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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

#161

Post by zmgsabst »

mrguyorama wrote: post #46
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…

There's really no reason to care about which of the two prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and we cannot force them to prevent a natural source wit…

A lab leak implies that we should cease funding work at WIV — and examine the officials responsible for doing so in the first place.

Perhaps even reconsider our entire approach to pandemic research, if our decisions led to the worst pandemic in generations.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#162

Post by coeneedell »

ctrlp wrote: post #60
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…

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

This line in the tractatus is not about the individual’s knowledge it’s about the entire research programme’s ability to know something fundamentally unknowable. In particular Wittgenstein was referring to logical philosophers talking about metaphysics, which evades logical positivism. Even then he wasn’t against the practice of metaphysics, only the attempt to describe it with hard logic.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#163

Post by stevenAthompson »

wk_end wrote: post #137
stevenAthompson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His citations for those claims about the authors are 3 substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors. I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.

> We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications tha…

He doesn’t link any of those. Only the blogs and the conspiracy site.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#164

Post by smrtinsert »

xkbarkar wrote: post #89
mapt wrote: post #8

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…

You forgot to mention the lefts position. They usually used the lab-leak theory to ridicule, mock and even have careers ended for those who dared to propose it as plausible. As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous. And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some merit, media just went silent on the matter. SO I disagree hard with that it's a right…

The media was not silent as it became more plausible it was prominent. Seems like you have have a somewhat myopic consumption pattern.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#166

Post by sportslife »

ghaff wrote: post #123
MostlyStable wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, wasn't it normal for journalists to have a particular specialization (even if that's not the _only_ thing they did), like "science reporter" or something? It is obviously impossible for every reporter to become an expert on every single topic that they might ever cover, but it is not unreasonable at all to get enough of a background on a topic that you cover regularly to be able to ask intelligent questi…

One of the problems is that journalism just doesn't pay very well in general. So news organizations may look for people with more experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in paying for that news/writing themselves. I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of the people who write on deep technical topics either don't need the m…

It doesn't pay well enough now.

30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.

Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.

Now, no science grad could make that choice.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#167

Post by runesofdoom »

giantrobot wrote: post #156
timr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great comment. One thing I'll add: if you don't have specific training in the field in question, just ignore any use of "scientific consensus" to justify an argument. The "scientific consensus" trope is just dressed-up appeal to authority, and even if there is such a "consensus", it's almost never broad enough to be applicable to whatever pop-science journalism thing you're reading. Also, even within the hallowed hal…

> Science only works if contrarians get a voice. This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN. Sometimes a contrarian is right and the accepted consensus is wrong. But that doesn't happen only because the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable th…

As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#168

Post by gptbore »

jonnycomputer wrote: post #99

I spent at least an hour reading through both the emails and the slack messages in this "expose", but I came away from it fairly certain that they are being portrayed unfairly, and I'm fairly surprised that Nate Silver has latched on to this. You have to both look at the time-line of the paper writing and the time-line of the conversations. By my reading, by the time the paper was being written, most of them had inde…

I agree with your description of what these correspondents consensus seemed to be at the time of writing.

I don't see how this is at all consistent with that the paper claimed - "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible", nor how it was portrayed by the media - "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin".

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#169

Post by robot_no_421 »

tetrep wrote: post #157
robot_no_421 wrote: post #37

Everyone should be skeptical of all sources. But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of. So while the title is technically true and I agree with the premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary at best and damaging at w…

> But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of. If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat,…

>If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same?

Difference is that a the guy in the lab coat has to conduct experiments on it, get them peer reviewed, publish a paper on it, and lay out all the assumptions and methodologies before it's actually "science". So it's not as simple as getting a guy in a lab coat to say it. Especially when all the other guys in lab coats are saying "that guy is lying and his methodology is garbage".

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#170

Post by thewanderer1983 »

"“trust the science” or “trust the experts” is usually right."

This statement and general belief is antithetical to science. Dr. Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying talk about this misconception of science on their Darkhorse podcast all the time. Dr Brian Keating nicely summarises this issue in this short video https://youtu.be/gAqq72m-ipo

You should "trust the scientific method" when done correctly.

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