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Why does science news suck so much?

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Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#231

Post by tptacek »

pen2l wrote: post #227
tptacek wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously not true. Teaching is a distinct skill (it's probably a large basket of distinct skills). People having varying aptitudes for it. Common sense tells you that the cliche can't possibly be true. George Bernard Shaw put those words deliberately into the mouth of a character you in particular would find absolutely insufferable.

To go even further, I find a saying attributed to Aristotle to be quite true: "Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach." I find that true experts are able to explain subject matter in their domain simply , they can ably distill complicated issues to their essence lest their pupil be bogged down in unnecessary side-details. I used to think Raymond Hettinger was just an awesome teacher because he could make ce…

Seems pretty unlikely that Aristotle said anything like that; all these epigrams are kind of silly, in that they're all stemming from something a fictional character said (or wrote) in a play.

But I agree, it's cringe-y to see people try to dunk on teachers like this. There are good teachers and bad teachers like there are good and bad everythings; if you've had a good teacher for something before, it's hard for me to imagine that you'd take Shaw's character seriously with the "those who can" stuff.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#232

Post by bsenftner »

wutbrodo wrote: post #196
bsenftner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The behavior we see due to the private ownership of media and news publishers betrays the colossal failure it is for the public and nations at large to have our society's self-reporting undermined by profit motives. News and media need to be treated as protected speech, with more formalization and more regulation. Leaving the governance of our society's self reporting to greedy Capitalists is a clear and active recip…

The profit motive does a poor job of handling the externalities journalism should be addressing. But govt control of the media landscape to the degree you're talking about can easily hamstring the important adversarial function journalism has vis-a-vis govt. It's a very hard problem, and there are no obvious or pat solutions.

Not government control, more regulation in the form of transparencies towards what gets reported and what does not, protections for investigative news journalists and whistleblowers, and no more masquerading entertainment as news journalism. Just as cigarettes have warnings about lung health, Fox News should have warnings about "not journalism, entertainment and the political opinion of Robert Murdoch".

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#233

Post by dctoedt »

tptacek wrote: post #175
rayiner wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it true or not? That’s what matters right?

It's obviously not true. Teaching is a distinct skill (it's probably a large basket of distinct skills). People having varying aptitudes for it. Common sense tells you that the cliche can't possibly be true. George Bernard Shaw put those words deliberately into the mouth of a character you in particular would find absolutely insufferable.

> George Bernard Shaw put those words deliberately into the mouth of a character you in particular would find absolutely insufferable.

Akin to Shakespeare having the evil Dick the Butcher saying, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_kill_all_the_lawyers

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#234

Post by hourago »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #205
wutbrodo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors)

Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#235

Post by barry-cotter »

bsenftner wrote: post #229
CWuestefeld wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, letting the government determine what comes through the media is the recipe for fascism. As evidence, consider that the first thing that any authoritarian regime does is to take control of the media. The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours is to consider what the impact of it will be when your political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable with Donald Trump (or really,…

Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of course letting any one power source control society's self conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and the rights of those collecting information for news reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists" to give their lives t…

> Who said "government control"? I said more regulation.

You do realize government control and regulation are synonymous, right?

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#236

Post by abdullahkhalids »

freework wrote: post #138
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…

> 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…

> The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.

I am not sure where these weird beliefs come from. Scientific papers are difficult to understand because it's incredibly difficult to explain things that have never been explained before [1]. I encourage anyone who has the above view to spend two years solving a difficult scientific problem, and then do a comprehensive summary in 10ish pages.

A more direct criticism of the above comment is that publication pressure is a very post-world war 2 thing. But you can pull random papers from earlier and find many of them extremely difficult to understand. Here is the 2nd most cited paper by Pauli from 1939 [2]. Try understanding what it truly says. This is one of the smartest humans to ever exist.

[1] To your knowledge at least. People who write bad papers, or do stuff similar to what has been done before often do it because they don't understand the work of others fully.

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspa.1939...

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#237

Post by bsenftner »

snarf21 wrote: post #84
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…

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…

It is not "largely our own fault", this situation has been engineered by the billionaires and the rest of the media and political power brokers specifically to create anxiety and confusion in the general public. Perfect preparation for eternal political divisions and whatever distracting whims they choose: War in Russia? Celebrity divorce! Planet on fire? Race on commercializing space! How's about an official Olympics digital coin and NFT series? Why not?

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#239

Post by beloch »

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…

>"Another problem with sources is that science news also frequently just repeats press releases without actually saying where they got their information from. It’s a problem because university press releases aren’t exactly unbiased."

This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3 or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually understand the papers that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a background in optics is better situated than most to understand an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they're still going to have to bang their heads against several walls to figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying from a press release doesn't.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#240

Post by bsenftner »

barry-cotter wrote: post #235
bsenftner wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of course letting any one power source control society's self conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and the rights of those collecting information for news reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists" to give their lives t…

> Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. You do realize government control and regulation are synonymous, right?

Yes, they are, and in practice regulations exist not because some evil bureaucrat wants to oppress free enterprise; regulations exist because one or more parties abused a freedom to the degree their behavior's impacts harmed others enough for laws to be written.
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