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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.
If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how newscycles and the news work. If you'd knew both, you would definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience. A science…
>> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience What is this need of which you speak? Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage fro…
> Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.
> It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline...
> Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years.
> Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.
1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no journalist would want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong, when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments.
2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative 'truth'.
Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're doing[2], how can journalists keep up?
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
[1]: https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-...
[2]: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/153423172385190707...
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…
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 economical situation of the media industry.
Not too be overly negative but Hossenfelder herself is a good example. She posted many authoritative-sounding videos about topics where she has little knowledge and it shows quickly. She’s a walking illustration of Gell-Mann amnesia. But clicks are good for her business, just as they’re good for the business of newspapers.
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