites:
|
| - Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome)
| - CrisprTalk (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8TW2xKYRqbLvfGaT7
| 83WQA/videos)... a retired guy with lots of lab experience going
| through clinical trial results, investing in CRISPR stocks and
| bashing ARK invest's stock picks - Modern Healthspan
| interview with Gregory Fahy (the channel has lots of other
| interesting videos, but I'm less interested in supplements and
| more about future research reversing aging). https://ww
| w.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_OTIP7kjo&list=PLkfzM7KJv6vY68Fvw1g7l9vN9
| NqhW7Fay
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Nature and Science took a big hit in my personal rating because
| they allow/encourage the publication of reviewer names for
| accepted papers. I think this will corrupt the review process
| in the long run. In addition with their clear money making
| agenda and limited preprint compatibility (this might have
| changed), I strongly prefer Physics Review Letters.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Why I am highly critical of Nature (and to somewhat lesser
| degree of Science) I do believe the review process needs much
| more transparency. I am not yet convinced that making reviews
| public will make much difference to the better, however
| saying it will corrupt the review process is completely
| missing how broken the process is right now, in particular
| for these high-impact journals. Some copernicus journals [1]
| (I have no association, never even published there) seem to
| follow some interesting ideas.
|
| [1] https://publications.copernicus.org/open-
| access_journals/jou...
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I don't think it's that broken in nuclear physics. sure
| there are bad reviewers, but it's on the editors to sort
| that out. But opening the door to "that reviewer reviewed
| us favorably, so we have to do the same" is not good.
|
| Edit: Can only speak of nuclear physics.
| camillomiller wrote:
| If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how
| science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how
| newscycles and the news work. If you'd knew both, you would
| definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between
| the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-
| able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a
| larger non-technical audience.
|
| A science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and
| readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit --
| could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the
| problem illustrated here.
| projektfu wrote:
| Like any good nerd kid of the early 90s I read Discover
| magazine. Looking back I see that it was filled with breathless
| coverage of the discoveries of a decade ago, rehashes of
| 101-level science, and a few newsy articles about a current
| topic. There was always a little bit of red meat for people
| like dinosaur enthusiasts and space futurists. Many topics
| would get recycled a year or two later.
|
| I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough
| history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be
| interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to
| most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop.
|
| I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back
| and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little
| organization.
|
| One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN
| outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as
| much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at
| the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results
| publicly.
| openknot wrote:
| >"science is large enough and has enough history that it
| doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the
| sense that what you already know is news to most people, you
| can stay interesting without getting a scoop."
|
| For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles
| often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings
| that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is
| certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.
| noduerme wrote:
| >> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science
| publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical
| audience
|
| What is this need of which you speak?
|
| Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just
| store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something
| like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google
| _have_ to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily
| garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news"
| sections?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Scientific American is already scraping the bottom of the
| barrel. You can't trust any publication to be written in good
| faith.
|
| > Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed
| that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically
| calling him a racist.
|
| > It is written by someone who apparently has no training in
| evolutionary biology, though she says she "intimately
| familiarized [herself] with Wilson's work and his dangerous
| ideas on what factors influence human behavior."
|
| https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-
| america...
|
| https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-
| decline...
|
| > Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America's
| leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right
| after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep
| decline of the magazine in recent years.
|
| > Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US
| dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is
| known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on
| different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel
| Prize winners have contributed to it.
| Rerarom wrote:
| Why is science news bad so often?
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