[HN Gopher] Journalists should be skeptical of all sources inclu...
___________________________________________________________________
Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
Author : amadeuspagel
Score : 248 points
Date : 2023-07-21 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (natesilver.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (natesilver.substack.com)
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| One of my beliefs is that truth may have negative short-term
| consequences, but the long term benefits are worth it in the long
| run.
|
| So, wow- the facts presented here are depressing. Really a huge
| example of people in positions of authority blatantly misleading
| the public.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Journalists have always been best at reporting the facts given to
| them, even without understanding intent and all the other nuance
| surrounding those facts. So we as readers should never take what
| you read at 100%. I don't think that will ever change.
|
| I love this little quote from "Michael Crichton"[1] as it's so
| true.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344530-briefly-stated-
| the-g...
| powera wrote:
| It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver
| must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts".
|
| The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because
| the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is
| in the reporting of the comments.
|
| This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert
| is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago.
| Apparently the bozos are winning here.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Did you read all the emails and slack messages? I came away
| thinking: science is messy, this is overblown, I don't think
| they did anything wrong.
| threeseed wrote:
| Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or
| anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion
| without a healthy dose of skepticism. No different to any other
| random person on the street.
|
| That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject
| where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may
| never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping
| to any conclusions.
| danenania wrote:
| "Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or
| anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his
| opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism."
|
| Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have
| the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have
| been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political
| biases.
| jgeada wrote:
| Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise.
| Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not
| render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on
| coronaviruses in general.
|
| Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge
| basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the
| existing models and detect something amiss. Without that
| foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of
| one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
| mikebenfield wrote:
| People have to make judgments about which experts in which
| fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a
| Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions
| about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to
| questions of ethics? They are experts, after all.
|
| What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in
| psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis
| in that field, where apparently most results can't be
| replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data
| manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the
| part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept
| results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently
| I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| One very obvious thing to consider is how a paper, whether it's
| philosophy or physics, was funded and which grants the authors
| received and from who. So many conclusions and biases are driven
| by funding mechanisms, sometimes it's corporate and sometimes
| it's government but the devil is always in the details and there
| is no safe or superior source of funding.
| [deleted]
| guilhas wrote:
| Clearly the media stakeholders had the narrative decided, and the
| journalists were forced to find the scientists that supported it
| and ignore or attack the scientists who opposed it
|
| Same for politics reporting
|
| The best way to stay informed is to read a book about something
| currently not on the news
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| bell-cot wrote:
| Cynical reaction: With how over-worked and under-resourced most
| journalists are these days, we're lucky when they _have_ sources
| who might maybe actually know something or other about the
| subject at hand.
|
| Bigger picture: In the specific case of COVID, what might have
| helped most would be some really mature meta-journalism. A calm
| Walter Cronkite telling us that, for the most part, nobody was
| really sure of anything. Loads of "1mm wide, 1km deep" scientists
| were scrambling to do stuff outside of their usual niches,
| usually in a fraction of the time they'd normally need, and under
| all sorts of emotional and political pressures - which they had
| no experience whatever dealing with. The vast majority of 'em had
| zero experience whatever in communicating scientific results to
| the general public. And a small minority of 'em suddenly found
| that they loved the limelight - about the same way that some
| teenagers suddenly develop a taste for hard liquor - and would
| certainly not be sources of reasonable nor sober information.
|
| ...but with umpteen million people stuck at home during COVID,
| and consuming any & all available news about it - what incentive
| did the big (for-profit) media corporations have, to deliver any
| sort of sober, mature coverage?
| coolliquidcode wrote:
| COVID was one place where their lack of skepticism really came
| through. Early reports of how COVID spread would have been
| deemed unrealistic quickly based on a basic understanding of
| statistics. The early reports of how long the virus lived and
| how easily transmittable it was should have meant the virus
| would have spread to a high percentage of the population
| immediately. Pfizer saying the vaccine prevented transmission
| even though it is a leaky vaccine should have raised skepticism
| to incredible heights. Instead, media used these reports to
| create panic, fear and division. I highly doubt it takes too
| much work to regurgitate other news outlets, Pfizer, and
| government organization talking points.
| Marazan wrote:
| Lol at Nate Silver still being angry at not being able to eat at
| a restaurant during the start of thr Delta wave.
|
| Covid broke his brain.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It's not
| what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
|
| You may not owe Nate Silver better but you owe this community
| better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| the line about "The truth is never going to come out" is related
| to the uncertainty of whether or not it came from a lab, not (as
| the piece implies) having anything to do with "They also thought
| they were going to get away with it". it's very misleading and
| should be corrected
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Yeah; they seemed skeptical that China would ever let the world
| know what actually happened, if something did escape.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Scientists should be skeptical of all source - including
| Journalists
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
| VintageCool wrote:
| 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 Mueller
| report. That one I couldn't believe -- there had been weeks of
| reporting about how Bill Barr had been hired/appointed to
| suppress the Mueller investigation. Then Bill Barr publishes a
| memo a few days before the report saying that it's no big deal,
| and the NY Times is publishing mea culpas about how they had done
| wrong by reporting on Trump/Russia connections exposed by the
| Mueller investigation??
|
| Instead, it seemed like the New York Times liked getting scoops
| from their sources high up in government, and they didn't want to
| preserve those sources by not upsetting them.
| [deleted]
| runesofdoom wrote:
| While he's certainly careful to hedge (much like the scientists
| he's critizcizing), Mr. Silver's argument boils down to, "I think
| four scientists published a technically correct but politicially
| motivated paper, so from now on journalists should consider peer-
| reviewed publications by reputable PhD's as the equivalent of
| Johnnie RedHat posting on Twitter".
| adra wrote:
| Sure? Due diligence is always important. I'm not implying that
| science and journal publishing, or journalism are in bad shape,
| but simply that scientific scholarships goal should be to
| eventually converge on a truth ( or more likely an exclusion of
| other opposing theories), whereas the goal of journalism to to
| seek a truthful point in time capture of a topic. Just because
| they're inherently different time scales to converge on truth,
| any given scientific discussion shouldn't be "thrown over the
| fence" with a low value copy pasta of the papers.
|
| I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists
| understand this general statement, but just because most
| individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary
| of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little
| due diligence.
| mapt wrote:
| The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically
| makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them
| is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If
| you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or
| the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit
| of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one
| presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work.
|
| The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the
| hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis
| being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's
| metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab
| leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were
| one idea that might be true or false.
|
| As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an
| undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured
| might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal
| cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon
| and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking
| out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a
| violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a
| significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).
|
| "Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't
| bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's
| clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as
| somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and
| bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-
| right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-
| affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional
| failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-
| count.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| You forgot to mention the lefts position. They usually used the
| lab-leak theory to ridicule, mock and even have careers ended
| for those who dared to propose it as plausible.
|
| As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking
| and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous.
|
| And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some
| merit, media just went silent on the matter. SO I disagree hard
| with that it's a right or far right tool to sell hero worship.
|
| Journalism has turned to absolute shit and anything that comes
| from the perceived "other" side must be instantly mocked
| without any investigation or partisan integrity. And should the
| "other" side show merit there will either be silence or
| continued mockery along the lines of "even a broken clock is
| right twice a day" . Left and right equally guilty.
|
| Journalism is a joke. Maybe it always was and it's just these
| past 3 years that made so many of us realise exactly what a
| sh**show it actually is.
|
| Several polls have shown that trust in news media is at a
| historical low https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-
| trust-mass-med...
|
| and even expert opinion
| https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-tru...
| has lost all merit as it is just, for the lack of a better
| word, raped to haul in clicks.
|
| This is especially true for the medical scientists who could
| not get their shit together during the crisis and seemed to
| have a pissingcompetition of who could recommend the most
| intrusive, obnoxious guideline that conflicted the most with
| what any other "expert" scientist recommended.
|
| Masking toddlers, banning sitting on public park benches,
| banning children from playgrounds. Banning walking outdoors in
| company. Masking while standing up in a restaurant to take it
| off while sitting down. Banning sports, isolating the elderly
| to the point of driving them to insanity and severe cognitive
| decline. DENYING AEROSOL SPREAD. That one is my personal pet
| peeve with the scientific community. The embarrassing list is
| endless.
|
| My own trust in medical expertise, that is, the one I see in
| the news. Is at an all time low. I ofc listen to my personal
| MD. But if she'd proclaim something in the media I'd probably
| never listen to her again and switch doctors.
| jxramos wrote:
| That Jon Stewart take on it is pretty funny
| https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=211, the Hershey factory, gets
| me pretty good.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| The media was not silent as it became more plausible it was
| prominent. Seems like you have have a somewhat myopic
| consumption pattern.
| vxNsr wrote:
| [dead]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-
| stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that
| plausibly has a body-count.
|
| I haven't seen any non-affiliated journalists doing this. I've
| seen right-wing journalists doing it, fitting whatever they can
| find into their ten times stepped-on John Birch worldview. What
| I've seem _far more of_ is administration-connected journalists
| characterizing whatever position that they support censorship
| of in its most extremist, unhinged, obviously factually-
| incorrect form. Radical right-wingers insist that they 're the
| only option other than current Democratic party orthodoxy, and
| Democrats agree with them 100%.
| ctoth wrote:
| [dead]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Certainly you are correct that there are several different
| "lab" theory versions, and they vary by orders of magnitude in
| how plausible they are. However:
|
| "I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape
| version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because
| they were already doing this type of work and the molecular
| data is fully consistent with that scenario."
|
| This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing
| remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia,
| perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to
| them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of
| a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of
| consideration.
|
| Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay
| China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a
| virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its
| implications than "China was researching bioweapons and
| released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which
| of those theories are remotely plausible, and which
| implausible?
|
| If only there were a profession, between scientists and the
| general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the
| work of the former...
| kmontrose wrote:
| > This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that.
| Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream
| newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being
| presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was
| no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as
| worthy of consideration.
|
| You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. "A
| thing is possible, therefore it happened." Is this molecular
| evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled
| basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it's
| also used in research.
|
| I'm unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak
| theory, but I will acknowledge it's basically impossible to
| disprove. We don't know where most diseases arose (or where
| they came from) - it's just we mostly don't care, unlike with
| COVID.
| susanasj wrote:
| I think, as with any politically charged topic, journalists are
| going to have biases. I don't think there is any particular
| solution to this except being conscious of those biases,
| particularly as they relate to career advancement and money.
| Money explains nearly everything about the issues in the American
| media ecosystem for me, not cultural factors like "some
| journalists are more open about being on the left".
|
| One writer that I followed nearly every day for the first 18
| months of the pandemic was Derek Lowe at Science.org who runs a
| fantastic blog about drug discovery, and he has given his
| assessment of the origins debate a few times. The short answer is
| he doesn't know either unfortunately
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic--...
| jxramos wrote:
| Don't be incurious, be curious and sensitive to what you
| understand and what you don't follow. There's a degree of
| humility involved where you honestly admit when you don't
| understand something and be vocal about it so people of good will
| can help fill in the blanks.
| kzz102 wrote:
| It seems to me that the authors of the paper, _in anticipation_
| that writing scientifically (that they don 't believe the lab
| leak hypothesis, but it cannot be disproven) will be
| misinterpreted by journalists and the public, resorted to write
| in more certain terms.
|
| I disagree with the authors. Scientists should not try to control
| the reaction to their publication.
|
| I also don't think this cast a good lights on the journalists at
| all. The nature of the issue is that even if the scientists had
| been precise in what they wrote, what they wrote would have been
| distorted and misrepresented.
| xbar wrote:
| I, for one, am skeptical of everyone who still calls themselves a
| journalist.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| Yes, journalists used to speak truth to power.
|
| Now they work on behalf of the power.
|
| And they don't just work on behalf of power, they are power
| themselves, and it isn't the people's power despite their claim
| to being "the voice of the people".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This level of cynicism is the cause of the downfall of society.
|
| Journalism is as necessary as government. As necessary as
| speech itself. Particularly in the age of perfect facsimiles of
| audio/photo/video evidence facilitated by AI, webs of trust and
| reputable sources of information will be as important as ever.
|
| It is dangerous and wrong to insult the profession as an idea.
|
| None of this is to say that journalism is flawless any more
| than government or society is flawless. But it is necessary.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| [flagged]
| papito wrote:
| Gotta love HN users. The initial comment is so "objective" and
| righteous. "This person is clearly looking at all points of
| view".
|
| Then you ask a simple question and it all comes out. Ok, I am
| off to "not one-sided news media" to read about how Ukrainian
| women were being raped in basements because of NATO, but at
| least the soldiers weren't wearing surgical masks.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Perhaps it's because I'm not a native speaker but I have no
| idea what you're trying to tell me. I'm trying to take the
| most positive interpretation and that you're saying that
| you're putting me into some right-wing lunatic fringe corner
| that's somehow pro-Russia? I honestly don't know. And... you
| never asked a question?
|
| Perhaps read this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, especially
| where it's about comments. I'm not the best example of always
| following them myself but I'm having a hard time extracting
| anyting of value from your comment. Sorry.
| slily wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of this line from the submission:
|
| "There's also a generational divide in journalism, with
| younger journalists tending to be more openly
| left/progressive than their older peers -- and tending to be
| more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil
| rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news
| stories are complicated and it's not particularly their job
| to pass moral judgment."
|
| This is probably true of the younger generations in general,
| not just journalists.
|
| Sadly any attempt at communicating a nuanced view makes you
| subject to vicious attacks from binary thinkers, who often
| miss the point and derail the discussion.
| papito wrote:
| Interesting. So we should probably have a more nuanced
| discussion about the Holocaust, yes? Hitler had his
| complicated reasons for it, and we need to be able to see
| his point of view.
|
| You know, at some point, if you try to see "both sides"
| like this, you are going to lose the plot.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| From raped women by masked NATO soldiers to the holocaust
| - I was really willing to the give you the benefit of the
| doubt, but it seems you're just baiting. Oh well.
| Scarbutt wrote:
| What was the issue with COVID?
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I spent at least an hour reading through both the emails and the
| slack messages in this "expose", but I came away from it fairly
| certain that they are being portrayed unfairly, and I'm fairly
| surprised that Nate Silver has latched on to this. You have to
| both look at the time-line of the paper writing and the time-line
| of the conversations. By my reading, by the time the paper was
| being written, most of them had indeed come to the conclusion
| that (1) there was no evidence for an engineered virus, (2) that
| the data was consistent with both a leak from a lab (without
| engineering) or from exposure to animals, but that (3) the former
| was not as a priori likely, given what they knew about the kinds
| of research being done.
|
| You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the
| start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in
| their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They
| _started_ with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved
| away from that view the more they learned.
| stubybubs wrote:
| "Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a
| purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to
| prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described
| here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2
| features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage
| site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe
| that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
|
| More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to
| favor one hypothesis over another."
|
| Pretty standard scientific writing. I think the lesson is don't
| trust journalists and the general public to not blow what
| you're saying out of proportion and assign it more certainty
| than you intended.
|
| Lab leak is _possible_ , sure. But keep in mind every horrible
| disease humanity has faced up until the early part of the 20th
| century came about before microbiology labs even existed.
| Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely.
|
| Imagine if polio or smallpox or leprosy popped up today, you'd
| have every Joe internet theorizing how it came from a lab in
| whatever country it appeared in first. I guess back in the day
| they used to say it was punishment from God. The Spanish flu,
| God out there smiting the Spaniards.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| 100% this.
| aredox wrote:
| Nate Silver has been blatantly wrong several times during
| COVID, has been schooled by actual scientists and is now on a
| personal vendetta against them.
|
| He is ready to fan the flames of science-bashing because his
| fragile yet enormuous ego has been hurt. That tells all that
| you need to know about him. (Don't believe me? He has never
| apologised nor shown a little bit of humility after being
| corrected. That's who he is.)
| hooverd wrote:
| Superforecasteritis is the new Nobelitis.
| tekla wrote:
| Provide links please.
| Fomite wrote:
| https://twitter.com/GermsAndNumbers/status/1634087467874947
| 0...
|
| This is a somewhat flippant take of mine, but is emblematic
| of a lot of Nate Silver's posting during the pandemic,
| which is that epidemiologists are all hyper risk adverse
| ninnies, and we're clearly at the end of the pandemic.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| You could go to the 2016 election and see Nate Silver
| backtrack and never admit failure if you like. This guy
| came up out of nowhere and is a clown.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Also, paper writing is a collaborative effort, which does not
| imply that everyone on the paper agrees with every part of it
| 100%. e.g. if I get Jane on the paper because she knows the
| more than me about X, but we end up having a soft disagreement
| about X, I'm not walking away from the paper.
|
| Also ... authors have good reason to manage their interactions
| with journalists. They don't want to be used or misrepresented.
| Also, given the politics of the moment, they also had every
| reason to be cautious about what they said publicly.
| Marazan wrote:
| [flagged]
| gptbore wrote:
| I agree with your description of what these correspondents
| consensus seemed to be at the time of writing.
|
| I don't see how this is at all consistent with that the paper
| claimed - "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based
| scenario is plausible", nor how it was portrayed by the media -
| "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin".
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| The phrase "is not likely" imo should have been substituted
| for "is not plausible", though I am not sure everyone else
| interprets the phrase "not plausible" as meaning something
| like "almost certainly not true"; they could have meant it
| as, something like, "the least likely of all the
| possibilities, by a fair margin." Sure, I'd have preferred if
| they had been explicit, by giving their estimate of the
| probability of each possibility explicitly.
| ke88y wrote:
| Big question: HOW?
|
| Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific
| education. At university I majored in two STEM subjects but also
| took 10 courses in Philosophy, Art, History, Journalism, and
| Economics. Almost no one majoring in any of those fields except
| Econ took more than 2-3 STEM courses, and even then there a
| dedicated watered down courses to ensure those people could
| graduate (Algebra instead of Calculus, "Physics for Future
| Presidents", etc.).
|
| My high school education in the humanities was also far better
| than my high school education in STEM, which is typical. And the
| deplorable state of Mathematics education in US high schools acts
| as a hard constraint toward improving the situation, since you
| need a baseline of mathematics literacy before proceeding along
| any other path in STEM.
|
| How are journalists supposed to be _productively_ skeptical when
| the vast majority of them don 't receive anything remotely
| approaching a truly well-rounded education?
|
| Go read the proximal origins paper. How is a journalist who has
| never seen a derivative, has never taken BIO 101, and whose
| Science distribution credit was fulfilled by Physics For Future
| Presidents supposed to dive into the claims in that paper and
| critically evaluate the surrounding literature? They can't.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Even if you get a STEM education, at least at the undergrad
| level, it tends not to include anywhere near enough hands on
| research to learn much about experimental methods that would
| help you assess the validity of study designs when reporting on
| a new paper that just got published. And even when you have
| that, experimental methods tend to be extremely specific to the
| field of study.
|
| I almost think it would be better if virtually everyone, even
| if you're not a STEM major, taking at least a course on
| hierarchy of evidence and how particular study designs attempt
| to demonstrate causation, along with some basic statistical
| literacy. But I was listening to a very good breakdown of the
| aspartame history this morning and the host was going on about
| criticisms of some of the early studies showing cancer in rats
| dealing with exactly how randomization works when you're
| dealing with multiple litters from the same gene line and why
| they usually terminate the rats early instead of waiting for
| natural death, and these are things you could never possibly
| know unless you specifically have a background in rodent
| studies. I was a biology major and still didn't know any of
| this stuff.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| [flagged]
| wk_end wrote:
| Silver isn't arguing for-or-against the lab leak hypothesis
| here.
|
| > To be clear, I'm not sure how COVID originated either. I'd
| "buy" the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell
| it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for
| me to be persuaded one way or the other.
|
| This post is his commentary on leaked communications
| demonstrating that the _authors of the paper themselves didn
| 't believe the contents of the paper_. This has nothing to do
| with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media
| savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| His citations for those claims about the authors are 3
| substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems
| to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors.
|
| I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already
| made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to
| believe.
| wk_end wrote:
| > We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed
| emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by
| Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along
| with other small, independent media outlets. You can find
| a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails
| and messages here at Public.
|
| None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation
| are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist
| largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| He doesn't link any of those. Only the blogs and the
| conspiracy site.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is true for everything a journalist might cover.
|
| They are not the expert, but still need to strive to find the
| truth of an issue they can relay to the public.
|
| In this case, the underlying skill is, how do you detect and
| expose a cover up of inconvenient facts?
|
| I don't know the answer to that question. But seems like a core
| skill of a journalist, regardless of the field being
| investigated.
| mettamage wrote:
| So wait, I could make a career in being a software engineering
| style type of journalist?
|
| I just don't think they would care, would they?
|
| If anyone is reading it working as such, feel free to humor me
| by shooting me an email (in my profile). I studied psychology
| (bachelor), business (bachelor), computer science (master) and
| game-design (master). I also did some course work related to
| journalism (though very limited, I only read The Elements of
| Style). I worked as a teacher (mostly in programming, though
| one lecture on rhetorics in a rhetorics class) and as a
| software engineer.
|
| Let me know! I'm up for a chat as I might be a good fit and
| able to help more accurate reporting on AI and software in
| general.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Yep that's all great but the key to being good at journalism
| is being a good journalist. Take Matt Levine. His background
| as an M&A attorney and investment banker clearly informs his
| journalism and makes it better. But no one would give a shit
| about that if he wasn't a good writer consistently writing
| good, interesting writing.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| Gary Stevenson was surprised no one wanted to publish his
| article. They already had an economist one said. He argued he
| could walk into large financial institutions and they would
| immediately hire him for millions, the staff economy writer
| wouldn't make it past the reception - but he should be the one
| to write all of the articles to inform the public?
| sn9 wrote:
| Ezra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufeckci about basically this
| because she's had an unusually good track record for a non-
| specialist on lots of topics, and it really comes down to being
| statistically literate and putting in the work:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
| harry8 wrote:
| >really comes down to being statistically literate
|
| A lot of people writing scientific papers aren't
| statistically literate.
|
| It also seems that what was considered first rate methodology
| even a decade ago is now considered deeply unreliable.
| ctrlp wrote:
| "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
| coeneedell wrote:
| This line in the tractatus is not about the individual's
| knowledge it's about the entire research programme's ability
| to know something fundamentally unknowable. In particular
| Wittgenstein was referring to logical philosophers talking
| about metaphysics, which evades logical positivism. Even then
| he wasn't against the practice of metaphysics, only the
| attempt to describe it with hard logic.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical
| when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely
| approaching a truly well-rounded education?
|
| Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face
| value. Assume you're being bullshitted.
|
| You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone
| back up what they are saying.
| newsclues wrote:
| multiple sources as well. present contrasting viewpoints
| ke88y wrote:
| Again, without a baseline educational background, doing so in
| a way that's productive -- ie anything more than running
| around like a chicken with its head cut off -- is impossible.
|
| There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a
| year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-
| studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the
| fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know
| which questions to ask, to know which people to ask, is all
| highly suspect.
| Fomite wrote:
| I have often asserted that one of the reasons the lab leak
| hypothesis has so much backing in the wider press vs. most
| epidemiologists and virologists I know is that it moves the
| pandemic back into a realm in which they are experts.
|
| Nate Silver is _much_ more comfortable asserting his
| opinion about this than I am, because, as an infectious
| disease epidemiologist who primarily focuses on the
| stochastics of disease emergence and disease extinction, my
| expertise is a good two weeks after when either a zoonotic
| jump or a lab leak would take place. Take that for what you
| will.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "Dr. Scientist, you said X. Describe the evidence for that
| claim?"
|
| "Dr. Scientist, are you aware of claim Y, which seems at
| odds with what you are saying? Explain why claim Y is
| wrong?"
|
| Write it up. You don't have to understand it to write a
| story about what they said. That's what "reporting" is.
| aydyn wrote:
| > You don't have to understand it to write a story about
| what they said.
|
| Pretty much the silliest thing I've heard today!
|
| "Dr. Scientist, you said that vaccines promote herd
| immunity describe your evidence for that claim"
|
| "Dr. Scientist, you said that mRNA vaccines aren't going
| to mutate humans, describe your evidence for that claim"
|
| "Dr. Scientist, you predicted this year is hotter than
| ever, but back in February it was -20. Why did you lie?"
|
| There are an infinite numbers of terrible questions you
| could ask as a reporter, if you don't have expertise. You
| need some degree of knowledge to talk about a subject,
| the only debate is how much.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > Assume you're being bullshitted.
|
| > You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make
| someone back up what they are saying.
|
| Isn't that what the Covid vaccine skeptics did? It didn't
| turn out that great and made journalists look like conspiracy
| theorists in some cases.
| obscurette wrote:
| Although I'm not really sure it's a global issue, but at least
| here in Eastern Europe you just have no time to dig in deeper
| in any subject as journalist. I've seen local academic
| institutions trying to support journalists to specialize on
| science reporting more than 10 years now, but all have left
| saying that pressure to produce just more text is too intense.
| Old school investigative journalism just doesn't exist any
| more.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Well, now they can have chatGPT save them so much time that
| they can do quality research, right?
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| I'm not sure existing journalists could do it, but perhaps this
| can act as a call to action for a scientist to start a blog or
| YouTube channel that analyzes scientific discoveries, and/or
| fact checks existing journalists' interpretations of scientific
| literature.
| Given_47 wrote:
| I'm sure there r random blogs devoted to that lol. Which is y
| I aggressively bookmark niche sites cuz by definition gold
| mines r very much not discoverable
| mike_hearn wrote:
| They don't have to shoot for perfection. The bar has sunk so
| low even very basic techniques can yield huge improvements in
| trust:
|
| 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased
| differently, stop taking academics at their word when they
| claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find
| people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word
| _people_ ; not just other academics but literally anyone
| disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of
| consensus. Bloggers are fine.
|
| 2. READ the papers. Journalists never do this. I cannot express
| how frequently you can spot scientific fraud by just reading
| the underlying papers, even as a layman. If you lack expertise
| maybe you'll miss 90% of the tricks but catching 10% of them is
| still sufficient to notice something is wrong, and often you
| don't need any special training. Here are some of my own
| investigations of bad papers - it's often obvious and most of
| it doesn't require expertise to spot.
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
|
| 3. Hold sources to account when it's proven that they were
| misleading you. Report on bad behavior to discourage it next
| time.
|
| 4. Be willing to report stories dug up by other people, even
| when they make Team University look bad. Note how the reporting
| Silver refers to hasn't been covered by legacy media outlets
| even though you don't need to be a scientist to understand what
| they're saying and how damning it is.
|
| In reality this stuff is easy. Nobody is asking for the NYT to
| engage in professional peer review of newly published papers.
| Just not assuming anything a professor says is gospel truth
| would be a good start, but there seems little chance of that
| happening :( Journalists depend so heavily on academics for
| rent-a-quote services and a constant flow of stories that
| getting tough would be biting the hand that feeds them.
| hooverd wrote:
| wrt 1., there are an unfortunate number of cranks for every
| discipline. It would be funny to see journos publish the
| emails that every faculty member who releases their email in
| the university phonebook gets as Serious Disagreement*
| though.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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/w
| iki/Oil_drop_experiment#Controvers... and https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
|
| Similarly, the original 3D structure of DNA from W&C was
| actually "wrong" but I truly doubt any laymen (laypeople)
| could have determined that by reading the original paper
| (which is a paragon of clear and simple scientific
| reporting).
| ke88y wrote:
| I agree with your prescriptions, but worry the point might've
| slipped by.
|
| _> READ the papers_
|
| The point of my original comment is that most journalists
| don't have the educational background required to do this.
| And everything else flows downstream of that problem.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The issue is not that they can't do it, they just don't
| want to. Journalists with no science background are happy
| to write quite technical fact checks of articles - even
| articles written by scientists - when those articles are
| contradicting something the journalists are already
| invested in.
|
| And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to
| spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery
| in this article can be detected as fraud by anyone:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422
|
| No expertise needed. Blatant stuff like that is more
| obvious than we'd hope.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The issue is that journalists _could_ do better if they
| wanted to, but they don 't want to and there's no system
| of incentives in place that would make them want to.
| There's no such thing as a journalism license they could
| lose, and publishing nonsensical science articles doesn't
| hurt their careers in any way because nobody expects
| better of them. After all, they're just journalists with
| no STEM education...
|
| Even if you somehow forced science journalists to all get
| STEM dual majors, it still wouldn't make them care.
| They'd still take the path of least resistance and pump
| out slop. The only way to make them care is to put them
| under editors that enforce standards. But how do you make
| a publication care enough to hire editors that care? Even
| state funded university press departments notoriously
| sloppy. If they can't uphold standards, I doubt any
| organization can.
| thorncorona wrote:
| > 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased
| differently, stop taking academics at their word when they
| claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find
| people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word
| people; not just other academics but literally anyone
| disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of
| consensus. Bloggers are fine.
|
| This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that
| don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is
| flat, whether climate change is real, etc.
|
| > 2. READ the papers.
|
| Literally nobody reads the papers. A huge amount of news
| isn't even investigated. A large number of news these days is
| regurgitated from other sources.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Journalists love reporting on flat Earthers even though
| their beliefs have no impact on anything in the real world:
|
| https://news.google.com/search?q=%22flat%20earth%22&hl=en-
| US...
|
| Realistically, journalists like to report on fringe or
| weird beliefs so they can laugh at the people holding them,
| and dislike reporting on serious disagreement with things
| they want to be true.
|
| Agree that almost nobody is reading the papers, outside of
| random tweeters and bloggers. Journalists might as well
| start, though. Reading obscure documents is a part of the
| job, classically at least.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You can still look at credentials.
|
| If there is disagreement among people with appropriate
| background, experience, and education, it can be reported
| as a legitimate disagreement. The journalist should be
| evaluating the credentials of sources, but not what they
| say, and not on the basis of whether the journalist
| personally agrees with them.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > This is how you get journalists to report disagreements
| that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth
| is flat, whether climate change is real, etc.
|
| Correct. Part of the problem is that _there is disagreement
| about whether a disagreement exists_. Cranks believe that
| there is a vigorous debate about flat-earth
| /evolution/climate change, and scientists don't.
|
| Do how does one (journalist) objectively determine whether
| an issue is settled or not?
| timr wrote:
| Great comment.
|
| One thing I'll add: if you don't have specific training in
| the field in question, just _ignore_ any use of "scientific
| consensus" to justify an argument.
|
| The "scientific consensus" trope is just dressed-up appeal to
| authority, and even if there _is_ such a "consensus", it's
| almost never broad enough to be applicable to whatever pop-
| science journalism thing you're reading.
|
| Also, even within the hallowed halls of academic science,
| most scientists are just repeating things they've heard other
| people say. Unless the "consensus" is amongst scientists who
| have spent their entire career studying the specific question
| (and by "specific", I mean... _hyper specific_ , not just "in
| the same field", and certainly not something meaningless like
| "epidemiology"), this kind of thing just devolves into a
| popularity contest. You'd be shocked by how many PhDs just
| confidently repeat whatever silly thing they saw that morning
| in the New York Times.
|
| Also, since I'm already seeing the meme appear...people are
| _waaaaay_ too worried about "amplifying fringe voices" these
| days. News flash: if you don't know what you're talking
| about, then you can't possibly know what you should or should
| not be "amplifying". Stick to what you know, be modest about
| what you _don 't_ know (which is most things), and let the
| facts sort themselves out over time. Science only works if
| contrarians get a voice.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Science only works if contrarians get a voice.
|
| This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always
| right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.
|
| _Sometimes_ a contrarian is right and the accepted
| consensus is wrong. But that doesn 't happen only because
| the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the
| contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper
| scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable theory that
| fits empirical observations _and_ is sufficiently
| predictive. They also set out to _disprove_ their
| hypothesis.
|
| Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's
| time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual
| motion theorem or electric universe bullshit. It's far
| easier to spam stupid contrarian ideas than to produce real
| rigorous scientific output.
| runesofdoom wrote:
| As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they
| laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers.
| But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
| timr wrote:
| > This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are
| always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on
| HN.
|
| No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean
| that, I don't _believe_ that, and trying to spin it that
| way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you
| quoted.
|
| Contrarians don't have to be _right_ to require a voice
| for the system to work.
|
| > Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth
| anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid
| perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.
|
| The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the
| difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is
| working is because I can _see the all the disagreements
| and judge for myself_. Efficiency isn 't the goal.
|
| But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent
| of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric
| universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my
| choice, and who are _you_ to tell me otherwise?
|
| Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded
| theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they
| are about censoring things they don't like.
| cwalv wrote:
| > Science only works if contrarians get a voice.
|
| I completely agree, but it's counterintuitive. There's a
| part of me that thinks "science == reproducible, observable
| fact". But it really is much more (er, less) than that.
| It'd be nice if there was a different word for the "not
| irrefutable" parts (i.e. almost all of it).
| matt3210 wrote:
| The idea that the normies could do real science is pure
| projection
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I don't write articles on subjects I don't understand no matter
| how much paper money is thrown at me.
|
| Maybe start there.
| scythe wrote:
| >Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific
| education.
|
| First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the
| journalist writing the article is a qualified science
| journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate
| curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of
| science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you
| need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning
| their education with partial credentials.
|
| Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real
| demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that
| they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is
| agitating to create such an infrastructure.
|
| Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball:
| a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a
| starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of
| people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified
| science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career
| opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't
| the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and
| in America, that's saying something.
| [deleted]
| Natsu wrote:
| > Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive
| basically zero scientific education.
|
| This right here is why I've mostly stopped listening to
| journalists and try to find primary sources regarding thee
| scientific papers, scientists, legal rulings, etc. in question
| instead of playing a game of telephone where people reinterpret
| everything to fit whatever story they're tying to tell me.
|
| It's also why I have been finding Wikipedia less useful these
| days, since they have an explicit policy of citing secondary
| sources instead of primary sources and I find those far less
| useful.
| swexbe wrote:
| The answer is more people with a background in STEM should go
| into journalism. Sadly, that sort of specialization is
| expensive and the public's willingness to spend on news seems
| to have gone down.
| incangold wrote:
| YouTube and Medium are awash with scientists doing
| journalism- there's plenty of supply.
|
| Maybe the answer is that people without a STEM background
| should get out of science journalism?
|
| The question mark is genuine- would this be a bad thing for
| some reason?
|
| Not that scientist journalists don't also make mistakes of
| course- I've seen plenty, usually due to covering topics
| outside their own specialty.
| swexbe wrote:
| That's true, but most medium articles & blogs are experts
| writing for other experts. I guess what's missing is
| broadly experts writing for laymen.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| In the past, wasn't it normal for journalists to have a
| particular specialization (even if that's not the _only_ thing
| they did), like "science reporter" or something? It is
| obviously impossible for every reporter to become an expert on
| every single topic that they might ever cover, but it is not
| unreasonable at all to get enough of a background on a topic
| that you cover regularly to be able to ask intelligent
| questions.
|
| If news organizations were serious about this, they might
| actively look for people who _do_ have greater amounts of
| training/experience in a given field.
|
| It may be true that in the current journalism paradigm the kind
| of skepticism called for is impossible, but it is absolutely
| not true that this is a fundamental state of journalism and
| that reporters could never become capable of doing it.
| blcknight wrote:
| There are still specialists but probably not as many as
| newsrooms have been cash strapped.
|
| NPR had a bunch of economic reporters and they're mostly ok
| but they still get a ton of stuff wrong, so it's not a great
| solution either.
| golergka wrote:
| There isn't enough money in journalism anymore to sustain
| this.
| andromeduck wrote:
| Colleges really need to upgrade STEM requirements for
| liberal arts.
|
| At my alma, science/engineering required 18 arts credits
| while arts required only 6 science/math credits.
| ghaff wrote:
| One of the problems is that journalism just doesn't pay very
| well in general.
|
| So news organizations may look for people with more
| experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people
| here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in
| paying for that news/writing themselves.
|
| I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of
| the people who write on deep technical topics either don't
| need the money or are doing it as a sideshow of their day
| jobs.
|
| (Which, if they write for independent news organizations can
| be an issue. The WSJ reporter who basically uncovered the
| Theranos scandal quit because he couldn't give public
| speaking engagements.)
| sportslife wrote:
| It doesn't pay well enough now.
|
| 30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary
| for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on
| magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice
| neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time.
| Expenses too if you were good.
|
| Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s,
| 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory
| days.
|
| Now, no science grad could make that choice.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I do occasional contract work these days and $1 to
| $1.50 a word for stuff I'm not being paid for anyway by
| my day job is OK--and pretty much my floor. Ends up being
| a couple hundred dollars per hour.
|
| But that's really not a random online pub rate.
|
| Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying
| profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid
| middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other
| or related income sources (which tend to be difficult
| given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time,
| or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League
| grad.
| huffmsa wrote:
| For some. My mother had a pretty solid biology and medical
| background before covering medical news.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > and that reporters could never become capable of doing it
|
| I disagree for any current reporters who were selected by
| going to journalism school rather than by gaining expertise
| and then turning to journalism.
| ghaff wrote:
| J-school in general is probably a poor criterion. Someone
| who has just done a bunch of reporting (and other things)
| isn't really less qualified to do journalism that someone
| with a J-school degree.
| ke88y wrote:
| Ideally, but AFAICT that's not how it works.
|
| I have given a number of interviews to "Science" journalists,
| in two occasions even for science-focused publications. In
| each case I began the interview by asking the journalist to
| tell me about their coursework and self-study background so I
| can be sure to meet them where they are. In only one case
| have I met a science reporter who I'd consider minimally
| competent to _report_ on science -- rather than eg write puff
| pieces -- and that reporter was educated in Europe.
| Given_47 wrote:
| Yea that's my main frustration with overall journalism. The
| one subject where I'd consider myself in the 99th
| percentile of knowledge (more of a reflection of the
| sample) is basketball and it drives me up a wall the number
| of Medill type, classically trained journalists who write
| about a thing they _barely_ understand. It's such a
| disservice to the audience and borderline blatant
| misinformation
| ricksunny wrote:
| Yes, and Ashley Rindsberg covers the science-writer / sci-
| journo divide well, a divide which I was not hip to prior:
|
| "The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the
| U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for
| general readers and for news publications like The New York
| Times or The Wall Street Journal are not--and do not
| pretend to be--journalists per se. They are science writers
| whose field is science communications--a distinction with a
| huge difference. They see their role as translating the
| lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather
| than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate
| the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding
| streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."
|
| https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-
| sci...
| robomartin wrote:
| > Big question: HOW?
|
| Simple: If they are not equipped to understand what they are
| going to write about, they should refrain from adding noise to
| the conversation. The potential to add nothing but noise or
| cause damage is great.
|
| Interestingly enough nobody would ever propose that, say, a
| fashion journalist report on surgical procedures or a range of
| other subjects. How is this problem not obvious in other
| domains?
|
| It's interesting to watch the difference between a
| reporter/journalist on any TV news show and, say, the people
| working at a financial news network like CNBC. In the latter
| case, they have to have a serious body of knowledge just to
| open their mouths. If you plucked your average
| reporter/journalist and put them into that seat, they would
| sound like complete morons because they just would not know
| what they are talking about.
| legitster wrote:
| Academia has sold itself and the world that it is only
| scrutinizable unto itself. But this was not always the case.
|
| If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they
| are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more
| involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.
| vondur wrote:
| As the fields have become more and more specialized over the
| years, and the technology has increased, it's gets more
| difficult to write about subjects without using jargon and
| more complicated visualizations. As mentioned in other
| comments, having journalists with a science background would
| definitely help.
| jfengel wrote:
| That was easier to do 50 or 100 years ago. The longer we do
| science, the more we already know. Finding something novel
| gets harder and harder. It becomes less and less likely that
| you can find it without having spent a long time learning
| what's already known.
|
| Academics certainly could be better writers and communicators
| now, but non-scientists cannot expect to understand most work
| that required years of education before they could perform
| it. The public can be given a rapid education in it when it
| matters, but that rapid education isn't going to put them in
| a position to critique the work. And when the public mistakes
| that rapid education for a superior grasp of the topic, it
| becomes a huge drain on the academics' time to correct the
| misconceptions.
| legitster wrote:
| Maybe this is true for some of the advanced sciences. But
| when it comes to some of the topics that get the most news
| coverage (psychology, public health, economics) you're not
| dealing with controlled experiments. So much of it is just
| random sampling and double blind studies.
|
| This work is good. But none of this work is particularly
| complicated or hard to understand - and so much of the
| "education" is busy work or learning the "inside baseball"
| of how to get meaningful results and how to get published.
|
| When we are talking about "trust the scientists" no one is
| really arguing that nuclear scientists or aeronautical
| engineers don't know what they are talking about. We're
| really talking about whether we should listen to an
| epidemiologist just because they have spent so much time
| looking at these studies (often conflicting!) that they can
| squint their eyes when they look at a set of data and give
| a more qualified off-the-cuff opinion.
| thrashh wrote:
| You don't judge a source by reading the source itself.
|
| Usually you do so by considering the context in which the
| source is made and then you might consult someone who can read
| the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in
| which they are giving you advice).
| ke88y wrote:
| _> You don't judge a source by reading the source itself._
|
| Well then, I guess we at least agree on the following: today
| we have science "reporting" done by "journalists" who will
| write about findings reported in publications that they
| haven't read and self-admittedly can't read.
|
| I suppose we can agree to disagree about the usefulness of
| that reporting and the potential harm of that reporting.
|
| _> Usually you do so by considering the context in which the
| source is made and then you might consult someone who can
| read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the
| context in which they are giving you advice)._
|
| You are missing the word ALSO. As in, you do so by reading
| and evaluating the source and then ALSO considering the
| surrounding context.
|
| Palace intrigue isn't something that should be ignored, but
| it also shouldn't be the entire story.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Simple: Stop believing it's true just because a scientist said
| it.
|
| You don't need a STEM degree to stop propagating theories
| before they're proven.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Yes.
|
| The whole point of science is that you do not have to believe
| anything just because a scientist said it. Only thing that
| matters is the validity of their data, whether the data truly
| backs their interpretation, and if the findings can be
| replicated.
| dekhn wrote:
| Wouldn't that mean that Galileo and Newton's discoveries
| would have had little to no impact?
|
| For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't
| have a detailed education in the subject could really
| contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can
| see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright
| because the authors made egregious errors in the study design
| or data collection (where data scientists/statisticians who
| don't work in the field can still be very useful), but for
| most modern physics or medical research, there are literally
| hundreds of years of well-established theory and practice
| that you absolutely need to know before dismissing ideas that
| don't make sense.
|
| This is especially important in areas like infectious
| disease.
| taeric wrote:
| Often the best way to be productively skeptical is to ask
| questions and get more sources? It can be frustrating for some
| scientific figureheads, but the adage of "no dumb questions"
| came to be for a reason.
|
| And don't get led astray by looking for "productivity." So much
| advancement is lost on the alter of efficiency and
| productivity. Yes, if you know the correct next move to make,
| do it. But don't discount exploration and general play.
| ke88y wrote:
| But who? And what questions do you ask? Without a baseline,
| you're poking around in the dark. Or knocking on the same 20
| doors at the same 20 universities, and all those people talk
| to each other and they and their students all sit on each
| others' grant review committees. Etc. And when two scientists
| disagree about the evidence, how do you determine whether one
| of them is a total quack? Or do you just report everything
| that everyone says as long as they say big words you don't
| know?
|
| It's really easy to be unproductively skeptical. Never
| believe anything. Everything is a lie or a conspiracy. That's
| not particularly productive, though, because although it
| protects you from lies and bad actors it will never get you
| to the truth.
| taeric wrote:
| Sorry, I meant to be more explicit there. I don't believe
| in "full productivity" in the search for things. You will,
| by necessity, waste some time.
|
| Do try and make sure you aren't completely poking around in
| the dark. But also don't feel bad if you find out you were.
|
| I do hate that I'm posting this in this thread. At large, I
| get the impression that the "coverup" is being blown out of
| proportion. I also can't deny that a lot of the dismissals
| earlier were heavy handed. Such that some topics and
| inquiries have somehow become toxic.
|
| But, at large, most "quack" theories don't have to be fully
| dismissed by other scientists. They are more easily
| explained with other ideas. It can be frustrating for some
| of them, as I'm sure many are tired of hearing about "UFOs"
| and such. But for a lot of crazier ideas, the "dismissal"
| can quite literally be "that necessarily leads to enough
| other things that we are not seeing, that I just can't
| bring myself to believe it right now."
|
| This does require, though, that asking the questions is not
| done in such a way to paint a contest. Try to build the
| questions in such a way to expand ideas.
| jimbokun wrote:
| But isn't that a journalist's job description?
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > Big question: HOW?
|
| Independent, transparent and publicly available journalism
| (open to critics) simplifies things a lot.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they
| report on court cases?
|
| They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on
| airplane crashes?
|
| They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial
| news?
|
| They're supposed to be experts at _reporting_ , which works out
| to mean experts at _finding out about topics that they don 't
| already know about_.
| nradov wrote:
| Well that explains why most reporting on aviation and
| financial issues in the mainstream media is such garbage. I
| mean I'm hardly an expert in those areas but even I can tell
| that the stories are crap in terms of missing key facts, not
| asking relevant questions, drawing bad conclusions, and
| pushing biased narratives. Fortunately there are some YouTube
| channels where I can get good information on those topics,
| although they aren't typically labeled as journalists and
| don't work for media companies.
| Fomite wrote:
| Based on most of the lawyers I know? Poorly.
| ke88y wrote:
| _> Most journalists aren 't experts on the law, either. How
| do they report on court cases?_
|
| Journalists have roughly the same undergraduate educational
| background as lawyers and receive a half-decent education on
| the high level basics of the American legal system in civics
| courses.
|
| _> They aren 't experts on aviation safety. How do they
| report on airplane crashes?_
|
| Crashes themselves often don't require any amount of aviation
| expertise.
|
| _> They aren 't experts on economics. How do they report
| financial news?_
|
| Mostly poorly, which is why eg Bloomberg's retail news
| business exists, and most of those folks have some financial
| background.
| coolliquidcode wrote:
| They do it very incompetently. The quality of reporting
| anymore is ridiculously low.
|
| It's not about being an expert in the subject but having a
| fundamental understanding and being logically minded enough
| to perform fact based and critically thought out reporting.
|
| Now everything is so trashy, economics is how they can bash
| their least favorite company or billionaire, law reporting is
| one-sided story telling for bashing or cheerleading someone
| in court, same with politics. It's mostly story telling
| anymore geared for entertainment or outrage.
| techx wrote:
| A news outlet can hire scientists to call out shady scientific
| paper, many scientific paper have obvious bad conclusions, or
| not following basic scientific rules, that can be detected even
| if the scientist reviewing is specialized in another fields.
| grammers wrote:
| Exactly. In addition, how would you gather any information at
| all if there's no one to trust. Yes, fake news are a huge
| problem, but we need reliable sources to gather information.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| You don't need a reliable source. Maximizing the chances that
| a source is reliable is good enough. This can be achieved by
| maximizing the number of journalists attacking the same
| problem. The process must be transparent and publicly
| available / open to critics. People (non-journalists,
| readers) will point out if something smells suspicious.
| cbeach wrote:
| The answer is plurality within the scientific community.
|
| During the Covid authoritarian period, scientists like Dr Robert
| Malone were evicted from society because they didn't toe the
| government line on support for mRNA vaccination.
|
| I'm not saying Malone and co were right, necessarily, but the way
| they were shut down and demonised suggested to me that we stopped
| doing real scientific enquiry for a couple of years and succumbed
| to corporate lobbying and government over-reach.
| zzbn00 wrote:
| Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was
| published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to
| other scientist, not that it is a fact.
|
| But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need
| to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively
| reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature.
|
| But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what
| even research institutions increasingly need to survive it seems
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was
| published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to
| other scientist, not that it is a fact."
|
| This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it
| doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other
| qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important
| flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's
| in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference
| to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what
| degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the
| peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a
| different role.
| avenido wrote:
| "They also thought they were going to get away with it. 'The
| truth is never going to come out', wrote Rambaut in one message."
|
| He took that statement way out of context. They were looking for
| the best explanation and given that their assumption of "the
| truth" about a lab leak wouldn't avail itself, they felt they
| needed to go on what would be a plausible scenario - a natural
| evolution of a virus.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| I agree. However, the problem lies far beyond the journalists'
| power. Let's take the latest investigation on the Biden family as
| an example. The IRS led the investigation for several years, and
| the IRS special agent provided a substantial amount of
| information pointing to bribes during their testimony. However,
| one of the political parties, including the FBI, showed no
| interest in finding the truth. This was evident from the type of
| questions that were asked. Why do they do that? Because they are
| protecting their own interests.
|
| When it comes to journalism, we can observe the exact same
| pattern. Journalists are not allowed to be skeptical because
| their skepticism could impact their company's ad revenue. When I
| worked at Huffington Post, I was not "allowed" to say anything
| negative about the then-President (Barack Obama). Even after the
| FBI was pressured to release all the Biden documents (FD-1023 -
| the one they were initially denying the existence of), the
| "reputable" news outlets remain predominantly silent. Ad revenue
| is a significant factor in this silence. They are protecting
| their own interests.
| epistasis wrote:
| But especially skeptical of pundits like Nate Silver.
| zzzeek wrote:
| Seriously, shouldn't they at least get Matt Taibbi's take also
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm sure Michael Schillenbergee has some opinions that he in
| no way financially benefits from spreading.
| robot_no_421 wrote:
| Everyone should be skeptical of all sources.
|
| But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from
| politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and
| everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of
| truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
|
| So while the title is technically true and I agree with the
| premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary
| at best and damaging at worst. Until we begin to be more
| skeptical in general and learn to distrust all the other
| mouthpieces vomiting lies every day, let's trust the scientists.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The essence of science is not trusting an expert, but requiring
| evidence and repeatability. Scientists aren't more trustworthy
| than those other groups for no reason, it's because they work
| in a field where work can be double-checked. As the
| repeatability crisis has shown, many believe their work will
| not be double-checked, and once they believe that, they become
| less and less worthy of that trust.
| robot_no_421 wrote:
| Right, that's why my first sentence was "everyone should be
| skeptical of every source"....
|
| But if I'm forced to trust someone (and most of us are on a
| daily basis), I'd rather trust the guys whose whole job
| revolves around the principle of "we require evidence and
| repeatable results before we believe you" than pretty much
| every other profession.
|
| Completely separate from my above point, I'd also say that I
| do believe scientists are on average more trustworthy than
| other career workers at a personal level. It's a profession
| that tends to attract people concerned with objective truth
| and rational logic. Just like how politics tends to attract
| those who want to work with people and the police force
| attracts people who are comfortable with violence. At least
| from my personal, anecdotal view.
| tetrep wrote:
| > But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from
| politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and
| everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class
| of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
|
| If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do
| you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that
| if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab
| coat, to say the same? I think that scientists are more likely
| to abuse the trust because it's implicit. You can't expect to
| abuse someone's trust in you (e.g. as a scientist) if you don't
| expect people to trust you. All the people you listed as
| untrustworthy are _obviously_ untrustworthy, which is what
| makes them not a serious risk. Saying "I really want to trust
| scientists" is the same as saying "If you want to exploit me,
| use a scientist to do it." I don't think you need to look any
| further than the Tobacco industry to see why blindly trusting
| scientists is not a viable mitigation to propaganda.
|
| I don't really have a good answer for how to make a good
| decision when you're ignorant (trusting scientists would make
| this easier), and we're all ignorant about most things. Being
| skeptical doesn't give you good knowledge, it just mitigates
| absorbing bad knowledge. So you're kinda stuck if you need to
| e.g. make a risk based decision about COVID and you don't trust
| scientists.
| robot_no_421 wrote:
| >If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good."
| Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda
| that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a
| white lab coat, to say the same?
|
| Difference is that a the guy in the lab coat has to conduct
| experiments on it, get them peer reviewed, publish a paper on
| it, and lay out all the assumptions and methodologies before
| it's actually "science". So it's not as simple as getting a
| guy in a lab coat to say it. Especially when all the other
| guys in lab coats are saying "that guy is lying and his
| methodology is garbage".
| tetrep wrote:
| And that's why everyone knows there's no relationship
| between autism and vaccines?
|
| I think you're underestimating the ability for people to
| abuse trust, i.e. lie.
|
| You can't say "trust scientist A but not scientist B"
| unless you've got some way to judge them. Which we don't as
| we're the ignorant laymen.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism
|
| edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You
| can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the
| other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists"
| makes it better.
| fkingmagnets wrote:
| I don't trust scientists, in particular doctors, when they're
| effectively bought by big pharma.
|
| I don't care if you have ten degrees from Harvard Medical
| School if you also take a 7 figure paycheck from big pharma,
| you're a big pharma rep as far as I'm concerned.
|
| Same with economists who shill for various groups, and so on.
|
| I suppose I can trust astrophysicists because so far we have no
| evidence they've been bought by alien civilizations.
| intrasight wrote:
| My take as well. And you don't have to be an expert to be
| skeptical.
| aredox wrote:
| [flagged]
| roody15 wrote:
| " The Times fired their Pulitzer Prize-winning coronavirus
| reporter in middle of the pandemic -- a reporter who saw the lab
| leak theory as credible -- and replaced him with another reporter
| who dismissed discussion of the lab leak as "racist"."
|
| This about sums up the state of modern journalism today .. sadly.
| yosito wrote:
| And readers should be skeptical of journalists. And everyone
| should be skeptical of everyone. Skeptical thinking should be a
| way of life.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I wonder what he'd have to say about the article published on
| FiveThirtyEight in May of 2020 that prominently cites one of the
| authors of this very paper [0]. I don't think he was very heavily
| involved in the science-reporting side of fivethirtyeight (he's
| always very obviously been more on the sports and politics side),
| and since at this point since he's no longer affiliated with the
| site, it sort of doesn't matter, but I'm also pretty sure that he
| didn't just come to the belief espoused in this post recently. I
| wonder if there were ever internal discussions about the piece.
|
| [0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-
| th...
| legitster wrote:
| I respect this position on principal, but I also forget like we
| are equally glossing over the context in this specific case.
|
| In 2020, the lab-leak theory was specifically being promoted by
| people who were advancing the idea that Covid was a) an
| engineered bio-weapon b) required a national security response in
| lieu of a medical one.
|
| But if we really want to look back at 2020-2021, there were MUCH
| more egregious examples of "experts" wielding their credentials
| maliciously. School closures I think will be the most pertinent
| example for a while to come.
| RyanAdamas wrote:
| Incorrect, the lab-leak theory was specifically disregarded
| using the well-poisoning methods you described as the blame
| would be shifted to a wild-goose chase. Considering China went
| through SARS 10 years previous with hundreds of millions of
| patients to examine, combined with the influx of viral research
| into the country after that period, it is by no means a stretch
| to assume duplicity was at hand. A for-profit medical response
| is a conflation of the kind you are suggesting should have
| taken place.
| legitster wrote:
| At the end of the day, no one really should have cared that
| much where Covid came from in 2020. The only people who
| really cared were people who were trying to win a game of
| political football. This is equally true with the scientists
| in the Lancet letter as it was with politicians trying to win
| a pissing match with China.
| pgrote wrote:
| Sort of tossing the baby out with the bath water.
|
| If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the
| accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized
| across many segments of society. It became one of the things
| you couldn't discuss publicly.
|
| Many topics became like this during covid including your
| mention of school closures. Weird time.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Both those ideas (a,b) are look to be vindicated. It does look
| like an engineered bio-weapon and there is a lot of
| circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. And whether
| the people pointing to a lab leak were also demanding a
| national security response or opposing one, that _is_ what
| happened, i.e., it _was_ a national security response (big
| pharma white labeling and providing distribution for DoD
| subcontractors product). Simple as.
| biophysboy wrote:
| One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that
| it will ever get "resolved". We dont have sequence samples at the
| time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on
| giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any
| phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial
| precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy
| where it needs to be sharp. In my opinion, this is the real thing
| stalling this debate, not politics.
| wredue wrote:
| [flagged]
| rossdavidh wrote:
| This sounds like "your theory is outside the Overton window,
| you are not allowed to think this". The simplest version of
| the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy, it is very literally
| the opposite: "never ascribe to conspiracy what is adequately
| explained by incompetence". We had warnings, in writing,
| about the very lab in question, from western scientists, that
| the safety standards there were insufficient.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Everyone is in agreement that the first known super spreader
| event was at that market. I don't really see how that's
| evidence one way or the other.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| We don't have zero evidence:
|
| - we know of the US funding collection of coronaviruses at
| WIV; and research on them using humanized mice
|
| - we know that the closest genetic match is a thousand miles
| away
|
| - we've been unable to identify the precursor in an animal,
| unlike other pandemics
|
| That strongly implies that directed evolution on a collected
| sample via repeated infection of humanized mice is
| responsible for COVID.
|
| Contrary to your claims, there's evidence against a zoonotic
| origin -- no precursor, high human infectivity (of alpha)
| that rapidly decreased in the wild (in delta and omicron),
| unusual genetics around the furin cleavage, etc.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There's really no reason to care about which of the two
| prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same
| outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese
| wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no
| intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in
| the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and
| we cannot force them to prevent a natural source without
| something stupid like extreme sanctions or war.
|
| So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when
| presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have
| handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about
| punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder
| why
| zmgsabst wrote:
| A lab leak implies that we should cease funding work at WIV
| -- and examine the officials responsible for doing so in the
| first place.
|
| Perhaps even reconsider our entire approach to pandemic
| research, if our decisions led to the worst pandemic in
| generations.
| [deleted]
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Then why didn't the scientists simply say 'we lack the data to
| conclusively resolve'?
|
| There _was_ a specific reason why they didn 't -- and in fact
| promoted a specific theory, and it had more to do with politics
| and funding than science.
| krisoft wrote:
| > China is never going to cooperate on giving more
| circumstantial evidence
|
| > In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate,
| not politics.
|
| But isn't that politics? (International politics to be
| precise.)
| johntfella wrote:
| Hanson's idea (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/gamble.html) of a
| betting market for science could be an interesting model for
| journalism. Probably easier said than done.
| thewanderer1983 wrote:
| ""trust the science" or "trust the experts" is usually right."
|
| This statement and general belief is antithetical to science. Dr.
| Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying talk about this misconception
| of science on their Darkhorse podcast all the time. Dr Brian
| Keating nicely summarises this issue in this short video
| https://youtu.be/gAqq72m-ipo
|
| You should "trust the scientific method" when done correctly.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > This statement and general belief is antithetical to science.
|
| No, it's not. 99% of the population doesn't have the cognitive
| ability to independently verify whether a scientific publishing
| has had rigorous checks on its scientific method and
| methodologies and samples were selected appropriately.
|
| In this scenario, you should trust the science and/or experts,
| _unless_ other experts have verified that the findings are
| garbage and /or something was fabricated.
|
| What's _really_ antithetical to science is when people present
| sources as having equal weights.
|
| Joe Rogan vs Meta-analysis of 30 studies does not have the same
| weight.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Personally, I never accepted that a lab leak was out of the
| question. I simply didn't think it mattered during the early days
| of the pandemic response (to the everyday citizen) since it
| didn't influence safe hygiene and social distancing. It was used
| by conservative media as something for their base to get mad
| about and be mildly racist about (Wuhan flu).
|
| What was more egregious was Dr. Fauci's assertion that masking
| wouldn't help slow the spread, which he likely knew to be false
| and had said so to prevent a run on N95s. I get it, but that is a
| huge undermining of public trust.
| matt3210 wrote:
| In 2023 I assume all news is biased or flat false. I assume all
| video is doctored or flat out generated. After one day I stopped
| consuming it all together as it was a pointless waste of time
| swayvil wrote:
| Consider the knowledge quality gradient. Ordered high to low.
|
| 1) see it yourself.
|
| 2) heard it from a friend.
|
| 3) bullshit.
| mquander wrote:
| As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes,
| there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality.
| Truth-seeking is time-consuming and will always be inherently
| trading off against other local incentives, like writing quickly,
| writing exciting things, and writing things that your audience
| will like. If almost all journalists have to bust their ass just
| to survive, a truth-seeking culture won't thrive.
|
| I think there are three main ways I can see things getting
| better:
|
| 1. Governments and academia have lots of money, but the money
| gets fed into a system of incentives that make academics not that
| good at either truth-seeking or popularizing their own work. This
| could change.
|
| 2. There is a large population of smart people who collectively
| can do a lot of truth-seeking and writing in their spare time,
| without needing to make money from it. However, right now there's
| not a particularly coherent way that those people can work
| together and produce collective information that is as easy to
| find and understand as mainstream media outlets. Improving
| technology to let amateurs work together and aggregate their
| opinions could be powerful.
|
| 3. The funding model for journalism could continue to evolve so
| that people who choose to do so can more directly fund truth-
| seeking journalism. Crowdfunding and self-publishing platforms
| are in this direction. This seems to me like it's already working
| fairly well in some cases to fund people's work, but then the
| attention market is not great at highlighting the more reliable
| voices, which is similar to the problem in point #2.
| truSo wrote:
| [dead]
| b8 wrote:
| Trust, but verify. This also reminds me of, "There's no truth in
| the news and no news in the truth".
| pessimizer wrote:
| Journalists these days are generally _not hired_ for their
| incredulity. They 're hired based on a track record of not
| deviating from their employer's political and financial
| priorities, regardless of the evidence. These are businesses, not
| public services. They owe their existence to dishonest and
| manipulative presentations of the qualities of third-party
| products that they sandwich between their own content.
|
| Lets go back to the days where media outlets were open about
| their editorial stances, rather than hiding them behind a veil of
| white-coated objectivity. Propagandists should stop pretending to
| be doctors, and just be _honest_ propagandists.
|
| Putting it all on Democrats isn't completely fair, although I get
| how bitter Silver is that they sanctified him when he told them
| what they wanted to hear and condemned him when the data pointed
| the other way. It could have just as easily been the Republicans
| in control of those institutions now if the party weren't so
| hostile to minorities.
|
| That hostility cut them off from dominance of the nonprofit
| sector, which serves to convert the money of governments (i.e.
| the will of elected officials) and oligarchs into media messages.
| They're stuck with thinktanks and veteran's organizations,
| although they sometimes find openings in patient's rights
| nonprofits (run by pharmaceutical companies.)
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| Yes additionally journalists are a sort of priestly caste in
| our secular society.
|
| I'm personally not a fan as there's a lot of self-anointed
| representation by journos: "We're the voice of the people!" No
| you are not my voice! You are not elected! You are the voice of
| advertisers, your business and your political interests!
| jimbokun wrote:
| The Republicans absolutely have their own media organizations,
| just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's biased
| towards Republican interests.
|
| It's just that the expectations are so low for them no one is
| surprised when they report things with an obvious slant or just
| factually wrong.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > The Republicans absolutely have their own media
| organizations
|
| Everybody has their own media organizations.
|
| > just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's
| biased towards Republican interests.
|
| This is both the law of averages, and also not relevant even
| if you had a good reason for saying it. I'm not saying the
| Republicans are any more honest than the Democrats (god
| forbid.) The Democrats are generally pushing for the same
| policies as the Republicans, except in matters that split
| their bases; we're still living in Reagan's world. Democrats
| are dominant now because they control nonprofits that are
| funded by the government and because they are supported by
| more billionaires. No other reason.
|
| 20 years from now it could be the Republicans in that
| position. It isn't like they don't have the ability; their
| takeover of state governments and redistricting is basically
| the same sort of tactic.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > and because they are supported by more billionaires. No
| other reason.
|
| If we take the 2022 House races, republican's House PAC
| received $79 million from 42 billionaires or their spouses,
| while democrat's House PAC received only $20 million from
| 17 billionaires or their spouses.
|
| The numbers might play a little differently if you look at
| all donations to party affiliated PACs and individual
| campaigns but it doesn't seem like it reverses the overall
| trend.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/article/meet-the-
| bill...
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-billionaires-
| politic...
| stubybubs wrote:
| >The Democrats are generally pushing for the same policies
| as the Republicans, except in matters that split their
| bases; we're still living in Reagan's world.
|
| I don't think this is true anymore. See what Lina Khan was
| appointed to do and is doing with the FTC. It's the first
| step in a long road of undoing decades of Reaganism.
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-
| trouble/#the-...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is actually an excellent article. If you look at why he says
| the lab-leak theory was problematic for these "journalists" (and
| the quotes are deliberate), none of the reasons are "it isn't
| true":
|
| 1. It could cause a political backlash
|
| 2. It could upset China and undermine research collaborations
|
| 3. It could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who
| touted the theory
|
| But in fact, the journalist's _only_ legitimate question is "is
| it true?" The consequences of reporting on it are not their
| concern.
|
| There was a time when journalists thought that way, or at least
| made a show of it. That time might have been a few brief decades,
| but it was there.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| define journalist:
|
| 1. an independent youtuber, who gives their opinion, can admit
| their bias, and is able to operate on good faith while allowing
| open discussions with people they disagree with
|
| 2. a corporate "journalist" who's integrity has become second
| rate in the age of the internet, who uses language as an
| instrument to get people to admit what they want them to admit in
| the most petty way possible
|
| i can agree with 1, i don't think 2 fits the definition
| _anymore_. it used to be the best we had for a few decades, but
| that age is over now. i don 't think 1 has any problem with
| admitting what should be an area of skepticism. however, i don't
| think that 2 is actually a journalist as they're not motivated to
| share information, they're instead motivated by the narratives of
| their employer
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| Yes this. Additionally (1) has no "higher caste" mentality.
| Whereas (2) often believe themselves to be the anointed truth-
| sayers of a secular world. Generally speaking they don't live
| up to that promise.
| Thoeu388 wrote:
| [flagged]
| rvz wrote:
| Goes without saying. "Trusted" sources can also spin stories to
| the general public and conflicts of interests can happen which
| the established media can close ranks to protect each other.
|
| Presenting all sides paints the entire picture.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I don't think Journalists have the skills to be able to actually
| dig into and verify most types of science. So I don't think it's
| realistic to hold them to such a high standard.
|
| But they absolutely do have the skills to shape the narrative.
| And In this case they failed spectacularly. Many seemed overly
| eager to attack and destroy any who came to a different
| conclusion. It seems like they took glee in it. Their behaviour
| was embarrassing, and there appears to have been very little
| acknowledgement or self reflection of this.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Journalist shouldn't be surprised why there is huge drop in trust
| in mainstream media. Covid exposed perfectly how terrible quick
| journalism is.
| ctrlp wrote:
| Nate Silver fundamentally misunderstands his own role in the
| information ecosystem. He and other journalists are primarily
| votaries to the mainline political myths of our time. This idea
| that they _should_ be skeptical is laughable on its face. They
| _can 't_ do that, not meaningfully. Mostly, they can't actually
| _think_ outside the religion, but even if they could they can 't
| write skeptically without losing their careers.
|
| There is an Overton window, and journalists are the Cerberus of
| the ideological superstructure of our society. If you're not
| familiar, Cerberus guards the gates of the Underworld and ensures
| that the spirits of the dead cannot leave the Underworld and that
| the living cannot enter it. That's basically the function of
| "journalists". Mainline newspapers and their scribblers share all
| the limitations of the governing classes and they never willingly
| place themselves in minority positions.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| While there are some (many) like that, I don't believe that
| Nate Silver is one of them.
| ctrlp wrote:
| but why?
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| If you don't trust 'em, don't read 'em. The problem will solve
| itself.
| papito wrote:
| There are professional journalists out there who in most
| organizations will get into hot water or lose their jobs if they
| fabricate news or sources.
|
| They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them
| will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact
| checkers - this is the best we have.
|
| Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that
| "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from
| @HotJerseyGirl1998.
| [deleted]
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