5 ms·

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Ti

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00794-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982221007946%3Fshowall%3Dtrue https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

sinsterizme 5y ago
I’d personally rather read the NYT article because it’s much easier to understand as a layman
- acituan 5y ago
  I prefer just the opposite, even if the jargon is harder to consume at a glance, the extra layer of editorializing can obfuscate central facts or salience peripheral details based on whatever their target demographic wants to hear (nothing exclusive to NYT).
  - derefr 5y ago
    If I don't have time to do more than to skim the text, then my own lack of understanding / misrecognition of jargon can also "obfuscate central facts or [the] salience [of] peripheral details."
    - wahern 5y ago
      Don't sell yourself short. Your ability to grok the summary (or abstract) of a research paper is probably not much worse--and possibly better--than a typical journalist, even a journalist at the NYT. Especially relative to younger journalists, who seem to rely on Twitter and other social media to contextualize things.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        I am generally surprised by the inability of journalists to grok research papers, but I think the age thing goes the other direction than what you suggest. General scientific/numeric literacy among people who don't work in science seems higher in the younger generation than the older to me.
        wahern 5y ago
        Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field. On social media nothing is ever unknown because there's always a large and emphatic group--some of whom will have PhDs, MDs, and other high-quality credentials--telling you with absolute certainty the way things are, and that's reflected in modern journalism. Not necessarily the certainty, per se, as outside academia the certainty of most information is inflated; but the shear breadth and depth of what's reported. To be clear, "young" to me includes people in their 30s and 40s, which also happens to be my age group. I've been watching in real-time the turnover over the past several years of radio journalists (NPR affiliates, etc) and print publications and I definitely see a change. The level of credulity is much too high, as is the level of partisanship. For nearly 15 years I disagreed vehemently with claims that such outlets were too partisan (notwithstanding FOX News and similar outlets), but over the past several years I can no longer sustain such defenses. The latest generation of journalists don't believe they're partisan because they believe the information they share is rooted in science, but real science is contingent, and the further away you get from hard science the greater the uncertainty in various claims, but because "science" discourse has become pseudo-religious and partisan the reality of this is lost. When you read a research paper, coming across the complexity and diversity of approaches and results is one of the most important aspects of the experience. It's difficult for experts, let alone journalists, to convey uncertainty and inconsistency. That's why it's so important, if you can, to read primary sources yourself. It doesn't matter whether you can understand the chemistry or calculus behind results. You can simply take the results and claims at face value, which in the vast majority of cases is how they'll be presented to you through the media. What matters is synthesizing the importance of the gaps that come into focus after reading many papers in a field.
    - acituan 5y ago
      The difference is with one you know you don’t know, with the other “authority” gives people a false confidence at scale and worst case you join the botnet of the narrative warfare. PS: to salience: to make salient.
- kragen 5y ago
  That's not helpful if what the NYT article says is wrong, which it probably is. As a general rule, any popular-press story about a scientific paper is wrong, usually dramatically, spectacularly wrong. I'm invariably better off just reading the paper's abstract.
neals 5y ago
Even better: The data is readily available in the world! All you need to do is a bit of research and travelling and you could come to a similar conclusion!
breck 5y ago
Here is the source code, AFAICT: https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipeline https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipe... I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper. The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompanied by not only source code but Spore like simulations that let you explore the ideas like a video game.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  It's written in Perl.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    So?
    - UncleOxidant 5y ago
      I have Perl Traumatic Stress Disorder from too much Perl in the 90s. Just looking at Perl code makes me break out in a cold sweat. I wish I were kidding. Otherwise, just noted that it was written in Perl.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        Ok. It came across as a value judgement. Personally I don't much care what its written in, executable line noise or anything else as long as practitioners of that particular language do not find anything wrong with it. Scientists typically don't particularly care about the latest and greatest software development environments and practices, they simply need answers. The best way to deal with that is to help out, I personally think they should be applauded for putting their code out there, which is better than the vast majority. Including CS, for that matter.
        deleted 5y ago

sinsterizme 5y ago

I’d personally rather read the NYT article because it’s much easier to understand as a layman

acituan 5y ago
I prefer just the opposite, even if the jargon is harder to consume at a glance, the extra layer of editorializing can obfuscate central facts or salience peripheral details based on whatever their target demographic wants to hear (nothing exclusive to NYT).
- derefr 5y ago
  If I don't have time to do more than to skim the text, then my own lack of understanding / misrecognition of jargon can also "obfuscate central facts or [the] salience [of] peripheral details."
  - wahern 5y ago
    Don't sell yourself short. Your ability to grok the summary (or abstract) of a research paper is probably not much worse--and possibly better--than a typical journalist, even a journalist at the NYT. Especially relative to younger journalists, who seem to rely on Twitter and other social media to contextualize things.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I am generally surprised by the inability of journalists to grok research papers, but I think the age thing goes the other direction than what you suggest. General scientific/numeric literacy among people who don't work in science seems higher in the younger generation than the older to me.
      - wahern 5y ago
        Younger people will remember their college education better, which will also happen to be more up-to-date with contemporary perspectives and techniques. But that's knowledge, not a skill. Good journalists rely on experts, and better journalists rely on multiple experts (for a topic, but also over time) to derive a sense of what's unknown and uncertain in a field. On social media nothing is ever unknown because there's always a large and emphatic group--some of whom will have PhDs, MDs, and other high-quality credentials--telling you with absolute certainty the way things are, and that's reflected in modern journalism. Not necessarily the certainty, per se, as outside academia the certainty of most information is inflated; but the shear breadth and depth of what's reported. To be clear, "young" to me includes people in their 30s and 40s, which also happens to be my age group. I've been watching in real-time the turnover over the past several years of radio journalists (NPR affiliates, etc) and print publications and I definitely see a change. The level of credulity is much too high, as is the level of partisanship. For nearly 15 years I disagreed vehemently with claims that such outlets were too partisan (notwithstanding FOX News and similar outlets), but over the past several years I can no longer sustain such defenses. The latest generation of journalists don't believe they're partisan because they believe the information they share is rooted in science, but real science is contingent, and the further away you get from hard science the greater the uncertainty in various claims, but because "science" discourse has become pseudo-religious and partisan the reality of this is lost. When you read a research paper, coming across the complexity and diversity of approaches and results is one of the most important aspects of the experience. It's difficult for experts, let alone journalists, to convey uncertainty and inconsistency. That's why it's so important, if you can, to read primary sources yourself. It doesn't matter whether you can understand the chemistry or calculus behind results. You can simply take the results and claims at face value, which in the vast majority of cases is how they'll be presented to you through the media. What matters is synthesizing the importance of the gaps that come into focus after reading many papers in a field.
  - acituan 5y ago
    The difference is with one you know you don’t know, with the other “authority” gives people a false confidence at scale and worst case you join the botnet of the narrative warfare. PS: to salience: to make salient.
kragen 5y ago
That's not helpful if what the NYT article says is wrong, which it probably is. As a general rule, any popular-press story about a scientific paper is wrong, usually dramatically, spectacularly wrong. I'm invariably better off just reading the paper's abstract.

neals 5y ago

Even better: The data is readily available in the world! All you need to do is a bit of research and travelling and you could come to a similar conclusion!

breck 5y ago

Here is the source code, AFAICT: https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipeline https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipe... I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper. The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompanied by not only source code but Spore like simulations that let you explore the ideas like a video game.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
It's written in Perl.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  So?
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    I have Perl Traumatic Stress Disorder from too much Perl in the 90s. Just looking at Perl code makes me break out in a cold sweat. I wish I were kidding. Otherwise, just noted that it was written in Perl.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Ok. It came across as a value judgement. Personally I don't much care what its written in, executable line noise or anything else as long as practitioners of that particular language do not find anything wrong with it. Scientists typically don't particularly care about the latest and greatest software development environments and practices, they simply need answers. The best way to deal with that is to help out, I personally think they should be applauded for putting their code out there, which is better than the vast majority. Including CS, for that matter.
      - deleted 5y ago