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Why does science news suck so much?

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Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#21

Post by gonzo41 »

knapcio wrote: post #8
gonzo41 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research connects to a persons lived experience. Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.

I don’t disagree that it may be worse in case of science but just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one of the areas where pure capitalism doesn’t work well.

yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit for the 4th estate. For something that is required so essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we don't publicly fund more news.

I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#22

Post by posterboy »

In short, I guess, reporting scales with the complexity of the field, contrast war reports, and "science" is a very big field at that, and by the way it's self referential when reports report and analyse reports.

PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as definition space)

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#24

Post by noduerme »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #11
foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet street…

I always found it funny that the example used to illustrate the effect is 'Palestine'.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#25

Post by Closi »

atoav wrote: post #15
foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

> 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…

Weather news is ok if you are outside the weather industry - but to those in the industry the forecasts are simplistic and biased, and the news doesn’t generally cover developments in forecasting technology or technique. The broader topic of climate in popular news is known to be a total shit show however (not just science, also policy etc).

For what it’s worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to wild stabs in the dark.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#26

Post by SyzygistSix »

influxmoment wrote: post #9
knapcio wrote: post #4

I would risk to say that nowadays any news suck which implies that it’s not a problem of science but journalism in general.

It probably always sucked but it was our only source of information before so we didn't know better

True but news media also knew less more slowly because everyday people on the ground had no way to make stories public through cell phone or a video on social media. And before the 24 hour news cycle, there was less expectation for the most immediate reporting.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#27

Post by padolsey »

foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

> We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise.

This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia", that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the whole story. There are different incentives at play. Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the research domain. It is in universities' interests to present research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight. Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because consequences and causalities are hard.

I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news = ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-by-domain basis.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#28

Post by mjw1007 »

foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

But it's hard to know whether or not this is true. There's no obvious reason to suppose that journalism is doing equally badly in all fields.

I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or worse than what I am.

And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much more effort in there.

(Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I think it's bad for different reasons.)

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#29

Post by Gimpei »

foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

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 medicine to a certain extent as well. But not in the social or hard sciences.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#30

Post by [deleted] »

foreigner wrote: post #5

It'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.

[deleted]
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