Author here: happy to take comments or criticism
I very much enjoyed this article you linked with the Times reporter and the law professor
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-corona...
All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
81–90 of 216 posts
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#82So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
The problem is on the demand side, not solely on the supply side. People desire reinforcement not challenge. That is natural. I suspect it is true of us all. Those who are capable direct their potential to be challenged in specific ways, allowing themselves to have biases reinforced in the unimportant places. And they have access to the knowledge in their specific areas. This is the reason for the enduring power of t…
Definitely true. We could compare it to the food industry (from production to retail including restaurants).
Its ideal purpose is to provide people with nourishing, healthy, enjoyable food.
But its actual incentive is to give people the food they choose to buy, which often isn't nourishing or healthy.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#83Reading the examples, where people jumped on a single mistake to discredit an entire report points to some sad conclusions: 1. Scientific literacy is super low in the general population. 2. Motivated reasoning is rampant. People will believe anything that enables them to do what they wanted to do anyway.
I think the author oversimplifies the problems with climate models. They've had numerous mistakes and extremely critical ones. Not least of which is that they haven't factored for Multi-decadal changes in cloud cover albedo. The climate system is incredibly complex and our models do not have good models for all the subsystems that make it up, including the oceanic oscillations like Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation,…
I agree, and there are the same politician leanings in climate change non-profits and think tanks as with anything else. Sometimes they may justify sightly more alarming views of data to gain more funding; justifying it with, "Well, it's going to be bad anyway"
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so. In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?
> In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists? The problem is that these incentives for academics aren't created out of purity of heart, but because of the system to which they belo…
Well, also as a journalist you can not get away with making up stories. There was a recent case of a high class journalist, who did that and was caught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius
But he did so very brutal so to say. The problem with journalism is mostly not straight lying, but missleading and bending the truth until it fits the agenda. So a classic journalist should not have another agenda than the truth. But this type seems to be very rare today.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#85So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
The problem is on the demand side, not solely on the supply side. People desire reinforcement not challenge. That is natural. I suspect it is true of us all. Those who are capable direct their potential to be challenged in specific ways, allowing themselves to have biases reinforced in the unimportant places. And they have access to the knowledge in their specific areas. This is the reason for the enduring power of t…
This is true. You can do good journalism and lose money (or have a wealthy backer who funds your loss-making newspaper) or you can make a profit by getting your "journalists" to publish lots of sensationalist stories. Y'know, Clickbait. (source: I ran a newspaper).
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#86The headline really cuts off the points nose.
Yeah - I was trying to play off the George Box quote but maybe it's too obscure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
Interesting, I did _not_ know the reference (I'm a SWE, not in scientific community), and I thought it was a clickbait headline. Obviously this differs from the person above me ^ who clicked the link _because_ of the reference.
Just perspective, and I'm very happy to know the reference now.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#87So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
A small (but important) correction: generally, journalists do not write headlines; sub-editors do. Most subs have been journalists but most journalists do not become subs.
I think the distinction is moot. They all work in the newsroom, and are that side of the "journalistic integrity" divide. Subs are not part of the management team, or commercially motivated.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#88Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation?
Yes, absolutely. If an epidemiologist identifies and models a trend in human disease around substations, or a trend in failures of substations, or a new way of modeling the ways electrical demand can change over time and influence demand in other times and places, etc., then their input should absolutely be considered.
Just as it's annoying when a total outsider claims to know everything about a field, it is equally problematic when insiders refuse to acknowledge anyone on the outside.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#89> Journalists must get quotes from other experts before publishing No, this isn't enough. This whole way of thinking isn't enough. It's a big part of the reason for the current situation. Journalists should report what's true, not what Tom, Dick or Harry said. If a journalist isn't qualified to make object-level claims on a given topic, don't write on that topic. For example, if Bob says there's a forest fire, then i…
Um, so if you want to publish an article on how many people will die of the virus, how do you ensure it's true? Obviously you either don't write the article, or you quote the most reliable projections you can find. But those are still projections.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#90So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
> If there is one less to be learned from this whole Covid-19 debacle (and I'm sure there are several), it is that our entire news ecosystem, public and private, is fundamentally structured wrong for doing what is supposed to be its purpose, which is to make people better informed. It's not bad at it by mistake, it's bad at it as an inevitable consequence of its design.
You speak of a failure in design as the root cause of the failure to achieve the purpose of “to inform”.
From a teleological perspective, viewing the media as a tool designed “to inform” would be a mistake, it would amount to nothing more than a supposition.
Having “better informed” people was never the stated purpose of mass media so it would be wrong to say it is not fulfilling its design objectives. What would be applicable here to help us better understand the actual purpose of the media is POSIWID: ”the purpose of a system is what it does”[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...