3 ms·

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.
        LocalPCGuy 5y ago
        I don't think it's only just an age thing, although that probably is a large part of it. I also think media outlets have gotten to what seems like a more partisan stance as a reaction to the other networks pulling farther and farther away from truth and hard science. And I'm not saying they haven't changed, that it's only the far right fringes pulling farther away, but that the changes are reactionary and pull left-ward because of that action. Add in that youth tend to skew left and you get a bit of a perfect storm. I want to believe that the ecosystem is ripe for some sort of centrist, fact-based news reporting, but not sure there is a big enough audience, unfortunately. And partly that is because the mainstream media outlets actually do a decent job of conveying the facts. It's just that it's 5min of every hour while the other 35 is talking heads "interpreting it for the layman". So if you're able to mentally sift through the bias and are willing to dig deeper yourself into other sources, you do get the basic information you need to become relatively fully educated. And I don't think that's the case these days with some of the more extreme networks. edit to add: I fully support your main point of encouraging people to read papers for themselves!
        idiotsecant 5y ago
        Boy you sure linked some concepts here. The news isn't more partisan because young reporters are introducing some kind of hyper-partisanship. Young reporters are not in charge. Old money people are. Old money people see that hyper-partisanship makes money because old people with money enjoy consuming it. Young people are much, much less partisan on average than older media consumers and that isn't something new. The older you get the more entrenched, generally, you get in your views.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - jltsiren 5y ago
        As an active researcher, I'm not surprised at all. It's common enough that people in the same field but a different subfield cannot properly understand a published paper. The same is often true for people working in the same subfield but on different topics. Just read all the horror stories about Reviewer 2. With some scientific literacy, you may be able to understand the central claims made in a paper. Or you may misunderstand them, because you may not be aware of the specific meanings of some words that are also used in everyday language. You may not be familiar with the context the paper was written in or with the best practices in the field. Hence you may not see the implicit assumptions that were made or know the justifications for certain choices. Because you are not an expert in the topic, you may not see the immediate consequences of the claims and are likely to take them too literally. It doesn't help that the authors probably didn't understand the results fully either. Most papers are difficult to understand, because they discuss early insights rather than final results. Clarity often comes with a better understanding years after the initial publication.
    - derefr 5y ago
      The journalist has more attention to spare, though, because extracting meaning from opaque text is, in large part, their job—the thing they're putting intentional focus and man-hours into; rather than something they're doing half-heartedly + absent-mindedly + in fits-and-starts as procrastination from their job. Certainly, as a dabbler in a lot of scientific fields, I might make fewer errors in comprehension than a typical journalist "on the science beat" who doesn't actually get much immersion in science. But, as someone who comes across this journal paper while scrolling HN on the bus and knows I get off at the next stop, I more-likely-than-not just won't pick up / comprehend any useful facts from reading the scientific abstract, before I get up and forget about the open tab, never coming back to it again. Whereas skimming a few paragraphs of an editorialized version of the paper, might be enough to at least let me absorb a nonzero amount of information, in that same distracted two minutes. Even if I don't absorb a precisely-correct + objective reiteration of the conclusion, then at least I might learn what the novel research method was, to the point that it piques my curiosity to go back and learn more later!
  - 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.

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.
      - LocalPCGuy 5y ago
        I don't think it's only just an age thing, although that probably is a large part of it. I also think media outlets have gotten to what seems like a more partisan stance as a reaction to the other networks pulling farther and farther away from truth and hard science. And I'm not saying they haven't changed, that it's only the far right fringes pulling farther away, but that the changes are reactionary and pull left-ward because of that action. Add in that youth tend to skew left and you get a bit of a perfect storm. I want to believe that the ecosystem is ripe for some sort of centrist, fact-based news reporting, but not sure there is a big enough audience, unfortunately. And partly that is because the mainstream media outlets actually do a decent job of conveying the facts. It's just that it's 5min of every hour while the other 35 is talking heads "interpreting it for the layman". So if you're able to mentally sift through the bias and are willing to dig deeper yourself into other sources, you do get the basic information you need to become relatively fully educated. And I don't think that's the case these days with some of the more extreme networks. edit to add: I fully support your main point of encouraging people to read papers for themselves!
      - idiotsecant 5y ago
        Boy you sure linked some concepts here. The news isn't more partisan because young reporters are introducing some kind of hyper-partisanship. Young reporters are not in charge. Old money people are. Old money people see that hyper-partisanship makes money because old people with money enjoy consuming it. Young people are much, much less partisan on average than older media consumers and that isn't something new. The older you get the more entrenched, generally, you get in your views.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - jltsiren 5y ago
      As an active researcher, I'm not surprised at all. It's common enough that people in the same field but a different subfield cannot properly understand a published paper. The same is often true for people working in the same subfield but on different topics. Just read all the horror stories about Reviewer 2. With some scientific literacy, you may be able to understand the central claims made in a paper. Or you may misunderstand them, because you may not be aware of the specific meanings of some words that are also used in everyday language. You may not be familiar with the context the paper was written in or with the best practices in the field. Hence you may not see the implicit assumptions that were made or know the justifications for certain choices. Because you are not an expert in the topic, you may not see the immediate consequences of the claims and are likely to take them too literally. It doesn't help that the authors probably didn't understand the results fully either. Most papers are difficult to understand, because they discuss early insights rather than final results. Clarity often comes with a better understanding years after the initial publication.
  - derefr 5y ago
    The journalist has more attention to spare, though, because extracting meaning from opaque text is, in large part, their job—the thing they're putting intentional focus and man-hours into; rather than something they're doing half-heartedly + absent-mindedly + in fits-and-starts as procrastination from their job. Certainly, as a dabbler in a lot of scientific fields, I might make fewer errors in comprehension than a typical journalist "on the science beat" who doesn't actually get much immersion in science. But, as someone who comes across this journal paper while scrolling HN on the bus and knows I get off at the next stop, I more-likely-than-not just won't pick up / comprehend any useful facts from reading the scientific abstract, before I get up and forget about the open tab, never coming back to it again. Whereas skimming a few paragraphs of an editorialized version of the paper, might be enough to at least let me absorb a nonzero amount of information, in that same distracted two minutes. Even if I don't absorb a precisely-correct + objective reiteration of the conclusion, then at least I might learn what the novel research method was, to the point that it piques my curiosity to go back and learn more later!
- 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.