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Why does science news suck so much?

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Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#251

Post by wolverine876 »

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…

I don't find them hard to understand, at least to a certain depth of understanding - but deep enough that I get a lot of value out of them, far more than news articles.

On the other hand, Avicenna claimed to have read Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times before Avicenna could understand it. So it's not a new problem!

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#253

Post by Izkata »

GeorgeTirebiter wrote: post #210
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)

You're missing the "for the people that know how".

I agree with GP: Most news is bad, but people can really only tell when it bumps up against something they know. News on science just has a bonus where research gets published separate from the news, and so even people outside the field can compare the two and point out exactly where the news is wrong.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#255

Post by s0rce »

mattkrause wrote: post #181

As a counterpoint, I'm a scientist whose work occasionally gets media attention. I was definitely worried about my name being featured in the middle of absolute nonsense, but the experience has usually been good: very few of the journalists completely missed the mark. The "tone" didn't always match what I was trying to get across, but it was usually close to someone in the field's attitude. There were some minor erro…

My experience when my work was covered is that the articles are generally decent, but the titles or initial claims are overblown ("clickbait"). I was often directly contacted by more reputable organizations to comment and explain and they didn't simply regurgitate the press-release. There were many many websites that are just carbon copies of press releases, most of which I had never heard of previously and didn't really understand their purpose.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#256

Post by blhack »

Because people use "news" articles as a type of fashion. A fancy watch isnt' better at telling time, but it does signal both an alliance to a certain ideology, and the ability to display that alliance.

Rolex isn't optimizing for time accuracy anymore, they're optimizing for that type of social signaling.

Similarly, science journalism (and really, all journalism) isn't optimizing for dissemination of information, they're optimizing themselves as a fashion/signal.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#257

Post by jelliclesfarm »

openknot wrote: post #221
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Nautilus https://nautil.us/

Nautilus is actually an example that supports how in-depth science reporting can be difficult to monetize. I really like many of their articles in the publication, but there was a major incident a while back when they were severely (many months, even longer than a year) behind on paying their writers. I actually happened to meet a writer who had this happen to them, but this incident was also publicized in an open le…

That’s very sad. There is go fund me and crows funding for all kinds of weird causes and 50k isn’t such a huge amount either.

The future seems bleak.

ETA: Oh!! The link re: the Twitter thread is gnarly! I hope this got resolved and the freelancers got something out of this.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#258

Post by mikkergp »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #200
indymike wrote: post #190

Science is really hard to make into news for three reasons: 1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100 years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from how interesting the article might be. 2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in understandi…

On your first point about uncertainty, I think both scientists and non-scientists struggle with how to have a meaningful conversation where real world decisions and policies have to be made in the face of material uncertainty. I generally see two ways of dealing with this on the ley side, which is to either ignore it altogether or to write if the finding or result completely. Neither is really appropriate and I think…

While I don’t disagree with anything you said, I think it’s more a supply and demand thing. Many(most?) people seem to value certainty over truth, in fact some people seem to think one is an indicator of the other and uncertainty is a form of weakness.

I like this article probably better because they didnt d approach it this way, but they seem to miss out on why many people consume science media and what those expectations are. See every discussion about COVID in the media ever.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#259

Post by Banana699 »

hourago wrote: post #234
pclmulqdq wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a highly simplistic and an ideologically-flattering (it's pretty obvious you subscribe to left wing views) picture you paint of the situation. Here's a mirror image of it your alternate right wing self might be saying on another HN in another universe:

?>>>? Right leaning politics need trust worthy news to survive, left leaning politics don't as their goal is to upset tradition and revolt on the status quo. If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create chaos, choas is the bread of revolution and malcontent.

As you can see, this sort of "I define my side to be the more accurate view of reality" is highly malleable and can be used to support any side with semi-convincing "just so" stories.

And you're not actually describing the left-wing/right-wing divide here (itself a highly simplistic and outdated view of politics and economics dating from more than a century), you're describing the conservative/progressive divide, which tends to correlate with the left/right divide in the US, which might be where you are from. But even there the correlation is not perfect, Trump for example was fairly 'progressive' in his populist politics, his extensive engagement with the public on Twitter was a very novel form of presidential press releases that upseted many traditions and angered many political conservatives. See how conservative/progressive is multi-dimensional ?, you're just too used to a few dominant dimensions being coorelated with a left\right slant.

Furthermore, even accepting the dubious renaming of conservative\progressive to right-wing\left-wing, it's still a leap of faith from here to assuming that the progressive side always benefits from representing truth and reality as it is. In fact, this is almost gauranteed to be false, because even if conservatives are randomly guessing, they would still get roughly 50% of the world right, and since progressives always oppose conservatives in this hyper-polarized political climate, they are gauranteed to be wrong that 50% of the time. This seems to be supported by reality as being a progressive is associated with a higher chance of believing there are 700 genders and that biological males are women, so there must be at least some situations where progressives ("Left-Wing" in your parlance) benefit from a mis-representation of reality.

Re: Why does science news suck so much?

#260

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.

I remember a story from a famous freelance investigative journalist who found evidence of disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 election. He collected a huge amount of evidence and testimony, and sent it to news outlets across the US. Most of them came back with:

"Uh, we contacted the , and they're denying this. We're not going to run the story."

Who'd have thought people accused of nefarious, potentially illegal activities would deny doing them?

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