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Why does science news suck so much?

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Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#201

Post by wrycoder »

Ekaros wrote: post #188
physicsguy wrote: post #124

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…

I'm also starting to think that most of the low hanging simple ideas are done already, so what is left is exceedingly technical and field specific ideas. Either these aren't very interesting for general public or explaining them is difficult. Not to forget push for media by most institutions on anything that could garner positive press.

That’s what Lord Kelvin thought. Then Roentgen discovered X-rays.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#202

Post by wrycoder »

physicsguy wrote: post #177
robonerd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. Not straightforward for the university press department? What could be more straightforward? Tell the university press writers to go talk to the university researchers they're writing about. If the researchers refuse to cooperate, then don't write the press release!

No, as in - even if you don’t want to take the scientist’s word for it, finding someone who is able to make an informed comment about whether the work is actually any good or not is really hard.

Heh - ask another faculty member.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#203

Post by pclmulqdq »

native_samples wrote: post #192
quest88 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO: People that write well are not jumping at the chance to write science articles for universities. Writing is hard and science is hard, and being passionate about both is rare.

It's not that rare, but the problem is that a lot of people who are outsiders, yet who truly understand science and then write about it, often end up becoming quite sceptical of it. Just like how journalists who understand politics end up sceptical. The difference is, journalists holding politicians to account is well understood to be a critical part of democracy, but for science it's the opposite. If journalists sta…

It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality studies.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#204

Post by wrycoder »

cycomanic wrote: post #47

The 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…

She also mugs for the thumbnail, like so many others. This seems unique to YouTube.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#205

Post by pclmulqdq »

wutbrodo wrote: post #174
snarf21 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a correlation with manner of funding.

NPR used to be my main news source until around 2016. Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors), they put out a lot of important stories that criticized both sides of the aisle. Then they got a serious case of TDS.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#206

Post by yunohn »

arnaudsm wrote: post #38

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…

> I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.

Why wouldn’t you blame people who voluntarily took a job writing science articles while having zero credentials? They could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on science specifically.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#207

Post by zenithd »

timr wrote: post #150
snarf21 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter. I say thi…

Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#208

Post by Helithumper »

Is is just me, or is this article missing links that it should have?

> Exactly 5 million on exactly that day? Probably not. But if not exactly, then just how large is the uncertainty? Here’s an example for how to do it right, from the economist, with a central estimate and an upper and lower estimate.

Where is the economist example? It's not linked or quoted or anything.

> Here’s an example for how not to do it from the Guardian. This work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This isn’t helpful. Here’s the same paper covered by the BBC. This one has a link. That’s how you do it.

The BBC Example isn't even linked (which I find hilarious bc the sentence is describing the BBC not linking the paper). I don't know what BBC example the author is discussing.

> An example is this story from 2019 about a paper which proposed to use certain types of rocks as natural particle detectors to search for dark matter.

What story? It's not linked....

Reading back to the top this appears to be a transcript, however it doesn't make much sense that only some of these parts are linked and as a result the transcript (for whatever reason) randomly includes links.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#209

Post by Ekaros »

wrycoder wrote: post #201
Ekaros wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also starting to think that most of the low hanging simple ideas are done already, so what is left is exceedingly technical and field specific ideas. Either these aren't very interesting for general public or explaining them is difficult. Not to forget push for media by most institutions on anything that could garner positive press.

That’s what Lord Kelvin thought. Then Roentgen discovered X-rays.

So how many such findings per year we are currently producing?

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#210

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

zefei wrote: post #137

It's just that science is easy to verify for the people that know how. If you are actual expect of any other topics (thus can verify if their news is any good), you'll find the news for those topics is at best as bad as for science, if not much worse. News cannot be 100% faithful to the material it covers, and the more you understand about the topics, the more discrepancy you can see.

I'm not sure I understand your comment that science is 'easy to verify' - how would any of us verify that the LHC actually found the Higgs boson a few years ago? (10 year anniversary coming up on July 4th)
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