I’m getting a bit tired of Sabine to be quite honest…
Maybe it’s time for her to go back to sciencing instead of creating youtube videos?
Why does science news suck so much?
101–110 of 285 posts
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is true to some extent. The fundamental problem is that the majority of journalists are generalists with training mostly in writing. This may have worked in the past, but the world has become very specialized. Generalized knowledge with a hermeneutical approach to discovery just doesn’t cut it. Media organizations seem to have realized this when it comes to law where many analysts are now lawyers, and in…
The good news is that we're about to have AI that can make anybody a geat writer, including any researcher whose reporting the general public finds boring and incomprehensible.
Nah, we've got AI that avoids the need for a researcher because instead of taking time to read the material you can use it as inputs to a neural network and get a near-instant response in the form of paraphrases of the key points and other statements which aren't true but involve enough relevant terms in syntactically correct English to get past a subeditor...
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#103I don't know where folks decided that if science is involved, corruption isn't possible.
Science is the new religion.
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#104Because there isn't enough proper progress within the field of science so the media have to create news in order to have something to write about.
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#105The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. pu…
I feel differently about her work. I think she is doing the less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there. She spends time deflating amazing claims. The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy expositions and is definitely not academic grade but it shouldn’t be! She is making pithy responses to headline grabbing sensational mainstream hype reporting. There is a…
I sort of agree and disagree with you. I think generally you are correct we do need more Sabines not fewer.
However, I disagree that what she does is the "less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there". The sort of takedowns she does are quite popular and very easy to do. However, my criticism is that quite a few of them are superficial and fall essentially into the same traps that she criticises, i.e. the actual topic is much too complex to either present or take down without a more comprehensive in-depth discussion (which would be much less popular).
Now this is still somewhat ok if she's the expert on the topic she is talking about as she has the expertise to know how good/bad the simplifications she makes are. However, recently she has started weighing in on topics where she not an expert at all: diesel fuel, antibiotic resistance, light pollution to name just 3 from the front page of her youtube channel. In this case things become quite problematic, because she is simplifying things that she might not have a full grasp of herself but still talks about like an expert.
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#106Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem: media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and government have a list of so-called experts that they want the journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalis…
Are you implying that, historically, journalists either 1) had some basic education in what they are reporting about, or 2) actually wanted to educate themselves in what they are reporting about, and that today, increasingly, journalists don't or don't want to do either 1) or 2)? That is, at it's core, saying that journalists are, on average, getting more and more stupid. This seems a bit strange and unsubstantiated,…
My point is that media owners and their pet editors don't want competent science journalists, they want compliant stenographers who will go to their assigned experts and repeat what they say. They don't want stories that will encourage their readers to engage in critical thinking.
There are plenty of people who could do competent science (and other) journalism if that was the standard they were held to. Such work can still be found here and there, in specialty journals (Science and Nature news reports are often quite good), but it's increasingly rare in corporate media for the above reasons.
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#107The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. pu…
> Top ten lists
I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest was "top players in quantum computing"
> awful generic CGI backgrounds
That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel. Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
> give me your opinion in the comments
Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#108Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem: media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and government have a list of so-called experts that they want the journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalis…
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Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#109The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. pu…
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Re: Why does science news suck so much?
#110It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as bad as the news in your area of expertise.
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