151–160 of 285 posts
There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article: 1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no jour…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many things are noble goals. Why is one to be preferred over another?
It’s easier to talk about feeding children to ignore stuff like out of control military acquisition or allowing oil companies to pillage public lands for peanuts.
What other people are doing that is wrong is rarely particularly useful to think about when working toward a goal of your own.
There is a saying: “those who can do, do, and those who can’t do, teach.” Maybe it would be fair to augment that with, “those who don’t understand a subject well enough to do or teach, report.” The problem is particularly bad in science journalism, but exists across the board. Financial journalism is really the only area I’ve seen where the journalists tend to have real backgrounds in the subject. And unsurprisingly…
This is an arrogant and toxic saying. Let's not repeat it let alone add to it please.
except https://www.sciencenews.org/ doesn't suck. They're just not on YouTube
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's that all news is that bad. I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever. But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understan…
> But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.
The "Science Section" of your local paper covers an absolutely massive range of topics: astronomy one week, zoology the next, and everything in between. Nobody--literally nobody--has the breadth of expertise to do all of those fields justice.
The rest of the paper has a more consistent focus. If you covered last year's debate over gun control, that background carries over to this week's debate. The players change slowly too--some of the folks in Congress have been there for decades.
Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public, and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. They’re not necessarily even going to be in your country. I’m a physicist by background and even when active in academia it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in…
> it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as h…
Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare.
In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...
A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news website. Most journalists had no science background, and were pressured into writing 4 articles a day. The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied press releases with no critical thinking. They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check. I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economic…
Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by people who are judged by views and reach and other eye…
I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni donations, etc..)