271–280 of 285 posts
"It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. But I wonder, is it just me who finds this annoying?" Nope, and that's basically the root cause: it's designed to get clicks and shares from people who Believe (rather than Understand) Science™
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I dunno if that's strictly true. Many fields can be reasonably covered with some minimal training. The hard sciences, though, are constantly changing so much that even practitioners in the same field of science can barely keep up in peer review... much less scientists from other disciplines, and much less poorly-paid journalists without dedicated science training. And these days, so many of the findings are subtle an…
Maybe reporters just shouldn't be reporting on every little paper but rather universities should have a media department with scientists that handles press releases so they don't suck ass
Reporters are supposed to sort through that and find the good ones. It's just not easy.
You can try it yourself sometime if you'd like. Choose a field of science, comb through a year (or a month's) worth of primary liteature on Google Scholar and Sci Hub, along with press releases from research labs, without resorting to secondary sources like blogs and science news. See if you can pick out the top 10 stories in any given time period and accurately summarize them for an 8th grade reading level. Email competing labs and other experts to get contrary opinions. Write it all up within a day or two, per article. Try to get it published somewhere, and get paid for it if you can. It's not an easy job...
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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.
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> 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. I…
Can you elaborate on this? Society has inertia, history has inertia, how is this "nobody mantains status quo" work?
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Perhaps the motive is that we want to see better science reporting and are dismayed when the media fails to do its job of producing accurate and informative journalism.
No. "Science reporting is bad" is fine and the criticism is constructive. But there are always chuckleheads in the comments smugly sowing distrust in all news media, journalism, and independent free press.
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…
By major discoveries, I mean ones I cant talk with my mom (a humanist and a lawyer) and make it exciting. Balls that could go though a wall? that's exciting. You travel fast and you age relatively less than someone who does not? Oh yeah.
Higgs boson? Boring
Something something black hole at 3 MM light years? what's a light year?
OTOH you have areas such as biology where the announcements are revolutionary (about 3 extraordinary findings against cancer avery week) but there is a lot of money behind so the details are sparse.
On my PhD thesis, the introduction was 5 lines long, stating that if you need an introduction you should probably not be reading this thesis but here are a few books you could start with. And of course the thesis was terribly boring for someone who is not in the field (even though it had "particles", "neural network" and other buzz words inside).
I’m getting a bit tired of Sabine to be quite honest… Maybe it’s time for her to go back to sciencing instead of creating youtube videos?
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.
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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. I…
> If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default Can you elaborate on this? Society has inertia, history has inertia, how is this "nobody mantains status quo" work?