Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general.
Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
People have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all.
What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
Sure? Due diligence is always important. I'm not implying that science and journal publishing, or journalism are in bad shape, but simply that scientific scholarships goal should be to eventually converge on a truth ( or more likely an exclusion of other opposing theories), whereas the goal of journalism to to seek a truthful point in time capture of a topic. Just because they're inherently different time scales to converge on truth, any given scientific discussion shouldn't be "thrown over the fence" with a low value copy pasta of the papers.
I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists understand this general statement, but just because most individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little due diligence.
The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work.
The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.
As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).
"Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
Certainly you are correct that there are several different "lab" theory versions, and they vary by orders of magnitude in how plausible they are. However:
"I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."
This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its implications than "China was researching bioweapons and released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which of those theories are remotely plausible, and which implausible?
If only there were a profession, between scientists and the general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the work of the former...
> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.
Note that all of this is deeply problematic, EVEN IF the truth is that the virus was a normally evolved bat coronavirus that got to Wuhan through some method that did not involve a lab in any way. The dichotomy between what they were saying in public, and what they were saying to each other in private, severely undercuts the idea that they are who the public should be trusting for advice on this topic.
I don't know that I've ever heard such a violent "woosh" as the goalposts were moved. Going from "obviously happened, consistent with evidence" to "the problem is the way it was discussed in private" is just... wow.
I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.
I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.
You forgot to mention the lefts position. They usually used the lab-leak theory to ridicule, mock and even have careers ended for those who dared to propose it as plausible.
As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous.
And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some merit, media just went silent on the matter.
SO I disagree hard with that it's a right or far right tool to sell hero worship.
Journalism has turned to absolute shit and anything that comes from the perceived "other" side must be instantly mocked without any investigation or partisan integrity. And should the "other" side show merit there will either be silence or continued mockery along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day" .
Left and right equally guilty.
Journalism is a joke. Maybe it always was and it's just these past 3 years that made so many of us realise exactly what a sh**show it actually is.
This is especially true for the medical scientists who could not get their shit together during the crisis and seemed to have a pissingcompetition of who could recommend the most intrusive, obnoxious guideline that conflicted the most with what any other "expert" scientist recommended.
Masking toddlers, banning sitting on public park benches, banning children from playgrounds. Banning walking outdoors in company. Masking while standing up in a restaurant to take it off while sitting down.
Banning sports, isolating the elderly to the point of driving them to insanity and severe cognitive decline.
DENYING AEROSOL SPREAD. That one is my personal pet peeve with the scientific community.
The embarrassing list is endless.
My own trust in medical expertise, that is, the one I see in the news. Is at an all time low.
I ofc listen to my personal MD. But if she'd proclaim something in the media I'd probably never listen to her again and switch doctors.
An incredibly dumb take by someone who has no idea what he's talking about.
The Hershey factory in question is the Huanan market - you know, the place where they were selling wild animals, where the initial cases were heavily clustered around. It's not the research institute on the other side of the city that never even had a closely related virus in the first place.
Yah Stephen hit him on that point, he counters with Austin Texas and the nightly bat flocking behavior which is true. There’s all kinds of bats in Houston Texas too.
> When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
I haven't seen any non-affiliated journalists doing this. I've seen right-wing journalists doing it, fitting whatever they can find into their ten times stepped-on John Birch worldview. What I've seem far more of is administration-connected journalists characterizing whatever position that they support censorship of in its most extremist, unhinged, obviously factually-incorrect form. Radical right-wingers insist that they're the only option other than current Democratic party orthodoxy, and Democrats agree with them 100%.
Your comment reminds me of this line from the submission:
"There’s also a generational divide in journalism, with younger journalists tending to be more openly left/progressive than their older peers — and tending to be more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news stories are complicated and it’s not particularly their job to pass moral judgment."
This is probably true of the younger generations in general, not just journalists.
Sadly any attempt at communicating a nuanced view makes you subject to vicious attacks from binary thinkers, who often miss the point and derail the discussion.
Interesting. So we should probably have a more nuanced discussion about the Holocaust, yes? Hitler had his complicated reasons for it, and we need to be able to see his point of view.
You know, at some point, if you try to see "both sides" like this, you are going to lose the plot.
Perhaps it's because I'm not a native speaker but I have no idea what you're trying to tell me. I'm trying to take the most positive interpretation and that you're saying that you're putting me into some right-wing lunatic fringe corner that's somehow pro-Russia? I honestly don't know. And... you never asked a question?
Perhaps read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, especially where it's about comments. I'm not the best example of always following them myself but I'm having a hard time extracting anyting of value from your comment. Sorry.
Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. At university I majored in two STEM subjects but also took 10 courses in Philosophy, Art, History, Journalism, and Economics. Almost no one majoring in any of those fields except Econ took more than 2-3 STEM courses, and even then there a dedicated watered down courses to ensure those people could graduate (Algebra instead of Calculus, "Physics for Future Presidents", etc.).
My high school education in the humanities was also far better than my high school education in STEM, which is typical. And the deplorable state of Mathematics education in US high schools acts as a hard constraint toward improving the situation, since you need a baseline of mathematics literacy before proceeding along any other path in STEM.
How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely approaching a truly well-rounded education?
Go read the proximal origins paper. How is a journalist who has never seen a derivative, has never taken BIO 101, and whose Science distribution credit was fulfilled by Physics For Future Presidents supposed to dive into the claims in that paper and critically evaluate the surrounding literature? They can't.
In the past, wasn't it normal for journalists to have a particular specialization (even if that's not the _only_ thing they did), like "science reporter" or something? It is obviously impossible for every reporter to become an expert on every single topic that they might ever cover, but it is not unreasonable at all to get enough of a background on a topic that you cover regularly to be able to ask intelligent questions.
If news organizations were serious about this, they might actively look for people who _do_ have greater amounts of training/experience in a given field.
It may be true that in the current journalism paradigm the kind of skepticism called for is impossible, but it is absolutely not true that this is a fundamental state of journalism and that reporters could never become capable of doing it.
I have given a number of interviews to "Science" journalists, in two occasions even for science-focused publications. In each case I began the interview by asking the journalist to tell me about their coursework and self-study background so I can be sure to meet them where they are. In only one case have I met a science reporter who I'd consider minimally competent to report on science -- rather than eg write puff pieces -- and that reporter was educated in Europe.
Yea that’s my main frustration with overall journalism. The one subject where I’d consider myself in the 99th percentile of knowledge (more of a reflection of the sample) is basketball and it drives me up a wall the number of Medill type, classically trained journalists who write about a thing they barely understand. It’s such a disservice to the audience and borderline blatant misinformation
Yes, and Ashley Rindsberg covers the science-writer / sci-journo divide well, a divide which I was not hip to prior:
"The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."
They can't. Liberal arts classes are taught at such a massively lower level that this requirement would mean STEM courses would have to be dumbed down or liberal arts majors couldn't pass. Lots of failed STEM majors in history class, but did you ever run into a failed liberal arts major in diff eq?
I went to a UK uni but my observation was that the curve was much narrower and forgiving for humanities and then much broader for STEM. So this meant it was much more straightforward to get a top grade in STEM but on the flipside it was easy to objectively fail.
Whereas for humanities it was extremely opaque what it took to get a top mark but most people would get a decent mark. And almost no one fails.
In the US it's just A's all the way. If you want to see where the problem comes from, just look at the average GPA in a teaching degree program! Standards are in the past here. They are even dumbing down math class now in the name of "equality."
J-school in general is probably a poor criterion. Someone who has just done a bunch of reporting (and other things) isn't really less qualified to do journalism that someone with a J-school degree.
One of the problems is that journalism just doesn't pay very well in general.
So news organizations may look for people with more experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in paying for that news/writing themselves.
I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of the people who write on deep technical topics either don't need the money or are doing it as a sideshow of their day jobs.
(Which, if they write for independent news organizations can be an issue. The WSJ reporter who basically uncovered the Theranos scandal quit because he couldn't give public speaking engagements.)
30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.
Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.
Yeah. I do occasional contract work these days and $1 to $1.50 a word for stuff I'm not being paid for anyway by my day job is OK--and pretty much my floor. Ends up being a couple hundred dollars per hour.
But that's really not a random online pub rate.
Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other or related income sources (which tend to be difficult given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time, or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League grad.
You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself.
Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).
> You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself.
Well then, I guess we at least agree on the following: today we have science "reporting" done by "journalists" who will write about findings reported in publications that they haven't read and self-admittedly can't read.
I suppose we can agree to disagree about the usefulness of that reporting and the potential harm of that reporting.
> Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).
You are missing the word ALSO. As in, you do so by reading and evaluating the source and then ALSO considering the surrounding context.
Palace intrigue isn't something that should be ignored, but it also shouldn't be the entire story.
Often the best way to be productively skeptical is to ask questions and get more sources? It can be frustrating for some scientific figureheads, but the adage of "no dumb questions" came to be for a reason.
And don't get led astray by looking for "productivity." So much advancement is lost on the alter of efficiency and productivity. Yes, if you know the correct next move to make, do it. But don't discount exploration and general play.
But who? And what questions do you ask? Without a baseline, you're poking around in the dark. Or knocking on the same 20 doors at the same 20 universities, and all those people talk to each other and they and their students all sit on each others' grant review committees. Etc. And when two scientists disagree about the evidence, how do you determine whether one of them is a total quack? Or do you just report everything that everyone says as long as they say big words you don't know?
It's really easy to be unproductively skeptical. Never believe anything. Everything is a lie or a conspiracy. That's not particularly productive, though, because although it protects you from lies and bad actors it will never get you to the truth.
Sorry, I meant to be more explicit there. I don't believe in "full productivity" in the search for things. You will, by necessity, waste some time.
Do try and make sure you aren't completely poking around in the dark. But also don't feel bad if you find out you were.
I do hate that I'm posting this in this thread. At large, I get the impression that the "coverup" is being blown out of proportion. I also can't deny that a lot of the dismissals earlier were heavy handed. Such that some topics and inquiries have somehow become toxic.
But, at large, most "quack" theories don't have to be fully dismissed by other scientists. They are more easily explained with other ideas. It can be frustrating for some of them, as I'm sure many are tired of hearing about "UFOs" and such. But for a lot of crazier ideas, the "dismissal" can quite literally be "that necessarily leads to enough other things that we are not seeing, that I just can't bring myself to believe it right now."
This does require, though, that asking the questions is not done in such a way to paint a contest. Try to build the questions in such a way to expand ideas.
Silver isn't arguing for-or-against the lab leak hypothesis here.
> To be clear, I’m not sure how COVID originated either. I’d “buy” the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other.
This post is his commentary on leaked communications demonstrating that the authors of the paper themselves didn't believe the contents of the paper. This has nothing to do with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
His citations for those claims about the authors are 3 substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors.
I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.
> We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public.
None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
Although I'm not really sure it's a global issue, but at least here in Eastern Europe you just have no time to dig in deeper in any subject as journalist. I've seen local academic institutions trying to support journalists to specialize on science reporting more than 10 years now, but all have left saying that pressure to produce just more text is too intense. Old school investigative journalism just doesn't exist any more.
I'm not sure existing journalists could do it, but perhaps this can act as a call to action for a scientist to start a blog or YouTube channel that analyzes scientific discoveries, and/or fact checks existing journalists' interpretations of scientific literature.
I’m sure there r random blogs devoted to that lol. Which is y I aggressively bookmark niche sites cuz by definition gold mines r very much not discoverable
The answer is more people with a background in STEM should go into journalism. Sadly, that sort of specialization is expensive and the public's willingness to spend on news seems to have gone down.
Academia has sold itself and the world that it is only scrutinizable unto itself. But this was not always the case.
If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.
That was easier to do 50 or 100 years ago. The longer we do science, the more we already know. Finding something novel gets harder and harder. It becomes less and less likely that you can find it without having spent a long time learning what's already known.
Academics certainly could be better writers and communicators now, but non-scientists cannot expect to understand most work that required years of education before they could perform it. The public can be given a rapid education in it when it matters, but that rapid education isn't going to put them in a position to critique the work. And when the public mistakes that rapid education for a superior grasp of the topic, it becomes a huge drain on the academics' time to correct the misconceptions.
Maybe this is true for some of the advanced sciences. But when it comes to some of the topics that get the most news coverage (psychology, public health, economics) you're not dealing with controlled experiments. So much of it is just random sampling and double blind studies.
This work is good. But none of this work is particularly complicated or hard to understand - and so much of the "education" is busy work or learning the "inside baseball" of how to get meaningful results and how to get published.
When we are talking about "trust the scientists" no one is really arguing that nuclear scientists or aeronautical engineers don't know what they are talking about. We're really talking about whether we should listen to an epidemiologist just because they have spent so much time looking at these studies (often conflicting!) that they can squint their eyes when they look at a set of data and give a more qualified off-the-cuff opinion.
As the fields have become more and more specialized over the years, and the technology has increased, it's gets more difficult to write about subjects without using jargon and more complicated visualizations. As mentioned in other comments, having journalists with a science background would definitely help.
> Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they report on court cases?
Journalists have roughly the same undergraduate educational background as lawyers and receive a half-decent education on the high level basics of the American legal system in civics courses.
> They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes?
Crashes themselves often don't require any amount of aviation expertise.
> They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news?
Mostly poorly, which is why eg Bloomberg's retail news business exists, and most of those folks have some financial background.
They do it very incompetently. The quality of reporting anymore is ridiculously low.
It's not about being an expert in the subject but having a fundamental understanding and being logically minded enough to perform fact based and critically thought out reporting.
Now everything is so trashy, economics is how they can bash their least favorite company or billionaire, law reporting is one-sided story telling for bashing or cheerleading someone in court, same with politics. It's mostly story telling anymore geared for entertainment or outrage.
Well that explains why most reporting on aviation and financial issues in the mainstream media is such garbage. I mean I'm hardly an expert in those areas but even I can tell that the stories are crap in terms of missing key facts, not asking relevant questions, drawing bad conclusions, and pushing biased narratives. Fortunately there are some YouTube channels where I can get good information on those topics, although they aren't typically labeled as journalists and don't work for media companies.
Even if you get a STEM education, at least at the undergrad level, it tends not to include anywhere near enough hands on research to learn much about experimental methods that would help you assess the validity of study designs when reporting on a new paper that just got published. And even when you have that, experimental methods tend to be extremely specific to the field of study.
I almost think it would be better if virtually everyone, even if you're not a STEM major, taking at least a course on hierarchy of evidence and how particular study designs attempt to demonstrate causation, along with some basic statistical literacy. But I was listening to a very good breakdown of the aspartame history this morning and the host was going on about criticisms of some of the early studies showing cancer in rats dealing with exactly how randomization works when you're dealing with multiple litters from the same gene line and why they usually terminate the rats early instead of waiting for natural death, and these are things you could never possibly know unless you specifically have a background in rodent studies. I was a biology major and still didn't know any of this stuff.
This line in the tractatus is not about the individual’s knowledge it’s about the entire research programme’s ability to know something fundamentally unknowable. In particular Wittgenstein was referring to logical philosophers talking about metaphysics, which evades logical positivism. Even then he wasn’t against the practice of metaphysics, only the attempt to describe it with hard logic.
They don't have to shoot for perfection. The bar has sunk so low even very basic techniques can yield huge improvements in trust:
1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine.
2. READ the papers. Journalists never do this. I cannot express how frequently you can spot scientific fraud by just reading the underlying papers, even as a layman. If you lack expertise maybe you'll miss 90% of the tricks but catching 10% of them is still sufficient to notice something is wrong, and often you don't need any special training. Here are some of my own investigations of bad papers - it's often obvious and most of it doesn't require expertise to spot.
3. Hold sources to account when it's proven that they were misleading you. Report on bad behavior to discourage it next time.
4. Be willing to report stories dug up by other people, even when they make Team University look bad. Note how the reporting Silver refers to hasn't been covered by legacy media outlets even though you don't need to be a scientist to understand what they're saying and how damning it is.
In reality this stuff is easy. Nobody is asking for the NYT to engage in professional peer review of newly published papers. Just not assuming anything a professor says is gospel truth would be a good start, but there seems little chance of that happening :( Journalists depend so heavily on academics for rent-a-quote services and a constant flow of stories that getting tough would be biting the hand that feeds them.
> 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine.
This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is flat, whether climate change is real, etc.
> 2. READ the papers.
Literally nobody reads the papers. A huge amount of news isn't even investigated. A large number of news these days is regurgitated from other sources.
Realistically, journalists like to report on fringe or weird beliefs so they can laugh at the people holding them, and dislike reporting on serious disagreement with things they want to be true.
Agree that almost nobody is reading the papers, outside of random tweeters and bloggers. Journalists might as well start, though. Reading obscure documents is a part of the job, classically at least.
If there is disagreement among people with appropriate background, experience, and education, it can be reported as a legitimate disagreement. The journalist should be evaluating the credentials of sources, but not what they say, and not on the basis of whether the journalist personally agrees with them.
> This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is flat, whether climate change is real, etc.
Correct. Part of the problem is that there is disagreement about whether a disagreement exists. Cranks believe that there is a vigorous debate about flat-earth/evolution/climate change, and scientists don't.
Do how does one (journalist) objectively determine whether an issue is settled or not?
One thing I'll add: if you don't have specific training in the field in question, just ignore any use of "scientific consensus" to justify an argument.
The "scientific consensus" trope is just dressed-up appeal to authority, and even if there is such a "consensus", it's almost never broad enough to be applicable to whatever pop-science journalism thing you're reading.
Also, even within the hallowed halls of academic science, most scientists are just repeating things they've heard other people say. Unless the "consensus" is amongst scientists who have spent their entire career studying the specific question (and by "specific", I mean...hyper specific, not just "in the same field", and certainly not something meaningless like "epidemiology"), this kind of thing just devolves into a popularity contest. You'd be shocked by how many PhDs just confidently repeat whatever silly thing they saw that morning in the New York Times.
Also, since I'm already seeing the meme appear...people are waaaaay too worried about "amplifying fringe voices" these days. News flash: if you don't know what you're talking about, then you can't possibly know what you should or should not be "amplifying". Stick to what you know, be modest about what you don't know (which is most things), and let the facts sort themselves out over time. Science only works if contrarians get a voice.
This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.
Sometimes a contrarian is right and the accepted consensus is wrong. But that doesn't happen only because the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable theory that fits empirical observations and is sufficiently predictive. They also set out to disprove their hypothesis.
Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit. It's far easier to spam stupid contrarian ideas than to produce real rigorous scientific output.
> This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.
No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean that, I don't believe that, and trying to spin it that way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you quoted.
Contrarians don't have to be right to require a voice for the system to work.
> Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.
The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is working is because I can see the all the disagreements and judge for myself. Efficiency isn't the goal.
But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my choice, and who are you to tell me otherwise?
Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they are about censoring things they don't like.
Well, it shouldn't be. But in case your research is informing "urgent" policy decisions, it's hard not to get frustrated and just want those who disagree to shut up.
In most things science I doubt you can "judge for yourself". In a field where you have some expertise, perhaps.
At least I don't have the knowledge (not just technical but also the lingo-related aspect) to read any paper or judge between any different positions on non-trivial things.
That's fair, but that means it's all the more dangerous to blindly accept things as facts. The field is important too; the more objectively data can be gathered and analyzed, the more trustworthy the research is. There are always issues, of course.
"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."
I completely agree, but it's counterintuitive. There's a part of me that thinks "science == reproducible, observable fact". But it really is much more (er, less) than that. It'd be nice if there was a different word for the "not irrefutable" parts (i.e. almost all of it).
I'm not sure what scientific thing would be reported on in popular media, there was a scientific consensus that was reported on and was wrong. Anything from the past 3 or so decades you can point to?
I agree with your prescriptions, but worry the point might've slipped by.
> READ the papers
The point of my original comment is that most journalists don't have the educational background required to do this. And everything else flows downstream of that problem.
The issue is not that they can't do it, they just don't want to. Journalists with no science background are happy to write quite technical fact checks of articles - even articles written by scientists - when those articles are contradicting something the journalists are already invested in.
And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery in this article can be detected as fraud by anyone:
The issue is that journalists could do better if they wanted to, but they don't want to and there's no system of incentives in place that would make them want to. There's no such thing as a journalism license they could lose, and publishing nonsensical science articles doesn't hurt their careers in any way because nobody expects better of them. After all, they're just journalists with no STEM education...
Even if you somehow forced science journalists to all get STEM dual majors, it still wouldn't make them care. They'd still take the path of least resistance and pump out slop. The only way to make them care is to put them under editors that enforce standards. But how do you make a publication care enough to hire editors that care? Even state funded university press departments notoriously sloppy. If they can't uphold standards, I doubt any organization can.
I don't think you have any idea of the kind of time pressures journalists are under, and how little time they have to devote hours or days of deep research to each and every story they work on. At best you can get that for a large story if you're an investigative journalist, but very few have that privilege.
All of the journalists I know personally would love to have more time to dig into stories, to do more background research, to spend more time following them up, and to get to understand a subject more deeply. None are given that opportunity in today's high pressure, short-staffed, and cut-to-the-bones newsrooms.
wrt 1., there are an unfortunate number of cranks for every discipline. It would be funny to see journos publish the emails that every faculty member who releases their email in the university phonebook gets as Serious Disagreement* though.
Similarly, the original 3D structure of DNA from W&C was actually "wrong" but I truly doubt any laymen (laypeople) could have determined that by reading the original paper (which is a paragon of clear and simple scientific reporting).
Although it's true I wasn't a layman, it turned out my own expertise in bot fighting had no utility to reviewing the paper. The review was done as a "layman", because the sociological subfield of twitter bot research has nothing to do with bots :( Anyone could have written that and actually most of the paper takedowns in that subfield are done by a team of a CS prof (with no specialism in bots) and a data journalist.
Understood. At best, though, I think these takedowns are based primarily on "technical invalidation": identification of one or more faults in logic, presumption, study design, or execution, which brings enough question to the results/conclusions that it's best just to assume the paper isn't worth reading.
(put another way: many papers that contributed what appears to be new, true knowledge contain factual errors, some of them invalidating, yet the paper turned out to be correct, in terms of its conclusions, in the long run)
Exactly. In addition, how would you gather any information at all if there's no one to trust. Yes, fake news are a huge problem, but we need reliable sources to gather information.
You don't need a reliable source. Maximizing the chances that a source is reliable is good enough. This can be achieved by maximizing the number of journalists attacking the same problem. The process must be transparent and publicly available / open to critics. People (non-journalists, readers) will point out if something smells suspicious.
>Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education.
First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the journalist writing the article is a qualified science journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning their education with partial credentials.
Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is agitating to create such an infrastructure.
Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball: a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and in America, that's saying something.
The whole point of science is that you do not have to believe anything just because a scientist said it. Only thing that matters is the validity of their data, whether the data truly backs their interpretation, and if the findings can be replicated.
Wouldn't that mean that Galileo and Newton's discoveries would have had little to no impact?
For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't have a detailed education in the subject could really contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright because the authors made egregious errors in the study design or data collection (where data scientists/statisticians who don't work in the field can still be very useful), but for most modern physics or medical research, there are literally hundreds of years of well-established theory and practice that you absolutely need to know before dismissing ideas that don't make sense.
This is especially important in areas like infectious disease.
Oh boy. Well for starters Newton and Galileo didn’t have the internet. That’s 80% of this misinformation problem.
And GP was talking about how journalists can be skeptical. No one is suggesting journalists should be debunking all new science findings—merely that they should be very skeptical when reporting about those findings.
So wait, I could make a career in being a software engineering style type of journalist?
I just don’t think they would care, would they?
If anyone is reading it working as such, feel free to humor me by shooting me an email (in my profile). I studied psychology (bachelor), business (bachelor), computer science (master) and game-design (master). I also did some course work related to journalism (though very limited, I only read The Elements of Style). I worked as a teacher (mostly in programming, though one lecture on rhetorics in a rhetorics class) and as a software engineer.
Let me know! I’m up for a chat as I might be a good fit and able to help more accurate reporting on AI and software in general.
Yep that’s all great but the key to being good at journalism is being a good journalist. Take Matt Levine. His background as an M&A attorney and investment banker clearly informs his journalism and makes it better. But no one would give a shit about that if he wasn’t a good writer consistently writing good, interesting writing.
> How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely approaching a truly well-rounded education?
Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face value. Assume you're being bullshitted.
You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.
Again, without a baseline educational background, doing so in a way that's productive -- ie anything more than running around like a chicken with its head cut off -- is impossible.
There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know which questions to ask, to know which people to ask, is all highly suspect.
> You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said.
Pretty much the silliest thing I've heard today!
"Dr. Scientist, you said that vaccines promote herd immunity describe your evidence for that claim"
"Dr. Scientist, you said that mRNA vaccines aren't going to mutate humans, describe your evidence for that claim"
"Dr. Scientist, you predicted this year is hotter than ever, but back in February it was -20. Why did you lie?"
There are an infinite numbers of terrible questions you could ask as a reporter, if you don't have expertise. You need some degree of knowledge to talk about a subject, the only debate is how much.
I have often asserted that one of the reasons the lab leak hypothesis has so much backing in the wider press vs. most epidemiologists and virologists I know is that it moves the pandemic back into a realm in which they are experts.
Nate Silver is much more comfortable asserting his opinion about this than I am, because, as an infectious disease epidemiologist who primarily focuses on the stochastics of disease emergence and disease extinction, my expertise is a good two weeks after when either a zoonotic jump or a lab leak would take place. Take that for what you will.
> Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education.
This right here is why I've mostly stopped listening to journalists and try to find primary sources regarding thee scientific papers, scientists, legal rulings, etc. in question instead of playing a game of telephone where people reinterpret everything to fit whatever story they're tying to tell me.
It's also why I have been finding Wikipedia less useful these days, since they have an explicit policy of citing secondary sources instead of primary sources and I find those far less useful.
Simple: If they are not equipped to understand what they are going to write about, they should refrain from adding noise to the conversation. The potential to add nothing but noise or cause damage is great.
Interestingly enough nobody would ever propose that, say, a fashion journalist report on surgical procedures or a range of other subjects. How is this problem not obvious in other domains?
It's interesting to watch the difference between a reporter/journalist on any TV news show and, say, the people working at a financial news network like CNBC. In the latter case, they have to have a serious body of knowledge just to open their mouths. If you plucked your average reporter/journalist and put them into that seat, they would sound like complete morons because they just would not know what they are talking about.
A news outlet can hire scientists to call out shady scientific paper, many scientific paper have obvious bad conclusions, or not following basic scientific rules, that can be detected even if the scientist reviewing is specialized in another fields.
Ezra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufeckci about basically this because she's had an unusually good track record for a non-specialist on lots of topics, and it really comes down to being statistically literate and putting in the work: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
Most scientists who don’t have grad level math education fail miserably in understanding statistics. Even the top ones. I was the statistics expert in my lab when doing my PhD and I had no business being one. All I was good at was calling out that one way ANOvA is just a t-test and when they should just stick to non parametric methods.
Also helps that Tüfekçi got her undergraduate degrees at good universities in Turkey which means she had to go through and score well on the grueling university entrance exams.
Gary Stevenson was surprised no one wanted to publish his article. They already had an economist one said. He argued he could walk into large financial institutions and they would immediately hire him for millions, the staff economy writer wouldn't make it past the reception - but he should be the one to write all of the articles to inform the public?
At least for this particular case it was not a matter of teaching journalists statistics or anything STEM-related. If it weren't for the leaked messages, we'd never hear about it. Epistemic sincerity and a good notion of statistics are important for sure, but giving whistleblowers legal cover and a means of releasing this kind of material is just as important.
It is unfortunate that money is a tool that makes society materially efficient but doesn't value certain members of society appropriately. This means not only Journalists, but also Teachers and just about every sort of regulator who can be bought.
Another problem is that many teachers aren't worth much money at all. How do parents ensure the teachers worth it get their tax dollars, and not some sleazy pedophile whose hiding behind the teachers union? Until that is solved to sufficient satisfaction, even good teachers will be paid crap.
Is "sleazy pedophile hiding behind the teachers union" a significant occurrence that warrants paying teachers poorly? If that is even a stated reason for low pay, it seems more like fearmongering. Pay teachers well and punish the slim minority who do immoral things.
By asking OTHER specialists. In the 1970s/80s of my experience, journalism was much higher quality than now, but reporters were still notoriously ignorant of technical subjects. Standard procedure for a reporter was to contact one or two outside specialists to comment on the case. A good reporter wasn't expected to have expert knowledge, but just to be an accurate "reporter" of what experts said.
And what if the 'other specialists' participate in a sci-bubble (grant review committees, peer review in-group) with the reporter's source in question? Relevant scientific niches for affirming credibility are too small for everyone not to already know each other through b̶a̶i̶j̶i̶u̶ i̶n̶ a̶ b̶a̶t̶c̶a̶v̶e̶ pre-existing co-opetitive relationships.
Thinking out loud here and this might be a terrible idea, and maybe at the risk of snubbing journalism majors, but what if the dependency was inverted? As in, what if, instead of having journalists who take a few classes here and there in various subjects, we instead had people who majored in subjects who also took some journalism classes, so they could write on subjects within the field?
What I mean is, instead of having a journalist who took an intro chem series writing about chem topics, we had people who majored in chemistry with a few journalism classes writing the articles instead?
You might say "well people who majored in their science field probably want to work in that field", but I'd say look no further than at the amount of science degree people doing dev work. Something something, a trained ai chatgpt-like tool might also help bridge the gap to journalism? Perhaps a pay gap would also need to be addressed.
You basically described Hamilton Morris from Vice. He does a great job at covering psychoactive substances. Although he does at times seem to be an active proponent instead of giving an unbiased perspective.
Regardless, it's refreshing to hear qualified people give their opinion and reportings on things than it is to listen to those that don't understand what they are commenting on.
I was an environmental science and sustainability major in college, along with a journalism minor. I enjoyed journalism but prior year classmates who worked the local beats would always share their nightmare career stories. Terrible pay, zero respect, long hours, poor benefits, constant downsizing, writing on deadline... for how important a job it is, it's terrible how they treat their writers.
Who's going to want to do that?
Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for journalists, but the overwhelming majority of them get the short end of the stick. It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates.
Put it this way. I dabbled in coding in college, doing some WordPress stuff. After two years I was paid better than most journalists after a decade. Granted dev work is really overpaid (especially before 2023) but journalism has been really underpaid, and getting worse all the time, so the difference was quite stark.
One has you doing almost no work for tremendous pay and benefits. The other has you working your ass off every week and weekends for nothing, with very little growth opportunities too. It may be decades before you pay off student loans. It's not a livable wage in most areas.
Want better journalism? We gotta treat our journalists better.
> It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates.
Sounds like a good reason to do a worker cooperative where money is important but stability of the whole is key component, so their decisions are often to keep united.
I think the industry as a whole isn't in a great spot. It was in a death spiral before Trump brought some temporary relief (through endless controversies), but I'm not sure if they were able to keep that momentum going.
Nobody pays for news anymore, and that was before GPT. Even worker coops need a source of income. At this rate I'd be surprised if the industry survives at all...
I think this is a chicken/egg dilemma, because if you could peek into an alternate universe where every journalist was a fully qualified professional in a STEM field, suddenly the power dynamics in the whole industry would shift because every journalist could credibly say "treat me right and pay me well, or I'll have a different, better job tomorrow."
Science reporting is one of those things that I think a formal education could actually help with. Especially since much of the job is dealing with academics and interpreting their jargon and unspoken assumptions for the public. Those are three very different cultures (academic sciences, journalism, mainstream) and it's not trivial to flow between them. Most readers don't have even a rudimentary grasp of scientific methods or statistics.
A large part of our curriculum was looking at the challenges of science communications (especially in regards to climate, but also cultural conflicts, land use, blah blah). The background context in the field was super helpful as a news reader. I can't imagine trying to write good stories with sensible context without that sort of understanding.
Could someone self-learn it? Probably. But I think the risk there is blindly falling into some tribe or another and becoming another controversial screaming head (and some would use the same argument against formal academia).
The more I learned about the field, the more I saw it as a no-win scenario. :/
I went to a very academic uni and my professor grumbled that while our students were all "clever" none of us knew how to make a poster. Which is also kind of important when you're doing research and presenting your findings
STEM students need to be heavily incentivized. When the world goes to shit I can guarantee the journalism majors aren’t going to be solving our global warming crisis. I mean, they’re already failing their one job of spreading awareness.
By talking to multiple sources, preferably ones who are not employed by the same company. If a chemist makes a claim, ask other chemists about it and publish their responses along with the original claim. The personal opinions of the journalist aren't needed or desirable.
This is a false barrier to critique of the scientific establishment. Many foundational questions can always be asked about the claims that scientists make, such as, how is research funded, where are the moral hazards, who benefits from certain conclusions, is the data open sourced, how are dissenting opinions treated, has repeatability been demonstrated, why is fraud not a concern, etc.
Simple and rational questions can go a long way here.
Those aren't foundational questions, though, they're circumstantial evidence. They don't get at whether the scientists did a good job or not. "Why is fraud not a concern" is kinda useless in proving fraud.
Maybe they help you feel a bit more or less confident?
I think reading a paper and asking "okay, what did they actually do, and how could it go wrong" might be a good start, or better yet asking some other scientist who know the field about that?
They are the questions that journalists should be asking in order to do their jobs. There are real political and economic consequences to the impact of science today, especially when funded by special interests.
It's just that it's not true "receiving education" is a requirement for "being intelligent". Get journalists who can do it. Don't hire ones who don't?
Like... I didn't study music or history in college but I know a lot about them. Because I'm not a dumbass and I read books. Being literate on subjects when it's your job to be should not be a high bar.
True that - and we are back to the CP Snow "Two Cultures" pamphlet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures). Looks to me that still STEM people learn much more of humanities, then humanities learn of STEM. To say "I'm illiterate" is shameful (in places that still have illiterate people - thankfully not many and ever less) in a way that in many - even developed - countries to say "I'm innumerate" is not. Shows up frequently (recently in the UK, on the belated subject of teaching maths), quite literate public figures publicly proclaim "I'm rubbish at maths" as if it's a badge of honor, not something to be ashamed of and worked on to be remediated.
The quality of online learning materials is mind boggling, never been better. For humanities maybe teaching logic and logical thinking (modus ponens, modus tollens, quantifiers like "none, some, at least one, at most one, all") in the context of public discussion, argument, public debate maybe more effective and receptive. It's fair to acknowledge that maths with abstract symbols and all that is too hard for most people and there maybe better way of teaching. Ditto data, distributions and statistics - that is I think a new can of worms (and we still struggle with the old one).
I wonder what he'd have to say about the article published on FiveThirtyEight in May of 2020 that prominently cites one of the authors of this very paper [0]. I don't think he was very heavily involved in the science-reporting side of fivethirtyeight (he's always very obviously been more on the sports and politics side), and since at this point since he's no longer affiliated with the site, it sort of doesn't matter, but I'm also pretty sure that he didn't just come to the belief espoused in this post recently. I wonder if there were ever internal discussions about the piece.
One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that it will ever get “resolved”. We dont have sequence samples at the time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy where it needs to be sharp. In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate, not politics.
There's really no reason to care about which of the two prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and we cannot force them to prevent a natural source without something stupid like extreme sanctions or war.
So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
Yeah I guess I contradicted myself somewhat. Im specifically referring to the domestic politics that Nate Silver is talking about, not Chinese politics.
I’m really not sure what you mean. There is literally zero evidence supporting a lab leak, while there’s multitudes of evidence of multiple contact leaps in the market.
Was there a time when the lab leak theory had the same credibility as it being naturally occurring in poor unsanitary market conditions? I’d personally say no, but for the sake of argument, forgetting basic tenants like “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one”, let’s say that early on, both had little measurable credibility.
Now though, early contact tracing shows the earliest contractions are clustered to the market, and that the virus leaped across species multiple times during early phase. This is not a coincidence and it is also not what we’d expect from a lab leak.
The lab leak theory is conspiracy theory. Full stop.
This sounds like "your theory is outside the Overton window, you are not allowed to think this". The simplest version of the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy, it is very literally the opposite: "never ascribe to conspiracy what is adequately explained by incompetence". We had warnings, in writing, about the very lab in question, from western scientists, that the safety standards there were insufficient.
No. There is evidence to support that it naturally occurred through contact tracing due to the large clustered concentration of outbreak within the confines of the market.
There is no evidence to support a lab leak.
This is not “your theory is outside the Overton window”. It is you attempting to shift the Overton window intentionally.
- we know of the US funding collection of coronaviruses at WIV; and research on them using humanized mice
- we know that the closest genetic match is a thousand miles away
- we’ve been unable to identify the precursor in an animal, unlike other pandemics
That strongly implies that directed evolution on a collected sample via repeated infection of humanized mice is responsible for COVID.
Contrary to your claims, there’s evidence against a zoonotic origin — no precursor, high human infectivity (of alpha) that rapidly decreased in the wild (in delta and omicron), unusual genetics around the furin cleavage, etc.
Two of the points are lack of evidence; these would be more compelling to me if I felt that our viral surveillance was robust. The first point is circumstantial like the wet market evidence.
Good evidence would be covid positive samples. We cant go back in time and collect this.
Theres definitely lots of evidence: COVID on surfaces, animals that can catch COVID photographed in the market, cases surrounding/emerging from this point. But the smoking gun would be a covid positive sample from one of the animals, which we can’t get. This is what I mean by the evidence always being a little cloudy.
I mean the answer is obvious to me: reputational “skin in the game”. Lab leak is an extremely specific assertion that someone else could easily criticize.
Out of an infinite number of possibilities that are encompassed by "we lack the data to answer the question", you picked lab leak as a strawman, which is very interesting.
Personally, I never accepted that a lab leak was out of the question. I simply didn't think it mattered during the early days of the pandemic response (to the everyday citizen) since it didn't influence safe hygiene and social distancing. It was used by conservative media as something for their base to get mad about and be mildly racist about (Wuhan flu).
What was more egregious was Dr. Fauci's assertion that masking wouldn't help slow the spread, which he likely knew to be false and had said so to prevent a run on N95s. I get it, but that is a huge undermining of public trust.
There are professional journalists out there who in most organizations will get into hot water or lose their jobs if they fabricate news or sources.
They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact checkers - this is the best we have.
Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from @HotJerseyGirl1998.
One very obvious thing to consider is how a paper, whether it’s philosophy or physics, was funded and which grants the authors received and from who. So many conclusions and biases are driven by funding mechanisms, sometimes it’s corporate and sometimes it’s government but the devil is always in the details and there is no safe or superior source of funding.
Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact.
But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature.
But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what even research institutions increasingly need to survive it seems
"Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact."
This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a different role.
But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
So while the title is technically true and I agree with the premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary at best and damaging at worst. Until we begin to be more skeptical in general and learn to distrust all the other mouthpieces vomiting lies every day, let's trust the scientists.
The essence of science is not trusting an expert, but requiring evidence and repeatability. Scientists aren't more trustworthy than those other groups for no reason, it's because they work in a field where work can be double-checked. As the repeatability crisis has shown, many believe their work will not be double-checked, and once they believe that, they become less and less worthy of that trust.
Right, that's why my first sentence was "everyone should be skeptical of every source"....
But if I'm forced to trust someone (and most of us are on a daily basis), I'd rather trust the guys whose whole job revolves around the principle of "we require evidence and repeatable results before we believe you" than pretty much every other profession.
Completely separate from my above point, I'd also say that I do believe scientists are on average more trustworthy than other career workers at a personal level. It's a profession that tends to attract people concerned with objective truth and rational logic. Just like how politics tends to attract those who want to work with people and the police force attracts people who are comfortable with violence. At least from my personal, anecdotal view.
This all makes sense to me, and I partially agree.
However, people whose whole job revolves around "you must provide evidence of something that gets published in a journal, on a regular basis, even if it is never of enough interest for anyone else to try to replicate it", with an extra helping of "if it's confirming people's biases enough to get you speaking gigs or a best-selling book, you get a pay raise", then you might over time start to attract a slightly different crowd.
> But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same?
I think that scientists are more likely to abuse the trust because it's implicit. You can't expect to abuse someone's trust in you (e.g. as a scientist) if you don't expect people to trust you. All the people you listed as untrustworthy are obviously untrustworthy, which is what makes them not a serious risk. Saying "I really want to trust scientists" is the same as saying "If you want to exploit me, use a scientist to do it." I don't think you need to look any further than the Tobacco industry to see why blindly trusting scientists is not a viable mitigation to propaganda.
I don't really have a good answer for how to make a good decision when you're ignorant (trusting scientists would make this easier), and we're all ignorant about most things. Being skeptical doesn't give you good knowledge, it just mitigates absorbing bad knowledge. So you're kinda stuck if you need to e.g. make a risk based decision about COVID and you don't trust scientists.
>If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same?
Difference is that a the guy in the lab coat has to conduct experiments on it, get them peer reviewed, publish a paper on it, and lay out all the assumptions and methodologies before it's actually "science". So it's not as simple as getting a guy in a lab coat to say it. Especially when all the other guys in lab coats are saying "that guy is lying and his methodology is garbage".
edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists" makes it better.
I don't trust scientists, in particular doctors, when they're effectively bought by big pharma.
I don't care if you have ten degrees from Harvard Medical School if you also take a 7 figure paycheck from big pharma, you're a big pharma rep as far as I'm concerned.
Same with economists who shill for various groups, and so on.
I suppose I can trust astrophysicists because so far we have no evidence they've been bought by alien civilizations.
As a former scientist, I would say scientists who talk to the media are much less trustworthy than scientists in general, and scientists in fields frequently featured in the media are much less trustworthy than the rest.
I respect this position on principal, but I also forget like we are equally glossing over the context in this specific case.
In 2020, the lab-leak theory was specifically being promoted by people who were advancing the idea that Covid was a) an engineered bio-weapon b) required a national security response in lieu of a medical one.
But if we really want to look back at 2020-2021, there were MUCH more egregious examples of "experts" wielding their credentials maliciously. School closures I think will be the most pertinent example for a while to come.
Incorrect, the lab-leak theory was specifically disregarded using the well-poisoning methods you described as the blame would be shifted to a wild-goose chase. Considering China went through SARS 10 years previous with hundreds of millions of patients to examine, combined with the influx of viral research into the country after that period, it is by no means a stretch to assume duplicity was at hand. A for-profit medical response is a conflation of the kind you are suggesting should have taken place.
At the end of the day, no one really should have cared that much where Covid came from in 2020. The only people who really cared were people who were trying to win a game of political football. This is equally true with the scientists in the Lancet letter as it was with politicians trying to win a pissing match with China.
If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly.
Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
Both those ideas (a,b) are look to be vindicated. It does look like an engineered bio-weapon and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. And whether the people pointing to a lab leak were also demanding a national security response or opposing one, that is what happened, i.e., it was a national security response (big pharma white labeling and providing distribution for DoD subcontractors product). Simple as.
In 2023 I assume all news is biased or flat false. I assume all video is doctored or flat out generated. After one day I stopped consuming it all together as it was a pointless waste of time
It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts".
The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments.
This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Apparently the bozos are winning here.
Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism. No different to any other random person on the street.
That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping to any conclusions.
"Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism."
Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political biases.
Clearly the media stakeholders had the narrative decided, and the journalists were forced to find the scientists that supported it and ignore or attack the scientists who opposed it
Same for politics reporting
The best way to stay informed is to read a book about something currently not on the news
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadSo, wow- the facts presented here are depressing. Really a huge example of people in positions of authority blatantly misleading the public.
Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists understand this general statement, but just because most individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little due diligence.
The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.
As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).
"Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
"I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."
This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its implications than "China was researching bioweapons and released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which of those theories are remotely plausible, and which implausible?
If only there were a profession, between scientists and the general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the work of the former...
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
The point: Scientist says in private "A thing is possible" but in public "A thing is not all possible!"
Not the point: "A thing is possible, therefore it happened"
...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.
Note that all of this is deeply problematic, EVEN IF the truth is that the virus was a normally evolved bat coronavirus that got to Wuhan through some method that did not involve a lab in any way. The dichotomy between what they were saying in public, and what they were saying to each other in private, severely undercuts the idea that they are who the public should be trusting for advice on this topic.
I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.
I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.
As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous.
And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some merit, media just went silent on the matter. SO I disagree hard with that it's a right or far right tool to sell hero worship.
Journalism has turned to absolute shit and anything that comes from the perceived "other" side must be instantly mocked without any investigation or partisan integrity. And should the "other" side show merit there will either be silence or continued mockery along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day" . Left and right equally guilty.
Journalism is a joke. Maybe it always was and it's just these past 3 years that made so many of us realise exactly what a sh**show it actually is.
Several polls have shown that trust in news media is at a historical low https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-med...
and even expert opinion https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-tru... has lost all merit as it is just, for the lack of a better word, raped to haul in clicks.
This is especially true for the medical scientists who could not get their shit together during the crisis and seemed to have a pissingcompetition of who could recommend the most intrusive, obnoxious guideline that conflicted the most with what any other "expert" scientist recommended.
Masking toddlers, banning sitting on public park benches, banning children from playgrounds. Banning walking outdoors in company. Masking while standing up in a restaurant to take it off while sitting down. Banning sports, isolating the elderly to the point of driving them to insanity and severe cognitive decline. DENYING AEROSOL SPREAD. That one is my personal pet peeve with the scientific community. The embarrassing list is endless.
My own trust in medical expertise, that is, the one I see in the news. Is at an all time low. I ofc listen to my personal MD. But if she'd proclaim something in the media I'd probably never listen to her again and switch doctors.
The Hershey factory in question is the Huanan market - you know, the place where they were selling wild animals, where the initial cases were heavily clustered around. It's not the research institute on the other side of the city that never even had a closely related virus in the first place.
I haven't seen any non-affiliated journalists doing this. I've seen right-wing journalists doing it, fitting whatever they can find into their ten times stepped-on John Birch worldview. What I've seem far more of is administration-connected journalists characterizing whatever position that they support censorship of in its most extremist, unhinged, obviously factually-incorrect form. Radical right-wingers insist that they're the only option other than current Democratic party orthodoxy, and Democrats agree with them 100%.
[0]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-...
"There’s also a generational divide in journalism, with younger journalists tending to be more openly left/progressive than their older peers — and tending to be more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news stories are complicated and it’s not particularly their job to pass moral judgment."
This is probably true of the younger generations in general, not just journalists.
Sadly any attempt at communicating a nuanced view makes you subject to vicious attacks from binary thinkers, who often miss the point and derail the discussion.
You know, at some point, if you try to see "both sides" like this, you are going to lose the plot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, especially where it's about comments. I'm not the best example of always following them myself but I'm having a hard time extracting anyting of value from your comment. Sorry.
Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. At university I majored in two STEM subjects but also took 10 courses in Philosophy, Art, History, Journalism, and Economics. Almost no one majoring in any of those fields except Econ took more than 2-3 STEM courses, and even then there a dedicated watered down courses to ensure those people could graduate (Algebra instead of Calculus, "Physics for Future Presidents", etc.).
My high school education in the humanities was also far better than my high school education in STEM, which is typical. And the deplorable state of Mathematics education in US high schools acts as a hard constraint toward improving the situation, since you need a baseline of mathematics literacy before proceeding along any other path in STEM.
How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely approaching a truly well-rounded education?
Go read the proximal origins paper. How is a journalist who has never seen a derivative, has never taken BIO 101, and whose Science distribution credit was fulfilled by Physics For Future Presidents supposed to dive into the claims in that paper and critically evaluate the surrounding literature? They can't.
If news organizations were serious about this, they might actively look for people who _do_ have greater amounts of training/experience in a given field.
It may be true that in the current journalism paradigm the kind of skepticism called for is impossible, but it is absolutely not true that this is a fundamental state of journalism and that reporters could never become capable of doing it.
I have given a number of interviews to "Science" journalists, in two occasions even for science-focused publications. In each case I began the interview by asking the journalist to tell me about their coursework and self-study background so I can be sure to meet them where they are. In only one case have I met a science reporter who I'd consider minimally competent to report on science -- rather than eg write puff pieces -- and that reporter was educated in Europe.
"The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-sci...
At my alma, science/engineering required 18 arts credits while arts required only 6 science/math credits.
Whereas for humanities it was extremely opaque what it took to get a top mark but most people would get a decent mark. And almost no one fails.
I disagree for any current reporters who were selected by going to journalism school rather than by gaining expertise and then turning to journalism.
So news organizations may look for people with more experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in paying for that news/writing themselves.
I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of the people who write on deep technical topics either don't need the money or are doing it as a sideshow of their day jobs.
(Which, if they write for independent news organizations can be an issue. The WSJ reporter who basically uncovered the Theranos scandal quit because he couldn't give public speaking engagements.)
30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.
Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.
Now, no science grad could make that choice.
But that's really not a random online pub rate.
Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other or related income sources (which tend to be difficult given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time, or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League grad.
NPR had a bunch of economic reporters and they’re mostly ok but they still get a ton of stuff wrong, so it’s not a great solution either.
Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).
Well then, I guess we at least agree on the following: today we have science "reporting" done by "journalists" who will write about findings reported in publications that they haven't read and self-admittedly can't read.
I suppose we can agree to disagree about the usefulness of that reporting and the potential harm of that reporting.
> Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).
You are missing the word ALSO. As in, you do so by reading and evaluating the source and then ALSO considering the surrounding context.
Palace intrigue isn't something that should be ignored, but it also shouldn't be the entire story.
And don't get led astray by looking for "productivity." So much advancement is lost on the alter of efficiency and productivity. Yes, if you know the correct next move to make, do it. But don't discount exploration and general play.
It's really easy to be unproductively skeptical. Never believe anything. Everything is a lie or a conspiracy. That's not particularly productive, though, because although it protects you from lies and bad actors it will never get you to the truth.
Do try and make sure you aren't completely poking around in the dark. But also don't feel bad if you find out you were.
I do hate that I'm posting this in this thread. At large, I get the impression that the "coverup" is being blown out of proportion. I also can't deny that a lot of the dismissals earlier were heavy handed. Such that some topics and inquiries have somehow become toxic.
But, at large, most "quack" theories don't have to be fully dismissed by other scientists. They are more easily explained with other ideas. It can be frustrating for some of them, as I'm sure many are tired of hearing about "UFOs" and such. But for a lot of crazier ideas, the "dismissal" can quite literally be "that necessarily leads to enough other things that we are not seeing, that I just can't bring myself to believe it right now."
This does require, though, that asking the questions is not done in such a way to paint a contest. Try to build the questions in such a way to expand ideas.
> To be clear, I’m not sure how COVID originated either. I’d “buy” the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other.
This post is his commentary on leaked communications demonstrating that the authors of the paper themselves didn't believe the contents of the paper. This has nothing to do with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.
None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
Maybe the answer is that people without a STEM background should get out of science journalism?
The question mark is genuine- would this be a bad thing for some reason?
Not that scientist journalists don’t also make mistakes of course- I’ve seen plenty, usually due to covering topics outside their own specialty.
If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.
Academics certainly could be better writers and communicators now, but non-scientists cannot expect to understand most work that required years of education before they could perform it. The public can be given a rapid education in it when it matters, but that rapid education isn't going to put them in a position to critique the work. And when the public mistakes that rapid education for a superior grasp of the topic, it becomes a huge drain on the academics' time to correct the misconceptions.
This work is good. But none of this work is particularly complicated or hard to understand - and so much of the "education" is busy work or learning the "inside baseball" of how to get meaningful results and how to get published.
When we are talking about "trust the scientists" no one is really arguing that nuclear scientists or aeronautical engineers don't know what they are talking about. We're really talking about whether we should listen to an epidemiologist just because they have spent so much time looking at these studies (often conflicting!) that they can squint their eyes when they look at a set of data and give a more qualified off-the-cuff opinion.
They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes?
They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news?
They're supposed to be experts at reporting, which works out to mean experts at finding out about topics that they don't already know about.
Journalists have roughly the same undergraduate educational background as lawyers and receive a half-decent education on the high level basics of the American legal system in civics courses.
> They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes?
Crashes themselves often don't require any amount of aviation expertise.
> They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news?
Mostly poorly, which is why eg Bloomberg's retail news business exists, and most of those folks have some financial background.
It's not about being an expert in the subject but having a fundamental understanding and being logically minded enough to perform fact based and critically thought out reporting.
Now everything is so trashy, economics is how they can bash their least favorite company or billionaire, law reporting is one-sided story telling for bashing or cheerleading someone in court, same with politics. It's mostly story telling anymore geared for entertainment or outrage.
I almost think it would be better if virtually everyone, even if you're not a STEM major, taking at least a course on hierarchy of evidence and how particular study designs attempt to demonstrate causation, along with some basic statistical literacy. But I was listening to a very good breakdown of the aspartame history this morning and the host was going on about criticisms of some of the early studies showing cancer in rats dealing with exactly how randomization works when you're dealing with multiple litters from the same gene line and why they usually terminate the rats early instead of waiting for natural death, and these are things you could never possibly know unless you specifically have a background in rodent studies. I was a biology major and still didn't know any of this stuff.
1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine.
2. READ the papers. Journalists never do this. I cannot express how frequently you can spot scientific fraud by just reading the underlying papers, even as a layman. If you lack expertise maybe you'll miss 90% of the tricks but catching 10% of them is still sufficient to notice something is wrong, and often you don't need any special training. Here are some of my own investigations of bad papers - it's often obvious and most of it doesn't require expertise to spot.
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
3. Hold sources to account when it's proven that they were misleading you. Report on bad behavior to discourage it next time.
4. Be willing to report stories dug up by other people, even when they make Team University look bad. Note how the reporting Silver refers to hasn't been covered by legacy media outlets even though you don't need to be a scientist to understand what they're saying and how damning it is.
In reality this stuff is easy. Nobody is asking for the NYT to engage in professional peer review of newly published papers. Just not assuming anything a professor says is gospel truth would be a good start, but there seems little chance of that happening :( Journalists depend so heavily on academics for rent-a-quote services and a constant flow of stories that getting tough would be biting the hand that feeds them.
This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is flat, whether climate change is real, etc.
> 2. READ the papers.
Literally nobody reads the papers. A huge amount of news isn't even investigated. A large number of news these days is regurgitated from other sources.
https://news.google.com/search?q=%22flat%20earth%22&hl=en-US...
Realistically, journalists like to report on fringe or weird beliefs so they can laugh at the people holding them, and dislike reporting on serious disagreement with things they want to be true.
Agree that almost nobody is reading the papers, outside of random tweeters and bloggers. Journalists might as well start, though. Reading obscure documents is a part of the job, classically at least.
If there is disagreement among people with appropriate background, experience, and education, it can be reported as a legitimate disagreement. The journalist should be evaluating the credentials of sources, but not what they say, and not on the basis of whether the journalist personally agrees with them.
Correct. Part of the problem is that there is disagreement about whether a disagreement exists. Cranks believe that there is a vigorous debate about flat-earth/evolution/climate change, and scientists don't.
Do how does one (journalist) objectively determine whether an issue is settled or not?
One thing I'll add: if you don't have specific training in the field in question, just ignore any use of "scientific consensus" to justify an argument.
The "scientific consensus" trope is just dressed-up appeal to authority, and even if there is such a "consensus", it's almost never broad enough to be applicable to whatever pop-science journalism thing you're reading.
Also, even within the hallowed halls of academic science, most scientists are just repeating things they've heard other people say. Unless the "consensus" is amongst scientists who have spent their entire career studying the specific question (and by "specific", I mean...hyper specific, not just "in the same field", and certainly not something meaningless like "epidemiology"), this kind of thing just devolves into a popularity contest. You'd be shocked by how many PhDs just confidently repeat whatever silly thing they saw that morning in the New York Times.
Also, since I'm already seeing the meme appear...people are waaaaay too worried about "amplifying fringe voices" these days. News flash: if you don't know what you're talking about, then you can't possibly know what you should or should not be "amplifying". Stick to what you know, be modest about what you don't know (which is most things), and let the facts sort themselves out over time. Science only works if contrarians get a voice.
This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.
Sometimes a contrarian is right and the accepted consensus is wrong. But that doesn't happen only because the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable theory that fits empirical observations and is sufficiently predictive. They also set out to disprove their hypothesis.
Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit. It's far easier to spam stupid contrarian ideas than to produce real rigorous scientific output.
No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean that, I don't believe that, and trying to spin it that way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you quoted.
Contrarians don't have to be right to require a voice for the system to work.
> Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.
The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is working is because I can see the all the disagreements and judge for myself. Efficiency isn't the goal.
But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my choice, and who are you to tell me otherwise?
Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they are about censoring things they don't like.
Well, it shouldn't be. But in case your research is informing "urgent" policy decisions, it's hard not to get frustrated and just want those who disagree to shut up.
At least I don't have the knowledge (not just technical but also the lingo-related aspect) to read any paper or judge between any different positions on non-trivial things.
"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."
I completely agree, but it's counterintuitive. There's a part of me that thinks "science == reproducible, observable fact". But it really is much more (er, less) than that. It'd be nice if there was a different word for the "not irrefutable" parts (i.e. almost all of it).
> READ the papers
The point of my original comment is that most journalists don't have the educational background required to do this. And everything else flows downstream of that problem.
And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery in this article can be detected as fraud by anyone:
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422
No expertise needed. Blatant stuff like that is more obvious than we'd hope.
Even if you somehow forced science journalists to all get STEM dual majors, it still wouldn't make them care. They'd still take the path of least resistance and pump out slop. The only way to make them care is to put them under editors that enforce standards. But how do you make a publication care enough to hire editors that care? Even state funded university press departments notoriously sloppy. If they can't uphold standards, I doubt any organization can.
All of the journalists I know personally would love to have more time to dig into stories, to do more background research, to spend more time following them up, and to get to understand a subject more deeply. None are given that opportunity in today's high pressure, short-staffed, and cut-to-the-bones newsrooms.
That said, 90% of all papers contain at least one important error that brings the conclusions into question. Note that even great papers that established long-accepted truths contain important errors, see both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Controvers... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
Similarly, the original 3D structure of DNA from W&C was actually "wrong" but I truly doubt any laymen (laypeople) could have determined that by reading the original paper (which is a paragon of clear and simple scientific reporting).
(put another way: many papers that contributed what appears to be new, true knowledge contain factual errors, some of them invalidating, yet the paper turned out to be correct, in terms of its conclusions, in the long run)
Maybe start there.
Independent, transparent and publicly available journalism (open to critics) simplifies things a lot.
First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the journalist writing the article is a qualified science journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning their education with partial credentials.
Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is agitating to create such an infrastructure.
Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball: a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and in America, that's saying something.
You don’t need a STEM degree to stop propagating theories before they’re proven.
The whole point of science is that you do not have to believe anything just because a scientist said it. Only thing that matters is the validity of their data, whether the data truly backs their interpretation, and if the findings can be replicated.
For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't have a detailed education in the subject could really contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright because the authors made egregious errors in the study design or data collection (where data scientists/statisticians who don't work in the field can still be very useful), but for most modern physics or medical research, there are literally hundreds of years of well-established theory and practice that you absolutely need to know before dismissing ideas that don't make sense.
This is especially important in areas like infectious disease.
And GP was talking about how journalists can be skeptical. No one is suggesting journalists should be debunking all new science findings—merely that they should be very skeptical when reporting about those findings.
They are not the expert, but still need to strive to find the truth of an issue they can relay to the public.
In this case, the underlying skill is, how do you detect and expose a cover up of inconvenient facts?
I don't know the answer to that question. But seems like a core skill of a journalist, regardless of the field being investigated.
I just don’t think they would care, would they?
If anyone is reading it working as such, feel free to humor me by shooting me an email (in my profile). I studied psychology (bachelor), business (bachelor), computer science (master) and game-design (master). I also did some course work related to journalism (though very limited, I only read The Elements of Style). I worked as a teacher (mostly in programming, though one lecture on rhetorics in a rhetorics class) and as a software engineer.
Let me know! I’m up for a chat as I might be a good fit and able to help more accurate reporting on AI and software in general.
Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face value. Assume you're being bullshitted.
You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.
There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know which questions to ask, to know which people to ask, is all highly suspect.
"Dr. Scientist, are you aware of claim Y, which seems at odds with what you are saying? Explain why claim Y is wrong?"
Write it up. You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said. That's what "reporting" is.
Pretty much the silliest thing I've heard today!
"Dr. Scientist, you said that vaccines promote herd immunity describe your evidence for that claim"
"Dr. Scientist, you said that mRNA vaccines aren't going to mutate humans, describe your evidence for that claim"
"Dr. Scientist, you predicted this year is hotter than ever, but back in February it was -20. Why did you lie?"
There are an infinite numbers of terrible questions you could ask as a reporter, if you don't have expertise. You need some degree of knowledge to talk about a subject, the only debate is how much.
Nate Silver is much more comfortable asserting his opinion about this than I am, because, as an infectious disease epidemiologist who primarily focuses on the stochastics of disease emergence and disease extinction, my expertise is a good two weeks after when either a zoonotic jump or a lab leak would take place. Take that for what you will.
> You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.
Isn't that what the Covid vaccine skeptics did? It didn't turn out that great and made journalists look like conspiracy theorists in some cases.
This right here is why I've mostly stopped listening to journalists and try to find primary sources regarding thee scientific papers, scientists, legal rulings, etc. in question instead of playing a game of telephone where people reinterpret everything to fit whatever story they're tying to tell me.
It's also why I have been finding Wikipedia less useful these days, since they have an explicit policy of citing secondary sources instead of primary sources and I find those far less useful.
Simple: If they are not equipped to understand what they are going to write about, they should refrain from adding noise to the conversation. The potential to add nothing but noise or cause damage is great.
Interestingly enough nobody would ever propose that, say, a fashion journalist report on surgical procedures or a range of other subjects. How is this problem not obvious in other domains?
It's interesting to watch the difference between a reporter/journalist on any TV news show and, say, the people working at a financial news network like CNBC. In the latter case, they have to have a serious body of knowledge just to open their mouths. If you plucked your average reporter/journalist and put them into that seat, they would sound like complete morons because they just would not know what they are talking about.
A lot of people writing scientific papers aren't statistically literate.
It also seems that what was considered first rate methodology even a decade ago is now considered deeply unreliable.
If there are only two groups, yes. There are often more than two groups.
By asking OTHER specialists. In the 1970s/80s of my experience, journalism was much higher quality than now, but reporters were still notoriously ignorant of technical subjects. Standard procedure for a reporter was to contact one or two outside specialists to comment on the case. A good reporter wasn't expected to have expert knowledge, but just to be an accurate "reporter" of what experts said.
What I mean is, instead of having a journalist who took an intro chem series writing about chem topics, we had people who majored in chemistry with a few journalism classes writing the articles instead?
You might say "well people who majored in their science field probably want to work in that field", but I'd say look no further than at the amount of science degree people doing dev work. Something something, a trained ai chatgpt-like tool might also help bridge the gap to journalism? Perhaps a pay gap would also need to be addressed.
Regardless, it's refreshing to hear qualified people give their opinion and reportings on things than it is to listen to those that don't understand what they are commenting on.
Who's going to want to do that?
Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for journalists, but the overwhelming majority of them get the short end of the stick. It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates.
Put it this way. I dabbled in coding in college, doing some WordPress stuff. After two years I was paid better than most journalists after a decade. Granted dev work is really overpaid (especially before 2023) but journalism has been really underpaid, and getting worse all the time, so the difference was quite stark.
One has you doing almost no work for tremendous pay and benefits. The other has you working your ass off every week and weekends for nothing, with very little growth opportunities too. It may be decades before you pay off student loans. It's not a livable wage in most areas.
Want better journalism? We gotta treat our journalists better.
Sounds like a good reason to do a worker cooperative where money is important but stability of the whole is key component, so their decisions are often to keep united.
Nobody pays for news anymore, and that was before GPT. Even worker coops need a source of income. At this rate I'd be surprised if the industry survives at all...
Easy fix there. Stop requiring degrees. Carl Bernstein failed out of college.
A large part of our curriculum was looking at the challenges of science communications (especially in regards to climate, but also cultural conflicts, land use, blah blah). The background context in the field was super helpful as a news reader. I can't imagine trying to write good stories with sensible context without that sort of understanding.
Could someone self-learn it? Probably. But I think the risk there is blindly falling into some tribe or another and becoming another controversial screaming head (and some would use the same argument against formal academia).
The more I learned about the field, the more I saw it as a no-win scenario. :/
Simple and rational questions can go a long way here.
Maybe they help you feel a bit more or less confident?
I think reading a paper and asking "okay, what did they actually do, and how could it go wrong" might be a good start, or better yet asking some other scientist who know the field about that?
Like... I didn't study music or history in college but I know a lot about them. Because I'm not a dumbass and I read books. Being literate on subjects when it's your job to be should not be a high bar.
1. By talking to a variety of experts
2. Purposefully seeking out alternative narratives or skeptics among reputable scientists.
3. Following up on criticisms that pop up across multiple, well regarded skeptics.
5. Challenging the original scientist based on input from these skeptics.
6. Transparently reporting on responses to these challenges.
Instead today we get:
1. Scientist makes claim
2. Reporter parrots the talking points
The quality of online learning materials is mind boggling, never been better. For humanities maybe teaching logic and logical thinking (modus ponens, modus tollens, quantifiers like "none, some, at least one, at most one, all") in the context of public discussion, argument, public debate maybe more effective and receptive. It's fair to acknowledge that maths with abstract symbols and all that is too hard for most people and there maybe better way of teaching. Ditto data, distributions and statistics - that is I think a new can of worms (and we still struggle with the old one).
[0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-th...
So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
Perhaps even reconsider our entire approach to pandemic research, if our decisions led to the worst pandemic in generations.
WIV was defunded by the US 2 days ago https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-halts-funding-access-wuhan-...
> In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate, not politics.
But isn’t that politics? (International politics to be precise.)
Was there a time when the lab leak theory had the same credibility as it being naturally occurring in poor unsanitary market conditions? I’d personally say no, but for the sake of argument, forgetting basic tenants like “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one”, let’s say that early on, both had little measurable credibility.
Now though, early contact tracing shows the earliest contractions are clustered to the market, and that the virus leaped across species multiple times during early phase. This is not a coincidence and it is also not what we’d expect from a lab leak.
The lab leak theory is conspiracy theory. Full stop.
There is no evidence to support a lab leak.
This is not “your theory is outside the Overton window”. It is you attempting to shift the Overton window intentionally.
- we know of the US funding collection of coronaviruses at WIV; and research on them using humanized mice
- we know that the closest genetic match is a thousand miles away
- we’ve been unable to identify the precursor in an animal, unlike other pandemics
That strongly implies that directed evolution on a collected sample via repeated infection of humanized mice is responsible for COVID.
Contrary to your claims, there’s evidence against a zoonotic origin — no precursor, high human infectivity (of alpha) that rapidly decreased in the wild (in delta and omicron), unusual genetics around the furin cleavage, etc.
Good evidence would be covid positive samples. We cant go back in time and collect this.
There was a specific reason why they didn't -- and in fact promoted a specific theory, and it had more to do with politics and funding than science.
What was more egregious was Dr. Fauci's assertion that masking wouldn't help slow the spread, which he likely knew to be false and had said so to prevent a run on N95s. I get it, but that is a huge undermining of public trust.
They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact checkers - this is the best we have.
Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from @HotJerseyGirl1998.
But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature.
But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what even research institutions increasingly need to survive it seems
This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a different role.
But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
So while the title is technically true and I agree with the premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary at best and damaging at worst. Until we begin to be more skeptical in general and learn to distrust all the other mouthpieces vomiting lies every day, let's trust the scientists.
But if I'm forced to trust someone (and most of us are on a daily basis), I'd rather trust the guys whose whole job revolves around the principle of "we require evidence and repeatable results before we believe you" than pretty much every other profession.
Completely separate from my above point, I'd also say that I do believe scientists are on average more trustworthy than other career workers at a personal level. It's a profession that tends to attract people concerned with objective truth and rational logic. Just like how politics tends to attract those who want to work with people and the police force attracts people who are comfortable with violence. At least from my personal, anecdotal view.
However, people whose whole job revolves around "you must provide evidence of something that gets published in a journal, on a regular basis, even if it is never of enough interest for anyone else to try to replicate it", with an extra helping of "if it's confirming people's biases enough to get you speaking gigs or a best-selling book, you get a pay raise", then you might over time start to attract a slightly different crowd.
If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same? I think that scientists are more likely to abuse the trust because it's implicit. You can't expect to abuse someone's trust in you (e.g. as a scientist) if you don't expect people to trust you. All the people you listed as untrustworthy are obviously untrustworthy, which is what makes them not a serious risk. Saying "I really want to trust scientists" is the same as saying "If you want to exploit me, use a scientist to do it." I don't think you need to look any further than the Tobacco industry to see why blindly trusting scientists is not a viable mitigation to propaganda.
I don't really have a good answer for how to make a good decision when you're ignorant (trusting scientists would make this easier), and we're all ignorant about most things. Being skeptical doesn't give you good knowledge, it just mitigates absorbing bad knowledge. So you're kinda stuck if you need to e.g. make a risk based decision about COVID and you don't trust scientists.
Difference is that a the guy in the lab coat has to conduct experiments on it, get them peer reviewed, publish a paper on it, and lay out all the assumptions and methodologies before it's actually "science". So it's not as simple as getting a guy in a lab coat to say it. Especially when all the other guys in lab coats are saying "that guy is lying and his methodology is garbage".
I think you're underestimating the ability for people to abuse trust, i.e. lie.
You can't say "trust scientist A but not scientist B" unless you've got some way to judge them. Which we don't as we're the ignorant laymen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccines_and_autism
edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists" makes it better.
I don't care if you have ten degrees from Harvard Medical School if you also take a 7 figure paycheck from big pharma, you're a big pharma rep as far as I'm concerned.
Same with economists who shill for various groups, and so on.
I suppose I can trust astrophysicists because so far we have no evidence they've been bought by alien civilizations.
In 2020, the lab-leak theory was specifically being promoted by people who were advancing the idea that Covid was a) an engineered bio-weapon b) required a national security response in lieu of a medical one.
But if we really want to look back at 2020-2021, there were MUCH more egregious examples of "experts" wielding their credentials maliciously. School closures I think will be the most pertinent example for a while to come.
If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly.
Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments.
This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Apparently the bozos are winning here.
That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping to any conclusions.
Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political biases.
Otherwise the source of the perceived biases may be closer to home.
Same for politics reporting
The best way to stay informed is to read a book about something currently not on the news