Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists • Hacker News Board

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#381

Post by dekhn » Mon, Jul 24, 2023, 10:25 PM UTC

mike_hearn wrote: post #376

dekhn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's rare for "layman" to find true errors in papers, and you weren't a layman when you did your investigation, as you say in the article. That said, 90% of all papers contain at least one important error that brings the conclusions into question. Note that even great papers that established long-accepted truths contain important errors, see both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Controvers... and htt…

Although it's true I wasn't a layman, it turned out my own expertise in bot fighting had no utility to reviewing the paper. The review was done as a "layman", because the sociological subfield of twitter bot research has nothing to do with bots :( Anyone could have written that and actually most of the paper takedowns in that subfield are done by a team of a CS prof (with no specialism in bots) and a data journalist.

Understood. At best, though, I think these takedowns are based primarily on "technical invalidation": identification of one or more faults in logic, presumption, study design, or execution, which brings enough question to the results/conclusions that it's best just to assume the paper isn't worth reading.

(put another way: many papers that contributed what appears to be new, true knowledge contain factual errors, some of them invalidating, yet the paper turned out to be correct, in terms of its conclusions, in the long run)

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#382

Post by FeloniousHam » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

COGlory wrote: post #284

stubybubs wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that we don't have any documented anything for the first couple hundred thousand of years of humanity's existence, and we encountered the most horrific viral and bacterial infections, many of which caused unthinkable mass deaths. They were so awful we attributed them to God(s) as punishment for our bad behavior. None of them have documented microbiological origins. Some would have some from spontaneous mu…

Because I didn't catch the edit: >Your hypothesis seems to be that it spread from lab distantly because of incubation time, then stopped spreading distantly once it reached the market? That does not make sense. It's not my hypothesis, I'm just pointing out the evidence is circumstantial and the language used by virologists is precisely engineered to lump together strong evidence that proves one thing (that the virus…

> 3) The thing of real importance here isn't what is being debated, but rather how the debate itself was performed, and what it says about authority, institutions, honesty, and elitism in the scientific community.

This! This is the point of Silver's piece. Whether or not the virus escaped a Wuhan lab, the summary dismissal of the hypothesis as an conspiracy of cranks, without engaging on the facts, _reinforces the legitimacy of crank-fueled conspiracies_.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#383

Post by jdog1076 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 6:53 PM UTC

tomhoward wrote: post #238

A few years ago I started undertaking practices to let go of emotional attachments, which I discovered after a lengthy and difficult period trying to figure out how to overcome some major life challenges. I’ve been doing these practices consistently now for about 11 years. Even after all that time, I’m not at all free of emotional attachments; I’m working through some very deep career-related ones right now. But that…

Do you mind referencing the specific practices?

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#384

Post by stevenwoo » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 11:24 PM UTC

VintageCool wrote: post #95

I have been upset with the NY Times for years because of their uncritical addiction to access journalism. * They held into the Abu Ghraib story for a year to avoid influencing the 2004 election. * They dismissed and discredited the story about DNS lookups between email servers at Trump Tower, Spectrum Health (DeVos / Erik Prince), and Alfa Bank (Russia) in 2016. * They uncritically repeated the Barr memo about the Mu…

This and the Judith Miller WMD fictions to turbocharge Iraq war justification, and Maggie Haberman's sycophancy during Trump years all add to evidence not being the liberal bastion that people believe for some reason.

Re: Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

#385

Post by avgcorrection » Thu, Jul 27, 2023, 7:30 AM UTC

unethical_ban wrote: post #378

avgcorrection wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t craft an argument. You just made a statement/assertion. Do you get to be lazy simply because your statement is the conventional wisdom? While I don’t get the same privilege? A premise of your assertion—that one lives in a democracy—fails in the case of the US (a popular country I hear) since a Princeton study shows that there is zero correlation between the policy preferences of 90% of Americans and the po…

To state that the US isn't an effective democracy doesn't counter the argument that journalism as a mechanism for an informed populace is necessary for an effective democracy. It seems what I'm saying is "proper journalism is important" and I can't tell if you're saying "we don't have proper journalism in the US" or "There is no such thing as effective journalism".

It goes deeper than that.

First of all I won’t give credit to institutions that simply don’t work that way (“we don't have proper journalism in the US”).

Second of all the locus of what democracy is and how it functions would obviously be with the people if we took the concept seriously/were practicing it seriously. It would not be with people like the intelligentsia, the elites, or (here) the presserati; to indirectly suggest that a necessary component of “democracy” would be a distant entity called the Media which people—the entities with the supposed power—are supposed to passively consume information from by way of newspapers, the TV, and YouTube is a perversion.

A privilege of those in power is that they decide how to deliberate, how to reach consensus, and how to wield it. There are by definition no gatekeepers who arbitrarily decide what “informed” means and then revoke the faux power of the people when they decide they don’t meet it.

The problem of “an informed populace” reveals itself as a fake one in a hypothetical actually existing democracy since it is in the best interest of people in power to be informed about what they are deliberating about, simply because they then can effectively use their power. Contrast with the status quo where you could spend dozens of hours each election cycle and only have a minuscule effect—or perhaps no effect at all—as you get to pick on of the elite-filtered candidates.

Of course what is often revealed on this topic is that many consider the above to be total nonsense. Instead they don’t want democracy but “elite democracy”: the elites make most of the decisions and then the mass of people get to help resolve elite internal feuds once in a while by way of votes. (This is what we nominally call “democracy”.) But they cynically call this form of governance “democracy” for blatant propaganda purposes. The real term is used in technical discussions while “democracy” is used when they just want to communicate the sense of “our great free and egalitarian form of governance”.