Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
natesilver.substack.com
Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
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Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#2[flagged]
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#3One of my beliefs is that truth may have negative short-term consequences, but the long term benefits are worth it in the long run.
So, wow- the facts presented here are depressing. Really a huge example of people in positions of authority blatantly misleading the public.
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#4Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general.
Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#5Scientists should be skeptical of all source - including Journalists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#6[deleted]
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#7Sure? Due diligence is always important. I'm not implying that science and journal publishing, or journalism are in bad shape, but simply that scientific scholarships goal should be to eventually converge on a truth ( or more likely an exclusion of other opposing theories), whereas the goal of journalism to to seek a truthful point in time capture of a topic. Just because they're inherently different time scales to converge on truth, any given scientific discussion shouldn't be "thrown over the fence" with a low value copy pasta of the papers.
I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists understand this general statement, but just because most individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little due diligence.
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#8The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work.
The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.
As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).
"Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#9[flagged]
Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
#10Big question: HOW?
Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. At university I majored in two STEM subjects but also took 10 courses in Philosophy, Art, History, Journalism, and Economics. Almost no one majoring in any of those fields except Econ took more than 2-3 STEM courses, and even then there a dedicated watered down courses to ensure those people could graduate (Algebra instead of Calculus, "Physics for Future Presidents", etc.).
My high school education in the humanities was also far better than my high school education in STEM, which is typical. And the deplorable state of Mathematics education in US high schools acts as a hard constraint toward improving the situation, since you need a baseline of mathematics literacy before proceeding along any other path in STEM.
How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely approaching a truly well-rounded education?
Go read the proximal origins paper. How is a journalist who has never seen a derivative, has never taken BIO 101, and whose Science distribution credit was fulfilled by Physics For Future Presidents supposed to dive into the claims in that paper and critically evaluate the surrounding literature? They can't.