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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment reminds me of this line from the submission: "There’s also a generational divide in journalism, with younger journalists tending to be more openly left/progressive than their older peers — and tending to be more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news stories are complicated and it’s not particularly their job to pass moral judgmen…
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Big 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…
The 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 h…
One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that it will ever get “resolved”. We dont have sequence samples at the time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy where it needs to be sharp. In my opini…
So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
Big 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…
If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.
One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that it will ever get “resolved”. We dont have sequence samples at the time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy where it needs to be sharp. In my opini…
> In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate, not politics.
But isn’t that politics? (International politics to be precise.)
Big 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…
They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes?
They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news?
They're supposed to be experts at reporting, which works out to mean experts at finding out about topics that they don't already know about.
Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact. But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature. But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what even r…
This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a different role.