If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how newscycles and the news work.
If you'd knew both, you would definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience.
A science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit -- could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the problem illustrated here.
>> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience
What is this need of which you speak?
Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news" sections?
Scientific American is already scraping the bottom of the barrel. You can’t trust any publication to be written in good faith.
> Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.
> It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.”
> Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years.
> Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.
Like any good nerd kid of the early 90s I read Discover magazine. Looking back I see that it was filled with breathless coverage of the discoveries of a decade ago, rehashes of 101-level science, and a few newsy articles about a current topic. There was always a little bit of red meat for people like dinosaur enthusiasts and space futurists. Many topics would get recycled a year or two later.
I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop.
I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization.
One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.
>"science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop."
For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.
Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research connects to a persons lived experience.
Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.
I don’t disagree that it may be worse in case of science but just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one of the areas where pure capitalism doesn’t work well.
It's also not a new phenomenon. Watch this BBC documentary that covers the history of news reporting and it goes back to the early days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0
yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit for the 4th estate. For something that is required so essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we don't publicly fund more news.
I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.
True but news media also knew less more slowly because everyday people on the ground had no way to make stories public through cell phone or a video on social media. And before the 24 hour news cycle, there was less expectation for the most immediate reporting.
Or not. They had a lot more resources before everybody started leeching the newspapers' contents, and offering free escapism. Yes, the internet is certainly to blame for the decline in journalism.
It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as bad as the news in your area of expertise.
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever.
But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. And the journalist might not have had those years, despite them having to explain it in a simpler way to an audience which might even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at times for them (understandably so).
Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very simple fashion requires more proficiency in that subject, not less.
Weather news is ok if you are outside the weather industry - but to those in the industry the forecasts are simplistic and biased, and the news doesn’t generally cover developments in forecasting technology or technique. The broader topic of climate in popular news is known to be a total shit show however (not just science, also policy etc).
For what it’s worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to wild stabs in the dark.
Until weather reporting became mostly automated, most news agencies had a policy of never reporting a chance of rain as being less than 20%. If it was 8%, it was always rounded up to 20%. If you remember seeing "20% of rain" excessively most of your life, this is why. Some of them still do this, especially with on the air reports by a human.
> But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation.
This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.
"Terrible" reportage can indeed mean getting quotes wrong and basic established facts incorrect.
But it also covers simplifying things for a (somewhat educated) lay audience, making decisions about what to include and exclude, and including perspectives that some experts may take issue with.
Certainly, it would be nice if many journalists had a better background in what they're writing about. But it's also a case that experts can have unreasonable expectations about the depth and nuance of something written for the more or less general public.
I think the nature of science reporting exacerbates it.
The "Science Section" of your local paper covers an absolutely massive range of topics: astronomy one week, zoology the next, and everything in between. Nobody--literally nobody--has the breadth of expertise to do all of those fields justice.
The rest of the paper has a more consistent focus. If you covered last year's debate over gun control, that background carries over to this week's debate. The players change slowly too--some of the folks in Congress have been there for decades.
It's true, many of the problems Sabine Hossenfelder cited about science news apply just as well to news about any topic.
But is the news categorically "bad"? No.
Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists, stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on with those topics.
Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect the general public to spend the time and effort to read them.
There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives, but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening and satisfy some curiosity.
> We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise.
This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia", that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the whole story. There are different incentives at play. Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the research domain. It is in universities' interests to present research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight. Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because consequences and causalities are hard.
I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news = ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-by-domain basis.
I think the operative trope is more Sturgeon's Law than Gell-Mann Amnesia. I had a period where I was reading obsessively about Covid, including reading papers and listing to TWiV (which is very informative but requires a massive time commitment). What I found is that the best of the science journalists (Helen Branswell, Jon Cohen, Kai Kupferschmidt, Amy Maxmen, Ed Jong) were excellent, writing with a deep understanding of the subject material and providing useful context. The median news story was just awful, and the WSJ and NYT opinion pages were for the most part a dumpster fire ("There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave'" is a masterpiece, chef's kiss).
I've generally found the same thing is true in other domains. Seek out writers who know their stuff. They exist, they're just not consistently the most popular.
It's actually better when stated without this 'name' like in the GP because then its weird nihilism and tropey-ness is more obvious. "Gell-Mann Amnesia" elevates a funny warmup bit Chrichton did in a talk once to something that sounds sophisticated and scientific.
But it's hard to know whether or not this is true. There's no obvious reason to suppose that journalism is doing equally badly in all fields.
I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or worse than what I am.
And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much more effort in there.
(Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I think it's bad for different reasons.)
I think this is true to some extent. The fundamental problem is that the majority of journalists are generalists with training mostly in writing. This may have worked in the past, but the world has become very specialized. Generalized knowledge with a hermeneutical approach to discovery just doesn’t cut it. Media organizations seem to have realized this when it comes to law where many analysts are now lawyers, and in medicine to a certain extent as well. But not in the social or hard sciences.
The good news is that we're about to have AI that can make anybody a geat writer, including any researcher whose reporting the general public finds boring and incomprehensible.
Nah, we've got AI that avoids the need for a researcher because instead of taking time to read the material you can use it as inputs to a neural network and get a near-instant response in the form of paraphrases of the key points and other statements which aren't true but involve enough relevant terms in syntactically correct English to get past a subeditor...
Good investigative journalism is usually quite the opposite. Some of my favorite pieces have times, dates, who, what, where etc and are firmly rooted in data.
There’s also a new sub-field that explores topics through data and they’re usually quite excellent.
Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it’s difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite example is the article series about illegal plutonium experiments by the US Government on civilians where they injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children with plutonium just to see what would happen.
> The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere.
If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and were about events that had happened in the past. It’s much more difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the “all news is bad” perception comes from.
News can be great. Given enough time and research.
I dunno if that's strictly true. Many fields can be reasonably covered with some minimal training. The hard sciences, though, are constantly changing so much that even practitioners in the same field of science can barely keep up in peer review... much less scientists from other disciplines, and much less poorly-paid journalists without dedicated science training. And these days, so many of the findings are subtle and perhaps somewhat interesting in a purely scientific sense, but have to be hyped up in marketing dept PRs to make the general news cycle at all.
The issue compounds when poorly trained, poorly paid journalists interview scientists and then misreport and misquote their findings, leading to a loss of a trust, the next interview being less detailed, etc. It's a vicious cycle of dumbing down and hyping up, all to fit our clickbait-sized attention spans.
Is there an easy way around it? I doubt it. You're essentially reporting bleeding-edge findings from leading PhDs flailing under a publish-or-perish model, to an audience who mostly has not touched science since middle school (if even then). People don't even know why they should CARE about science, much less what your margins of error and P-values are, etc.
Maybe reporters just shouldn't be reporting on every little paper but rather universities should have a media department with scientists that handles press releases so they don't suck ass
The problem is that they caused that reporting. No PR about superluminal neutrinos, no hysterical reporting about them. This would have given the community time to find the bad connection which caused the bad data.
I'm sure that would go down well, I mean what better way to make enemies at your university than by publishing critical reviews of your colleagues work in a public press release. A better idea would be to have the anonymous peer reviews published as an addendum to each paper, that would be fun. Also highlight whether or not the work was published in a 'private club' journal with lax standards or not. Maybe interview the lab techs as anonymous sources to see what kind of standards the lab really operates with? Do some investigative journalism? Cue furious PIs demanding the entire media relations department be fired...
University media relations departments are just not going to to point out flaws in the work of their own PI-led research groups, they're in the business of fluffing their reputations, because that means they might get more students, more grants, more positive media coverage, etc. It's a business these days, isn't it? Corporate PR professionals are running that show more often than not.
I agree with essentially everything you say, although I would hope we could figure out a way to structure our research organizations to prevent that sort of bias but having a dedicated scientific reporting organization of some kind that does serious due diligence I think could definitely work
Universities do. But they're biased and try to hype up the science.
Reporters are supposed to sort through that and find the good ones. It's just not easy.
You can try it yourself sometime if you'd like. Choose a field of science, comb through a year (or a month's) worth of primary liteature on Google Scholar and Sci Hub, along with press releases from research labs, without resorting to secondary sources like blogs and science news. See if you can pick out the top 10 stories in any given time period and accurately summarize them for an 8th grade reading level. Email competing labs and other experts to get contrary opinions. Write it all up within a day or two, per article. Try to get it published somewhere, and get paid for it if you can. It's not an easy job...
I’ve been ignoring most news since about mid January. My thought was that if it’s important enough, I’ll find out eventually, and I’ll reduce the amount of information noise going into my brain. That’s turned out to be true. But another unexpected effect was that it’s become much easier to spot bad news outside of my expertise. I’m center-left, and find it pretty easy to pick out nonsense from the right, but looking at centrist and left wing news now (even “good” sources) is horrifying. What passes for reason is astounding. I think that without the daily firehouse of bias reinforcement, it’s really helped me to see that, yeah, all news is really really terrible, and probably does more harm than good.
Perhaps the motive is that we want to see better science reporting and are dismayed when the media fails to do its job of producing accurate and informative journalism.
Who cares what the chuckleheads are saying? Better to ignore them and focus on substantive criticism. Attempting to divine the motives of morons is a waste of time and it distracts from issues that really do matter (of course, for some, that's exactly the point of focusing on the stupidities of extreme positions—they divert attention from genuine problems).
very good points, especially about focus on 'consensus' which seems to be a consequence of US reception of global warming but has become a standard in discourse about science ...
I would also argue that science sucks in it's current state as well. It's all about Hirsch-Index. Looking as scientific and complicated as possible, so other scientist want to quote you and the Hirsch-Index rises. Also if numbers don't fit, they will be made fit. Fake or not doesn't really matter because no one will ever read it anyways. See the auto generating tools for papers and positive submission of them. This is by all means not the case for all scientist. There are lots of good, talented people there. But they get overshadowed by the previous mentioned.
It's like this. (Not that it needs to be stated. We all know this.) The Delta Airline pilot union today put out a terse, two paragraph letter to the public, blaming the airline for their forced overtime and subsequent flight delays. There were hundreds of news articles about this, all of which strung out the lead into several paragraphs and doled out a few sentences of this bland letter. Most of them did not link to the actual letter. By reading the articles you would notice a few things:
1. They were all written by barely sentient hominids, or possibly AIs who were tasked at 4am with turning a very short letter into a clickbait story
2. None of these hominids had actually read the letter in a linear way
3. None of them had the slightest reason to think you would read all the way to the end of the article they were writing.
Take this form of 'journalism' and apply it to anything about black holes, quantum physics, strawberry ultra harvest moons, yesterday's Wordle, inflation, riots, covid, etc. and you basically have the recipe for (a) a severely bewildered population and (b) an extremely frustrated small group of people trying to hack through all this bullshit to obtain some idea of what, if anything, is actually going on.
Thanks for submitting that link. It was a very interesting perspective although I doubt that the author (or Bourdieu, or both) really understands the nature of the Art MarketS (with a capital S to emphasize that it is not just one market but several, with similarities and differences).
Eg, in the text it is presented as if the actual producer (artist) is somehow involved in the value adding while in most Art markets I know of the production is really removed from the actual value chain and the market is largely a market that adds value starting on the second sale, ie. after the producer has lost touch with the value chain. Also, Art as such was really tangential to the subject matter of Media and Journalism.
So, that part of the article could have been left out, as it brings no extra clarity - especially as the main point was not really about market value for the product (neither Journalism nor Art) but instead market value for the producer (either "Artist" or "Liberal Arts Graduate" on a totally different market: The Job Market.
Still, it was an interesting read, and it did add another piece to the puzzle of "understanding some of the reasons we as a civilization are steadily losing our grip on reality" (here, I assume that "we" and "civilization" is lacking the unstated specifier "USA/American")
In short, I guess, reporting scales with the complexity of the field, contrast war reports, and "science" is a very big field at that, and by the way it's self referential when reports report and analyse reports.
PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as definition space)
Maybe the beginning of the solution is to start by hosting your science articles on a paid domain, with a short and easy to remember name.
Once you do that, you can maybe start complaining.
There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article:
1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no journalist would want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong, when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments.
2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative 'truth'.
Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're doing[2], how can journalists keep up?
I’m sympathetic to the argument but Taleb’s writing is horrendous. He doesn’t explain things well at all, seems to mainly criticize strawman datasets, and primarily engages in ad hominems against anyone that doesn’t agree with him.
> 2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down.
It's such a bizarre argument to simultaneously acknowledge that The Science is often wrong yet double down on manipulating the public with this idea that scientific consensus equals Truth. In my view, this practice adulterates science into a technical sophistry that serves as a fifth column for a political agenda. But the root cause here is that science itself is corrupted by the desire to effect change. That is the realm of politics and if scientists want to stop losing trust, they will get out of the business of "ought".
Not too be overly negative but Hossenfelder herself is a good example. She posted many authoritative-sounding videos about topics where she has little knowledge and it shows quickly. She’s a walking illustration of Gell-Mann amnesia. But clicks are good for her business, just as they’re good for the business of newspapers.
> ... stories about how the increasing temperatures from climate change kill people in heat waves, but fail to mention that the same increasing temperatures also save lives because fewer people freeze to death. Yeah, I don’t trust any of these sources.
This is not sourced, but then again it is also not science.
A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news website.
Most journalists had no science background, and were pressured into writing 4 articles a day.
The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied press releases with no critical thinking. They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.
I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.
Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something, then that's surely better than filling millions of peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?
It’s easier to talk about feeding children to ignore stuff like out of control military acquisition or allowing oil companies to pillage public lands for peanuts.
Something that should be noted here is that our brains won't work properly without adequate nutrition. Our neurons require plenty of potassium to operate and other minerals such as magnesium and zinc. On top of that essential fatty acids and amino acids are super important for making neurotransmitters
All of this gets ignored because the poors deserve it or some stupid nonsense thrown around by the people with money and power
> What's the point in paying for school lunches for kids who have no interest in learning?
Because the state requires them to be there anyway, so it's the state's responsibility to ensure they are well fed? Academic performance has no bearing on whether somebody deserves food.
Even with your cynicism — and from your argument, why send them to school at all? — food is so cheap that paying for everyone’s school meals (even if they could afford it without help or hate learning) is a really cheap way to help those that are interested but can’t afford to eat well.
Let me use UK costs as an example, to show how cheap school lunches are compared to all the other aspects of education, because I don’t know the USA well enough: If I assume £2/school lunch (mine were £1, but that was the 90s), and if the school year is still 39 weeks, that’s £390/year, or £11,700 per year for a class of 30, compared to a qualified teacher’s starting salary of £25,714 (head teachers go up to £125,098 in London), and then you need to add the cost of books, and consumables, and the building itself, and insurance, and support staff (HR, caretakers, supply teachers).
Sorry, but news organizations aren't out there doing what the public wants. Most of them are doing what will get attention. That is very different. The public doesn't want to have to give them attention, but when they say things like "X cures cancer" or "X is a threat to your children" it makes people listen. When the article turns out to be nothing, a small fraction of the people you fooled turn off your channel forever, and the rest just say "this was a waste" and go on to read the next piece of clickbait.
This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently.
What the public wants and what tricks people into giving you attention are different things. Journalists today go for the latter, which is why we have all of these "alternative" news sources now.
> This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently.
I'd love a browser extension that shows me a crowd-sourced batting average for the author of any article I'm reading online. Something that tells me "Oh, you're reading an article written by journalist Joe Schmoe? Joe has previously written 400 breathless articles about scientists discovering space aliens"
I know I know, technical solution to a social problem. And curating these crowdsourced article tags and statistics would probably be an intractable nightmare. It probably can't hurt much to try though. I think the fundamental problem is there are too many journalists for many individual journalists to develop a reputation in the minds of readers. I read several hundred, maybe a few thousand articles a year, but I could only tell you the names of a handful of journalists at best. There must be some way for technology to help bridge this gap.
I've heard of newsguard and ground news. Both are biased in favor of "reputable" sources who should have been punished for fake news and haven't (USA Today, NY Times).
The idea sounds good, but I don't think it could work in the real world. The result wouldn't be people endorsing the quality of an article, but rather whether the article weighs on their political side of an issue
Nautilus is actually an example that supports how in-depth science reporting can be difficult to monetize. I really like many of their articles in the publication, but there was a major incident a while back when they were severely (many months, even longer than a year) behind on paying their writers.
It's the difference between the government justifying the funding and politicians (who control the budget) justifying funding. The government could easily justify funding as its own in-house journalism team that processes raw scientific publications into information usable by various government agencies. Politicians, instead, pander to voters with their cost/benefit metrics.
The behavior we see due to the private ownership of media and news publishers betrays the colossal failure it is for the public and nations at large to have our society's self-reporting undermined by profit motives. News and media need to be treated as protected speech, with more formalization and more regulation. Leaving the governance of our society's self reporting to greedy Capitalists is a clear and active recipe for doublespeak and fascism.
On the contrary, letting the government determine what comes through the media is the recipe for fascism. As evidence, consider that the first thing that any authoritarian regime does is to take control of the media.
The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours is to consider what the impact of it will be when your political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable with Donald Trump (or really, anyone of his faction) having this power?
Who said "government control"? I said more regulation. Of course letting any one power source control society's self conversation is bad. We need to accept the concept that regulation exists because the alternative is worse, and that includes regulation of how the news is delivered and the rights of those collecting information for news reporting. As it stands, society expects "good journalists" to give their lives to report the truth the public needs to understand how far our lack of regulation has allowed things to become.
Yes, they are, and in practice regulations exist not because some evil bureaucrat wants to oppress free enterprise; regulations exist because one or more parties abused a freedom to the degree their behavior's impacts harmed others enough for laws to be written.
The profit motive does a poor job of handling the externalities journalism should be addressing. But govt control of the media landscape to the degree you're talking about can easily hamstring the important adversarial function journalism has vis-a-vis govt.
It's a very hard problem, and there are no obvious or pat solutions.
Not government control, more regulation in the form of transparencies towards what gets reported and what does not, protections for investigative news journalists and whistleblowers, and no more masquerading entertainment as news journalism. Just as cigarettes have warnings about lung health, Fox News should have warnings about "not journalism, entertainment and the political opinion of Robert Murdoch".
Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism. We want it to be free which means ads. NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model. But to be clear, they are surely not immune. They are still run by people who are judged by views and reach and other eyeball metrics. We don't really want news anymore. We want our preconceived notions affirmed (we like to be "right") and we want to be entertained. Unfortunately, we get what we've asked for.
NPR's science reporting has been abysmal for the past few years. Maybe they don't have the click-bait problem (debatable), but they routinely report everything one side of the political spectrum says as scientific fact. They also fall victim to the "experts say..." and "scientific consensus is..." tropes. Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter.
I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.
Twitter influence is now a not-insignificant leg up in faculty hiring and academic politics. It’s becoming really hard to take academic science seriously.
>"Their "scientific expert" source list looks suspiciously like a group of the loudest voices on Twitter."
That's probably where the journalists find people to interview, likely because a large majority of journalists are active on Twitter.
This definitely isn't the only place, because there are free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source: https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting journalists to researchers. Many universities also have their own expert directories set up, and journalists can also find papers and contact their authors.
However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people who market their research more on Twitter may be more likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.
What really sucks is some funders are becoming interested in metrics that track social media engagement and other forms of attention, rewarding Twitter punditry.
> Exactly this. It is all about click bait to drive digital advertising. It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.
I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni donations, etc..)
IMO: People that write well are not jumping at the chance to write science articles for universities. Writing is hard and science is hard, and being passionate about both is rare.
It's not that rare, but the problem is that a lot of people who are outsiders, yet who truly understand science and then write about it, often end up becoming quite sceptical of it. Just like how journalists who understand politics end up sceptical. The difference is, journalists holding politicians to account is well understood to be a critical part of democracy, but for science it's the opposite. If journalists start asking tough questions they're immediately evicted from the best known institutions because scientists (academics) have done a great job of convincing those in power that doubting scientists in any way is immoral and dangerous.
So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.
In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".
It would help if journalists would hold anyone's feet to the fire these days. Science journalism is so bad at this that it seems to drive scientists to create low-quality studies.
Retraction Watch (source: https://retractionwatch.com) and independent consultants like Elisabeth Bik (article about her in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z) are good for this, though they aren't really traditional media. ProPublica and large newspapers (e.g. The New York Times occasionally) do publish investigative work on science topics sometimes too.
You would be surprised. Universities pay substantially better than newspapers (likely with better job security), and writing jobs are typically hard to find and low-paying in general. Many former experienced journalists end up working at university press departments because of the better working conditions.
From an enjoyment side, writing is hard, but for a lot of people, it's much easier than research. There are fewer credentials needed for a career in science journalism versus scientific research (a Bachelor's only versus a PhD for many senior scientist positions). I know a lot of people who have a natural skill at writing who decided to major in a science field for one reason or another, performed okay-ish at their courses, and tried to get back to writing work.
The end result is also similar writing for a magazine/newspaper versus a university. A university may have higher standards for accuracy and precision (especially if an interviewed scientist wants to review it, while a newspaper/magazine may have a policy to avoid sharing drafts to avoid bias in the article). However, higher-end magazines (like the New Yorker) have more prestige. There is also far less room at universities for dissent (e.g. presenting an opposing scientific view or publishing investigative work).
University press departments are (indirectly) funded by grant agencies. Thus, it is strongly in their interests to convey to those agencies that their institution is doing groundbreaking work.
Well first off, this is an informal discussion. Secondly:
> It is ALL about click bait to drive digital advertising
(Emphasis my own.) Science reporting is still crap even when it isn't funded by advertising, so there's obviously more going on than the funding model making things shit. The BBC and CBC both have crappy science reporting too, as do university press departments. These counter-examples refute the claim which was stated too strongly (I do think advertising plays some role in it, but obviously not all.)
> NPR/PBS tends to have better and more balanced news but it is largely because of their donor/patron model.
This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a correlation with manner of funding.
NPR used to be my main news source until around 2016. Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors), they put out a lot of important stories that criticized both sides of the aisle. Then they got a serious case of TDS.
> Despite the bias in their funding source (~90% left-leaning donors)
Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.
This is a highly simplistic and an ideologically-flattering (it's pretty obvious you subscribe to left wing views) picture you paint of the situation. Here's a mirror image of it your alternate right wing self might be saying on another HN in another universe:
?>>>? Right leaning politics need trust worthy news to survive, left leaning politics don't as their goal is to upset tradition and revolt on the status quo. If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create chaos, choas is the bread of revolution and malcontent.
As you can see, this sort of "I define my side to be the more accurate view of reality" is highly malleable and can be used to support any side with semi-convincing "just so" stories.
And you're not actually describing the left-wing/right-wing divide here (itself a highly simplistic and outdated view of politics and economics dating from more than a century), you're describing the conservative/progressive divide, which tends to correlate with the left/right divide in the US, which might be where you are from. But even there the correlation is not perfect, Trump for example was fairly 'progressive' in his populist politics, his extensive engagement with the public on Twitter was a very novel form of presidential press releases that upseted many traditions and angered many political conservatives. See how conservative/progressive is multi-dimensional ?, you're just too used to a few dominant dimensions being coorelated with a left\right slant.
Furthermore, even accepting the dubious renaming of conservative\progressive to right-wing\left-wing, it's still a leap of faith from here to assuming that the progressive side always benefits from representing truth and reality as it is. In fact, this is almost gauranteed to be false, because even if conservatives are randomly guessing, they would still get roughly 50% of the world right, and since progressives always oppose conservatives in this hyper-polarized political climate, they are gauranteed to be wrong that 50% of the time. This seems to be supported by reality as being a progressive is associated with a higher chance of believing there are 700 genders and that biological males are women, so there must be at least some situations where progressives ("Left-Wing" in your parlance) benefit from a mis-representation of reality.
Not at all, tradition and status quo needs maintaining just as much as revolution needs mobilising. The 'inertia' metaphor is misleading: humans die, if nobody educates\indoctrinates (depending on your view) the new generation then tradition dies off. Furthermore, the world keeps changing, constantly putting tradition and the status quo on the defensive, if nobody expends energy to constantly reinvent and adapt traditions, they will gradually become irrelevant.
It refers to when a media outlet thinks that everything the Trump admin does is an unprecedented terrible action, even when that thing is humanitarian aid or peace treaties in the middle east.
> It is largely our own fault. We (by and large) don't want to pay good journalism.
It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.
I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.
> I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while.
What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I think one of the argument is that you would see more of those decent articles if people were more enclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers.
>"you would see more of those decent articles if people were more inclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers."
I think this argument holds up. For example, publications like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly, versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.
Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are, but I found myself struggling to justify such a subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-tainment. The publications that can more easily get people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people make more money or find career success, which is why industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend to be more financially successful.
It is not "largely our own fault", this situation has been engineered by the billionaires and the rest of the media and political power brokers specifically to create anxiety and confusion in the general public. Perfect preparation for eternal political divisions and whatever distracting whims they choose: War in Russia? Celebrity divorce! Planet on fire? Race on commercializing space! How's about an official Olympics digital coin and NFT series? Why not?
There's a bunch of millionaires who have broken off from legacy news to make written and/or podcast style news content. We're willing to pay for quality work, but the legacy news isn't creating it.
> I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.
Why wouldn’t you blame people who voluntarily took a job writing science articles while having zero credentials? They could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on science specifically.
I once went to a journalism conference, and there was a panel where a professional science journalist strongly pushed for the view along the lines of, "you don't need a science background to be a science writer," instead of encouraging aspiring journalists to study the relevant background over the years.
I'm sure a view against credentials isn't shared by all journalists (for example, many publications do require a relevant background), but that experience was personally disheartening because it seemed to be supported in the room.
I was also disheartened by the focus on self-marketing and self-promotion in general over doing quality, accurate journalism, and a much bigger focus on having a good "narrative" and writing engagingly versus having a discussion on ethics. To some extent, I get it, because the advice likely works in helping someone succeed in their career. But there are clearly problems in science news related to precision and accuracy, and not much drive in many publications to fix it.
>"Another problem with sources is that science news also frequently just repeats press releases without actually saying where they got their information from. It’s a problem because university press releases aren’t exactly unbiased."
This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3 or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually understand the papers that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a background in optics is better situated than most to understand an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they're still going to have to bang their heads against several walls to figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying from a press release doesn't.
And those press releases are often written by university PR offices without a clear understanding of the research they're promoting, and the articles repeating those press releases frequently get copied poorly by other science publications. It's a game of telephone all the way down.
> They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.
I remember a story from a famous freelance investigative journalist who found evidence of disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 election. He collected a huge amount of evidence and testimony, and sent it to news outlets across the US. Most of them came back with:
"Uh, we contacted the <person/group accused>, and they're denying this. We're not going to run the story."
Who'd have thought people accused of nefarious, potentially illegal activities would deny doing them?
I wonder about this because allocation of money in the world is uneven, and people get paid LOTS of money to work for wall street, but very little for worthy journalism.
I think good scientific journalism might be something where funding is not proportional to benefit to society. Also things like investigating regulatory capture.
this is largely a reaction to the old stereotypical attitude towards science: i.e. nerdy and uncool and for boring people. news sources - in some ways admirably - have tried to make it more interesting for the general public. they've achieved this, but at a pretty high cost, which are the points laid out in this article.
considering the size of the scientific community (i.e. people who could tell you what a confidence interval is) vs the size of the general news-reading population, I'd suggest that the likely alternative to a lot of the science reporting referred to in the article is not better science reporting, but less of it overall. sadly, these companies are simply meeting a demand from a relatively uneducated population a large proportion of whom's brains will switch off at the sight of the words "confidence interval"
my suggested solution to this is more public investment in the news industry. more grants for independent journalism
The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. put your dates at the top, cite your sources...)
As a side note, I hate how her channel has become something which exemplifies much of what I dislike about the now typical youtube channels: Top ten lists, grossly overstated titles, "give me your opinion in the comments", the awful generic CGI backgrounds ...
The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.
I feel differently about her work. I think she is doing the less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there. She spends time deflating amazing claims. The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy expositions and is definitely not academic grade but it shouldn’t be! She is making pithy responses to headline grabbing sensational mainstream hype reporting. There is an audience for that and she caters to it. You don’t like her aesthetic, fine. That’s a valid opinion but it doesn’t invalidate her work or make her the equivalent of what she is criticising. Headlines are to grab attention and sorry but that’s a fact for YouTube, trade books and even peer reviewed papers. The content is what ultimately should be judged and her content is high quality for what it aims to be. Want academic level peer reviewed literature? Go read a paper, text book or take a course.
The issue for me with her videos is that she mixes two very different kinds of criticism.
The first is criticism of things that are clearly wrong, such as the aforementioned science journalism. This is a good public service, I agree.
The second is criticism of other physicists’ ideas. i.e. her personal opinions and professional disagreements with other physicists.
She doesn’t delineate the two clearly enough to her audience, so some of her viewers may come away thinking that views that are held by physicists who are her peers, are in the same bucket as junk pop science articles. Just read the comments on her videos, they are full of “physics is a scam” type people who feel vindicated.
On top of that, in her more recent videos I get a weird feeling of her leaving some things purposefully ambiguous for that audience.
For example in the video to this article she was using a lot of climate science examples, which will be interpreted in a certain way by the "science is a scam" crowd. I'm not sure she is doing this on purpose (I have the impression she strongly believes in climate change), accidentally or if I'm just oversensitive to some things.
I think it's normal and expected that people who are skeptical are looking for people who will take their questions and concerns seriously.
I am very personally convinced of anthropogenic climate change and that it's a serious risk for humanity. I still believe that it's important to take people's questions seriously, and to respect that people who aren't convinced have been making their best attempt at understanding the world. For these people, biased stories that don't put numbers in context are seen as deceptive, and I think that perception is legitimate. The only way to actually meaningfully reach them is to credibly demonstrate that you're actually checking the evidence that disagrees with your conclusion.
I really don’t think it’s her problem to fix that the crazies latch on to it. I have no problem getting when she is offering a view or criticising consensus. And to be honest it seems you don’t either.
I sort of agree and disagree with you. I think generally you are correct we do need more Sabines not fewer.
However, I disagree that what she does is the "less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there". The sort of takedowns she does are quite popular and very easy to do. However, my criticism is that quite a few of them are superficial and fall essentially into the same traps that she criticises, i.e. the actual topic is much too complex to either present or take down without a more comprehensive in-depth discussion (which would be much less popular).
Now this is still somewhat ok if she's the expert on the topic she is talking about as she has the expertise to know how good/bad the simplifications she makes are. However, recently she has started weighing in on topics where she not an expert at all: diesel fuel, antibiotic resistance, light pollution to name just 3 from the front page of her youtube channel. In this case things become quite problematic, because she is simplifying things that she might not have a full grasp of herself but still talks about like an expert.
> The medium of YouTube is not conducive to lengthy expositions
I've actually found a couple channels on YT specialising in lengthy reviews/essays, which I find very good. Off the top of my head:
1. Whitelight[1] - game reviews/critiques/analyses. Particularly worthy of note are the Assassin's Creed Unity[2] (1.5h), Batman Arkham City[3] (3h 10min) and Watch Dogs[4] (1h 15min) reviews.
2. MauLer[5] - critiques of mostly Star Wars, but sometimes also other mainstream films. The ongoing series of TFA critiques has 4 parts so far (there is going to be at least 6 total), each part taking anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.
I also feel that I'm forgetting some, which I don't watch regularly, but periodically am reminded about their existence and then after a long break spend several days watching, to then forget about them again.
But the channels I listed aren't fringe. Quite the contrary, they're quite popular. I think it's also interesting that one of, if not the most popular Vsauce video is the one about the Banach-Tarski paradox[6], which is almost 30 minutes long. His other videos also show this trend, where the long-form ones seem to get more views in general.
And those are just essays/reviews/etc. There is a whole genre of podcasts on youtube dedicated to 3-4h in-depth interviews. Everybody knows a whole bunch of them, therefore I don't even need to list any examples here to support that.
So it seems that YouTube is a pretty good place for long-form in-depth exploration of whatever topic (as long as you don't say "fuck", "murder" or show a human body).
I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest was "top players in quantum computing"
> awful generic CGI backgrounds
That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel. Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
> give me your opinion in the comments
Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
> I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest was "top players in quantum computing"
The whole premise of the video of this article is "I give you the ten reasons why I think science suck". Sure it's not in the title (which is even more polarizing), but it's still a top ten list.
>> awful generic CGI backgrounds
> That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel. Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
She could just be sitting at her desk though, but I agree this is more aesthetics
and it would have not grated me if it wasn't for the other things
>> give me your opinion in the comments
> Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
That's exactly my point. I don't necessarily blame her, but am more lamenting the fact that all videos seem to have to become like this, if a creator wants to make a living on youtube.
> Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
I'm not sure, her work is definitely not on par with quanta magazine for example.
The article is simply glossing over the fact that a lot of "science news" is lies to make it sound like someone just invented the warp drive to sell stories. It's because the education system around us is so bad that if they mentioned half of these things (or heaven forbid basic stats) on the news people would either switch off or decry you as a modern day witch...
I subscribed to Nature magazine, and I don't see that it ,,sucks so much''. The answer is simple: you get what you pay for.
Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any specific area of science...some of my favourites:
- Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome)
- CrisprTalk (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8TW2xKYRqbLvfGaT783WQA/videos)... a retired guy with lots of lab experience going through clinical trial results, investing in CRISPR stocks and bashing ARK invest's stock picks
- Modern Healthspan interview with Gregory Fahy (the channel has lots of other interesting videos, but I'm less interested in supplements and more about future research reversing aging).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_OTIP7kjo&list=PLkfzM7KJv6vY68Fvw1g7l9vN9NqhW7Fay
Nature and Science took a big hit in my personal rating because they allow/encourage the publication of reviewer names for accepted papers. I think this will corrupt the review process in the long run. In addition with their clear money making agenda and limited preprint compatibility (this might have changed), I strongly prefer Physics Review Letters.
Why I am highly critical of Nature (and to somewhat lesser degree of Science) I do believe the review process needs much more transparency. I am not yet convinced that making reviews public will make much difference to the better, however saying it will corrupt the review process is completely missing how broken the process is right now, in particular for these high-impact journals. Some copernicus journals [1] (I have no association, never even published there) seem to follow some interesting ideas.
I don't think it's that broken in nuclear physics. sure there are bad reviewers, but it's on the editors to sort that out. But opening the door to "that reviewer reviewed us favorably, so we have to do the same" is not good.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadA science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit -- could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the problem illustrated here.
What is this need of which you speak?
Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news" sections?
> Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist.
> It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america...
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline...
> Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years.
> Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.
I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop.
I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization.
One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.
For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.
Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.
I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever.
But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. And the journalist might not have had those years, despite them having to explain it in a simpler way to an audience which might even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at times for them (understandably so).
Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very simple fashion requires more proficiency in that subject, not less.
For what it’s worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to wild stabs in the dark.
Most people will interpret "8% of rain" as "it's not going to rain", and then be mad at the "inaccurate" weather report if it rains the next day.
This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.
But it also covers simplifying things for a (somewhat educated) lay audience, making decisions about what to include and exclude, and including perspectives that some experts may take issue with.
Certainly, it would be nice if many journalists had a better background in what they're writing about. But it's also a case that experts can have unreasonable expectations about the depth and nuance of something written for the more or less general public.
The "Science Section" of your local paper covers an absolutely massive range of topics: astronomy one week, zoology the next, and everything in between. Nobody--literally nobody--has the breadth of expertise to do all of those fields justice.
The rest of the paper has a more consistent focus. If you covered last year's debate over gun control, that background carries over to this week's debate. The players change slowly too--some of the folks in Congress have been there for decades.
I'd venture to say weather news is also alarmist and therefore bad, particularly during severe weather events and hyping up hurricane news.
But is the news categorically "bad"? No.
Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists, stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on with those topics.
Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect the general public to spend the time and effort to read them.
There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives, but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening and satisfy some curiosity.
This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia", that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the whole story. There are different incentives at play. Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the research domain. It is in universities' interests to present research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight. Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because consequences and causalities are hard.
I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news = ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-by-domain basis.
The only differentiator is to what degree. Gell-man amnesia is stating that all news has a high degree of it, not exactly equal amounts.
I've generally found the same thing is true in other domains. Seek out writers who know their stuff. They exist, they're just not consistently the most popular.
It's actually better when stated without this 'name' like in the GP because then its weird nihilism and tropey-ness is more obvious. "Gell-Mann Amnesia" elevates a funny warmup bit Chrichton did in a talk once to something that sounds sophisticated and scientific.
I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or worse than what I am.
And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much more effort in there.
(Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I think it's bad for different reasons.)
What I expect, is more wordy gibberish, that gives the impression of high level writing, but is not.
There’s also a new sub-field that explores topics through data and they’re usually quite excellent.
Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it’s difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite example is the article series about illegal plutonium experiments by the US Government on civilians where they injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children with plutonium just to see what would happen.
The articles forced disclosure from the US Govt. in the form of an executive order and led to the book, The Plutonium Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files
> The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere.
You should be able to read it here, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/86870...
Another great example is the assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program by the NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc...
It’s a beautiful example of great journalism.
If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and were about events that had happened in the past. It’s much more difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the “all news is bad” perception comes from.
News can be great. Given enough time and research.
The issue compounds when poorly trained, poorly paid journalists interview scientists and then misreport and misquote their findings, leading to a loss of a trust, the next interview being less detailed, etc. It's a vicious cycle of dumbing down and hyping up, all to fit our clickbait-sized attention spans.
Is there an easy way around it? I doubt it. You're essentially reporting bleeding-edge findings from leading PhDs flailing under a publish-or-perish model, to an audience who mostly has not touched science since middle school (if even then). People don't even know why they should CARE about science, much less what your margins of error and P-values are, etc.
University media relations departments are just not going to to point out flaws in the work of their own PI-led research groups, they're in the business of fluffing their reputations, because that means they might get more students, more grants, more positive media coverage, etc. It's a business these days, isn't it? Corporate PR professionals are running that show more often than not.
Reporters are supposed to sort through that and find the good ones. It's just not easy.
You can try it yourself sometime if you'd like. Choose a field of science, comb through a year (or a month's) worth of primary liteature on Google Scholar and Sci Hub, along with press releases from research labs, without resorting to secondary sources like blogs and science news. See if you can pick out the top 10 stories in any given time period and accurately summarize them for an 8th grade reading level. Email competing labs and other experts to get contrary opinions. Write it all up within a day or two, per article. Try to get it published somewhere, and get paid for it if you can. It's not an easy job...
But there are always chuckleheads in the comments smugly sowing distrust in all news media, journalism, and independent free press.
1. They were all written by barely sentient hominids, or possibly AIs who were tasked at 4am with turning a very short letter into a clickbait story
2. None of these hominids had actually read the letter in a linear way
3. None of them had the slightest reason to think you would read all the way to the end of the article they were writing.
Take this form of 'journalism' and apply it to anything about black holes, quantum physics, strawberry ultra harvest moons, yesterday's Wordle, inflation, riots, covid, etc. and you basically have the recipe for (a) a severely bewildered population and (b) an extremely frustrated small group of people trying to hack through all this bullshit to obtain some idea of what, if anything, is actually going on.
Oh. That reminds me. This was good:
https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that...
Eg, in the text it is presented as if the actual producer (artist) is somehow involved in the value adding while in most Art markets I know of the production is really removed from the actual value chain and the market is largely a market that adds value starting on the second sale, ie. after the producer has lost touch with the value chain. Also, Art as such was really tangential to the subject matter of Media and Journalism.
So, that part of the article could have been left out, as it brings no extra clarity - especially as the main point was not really about market value for the product (neither Journalism nor Art) but instead market value for the producer (either "Artist" or "Liberal Arts Graduate" on a totally different market: The Job Market.
Still, it was an interesting read, and it did add another piece to the puzzle of "understanding some of the reasons we as a civilization are steadily losing our grip on reality" (here, I assume that "we" and "civilization" is lacking the unstated specifier "USA/American")
11. Don't conflate correlation with causation.
PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as definition space)
1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no journalist would want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong, when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments.
2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative 'truth'.
Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're doing[2], how can journalists keep up?
[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
[1]: https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-...
[2]: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/153423172385190707...
It's such a bizarre argument to simultaneously acknowledge that The Science is often wrong yet double down on manipulating the public with this idea that scientific consensus equals Truth. In my view, this practice adulterates science into a technical sophistry that serves as a fifth column for a political agenda. But the root cause here is that science itself is corrupted by the desire to effect change. That is the realm of politics and if scientists want to stop losing trust, they will get out of the business of "ought".
> ... stories about how the increasing temperatures from climate change kill people in heat waves, but fail to mention that the same increasing temperatures also save lives because fewer people freeze to death. Yeah, I don’t trust any of these sources.
This is not sourced, but then again it is also not science.
The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied press releases with no critical thinking. They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check.
I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.
Why?
Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it.
The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.
But instead of making dozens of people learning something you paid for school lunches for 200 students each month?
It’s a limit pot of tax payer money and it needs to be used on the highest impact things.
Edit: we prioritize feeding people over giving them educational science articles; seems appropriate
What other people are doing that is wrong is rarely particularly useful to think about when working toward a goal of your own.
All of this gets ignored because the poors deserve it or some stupid nonsense thrown around by the people with money and power
Because the state requires them to be there anyway, so it's the state's responsibility to ensure they are well fed? Academic performance has no bearing on whether somebody deserves food.
Let me use UK costs as an example, to show how cheap school lunches are compared to all the other aspects of education, because I don’t know the USA well enough: If I assume £2/school lunch (mine were £1, but that was the 90s), and if the school year is still 39 weeks, that’s £390/year, or £11,700 per year for a class of 30, compared to a qualified teacher’s starting salary of £25,714 (head teachers go up to £125,098 in London), and then you need to add the cost of books, and consumables, and the building itself, and insurance, and support staff (HR, caretakers, supply teachers).
This behavior needs to be called out and there needs to be accountability. However, there is none. Even when the stories are completely fabricated, as happened at USA Today recently.
What the public wants and what tricks people into giving you attention are different things. Journalists today go for the latter, which is why we have all of these "alternative" news sources now.
I'd love a browser extension that shows me a crowd-sourced batting average for the author of any article I'm reading online. Something that tells me "Oh, you're reading an article written by journalist Joe Schmoe? Joe has previously written 400 breathless articles about scientists discovering space aliens"
I know I know, technical solution to a social problem. And curating these crowdsourced article tags and statistics would probably be an intractable nightmare. It probably can't hurt much to try though. I think the fundamental problem is there are too many journalists for many individual journalists to develop a reputation in the minds of readers. I read several hundred, maybe a few thousand articles a year, but I could only tell you the names of a handful of journalists at best. There must be some way for technology to help bridge this gap.
https://nautil.us/
I actually happened to meet a writer who had this happen to them, but this incident was also publicized in an open letter (source: https://nwu.org/an-open-letter-from-freelancers-at-nautilus-..., with discussion about this on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/aznfusion/status/941051077922869248). This happened in 2017, and I'm not sure how long it took to get resolved.
The future seems bleak.
ETA: Oh!! The link re: the Twitter thread is gnarly! I hope this got resolved and the freelancers got something out of this.
The first test you've got to do for any proposal like yours is to consider what the impact of it will be when your political opponents are at the reins. Are you comfortable with Donald Trump (or really, anyone of his faction) having this power?
You do realize government control and regulation are synonymous, right?
It's a very hard problem, and there are no obvious or pat solutions.
I say this as someone on that side of the political spectrum.
That's probably where the journalists find people to interview, likely because a large majority of journalists are active on Twitter.
This definitely isn't the only place, because there are free services like SciLine by the AAAS (source: https://www.sciline.org) and many others for connecting journalists to researchers. Many universities also have their own expert directories set up, and journalists can also find papers and contact their authors.
However, for many journalists on deadline, it's just far less effort to message vocal professors on Twitter, so this may be a reason for this effect if it's true. The people who market their research more on Twitter may be more likely to get covered in the press, and thus interviewed.
I'm not buying it. Science reporting from university press departments is just as bad if not worse, and they are funded by the university not advertising (tuition, grants, alumni donations, etc..)
So what you get is worthless fanboy journalism in which those who are smart enough to ask tough questions get removed, and those who are left just want to copy paste university press releases.
In turn that beds general scepticism amongst the population because they can sense that nobody is challenging the "experts".
From an enjoyment side, writing is hard, but for a lot of people, it's much easier than research. There are fewer credentials needed for a career in science journalism versus scientific research (a Bachelor's only versus a PhD for many senior scientist positions). I know a lot of people who have a natural skill at writing who decided to major in a science field for one reason or another, performed okay-ish at their courses, and tried to get back to writing work.
The end result is also similar writing for a magazine/newspaper versus a university. A university may have higher standards for accuracy and precision (especially if an interviewed scientist wants to review it, while a newspaper/magazine may have a policy to avoid sharing drafts to avoid bias in the article). However, higher-end magazines (like the New Yorker) have more prestige. There is also far less room at universities for dissent (e.g. presenting an opposing scientific view or publishing investigative work).
An example, "My uncle became blind because of diabetes", similar answer: "I don't buy it, my father is diabetic and never got blind". Doesn't work.
In other words, the reason why scientific journalism in non-university press could be bad for various different reason than university press.
> It is ALL about click bait to drive digital advertising
(Emphasis my own.) Science reporting is still crap even when it isn't funded by advertising, so there's obviously more going on than the funding model making things shit. The BBC and CBC both have crappy science reporting too, as do university press departments. These counter-examples refute the claim which was stated too strongly (I do think advertising plays some role in it, but obviously not all.)
This is an interesting hypothesis, because PBS is near the top of my quality ranking for news orgs while NPR is near the bottom (obviously excluding the long-tail of sources I don't often encounter, like breitbart). I don't see much of a correlation with manner of funding.
Despite? Or because of it? Left leaning politics need trust worthy news to advance, right leaning politics don't as their goal is to maintain tradition and the status quo. If nobody mobilises the right wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create apathy, apathy is the bread of the status quo.
?>>>? Right leaning politics need trust worthy news to survive, left leaning politics don't as their goal is to upset tradition and revolt on the status quo. If nobody maintains the status quo the left wing polices win by default, noise instead of news helps to create chaos, choas is the bread of revolution and malcontent.
As you can see, this sort of "I define my side to be the more accurate view of reality" is highly malleable and can be used to support any side with semi-convincing "just so" stories.
And you're not actually describing the left-wing/right-wing divide here (itself a highly simplistic and outdated view of politics and economics dating from more than a century), you're describing the conservative/progressive divide, which tends to correlate with the left/right divide in the US, which might be where you are from. But even there the correlation is not perfect, Trump for example was fairly 'progressive' in his populist politics, his extensive engagement with the public on Twitter was a very novel form of presidential press releases that upseted many traditions and angered many political conservatives. See how conservative/progressive is multi-dimensional ?, you're just too used to a few dominant dimensions being coorelated with a left\right slant.
Furthermore, even accepting the dubious renaming of conservative\progressive to right-wing\left-wing, it's still a leap of faith from here to assuming that the progressive side always benefits from representing truth and reality as it is. In fact, this is almost gauranteed to be false, because even if conservatives are randomly guessing, they would still get roughly 50% of the world right, and since progressives always oppose conservatives in this hyper-polarized political climate, they are gauranteed to be wrong that 50% of the time. This seems to be supported by reality as being a progressive is associated with a higher chance of believing there are 700 genders and that biological males are women, so there must be at least some situations where progressives ("Left-Wing" in your parlance) benefit from a mis-representation of reality.
Can you elaborate on this? Society has inertia, history has inertia, how is this "nobody mantains status quo" work?
It refers to when a media outlet thinks that everything the Trump admin does is an unprecedented terrible action, even when that thing is humanitarian aid or peace treaties in the middle east.
It's not about people not wanting to pay, it's that the value of a single article is too small to charge money for. A single article is maybe worth a hundredth of a cent to me. There's no viable mechanism for me to pay a hundredth of a cent to a writer, just transaction fees will be more than the amount transacted.
I'm not going to pay a subscription to a site I might not ever visit again. I'm also not going to pay a subscription fee to every site I come across that might have a decently written article once in a while. Advertising ends up being the only viable way to "charge" a tiny fraction of a cent to readers.
What if the site was consistenly putting decent articles? I think one of the argument is that you would see more of those decent articles if people were more enclined to follow a subscription model where the journal is accountable to its customers.
I think this argument holds up. For example, publications like the Scientific American and The Scientist tend to be very high quality in terms of accuracy (usually with unobtrusive citations, if I recall correctly). It's too bad their subscriptions prices are so high; they were hundreds of dollars a year if I remember correctly, versus less than 50 dollars a year for other magazines.
Ii'm not sure about how financially successful they are, but I found myself struggling to justify such a subscription price, when the purpose was essentially edu-tainment. The publications that can more easily get people to pay more, in my view, ostensibly help people make more money or find career success, which is why industry publications like STAT for biotech/medicine (and more generally, publications like the WSJ/Bloomberg) tend to be more financially successful.
Why wouldn’t you blame people who voluntarily took a job writing science articles while having zero credentials? They could be normal news journos, nobody forced them to report on science specifically.
I'm sure a view against credentials isn't shared by all journalists (for example, many publications do require a relevant background), but that experience was personally disheartening because it seemed to be supported in the room.
I was also disheartened by the focus on self-marketing and self-promotion in general over doing quality, accurate journalism, and a much bigger focus on having a good "narrative" and writing engagingly versus having a discussion on ethics. To some extent, I get it, because the advice likely works in helping someone succeed in their career. But there are clearly problems in science news related to precision and accuracy, and not much drive in many publications to fix it.
writing and publishing four articles a day with only cursory review/editorial oversight, if any, isn't journalism at all, it's a content mill
This is probably why exaggerated claims from press releases usually just get passed on and, frequently, exaggerated. Even someone educated in the field doesn't have time to dig into 3 or 4 new sub-fields a day and actually understand the papers that press releases are talking about. e.g. A physicist with a background in optics is better situated than most to understand an experimental quantum cryptography paper, but they're still going to have to bang their heads against several walls to figure out what's going on. Head-banging takes time. Copying from a press release doesn't.
I remember a story from a famous freelance investigative journalist who found evidence of disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 election. He collected a huge amount of evidence and testimony, and sent it to news outlets across the US. Most of them came back with:
"Uh, we contacted the <person/group accused>, and they're denying this. We're not going to run the story."
Who'd have thought people accused of nefarious, potentially illegal activities would deny doing them?
I think good scientific journalism might be something where funding is not proportional to benefit to society. Also things like investigating regulatory capture.
considering the size of the scientific community (i.e. people who could tell you what a confidence interval is) vs the size of the general news-reading population, I'd suggest that the likely alternative to a lot of the science reporting referred to in the article is not better science reporting, but less of it overall. sadly, these companies are simply meeting a demand from a relatively uneducated population a large proportion of whom's brains will switch off at the sight of the words "confidence interval"
my suggested solution to this is more public investment in the news industry. more grants for independent journalism
It doesn’t suck. People don’t know where to look.
As a side note, I hate how her channel has become something which exemplifies much of what I dislike about the now typical youtube channels: Top ten lists, grossly overstated titles, "give me your opinion in the comments", the awful generic CGI backgrounds ...
The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.
Can we all stop blaming 'economics'. Economics says people are largely self-interested, selfish and maximize their own utility (happiness-whatever).
It's not 'economics', it's people. Labor unions are also maximizing their revenue.
You mean, "many Economists with a simplistic, reductionist view of human societies' behavior say".
We need more Sabines not fewer.
The first is criticism of things that are clearly wrong, such as the aforementioned science journalism. This is a good public service, I agree.
The second is criticism of other physicists’ ideas. i.e. her personal opinions and professional disagreements with other physicists.
She doesn’t delineate the two clearly enough to her audience, so some of her viewers may come away thinking that views that are held by physicists who are her peers, are in the same bucket as junk pop science articles. Just read the comments on her videos, they are full of “physics is a scam” type people who feel vindicated.
For example in the video to this article she was using a lot of climate science examples, which will be interpreted in a certain way by the "science is a scam" crowd. I'm not sure she is doing this on purpose (I have the impression she strongly believes in climate change), accidentally or if I'm just oversensitive to some things.
I am very personally convinced of anthropogenic climate change and that it's a serious risk for humanity. I still believe that it's important to take people's questions seriously, and to respect that people who aren't convinced have been making their best attempt at understanding the world. For these people, biased stories that don't put numbers in context are seen as deceptive, and I think that perception is legitimate. The only way to actually meaningfully reach them is to credibly demonstrate that you're actually checking the evidence that disagrees with your conclusion.
However, I disagree that what she does is the "less popular and therefore less lucrative work of summarising what is just not correct out there". The sort of takedowns she does are quite popular and very easy to do. However, my criticism is that quite a few of them are superficial and fall essentially into the same traps that she criticises, i.e. the actual topic is much too complex to either present or take down without a more comprehensive in-depth discussion (which would be much less popular).
Now this is still somewhat ok if she's the expert on the topic she is talking about as she has the expertise to know how good/bad the simplifications she makes are. However, recently she has started weighing in on topics where she not an expert at all: diesel fuel, antibiotic resistance, light pollution to name just 3 from the front page of her youtube channel. In this case things become quite problematic, because she is simplifying things that she might not have a full grasp of herself but still talks about like an expert.
I've actually found a couple channels on YT specialising in lengthy reviews/essays, which I find very good. Off the top of my head:
1. Whitelight[1] - game reviews/critiques/analyses. Particularly worthy of note are the Assassin's Creed Unity[2] (1.5h), Batman Arkham City[3] (3h 10min) and Watch Dogs[4] (1h 15min) reviews.
2. MauLer[5] - critiques of mostly Star Wars, but sometimes also other mainstream films. The ongoing series of TFA critiques has 4 parts so far (there is going to be at least 6 total), each part taking anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.
I also feel that I'm forgetting some, which I don't watch regularly, but periodically am reminded about their existence and then after a long break spend several days watching, to then forget about them again.
But the channels I listed aren't fringe. Quite the contrary, they're quite popular. I think it's also interesting that one of, if not the most popular Vsauce video is the one about the Banach-Tarski paradox[6], which is almost 30 minutes long. His other videos also show this trend, where the long-form ones seem to get more views in general.
And those are just essays/reviews/etc. There is a whole genre of podcasts on youtube dedicated to 3-4h in-depth interviews. Everybody knows a whole bunch of them, therefore I don't even need to list any examples here to support that.
So it seems that YouTube is a pretty good place for long-form in-depth exploration of whatever topic (as long as you don't say "fuck", "murder" or show a human body).
[1]: <https://www.youtube.com/c/Whitelight>
[2]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5dOporS8IY>
[3]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3U1TL5yBm4>
[4]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2G6zc5pKo>
[5]: <https://www.youtube.com/c/MauLerYoutube>
[6]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s86-Z-CbaHA>
I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest was "top players in quantum computing"
> awful generic CGI backgrounds
That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel. Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
> give me your opinion in the comments
Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
> I couldn't find any "listicle" style top N list, the closest was "top players in quantum computing"
The whole premise of the video of this article is "I give you the ten reasons why I think science suck". Sure it's not in the title (which is even more polarizing), but it's still a top ten list.
>> awful generic CGI backgrounds
> That's pretty par for the course for this tier of channel. Arguably the "quirky room with nerd tchatckies backdrop" is more authentic, but both are just filler behind a talking head.
She could just be sitting at her desk though, but I agree this is more aesthetics and it would have not grated me if it wasn't for the other things
>> give me your opinion in the comments
> Necessary evil to drive engagement to appease The Algo.
That's exactly my point. I don't necessarily blame her, but am more lamenting the fact that all videos seem to have to become like this, if a creator wants to make a living on youtube.
> Imho her work is a step above the lion's share of science reporting, but I can see how she might be polarizing.
I'm not sure, her work is definitely not on par with quanta magazine for example.
Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any specific area of science...some of my favourites:
- Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome)
[1] https://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/jou...
Edit: Can only speak of nuclear physics.
Then she quotes a study and doesn’t link to it in the video description. She doesn’t link to this post either.
I like the videos she makes explaining scientific concepts but her criticism videos tend to miss the mark with me.