201–210 of 385 posts
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Provide links please.
https://twitter.com/GermsAndNumbers/status/16340874678749470... This is a somewhat flippant take of mine, but is emblematic of a lot of Nate Silver's posting during the pandemic, which is that epidemiologists are all hyper risk adverse ninnies, and we're clearly at the end of the pandemic.
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…
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…
NPR had a bunch of economic reporters and they’re mostly ok but they still get a ton of stuff wrong, so it’s not a great solution either.
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> 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".…
I think you're underestimating the ability for people to abuse trust, i.e. lie.
You can't say "trust scientist A but not scientist B" unless you've got some way to judge them. Which we don't as we're the ignorant laymen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism
edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists" makes it better.
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…
More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
Pretty standard scientific writing. I think the lesson is don't trust journalists and the general public to not blow what you're saying out of proportion and assign it more certainty than you intended.
Lab leak is possible, sure. But keep in mind every horrible disease humanity has faced up until the early part of the 20th century came about before microbiology labs even existed. Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely.
Imagine if polio or smallpox or leprosy popped up today, you'd have every Joe internet theorizing how it came from a lab in whatever country it appeared in first. I guess back in the day they used to say it was punishment from God. The Spanish flu, God out there smiting the Spaniards.
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…
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scie…
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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…
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…
I completely agree, but it's counterintuitive. There's a part of me that thinks "science == reproducible, observable fact". But it really is much more (er, less) than that. It'd be nice if there was a different word for the "not irrefutable" parts (i.e. almost all of it).
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Ezra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufeckci about basically this because she's had an unusually good track record for a non-specialist on lots of topics, and it really comes down to being statistically literate and putting in the work: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
>really comes down to being statistically literate A lot of people writing scientific papers aren't statistically literate. It also seems that what was considered first rate methodology even a decade ago is now considered deeply unreliable.
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> 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 an…
Well, it shouldn't be. But in case your research is informing "urgent" policy decisions, it's hard not to get frustrated and just want those who disagree to shut up.
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Simple: Stop believing it’s true just because a scientist said it. You don’t need a STEM degree to stop propagating theories before they’re proven.
Wouldn't that mean that Galileo and Newton's discoveries would have had little to no impact? For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't have a detailed education in the subject could really contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright because the authors made egregious errors in the study design or data collection (where da…
And GP was talking about how journalists can be skeptical. No one is suggesting journalists should be debunking all new science findings—merely that they should be very skeptical when reporting about those findings.
I, for one, am skeptical of everyone who still calls themselves a journalist.
Yes, journalists used to speak truth to power. Now they work on behalf of the power. And they don't just work on behalf of power, they are power themselves, and it isn't the people's power despite their claim to being "the voice of the people".
How do you know that? Certainly it happened sometimes, and it still happens sometimes, but was it ever common? Maybe journalists like to tell stories about the times journalists did really good work and they deliberately leave out all the many more times they didn't. Media tropes of principled gumshoe journalists breaking important stories are probably not representative of what it was typically like.