Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face value. Assume you're being bullshitted. You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.
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…
Nate Silver is much more comfortable asserting his opinion about this than I am, because, as an infectious disease epidemiologist who primarily focuses on the stochastics of disease emergence and disease extinction, my expertise is a good two weeks after when either a zoonotic jump or a lab leak would take place. Take that for what you will.