51–60 of 285 posts
There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article: 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 jour…
Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any specific area of science...some of my favourites:
- Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome)
- CrisprTalk (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8TW2xKYRqbLvfGaT783WQA/videos)... a retired guy with lots of lab experience going through clinical trial results, investing in CRISPR stocks and bashing ARK invest's stock picks
- Modern Healthspan interview with Gregory Fahy (the channel has lots of other interesting videos, but I'm less interested in supplements and more about future research reversing aging).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_OTIP7kjo&list=PLkfzM7KJv6vY68Fvw1g7l9vN9NqhW7FayThen she quotes a study and doesn’t link to it in the video description. She doesn’t link to this post either.
I like the videos she makes explaining scientific concepts but her criticism videos tend to miss the mark with me.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's that all news is that bad. I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever. But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understan…
Until weather reporting became mostly automated, most news agencies had a policy of never reporting a chance of rain as being less than 20%. If it was 8%, it was always rounded up to 20%. If you remember seeing "20% of rain" excessively most of your life, this is why. Some of them still do this, especially with on the air reports by a human.
Most people will interpret "8% of rain" as "it's not going to rain", and then be mad at the "inaccurate" weather report if it rains the next day.
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…
the news industry needs public investment from all angles. right now the incentives are completely wrong
Why?
Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it.
The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.
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…
I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop.
I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization.
One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.
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.
> it's that all news is that bad. I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever. But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understan…
This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.