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Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

natesilver.substack.com

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Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#101

Post by mike_hearn »

thorncorona wrote: post #71
mike_hearn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have to shoot for perfection. The bar has sunk so low even very basic techniques can yield huge improvements in trust: 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people ; not just other academics but literally anyone…

> 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine. This is how you get journalists to repor…

Journalists love reporting on flat Earthers even though their beliefs have no impact on anything in the real world:

https://news.google.com/search?q=%22flat%20earth%22&hl=en-US...

Realistically, journalists like to report on fringe or weird beliefs so they can laugh at the people holding them, and dislike reporting on serious disagreement with things they want to be true.

Agree that almost nobody is reading the papers, outside of random tweeters and bloggers. Journalists might as well start, though. Reading obscure documents is a part of the job, classically at least.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#102

Post by roody15 »

“ The Times fired their Pulitzer Prize-winning coronavirus reporter in middle of the pandemic — a reporter who saw the lab leak theory as credible — and replaced him with another reporter who dismissed discussion of the lab leak as “racist”.”

This about sums up the state of modern journalism today .. sadly.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#103

Post by jonnycomputer »

alphabet9000 wrote: post #94

the line about "The truth is never going to come out" is related to the uncertainty of whether or not it came from a lab, not (as the piece implies) having anything to do with "They also thought they were going to get away with it". it's very misleading and should be corrected

Yeah; they seemed skeptical that China would ever let the world know what actually happened, if something did escape.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#104

Post by scythe »

ke88y wrote: post #10

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…

>Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education.

First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the journalist writing the article is a qualified science journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning their education with partial credentials.

Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is agitating to create such an infrastructure.

Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball: a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and in America, that's saying something.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#105

Post by jonnycomputer »

powera wrote: post #54

It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts". The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments. This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Ap…

Did you read all the emails and slack messages? I came away thinking: science is messy, this is overblown, I don't think they did anything wrong.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#106

Post by TheBigSalad »

wredue wrote: post #69
biophysboy wrote: post #13

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…

I’m really not sure what you mean. There is literally zero evidence supporting a lab leak, while there’s multitudes of evidence of multiple contact leaps in the market. Was there a time when the lab leak theory had the same credibility as it being naturally occurring in poor unsanitary market conditions? I’d personally say no, but for the sake of argument, forgetting basic tenants like “the simplest explanation is mo…

Everyone is in agreement that the first known super spreader event was at that market. I don't really see how that's evidence one way or the other.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#108

Post by danenania »

threeseed wrote: post #70
powera wrote: post #54

It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts". The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments. This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Ap…

Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism. No different to any other random person on the street. That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping to any conclusions.

"Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism."

Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political biases.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#110

Post by mquander »

As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes, there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality. Truth-seeking is time-consuming and will always be inherently trading off against other local incentives, like writing quickly, writing exciting things, and writing things that your audience will like. If almost all journalists have to bust their ass just to survive, a truth-seeking culture won't thrive.

I think there are three main ways I can see things getting better:

1. Governments and academia have lots of money, but the money gets fed into a system of incentives that make academics not that good at either truth-seeking or popularizing their own work. This could change.

2. There is a large population of smart people who collectively can do a lot of truth-seeking and writing in their spare time, without needing to make money from it. However, right now there's not a particularly coherent way that those people can work together and produce collective information that is as easy to find and understand as mainstream media outlets. Improving technology to let amateurs work together and aggregate their opinions could be powerful.

3. The funding model for journalism could continue to evolve so that people who choose to do so can more directly fund truth-seeking journalism. Crowdfunding and self-publishing platforms are in this direction. This seems to me like it's already working fairly well in some cases to fund people's work, but then the attention market is not great at highlighting the more reliable voices, which is similar to the problem in point #2.

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