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Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

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Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#171

Post by tekla »

aredox wrote: post #158
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…

Nate Silver has been blatantly wrong several times during COVID, has been schooled by actual scientists and is now on a personal vendetta against them. He is ready to fan the flames of science-bashing because his fragile yet enormuous ego has been hurt. That tells all that you need to know about him. (Don't believe me? He has never apologised nor shown a little bit of humility after being corrected. That's who he is.…

Provide links please.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#173

Post by zmgsabst »

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…

We don’t have zero evidence:

- we know of the US funding collection of coronaviruses at WIV; and research on them using humanized mice

- we know that the closest genetic match is a thousand miles away

- we’ve been unable to identify the precursor in an animal, unlike other pandemics

That strongly implies that directed evolution on a collected sample via repeated infection of humanized mice is responsible for COVID.

Contrary to your claims, there’s evidence against a zoonotic origin — no precursor, high human infectivity (of alpha) that rapidly decreased in the wild (in delta and omicron), unusual genetics around the furin cleavage, etc.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#174

Post by mcpackieh »

mike_hearn wrote: post #148
ke88y wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your prescriptions, but worry the point might've slipped by. > READ the papers The point of my original comment is that most journalists don't have the educational background required to do this. And everything else flows downstream of that problem.

The issue is not that they can't do it, they just don't want to. Journalists with no science background are happy to write quite technical fact checks of articles - even articles written by scientists - when those articles are contradicting something the journalists are already invested in. And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery in this arti…

The issue is that journalists could do better if they wanted to, but they don't want to and there's no system of incentives in place that would make them want to. There's no such thing as a journalism license they could lose, and publishing nonsensical science articles doesn't hurt their careers in any way because nobody expects better of them. After all, they're just journalists with no STEM education...

Even if you somehow forced science journalists to all get STEM dual majors, it still wouldn't make them care. They'd still take the path of least resistance and pump out slop. The only way to make them care is to put them under editors that enforce standards. But how do you make a publication care enough to hire editors that care? Even state funded university press departments notoriously sloppy. If they can't uphold standards, I doubt any organization can.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#175

Post by aydyn »

SoftTalker wrote: post #150
ke88y wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, without a baseline educational background, doing so in a way that's productive -- ie anything more than running around like a chicken with its head cut off -- is impossible. There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know which qu…

"Dr. Scientist, you said X. Describe the evidence for that claim?" "Dr. Scientist, are you aware of claim Y, which seems at odds with what you are saying? Explain why claim Y is wrong?" Write it up. You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said. That's what "reporting" is.

> You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said.

Pretty much the silliest thing I've heard today!

"Dr. Scientist, you said that vaccines promote herd immunity describe your evidence for that claim"

"Dr. Scientist, you said that mRNA vaccines aren't going to mutate humans, describe your evidence for that claim"

"Dr. Scientist, you predicted this year is hotter than ever, but back in February it was -20. Why did you lie?"

There are an infinite numbers of terrible questions you could ask as a reporter, if you don't have expertise. You need some degree of knowledge to talk about a subject, the only debate is how much.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#176

Post by stainablesteel »

define journalist:

1. an independent youtuber, who gives their opinion, can admit their bias, and is able to operate on good faith while allowing open discussions with people they disagree with

2. a corporate "journalist" who's integrity has become second rate in the age of the internet, who uses language as an instrument to get people to admit what they want them to admit in the most petty way possible

i can agree with 1, i don't think 2 fits the definition anymore. it used to be the best we had for a few decades, but that age is over now. i don't think 1 has any problem with admitting what should be an area of skepticism. however, i don't think that 2 is actually a journalist as they're not motivated to share information, they're instead motivated by the narratives of their employer

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#177

Post by ghaff »

sportslife wrote: post #166
ghaff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. I do occasional contract work these days and $1 to $1.50 a word for stuff I'm not being paid for anyway by my day job is OK--and pretty much my floor. Ends up being a couple hundred dollars per hour.

But that's really not a random online pub rate.

Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other or related income sources (which tend to be difficult given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time, or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League grad.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#178

Post by ricksunny »

ke88y wrote: post #22
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…

Ideally, but AFAICT that's not how it works. I have given a number of interviews to "Science" journalists, in two occasions even for science-focused publications. In each case I began the interview by asking the journalist to tell me about their coursework and self-study background so I can be sure to meet them where they are. In only one case have I met a science reporter who I'd consider minimally competent to repo…

Yes, and Ashley Rindsberg covers the science-writer / sci-journo divide well, a divide which I was not hip to prior:

"The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-sci...

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#179

Post by timr »

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…

> This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.

No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean that, I don't believe that, and trying to spin it that way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you quoted.

Contrarians don't have to be right to require a voice for the system to work.

> Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.

The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is working is because I can see the all the disagreements and judge for myself. Efficiency isn't the goal.

But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my choice, and who are you to tell me otherwise?

Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they are about censoring things they don't like.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#180

Post by no_butterscotch »

pessimizer wrote: post #113

Journalists these days are generally not hired for their incredulity. They're hired based on a track record of not deviating from their employer's political and financial priorities, regardless of the evidence. These are businesses, not public services. They owe their existence to dishonest and manipulative presentations of the qualities of third-party products that they sandwich between their own content. Lets go ba…

Yes additionally journalists are a sort of priestly caste in our secular society.

I'm personally not a fan as there's a lot of self-anointed representation by journos: "We're the voice of the people!" No you are not my voice! You are not elected! You are the voice of advertisers, your business and your political interests!

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