20 ms·

Why does science news suck so much?

259 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

MaggieL 4y ago
It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. Because it's written by people who don't know the first thing about science.
musk8tor 4y ago
Because the fix is already in, it's not science, it's fundraising to do what you're told to do.
camillomiller 4y ago
If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how newscycles and the news work. If you'd knew both, you would definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience. A science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit -- could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the problem illustrated here.
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience What is this need of which you speak? Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news" sections?
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Scientific American is already scraping the bottom of the barrel. You can’t trust any publication to be written in good faith. > Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist. > It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america... https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline-of-scientific-american-a028b90d0bdd https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline... > Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years. > Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.
- projektfu 4y ago
  Like any good nerd kid of the early 90s I read Discover magazine. Looking back I see that it was filled with breathless coverage of the discoveries of a decade ago, rehashes of 101-level science, and a few newsy articles about a current topic. There was always a little bit of red meat for people like dinosaur enthusiasts and space futurists. Many topics would get recycled a year or two later. I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop. I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization. One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.
  - openknot 4y ago
    >"science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop." For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.
knapcio 4y ago
I would risk to say that nowadays any news suck which implies that it’s not a problem of science but journalism in general.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research connects to a persons lived experience. Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.
  - knapcio 4y ago
    I don’t disagree that it may be worse in case of science but just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one of the areas where pure capitalism doesn’t work well.
    - hnhg 4y ago
      It's also not a new phenomenon. Watch this BBC documentary that covers the history of news reporting and it goes back to the early days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit for the 4th estate. For something that is required so essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we don't publicly fund more news. I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.
- influxmoment 4y ago
  It probably always sucked but it was our only source of information before so we didn't know better
foreigner 4y ago
It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as bad as the news in your area of expertise.
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  In fact, every point raised by her equally applies to any kind of news. She basically gave a good summary of why news sucks in general.
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  > “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I always found it funny that the example used to illustrate the effect is 'Palestine'.
- atoav 4y ago
  > it's that all news is that bad. I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever. But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. And the journalist might not have had those years, despite them having to explain it in a simpler way to an audience which might even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at times for them (understandably so). Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very simple fashion requires more proficiency in that subject, not less.
nathias 4y ago
very good points, especially about focus on 'consensus' which seems to be a consequence of US reception of global warming but has become a standard in discourse about science ...
setuid9001 4y ago
I would also argue that science sucks in it's current state as well. It's all about Hirsch-Index. Looking as scientific and complicated as possible, so other scientist want to quote you and the Hirsch-Index rises. Also if numbers don't fit, they will be made fit. Fake or not doesn't really matter because no one will ever read it anyways. See the auto generating tools for papers and positive submission of them. This is by all means not the case for all scientist. There are lots of good, talented people there. But they get overshadowed by the previous mentioned.
noduerme 4y ago
It's like this. (Not that it needs to be stated. We all know this.) The Delta Airline pilot union today put out a terse, two paragraph letter to the public, blaming the airline for their forced overtime and subsequent flight delays. There were hundreds of news articles about this, all of which strung out the lead into several paragraphs and doled out a few sentences of this bland letter. Most of them did not link to the actual letter. By reading the articles you would notice a few things: 1. They were all written by barely sentient hominids, or possibly AIs who were tasked at 4am with turning a very short letter into a clickbait story 2. None of these hominids had actually read the letter in a linear way 3. None of them had the slightest reason to think you would read all the way to the end of the article they were writing. Take this form of 'journalism' and apply it to anything about black holes, quantum physics, strawberry ultra harvest moons, yesterday's Wordle, inflation, riots, covid, etc. and you basically have the recipe for (a) a severely bewildered population and (b) an extremely frustrated small group of people trying to hack through all this bullshit to obtain some idea of what, if anything, is actually going on. Oh. That reminds me. This was good: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that-wrecked-the-media https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yetanother12345 4y ago
  Thanks for submitting that link. It was a very interesting perspective although I doubt that the author (or Bourdieu, or both) really understands the nature of the Art MarketS (with a capital S to emphasize that it is not just one market but several, with similarities and differences). Eg, in the text it is presented as if the actual producer (artist) is somehow involved in the value adding while in most Art markets I know of the production is really removed from the actual value chain and the market is largely a market that adds value starting on the second sale, ie. after the producer has lost touch with the value chain. Also, Art as such was really tangential to the subject matter of Media and Journalism. So, that part of the article could have been left out, as it brings no extra clarity - especially as the main point was not really about market value for the product (neither Journalism nor Art) but instead market value for the producer (either "Artist" or "Liberal Arts Graduate" on a totally different market: The Job Market. Still, it was an interesting read, and it did add another piece to the puzzle of "understanding some of the reasons we as a civilization are steadily losing our grip on reality" (here, I assume that "we" and "civilization" is lacking the unstated specifier "USA/American")
cortic 4y ago
like to add; 11. Don't conflate correlation with causation.
kurupt213 4y ago
the real question is why aren't they just publishing the abstract with a doi link
voxadam 4y ago
This reminds me of a 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴 by CurryFriedSquid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSMRp1ARUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSMRp1ARUc
posterboy 4y ago
In short, I guess, reporting scales with the complexity of the field, contrast war reports, and "science" is a very big field at that, and by the way it's self referential when reports report and analyse reports. PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as definition space)
Rerarom 4y ago
Why is science news bad so often?
begueradj 4y ago
Maybe the beginning of the solution is to start by hosting your science articles on a paid domain, with a short and easy to remember name. Once you do that, you can maybe start complaining.
concinds 4y ago
There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article: 1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no journalist would want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong, when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments. 2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative 'truth'. Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're doing[2], how can journalists keep up? [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... [1]: https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-the-failed-science-of-iq-4fb17ce3f12 https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-... [2]: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/1534231723851907072 https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/153423172385190707...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Taleb's piece is great, thanks for posting!
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I’m sympathetic to the argument but Taleb’s writing is horrendous. He doesn’t explain things well at all, seems to mainly criticize strawman datasets, and primarily engages in ad hominems against anyone that doesn’t agree with him.
Hnrobert42 4y ago
I’d argue you get what you pay for. That’s why I donate money and subscribe to a number of news sources I like, e.g. ars technica and the Guardian.
in3d 4y ago
Not too be overly negative but Hossenfelder herself is a good example. She posted many authoritative-sounding videos about topics where she has little knowledge and it shows quickly. She’s a walking illustration of Gell-Mann amnesia. But clicks are good for her business, just as they’re good for the business of newspapers.
- mort96 4y ago
  Examples to substantiate this accusation would be good.
  - wiredearp 4y ago
    It says in the article that there are > ... stories about how the increasing temperatures from climate change kill people in heat waves, but fail to mention that the same increasing temperatures also save lives because fewer people freeze to death. Yeah, I don’t trust any of these sources. This is not sourced, but then again it is also not science.
arnaudsm 4y ago
A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news website. Most journalists had no science background, and were pressured into writing 4 articles a day. The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied press releases with no critical thinking. They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check. I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.
- permo-w 4y ago
  the news industry needs public investment from all angles. right now the incentives are completely wrong
  - refurb 4y ago
    I mean we have public broadcasters like Canada’s CBC and they still do the same thing. Why? Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it. The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Sometimes it's not about what the public wants, but what it needs.
      - refurb 4y ago
        Do you force the public to read it? Or just live with the fact you get dozens of views for news that took hours and thousands of dollars to create.
        marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something, then that's surely better than filling millions of peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?
permo-w 4y ago
this is largely a reaction to the old stereotypical attitude towards science: i.e. nerdy and uncool and for boring people. news sources - in some ways admirably - have tried to make it more interesting for the general public. they've achieved this, but at a pretty high cost, which are the points laid out in this article. considering the size of the scientific community (i.e. people who could tell you what a confidence interval is) vs the size of the general news-reading population, I'd suggest that the likely alternative to a lot of the science reporting referred to in the article is not better science reporting, but less of it overall. sadly, these companies are simply meeting a demand from a relatively uneducated population a large proportion of whom's brains will switch off at the sight of the words "confidence interval" my suggested solution to this is more public investment in the news industry. more grants for independent journalism
james-redwood 4y ago
www.quantamagazine.org www.nature.com It doesn’t suck. People don’t know where to look.
- robonerd 4y ago
  Even Nature has a sensationalism bias; that's why they're so well known. They like to publish papers with the most punch.
cycomanic 4y ago
The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. put your dates at the top, cite your sources...) As a side note, I hate how her channel has become something which exemplifies much of what I dislike about the now typical youtube channels: Top ten lists, grossly overstated titles, "give me your opinion in the comments", the awful generic CGI backgrounds ... The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.
- rob_c 4y ago
  Thank you for saying it
- diognesofsinope 4y ago
  > The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics. Can we all stop blaming 'economics'. Economics says people are largely self-interested, selfish and maximize their own utility (happiness-whatever). It's not 'economics', it's people. Labor unions are also maximizing their revenue.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Yes, the processes of incentives driving outcomes is economics.
  - feet 4y ago
    You're assuming that the entire field of economics isn't bullshit
  - einpoklum 4y ago
    > Economics says You mean, "many Economists with a simplistic, reductionist view of human societies' behavior say".
rob_c 4y ago
The article is simply glossing over the fact that a lot of "science news" is lies to make it sound like someone just invented the warp drive to sell stories. It's because the education system around us is so bad that if they mentioned half of these things (or heaven forbid basic stats) on the news people would either switch off or decry you as a modern day witch...
xiphias2 4y ago
I subscribed to Nature magazine, and I don't see that it ,,sucks so much''. The answer is simple: you get what you pay for. Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any specific area of science...some of my favourites: - Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome) - CrisprTalk (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8TW2xKYRqbLvfGaT783WQA/videos)... a retired guy with lots of lab experience going through clinical trial results, investing in CRISPR stocks and bashing ARK invest's stock picks - Modern Healthspan interview with Gregory Fahy (the channel has lots of other interesting videos, but I'm less interested in supplements and more about future research reversing aging). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_OTIP7kjo&list=PLkfzM7KJv6vY68Fvw1g7l9vN9NqhW7Fay
- davrosthedalek 4y ago
  Nature and Science took a big hit in my personal rating because they allow/encourage the publication of reviewer names for accepted papers. I think this will corrupt the review process in the long run. In addition with their clear money making agenda and limited preprint compatibility (this might have changed), I strongly prefer Physics Review Letters.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Why I am highly critical of Nature (and to somewhat lesser degree of Science) I do believe the review process needs much more transparency. I am not yet convinced that making reviews public will make much difference to the better, however saying it will corrupt the review process is completely missing how broken the process is right now, in particular for these high-impact journals. Some copernicus journals [1] (I have no association, never even published there) seem to follow some interesting ideas. [1] https://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/journals_by_subject.html https://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/jou...
    - davrosthedalek 4y ago
      I don't think it's that broken in nuclear physics. sure there are bad reviewers, but it's on the editors to sort that out. But opening the door to "that reviewer reviewed us favorably, so we have to do the same" is not good. Edit: Can only speak of nuclear physics.
MichaelApproved 4y ago
In her video, she claims that linking to studies is the proper way to present news. Then she quotes a study and doesn’t link to it in the video description. She doesn’t link to this post either. I like the videos she makes explaining scientific concepts but her criticism videos tend to miss the mark with me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kosyblysk666 4y ago
colechristensen 4y ago
I’ve thought about doing news well on a small scale for a long time. Who wants to write freelance for me and how much do you want?
mrfusion 4y ago
FYI it’s actually all news. It’s just that you know some science and recognize it more there.
verisimi 4y ago
Is it because so much science is now theoretical or niche, with little practical application?
- wolverine876 4y ago
  I think the focus on 'practical application' is an attempt to analyze the problem of the challenge of communicating science, but it's a red herring. What's the practical application of discovering Pluto or black holes? Walking on the moon - maybe in decades, but now it has no practical effect.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem: media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and government have a list of so-called experts that they want the journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalists who will just repeat whatever they're told. This suits the interests of pharmaceutical corporations ('buy our wonderful new Vioxx drug! don't ask us about flaws in clinical trial design!), financial fraudsters ('our expert economists say get an adjustable rate loan! it's the way of the future!), and similar types. Here's a similar discussion from a decade ago, a rather defensive piece from a journalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-scientists-and-journalists-dont-always-play-well-together/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-sci... Corporate media is, more often than not, just a mouthpiece for state and corporate propaganda, and the types of journalists who succeed in that environment are just pliable weathervanes who do what their editors tell them to do, and the editors do what the owners tell them to do, and hey, meet the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos whose AWS got a $600 million CIA contract for web services, so no more investigative journalism like Top Secret America, please! As far as the main points Hossenfelder raises, i.e. basic concepts like original sources, range of uncertainties, margins of error, unquestioning reliance on press releases, alternative hypothesis, understanding of how mathematical models of physical phenomena are tested against observational data - well, that might force the public to think about what they're reading. That's not the job of the corporate media, they're not there to encourage critical thinking - they're there to take complex topics, simplify them to the point where a small child could understand them, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. That's the essence of propaganda tactics.
- samhuk 4y ago
  Are you implying that, historically, journalists either 1) had some basic education in what they are reporting about, or 2) actually wanted to educate themselves in what they are reporting about, and that today, increasingly, journalists don't or don't want to do either 1) or 2)? That is, at it's core, saying that journalists are, on average, getting more and more stupid. This seems a bit strange and unsubstantiated, but could very well be true. What would cause a gradual decrease in the intelligence of humanity's journalists? Or are things like science just getting more complex (more specialized) that an average journalists requires "too much" time to educate themselves about. That would then mean they aren't getting less intelligent, per se...
rexreed 4y ago
Tech news / "journalism" is even worse.
booleandilemma 4y ago
I think part of the reason is because there’s a disconnect between science and the rest of society. Science doesn’t work in 2 week sprints or fiscal quarters or election cycles. It’s not something that can be scheduled or forecasted. It’s slow and error-prone and there may just not be anything newsworthy for several years at a time.
einpoklum 4y ago
*edit:* Recalled the quote, thanks raphlinus This reminds me of the "Gell-mann amnesia effect": http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ220W/WhySpeculate.pdf http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ220W/WhySpeculate.pdf Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- raphlinus 4y ago
  If you're not able to remember, it seems like you're suffering from some form of amnesia. You know who wrote about amnesia in this context? Murray Gell-Mann, that's who!
bannedbybros 4y ago
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
I’m getting a bit tired of Sabine to be quite honest… Maybe it’s time for her to go back to sciencing instead of creating youtube videos?
- 11amxn11 4y ago
hatware 4y ago
I don't know where folks decided that if science is involved, corruption isn't possible. Science is the new religion.
ThomPete 4y ago
Because there isn't enough proper progress within the field of science so the media have to create news in order to have something to write about.
phlogisticfugu 4y ago
except https://www.sciencenews.org/ https://www.sciencenews.org/ doesn't suck. They're just not on YouTube
- freediver 4y ago
  Unfortunately, maybe only if you can get to the journalism itself through shoe ads first (which is what takes 1/3 of my screen when I open an article on climate change).
- Jaruzel 4y ago
  And they have an RSS feed. Nice. Added to my reader! Thx.
rayiner 4y ago
There is a saying: “those who can do, do, and those who can’t do, teach.” Maybe it would be fair to augment that with, “those who don’t understand a subject well enough to do or teach, report.” The problem is particularly bad in science journalism, but exists across the board. Financial journalism is really the only area I’ve seen where the journalists tend to have real backgrounds in the subject. And unsurprisingly financial journalism stands head and shoulders above other journalistic fields.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  That is because there is actually audience willing to pay for the quality content. We really should solve how to pay for content problem. Subscription is not cutting it, but per article seems to be abandoned. Add driven drives everything to crap. Couple of years ago I was joking that Jezebel and EverydayFeminism dies because NYTimes became them with better spellcheck. Unfortunately not a joke anymore.
- tensor 4y ago
  This is an arrogant and toxic saying. Let's not repeat it let alone add to it please.
  - zaphar 4y ago
    Someone made a statement of opinion without supporting evidence. You followed that up with another statement of opinion without supporting evidence. As a result no consensus was reached and this entire exchange went no where. Why do you think it was an arrogant and toxic statement? Do you disagree that financial journalism is better? Do you think finance journalism itself is toxic? Do you have evidence that a belief such as "finance jounalism is generally more excellent than others" is toxic in some way?
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      They're referring the first sentence, with the cliche phrase. I personally don't make it seriously, because half the "doers" I've met can hardly do shit.
physicsguy 4y ago
Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public, and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. They’re not necessarily even going to be in your country. I’m a physicist by background and even when active in academia it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I did theoretical and computational physics research and understanding leaps forward in for e.g. experimental hardware would have got blank stares from me. For a journalist, who may have been out of academia for some time, a large amount just gets taken on trust from what the academics themselves say, because you haven’t got a hope of understanding the fine points of the research.
- freework 4y ago
  > it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.
  - vapemaster 4y ago
    > If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare. In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...
swayvil 4y ago
Haphazard methodology. Profit driven. I think that covers it. If we want to deliver the scientific gospel to the laymen we need some kind of rigorous technical writing thing. Unless entertainment is literally our method and profit is literally our aim. Is it?
drewcoo 4y ago
Science news sucks because their audience is a science-illiterate public that doesn't really want to learn but feels it knows enough to make important decisions. To be eye-catching (ad-attractive) enough for widespread broadcast it needs to have human interest angles and show "both sides" (as if there are 2) and not alienate that ad-clicking audience. No matter how good the advice to reporters is, no matter how closely they follow that advice, science news will still suck.
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ReptileMan 4y ago
Well all news sucks lately. We are not paying for news but for infotainment.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. I don't think it's limited to being a for issue. The by and source (i.e., publisher / editor) as have an impact on quality.
omershapira 4y ago
Among my TV jobs, I was a science reporter in a highly rated news show in Israel. Younger, more educated audience, relatively long attention spans and all. Because the EP trusted my judgement, Science items on that show had 4 minutes max, which was very generous, considering that news items can be given 1:40-2:00 on 8pm news and 2:30 for late-night. During those 4 minutes, every box of daily journalism still had to be checked: • Is it clear? • Does it explain why it's news? • Is it informing people of an ongoing event they're familiar with? • If it's entirely new, are they given enough context to make independent judgement? Unfortunately, scientific content rarely checks these boxes. If you want to explain the LIGO gravitational waves discovery or the Higgs Boson discovery, you can't give enough background for the user to feel informed other than "scientists believe this is significant" - so it's only fit for print. If you want to explain a new discovery in 4 minutes, it better come with a demo, that demo better be rendered/filmed like a product video, or people lose interest. So the science you end up covering is either from highly funded labs (think labs in Harvard and MIT that have DOD/industry sponsorship), or venture-funded companies with whitepapers and cool demos. If you're lucky, you have a relationship with the labs, and you get to serve as their informal media adviser. I often met with professors for coffee to teach them to make press kits for their papers. As a researcher, if you do market your paper, you run the risk of the press distorting it, as OP said. tl;dr: science is slow and rigorous. News defers rigor to the extent permitted by law. Incentives follow.
zefei 4y ago
It's just that science is easy to verify for the people that know how. If you are actual expect of any other topics (thus can verify if their news is any good), you'll find the news for those topics is at best as bad as for science, if not much worse. News cannot be 100% faithful to the material it covers, and the more you understand about the topics, the more discrepancy you can see.
- GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your comment that science is 'easy to verify' - how would any of us verify that the LHC actually found the Higgs boson a few years ago? (10 year anniversary coming up on July 4th)
  - Izkata 4y ago
    You're missing the "for the people that know how". I agree with GP: Most news is bad, but people can really only tell when it bumps up against something they know. News on science just has a bonus where research gets published separate from the news, and so even people outside the field can compare the two and point out exactly where the news is wrong.
ekianjo 4y ago
You could remove science from the title and it would still make sense.
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random_upvoter 4y ago
All news sucks that much, it just so happens that you know enough of the subject to recognize the suckage.
- pixodaros 4y ago
  Journalists can be pretty good at reporting local events and uncovering the relationships between local people ("this property developer's husband made a big loan to that town councilor before the councilor suddenly changed his vote to approve a development"). Where they almost always fail is analysis and domain knowledge. Gell-Mann amnesia describes the failures of technical reporting.
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Cupertino95014 4y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder is a great source to follow (and author of books to read). One of the absolute worst things about the pandemic was the deluge of garbage articles about COVID, like the ones she's talking about. "Someone somewhere found a correlation of X with Y!!!" gets reported as if it were Nobel-worthy. "Did it used to be different?" No, science reporting has always been garbage. But in the before times, the mainstream news still reported garbage, but there was less of it to report, and you could easily find quality reporting if you looked for it. Now there are many more "experts" vying for press time, and the press is able to disseminate their garbage much more effectively.
jelliclesfarm 4y ago
Because we have more bloggers than journalists these days. And the latter have to compete with the former for likes and eyeballs.
mattkrause 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I'm a scientist whose work occasionally gets media attention. I was definitely worried about my name being featured in the middle of absolute nonsense, but the experience has usually been good: very few of the journalists completely missed the mark. The "tone" didn't always match what I was trying to get across, but it was usually close to someone in the field's attitude. There were some minor errors and a lot of them come from a surprising source: many journals believe it's unethical to show "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the newsroom. Some scientific terms have nuances that aren't immediately obvious to people outside the field. For example, mine distinguishes between "inhibition" of neural activity, which involves specific molecular mechanisms (GABA, mostly) and suppressing it, which could be anything. This distinction probably isn't obvious to even attentive "general" fact-checker.
- CWuestefeld 4y ago
  many journals believe it's unethical to show "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the newsroom It seems like you didn't quite complete this thought. It sounds like your point is that inaccuracies creep in because the journalists won't give a chance to vet an article's accuracy to the people who have the expertise to do so?
  - openknot 4y ago
    I'm not the same commenter, but I completely agree from previous experience in journalism. Many journalists who write about research findings are in the same publications who publish general news (e.g. national politics). So, many science journalists are held to newsroom policies where they can't share drafts with sources before publication, to avoid bias. This is highly relevant for sharing drafts with a politician, but much less relevant for sharing articles with a scientist. Some newsrooms do have exceptions for scientific expertise, or have wiggle room saying that experts can verify whether quotes or sections of the article are accurate, versus the whole draft. This is a decent compromise if a publication allows it, though I'm personally in favor of having a more trusting relationship between journalists and scientists for typical articles on research findings (unless the article is investigative). Well-funded magazines (e.g. The New Yorker) also get around this by having fact-checkers with strong scientific backgrounds. This is probably the best solution for editorial independence that avoids sharing drafts, but there's not a lot of money in media and writing as-is, so it's not a realistic solution for the vast majority of publications (especially when even big magazines have been cutting funding for their fact-checking teams, shifting more responsibility to the editors/journalists for accuracy).
wafriedemann 4y ago
News are irrelevant for your life. Period. That's why the news industry is the way it is. And that's why it is of no concern wether it is this way or not. The biggest benefit you can get is not to consume any news. Changing news has none.
cm42 4y ago
"It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. But I wonder, is it just me who finds this annoying?" Nope, and that's basically the root cause: it's designed to get clicks and shares from people who Believe (rather than Understand) Science™
- tintedfireglass 4y ago
  People shouldn't believe in science, they need to believe in the scientific method... That is the peopblem with schools as they teach facts and not the methodology
6510 4y ago
Odd that no one mentioned SEO? Linking to anything in your article is bad, if people click on it they are not clicking on advertisements. If its a page not often linked to by high profile websites you are endorsing it. The target page (journal publication) might not be available to the crawler. It could be poorly formatted from a search engines perspective. But if it isn't paywalled the article about the publication is pretty much a less specific duplicate of the page you've linked to. Which one to rank higher? The duplicate or the original? Extra points if you copy the illustrations too. Ah, you've been using the big words now have you? These big unusual words must be important to the context of the article. The average casual reader most likely prefers English. You put a date at the top of your article? That means it is important today but less important on every day that follows. I'm sure I'm missing 20 other relevant "optimizations". edit: Try imagine what happens with the news website if it is dropped from the index because it doesn't follow the SEO guidelines. Is there any hope?
indymike 4y ago
Science is really hard to make into news for three reasons: 1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100 years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from how interesting the article might be. 2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in understanding add up over time, but really are hard to get excited about individually. Once in a while we get a huge leap, but most of the time, it's "we got a few more digits of pi calculated". It's really hard to extrapolate these tiny changes into anything that the average reader will even notice in their lifetime. 3. Ultimately, science has to compete for attention with wars, politics, sport, local, finance (ok, might be as boring as most science, but at least people are literally invested). So, it's hard. BTW - the author of the article does a great job making science more interesting. Would love to see more writers cover the subject at the level Sabine Hassenfelder does.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  On your first point about uncertainty, I think both scientists and non-scientists struggle with how to have a meaningful conversation where real world decisions and policies have to be made in the face of material uncertainty. I generally see two ways of dealing with this on the ley side, which is to either ignore it altogether or to write if the finding or result completely. Neither is really appropriate and I think it's due to humans not being well wired to appreciate how uncertain everything that we don't have uncertainty parameters for actually is. Establishing a probable interval doesn't actually affect the probability of a thing. On the academic side, the problem is that most academic are cowards. They see a disproportionate cost to being wrong, and culturally, are trained to always be able to give a 'right' answer, even if that answer is useless. Theres a kind of automoton language that is used by researchers that allows them to escape any real consequences that might extend from having an opinion. It's a kind of aloofness that pretends that the science is happening in some kind of white tower vacuum of pure intellectualism. And they aren't wrong from a social perspective, in that academia will enforce a serious cost to them for being wrong. To sum up, my broader point is that both journalists and academics tiptoe around and hide behind uncertainty far too much. Any issue worth having a conversation on is one where decisions will need to be made inspite of uncertainty. As well, everything is uncertain, and just because we haven't/ can't get an uncertainty on something, it shouldn't give you more confidence than something we can establish an uncertainty for.
bobthechef 4y ago
tehchromic 4y ago
The big news in Science (big S for the institution of) is the existential crises of the Anthropocene, the art and technology of sustainably occupying planet e, radically transforming human culture around primary support for the ecological planetary biosphere vs the old dominionist paradigm of human centered everything, and the fight to preserve the biological wealth of the planet against the inexorable onslaught of mass consumption and exploit, especially as it impacts global systems like atmospheric and ocean chemistry, threatening habitability of the surface. This news is very exciting! I think one can only call science news boring if one clings to merely the old idea of science as a simple methodology for validating laws/truth of reality rather than appreciating that Science is the institution of cultural realism and the modern religion to which we all subscribe, so much so that we take it for granted. This is the problem with "science news", is that it's news performed under the presumption that the methodology of scientific practice needs to be more explicit for it to be effective news. This is only true for folks who accept superficial obeisance towards science as significant equivalence for factuality.
spinaltap 4y ago
Well lady, too bad, you have a conflict of interest with the news writers. What you care about is the news, what they care about is how much traffic they get.
Helithumper 4y ago
Is is just me, or is this article missing links that it should have? > Exactly 5 million on exactly that day? Probably not. But if not exactly, then just how large is the uncertainty? Here’s an example for how to do it right, from the economist, with a central estimate and an upper and lower estimate. Where is the economist example? It's not linked or quoted or anything. > Here’s an example for how not to do it from the Guardian. This work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This isn’t helpful. Here’s the same paper covered by the BBC. This one has a link. That’s how you do it. The BBC Example isn't even linked (which I find hilarious bc the sentence is describing the BBC not linking the paper). I don't know what BBC example the author is discussing. > An example is this story from 2019 about a paper which proposed to use certain types of rocks as natural particle detectors to search for dark matter. What story? It's not linked.... Reading back to the top this appears to be a transcript, however it doesn't make much sense that only some of these parts are linked and as a result the transcript (for whatever reason) randomly includes links.
antisthenes 4y ago
Same reason most news suck. Journalists aren't subject matter experts and by definition will not understand the full depth of the scientific publication. And most won't even try to. They're happy to write their twitter-ized clickbaity headline and move on to the next article.
andreyk 4y ago
I can add my cents wrt AI coverage. First, remember the rule that 'most of everything sucks'. Is science coverage especially worse than politics, economy, etc.? Not sure. Secondly, over the years there have been more and more reporters who specialize in writing about AI, and whose articles are generally of very high quality. It's not as bad as it used to be, and I'd argue it's better than most people thing. Some context: I co-run the Last Week in AI newsletter and podcast, so I am exposed to a loooot of AI coverage.
Noughmad 4y ago
Simple answer: because you know enough about science to recognize how bad the news articles are. If you knew a lot about ice cream, you would be asking why ice cream news suck. All news suck.
vkou 4y ago
Does it? I'm not sure it sucks any more than regular news. Perhaps we just hold it to a higher standard.
graycat 4y ago
> Why does science news suck so much? Gee, back some weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927 I presented my opinion: "... the worst bottleneck in civilization, bad documentation of computer hard/software, ... " And my opinion would be similar on nearly all less important topics, that is, not really bottlenecks for civilization. Long my usual summary view has been that the MSM (mainstream media) has some traditions: Create narratives as in E. Bernays. Repeat those narratives as in Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. J. Goebbels and his famous "If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it.". Then have the media outlets gang up, pile on, form a mob, and repeat the most recently selected narratives over and over. Do this with deceptive "click bait" headlines to get eyeballs for ad revenue and, maybe, to push some specific political agenda. A little more generally, have the writing borrow from formula fiction and belle lettre, that is, with my view of such literature, create VEFEEE -- vicarious escapist fantasy experience emotional entertainment. The technique is to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, nearly never between the ears. Missing are, say, the standards of common high school term papers with careful quotes of credible, hopefully primary references, etc. Also usually missing is a goal of providing objective, credible information as needed by an informed electorate or credible information for any purpose, science, cooking, parenting, software development, much more in careers, finance, .... Also nearly totally missing is credible, meaningful presentations of quantitative data, e.g., statistical hypothesis tests with stated probabilities of Type I and Type II errors. Actually, far simpler than hypothesis tests, the media commonly is unable even to report percentages carefully. E.g., instead we get some "up 7.60%" without since when, measured how, by whom, reported where? And, why is this not just some case of cherry picking? What about corrections for inflation? What about over more points in time than just two? What about causes? While generally I'm outraged at the writing and content in the media, apparently some people like it. So, my condemnations have to be just my own opinions. E.g., my standard remark about the NYT and WaPo is that "On paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads." but lots of people like the NYT and WaPo and disagree with me. Maybe due to bad writing lots of old media outlets are losing readers and, thus, ad revenues and are on the way to massive change or just out of business, now to be replaced by new media on the Internet, media that gets to save on ink and paper. Maybe. I can wish but can't be very confident. Let's give the Internet and its new media a few more years and see if some greater variety of content sprouts up from the landscape.
nioj 4y ago
Reminds me of this satire piece: https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1 https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/s...
blhack 4y ago
Because people use "news" articles as a type of fashion. A fancy watch isnt' better at telling time, but it does signal both an alliance to a certain ideology, and the ability to display that alliance. Rolex isn't optimizing for time accuracy anymore, they're optimizing for that type of social signaling. Similarly, science journalism (and really, all journalism) isn't optimizing for dissemination of information, they're optimizing themselves as a fashion/signal.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
Science is hard, and you can usually make an exciting announcement about big discoveries. In physics we did not have any major discovery since the early XX century. By major discoveries, I mean ones I cant talk with my mom (a humanist and a lawyer) and make it exciting. Balls that could go though a wall? that's exciting. You travel fast and you age relatively less than someone who does not? Oh yeah. Higgs boson? Boring Something something black hole at 3 MM light years? what's a light year? OTOH you have areas such as biology where the announcements are revolutionary (about 3 extraordinary findings against cancer avery week) but there is a lot of money behind so the details are sparse. On my PhD thesis, the introduction was 5 lines long, stating that if you need an introduction you should probably not be reading this thesis but here are a few books you could start with. And of course the thesis was terribly boring for someone who is not in the field (even though it had "particles", "neural network" and other buzz words inside).
Blackstrat 4y ago
Politics. Look at what Scientific American has become. Everything has an agenda. True science news is hard to come by.

259 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. Because it's written by people who don't know the first thing about science.

musk8tor 4y ago

Because the fix is already in, it's not science, it's fundraising to do what you're told to do.

camillomiller 4y ago

If you're asking this question, to me you're saying you know how science works, maybe, but you have absolutely no clue how newscycles and the news work. If you'd knew both, you would definitely see the (honestly unsolvable) incompatibility between the pace and approach of science and the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience. A science publication that wouldn't care about news economics and readership -- therefore maybe only a publicly-funded no-profit -- could maybe approach science news in a way that would solve the problem illustrated here.

noduerme 4y ago
>> the need for ephemeral news-able items to make a science publication actually compelling to a larger non-technical audience What is this need of which you speak? Let's say some responsible journalistic outlet decided to just store it up, filter it, edit it and publish it in something like Popular Mechanics. Does that mean that Yahoo and Google have to still scrape the bottom of the barrel for new daily garbage from space-fun.biz to fill their "science news" sections?
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Scientific American is already scraping the bottom of the barrel. You can’t trust any publication to be written in good faith. > Scientific American has hit rock bottom with this new op-ed that is nothing more than a hit piece on Ed Wilson, basically calling him a racist. > It is written by someone who apparently has no training in evolutionary biology, though she says she “intimately familiarized [herself] with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-american-does-an-asinine-hit-job-on-e-o-wilson-calling-him-a-racist/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/12/30/scientific-america... https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline-of-scientific-american-a028b90d0bdd https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-shameful-decline... > Scientific American just did a hit job on one of America’s leading biologists and conservationists. All that, right after his passing. This marks a shameful low point in a steep decline of the magazine in recent years. > Scientific American is the oldest magazine in the US dealing with science. Continuously in print since 1845, it is known for being full of articles by world-class scientists on different topics. According to its About page, over 200 Nobel Prize winners have contributed to it.
projektfu 4y ago
Like any good nerd kid of the early 90s I read Discover magazine. Looking back I see that it was filled with breathless coverage of the discoveries of a decade ago, rehashes of 101-level science, and a few newsy articles about a current topic. There was always a little bit of red meat for people like dinosaur enthusiasts and space futurists. Many topics would get recycled a year or two later. I guess my point is that science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop. I tried following ScienceDaily with an RSS feed a while back and it was just too much. A fire hose of articles and little organization. One thing I wonder is why there isn't a resource like HN outside of this area. I suspect that people aren't doing as much writing to understand themselves in other fields, and at the same time, they are afraid to discuss preliminary results publicly.
- openknot 4y ago
  >"science is large enough and has enough history that it doesn't need the 24 hour news cycle to be interesting. In the sense that what you already know is news to most people, you can stay interesting without getting a scoop." For additional evidence, consider how History Today articles often reach the front page of HN, about historical findings that haven't necessarily been published recently. There is certainly an interest for well-written timeless articles.

knapcio 4y ago

I would risk to say that nowadays any news suck which implies that it’s not a problem of science but journalism in general.

gonzo41 4y ago
Science is hard, slow, there's lots of negative results, and also sometimes it's very abstract and how a bit of research connects to a persons lived experience. Most people who consume the news, consume it online. The attention economy is destroying everything of substance, because substance is also hard, hard to produce and hard consume.
- knapcio 4y ago
  I don’t disagree that it may be worse in case of science but just pointing out that the problem is possibly broader and science news is just one of the victims. IMO news may be one of the areas where pure capitalism doesn’t work well.
  - hnhg 4y ago
    It's also not a new phenomenon. Watch this BBC documentary that covers the history of news reporting and it goes back to the early days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mJFKlla-U0
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    yeah, I tend to agree with capitalism not being a good fit for the 4th estate. For something that is required so essentially by democracies I've always been surprised we don't publicly fund more news. I remember when all the news papers were folding up around the early naughts, there was talk about making them all non-profits and giving them tax free status to produce. But that never happened. I think it was a missed opportunity.
influxmoment 4y ago
It probably always sucked but it was our only source of information before so we didn't know better

foreigner 4y ago

It's not that science (or tech) news is bad, it's that all news is that bad. We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. The next time you're reading an article about some field you're not an expert in, try to remember that it is just as bad as the news in your area of expertise.

lifthrasiir 4y ago
In fact, every point raised by her equally applies to any kind of news. She basically gave a good summary of why news sucks in general.
bakuninsbart 4y ago
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. > In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
- noduerme 4y ago
  I always found it funny that the example used to illustrate the effect is 'Palestine'.
atoav 4y ago
> it's that all news is that bad. I don't think so. Weather news are alright, traffic news are alright, etc. There are fields that suck harder and there are fields that just work okay, maybe because they are simple enough, maybe because you can learn them once and apply what you have learned forever. But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. And the journalist might not have had those years, despite them having to explain it in a simpler way to an audience which might even know less. A good journalist writing about any other topic might be able to grasp a topic quite firmly when they prepare for a week or two, but something as complex as the bleeding edge of any scientific field will be extremely hard to grasp at times for them (understandably so). Now the issue is: to explain a complicated issue in a very simple fashion requires more proficiency in that subject, not less.

nathias 4y ago

very good points, especially about focus on 'consensus' which seems to be a consequence of US reception of global warming but has become a standard in discourse about science ...

setuid9001 4y ago

I would also argue that science sucks in it's current state as well. It's all about Hirsch-Index. Looking as scientific and complicated as possible, so other scientist want to quote you and the Hirsch-Index rises. Also if numbers don't fit, they will be made fit. Fake or not doesn't really matter because no one will ever read it anyways. See the auto generating tools for papers and positive submission of them. This is by all means not the case for all scientist. There are lots of good, talented people there. But they get overshadowed by the previous mentioned.

noduerme 4y ago

It's like this. (Not that it needs to be stated. We all know this.) The Delta Airline pilot union today put out a terse, two paragraph letter to the public, blaming the airline for their forced overtime and subsequent flight delays. There were hundreds of news articles about this, all of which strung out the lead into several paragraphs and doled out a few sentences of this bland letter. Most of them did not link to the actual letter. By reading the articles you would notice a few things: 1. They were all written by barely sentient hominids, or possibly AIs who were tasked at 4am with turning a very short letter into a clickbait story 2. None of these hominids had actually read the letter in a linear way 3. None of them had the slightest reason to think you would read all the way to the end of the article they were writing. Take this form of 'journalism' and apply it to anything about black holes, quantum physics, strawberry ultra harvest moons, yesterday's Wordle, inflation, riots, covid, etc. and you basically have the recipe for (a) a severely bewildered population and (b) an extremely frustrated small group of people trying to hack through all this bullshit to obtain some idea of what, if anything, is actually going on. Oh. That reminds me. This was good: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that-wrecked-the-media https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/the-generation-that...

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yetanother12345 4y ago
Thanks for submitting that link. It was a very interesting perspective although I doubt that the author (or Bourdieu, or both) really understands the nature of the Art MarketS (with a capital S to emphasize that it is not just one market but several, with similarities and differences). Eg, in the text it is presented as if the actual producer (artist) is somehow involved in the value adding while in most Art markets I know of the production is really removed from the actual value chain and the market is largely a market that adds value starting on the second sale, ie. after the producer has lost touch with the value chain. Also, Art as such was really tangential to the subject matter of Media and Journalism. So, that part of the article could have been left out, as it brings no extra clarity - especially as the main point was not really about market value for the product (neither Journalism nor Art) but instead market value for the producer (either "Artist" or "Liberal Arts Graduate" on a totally different market: The Job Market. Still, it was an interesting read, and it did add another piece to the puzzle of "understanding some of the reasons we as a civilization are steadily losing our grip on reality" (here, I assume that "we" and "civilization" is lacking the unstated specifier "USA/American")

cortic 4y ago

like to add; 11. Don't conflate correlation with causation.

kurupt213 4y ago

the real question is why aren't they just publishing the abstract with a doi link

voxadam 4y ago

This reminds me of a 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘚𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘑𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴 by CurryFriedSquid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSMRp1ARUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSMRp1ARUc

posterboy 4y ago

In short, I guess, reporting scales with the complexity of the field, contrast war reports, and "science" is a very big field at that, and by the way it's self referential when reports report and analyse reports. PS: Indeed, pretty much every point made can be found in Aaronson's how to tease out bullshit papers. So the problem is highly fractal (in 8 dimensions if going by the keypoints as definition space)

Rerarom 4y ago

Why is science news bad so often?

begueradj 4y ago

Maybe the beginning of the solution is to start by hosting your science articles on a paid domain, with a short and easy to remember name. Once you do that, you can maybe start complaining.

concinds 4y ago

There's 2 huge huge problems not mentioned in the article: 1. Take Taleb's piece on IQ[0]. Which journalists have the mathematical background to understand it? None. Most of the psychologists who reponded to Taleb didn't understand his math either (some did). So how do you know if Taleb's bullshitting? McClure tried to dumb it down in a great article[1], but even if you understand those arguments, practically no journalist would want to go on a limb and declare a "consensus" is dead wrong, when both sides have seemingly coherent arguments. 2. There's always what I'll call "pendulum effects". If science journalism took the "skeptic" POV to try to increase scientific literacy, by showing the many cases where the scientific consensus was wrong historically (with the hopes of improving people's critical thinking), you'd just end up giving fodder to people to arbitrarily distrust any consensus they don't like (for political reasons). So it becomes "socially useful" for people to believe that consensus means truth. If you taught people all the ways in which science can get it wrong, even highly cited studies in top journals, they'd burn Harvard down. The bias is in the opposite direction: Freakonomics-style 'science journalism' that takes one finding and turns it into an overarching narrative 'truth'. Science in more complex fields (quantum, economics, sociology) is getting out of reach of journalists and average people. People apply simplistic and inadequate statistical tools to complex systems and reach BS conclusions. Complexity science isn't taught enough. Will journalists ever understand complexity theory? Power laws? If even AI researchers can misunderstand what they're doing[2], how can journalists keep up? [0]: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... [1]: https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-the-failed-science-of-iq-4fb17ce3f12 https://seanamcclure.medium.com/intelligence-complexity-and-... [2]: https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/1534231723851907072 https://twitter.com/sean_a_mcclure/status/153423172385190707...

cycomanic 4y ago
Taleb's piece is great, thanks for posting!
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I’m sympathetic to the argument but Taleb’s writing is horrendous. He doesn’t explain things well at all, seems to mainly criticize strawman datasets, and primarily engages in ad hominems against anyone that doesn’t agree with him.

Hnrobert42 4y ago

I’d argue you get what you pay for. That’s why I donate money and subscribe to a number of news sources I like, e.g. ars technica and the Guardian.

in3d 4y ago

Not too be overly negative but Hossenfelder herself is a good example. She posted many authoritative-sounding videos about topics where she has little knowledge and it shows quickly. She’s a walking illustration of Gell-Mann amnesia. But clicks are good for her business, just as they’re good for the business of newspapers.

mort96 4y ago
Examples to substantiate this accusation would be good.
- wiredearp 4y ago
  It says in the article that there are > ... stories about how the increasing temperatures from climate change kill people in heat waves, but fail to mention that the same increasing temperatures also save lives because fewer people freeze to death. Yeah, I don’t trust any of these sources. This is not sourced, but then again it is also not science.

arnaudsm 4y ago

A friend of mine worked for a mainstream European science news website. Most journalists had no science background, and were pressured into writing 4 articles a day. The result of course, was low quality articles and hastily copied press releases with no critical thinking. They believed everything corporations said, because they had no time to check. I don't blame the journalists, but the work conditions and economical situation of the media industry.

permo-w 4y ago
the news industry needs public investment from all angles. right now the incentives are completely wrong
- refurb 4y ago
  I mean we have public broadcasters like Canada’s CBC and they still do the same thing. Why? Because they need to justify their budget. If nobody reads/views your reports, why should the government pay for it. The real answer is: the public doesn’t want science reporting unless it’s punchy, simple and exciting.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Sometimes it's not about what the public wants, but what it needs.
    - refurb 4y ago
      Do you force the public to read it? Or just live with the fact you get dozens of views for news that took hours and thousands of dollars to create.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Well, if you've made dozens of people learn something, then that's surely better than filling millions of peoples heads with nothing but vapid nonsense, isn't it?

permo-w 4y ago

this is largely a reaction to the old stereotypical attitude towards science: i.e. nerdy and uncool and for boring people. news sources - in some ways admirably - have tried to make it more interesting for the general public. they've achieved this, but at a pretty high cost, which are the points laid out in this article. considering the size of the scientific community (i.e. people who could tell you what a confidence interval is) vs the size of the general news-reading population, I'd suggest that the likely alternative to a lot of the science reporting referred to in the article is not better science reporting, but less of it overall. sadly, these companies are simply meeting a demand from a relatively uneducated population a large proportion of whom's brains will switch off at the sight of the words "confidence interval" my suggested solution to this is more public investment in the news industry. more grants for independent journalism

james-redwood 4y ago

www.quantamagazine.org www.nature.com It doesn’t suck. People don’t know where to look.

robonerd 4y ago
Even Nature has a sensationalism bias; that's why they're so well known. They like to publish papers with the most punch.

cycomanic 4y ago

The irony here is that Sabine Hossenfelder falls into exactly the same patterns as the science media that she is criticizing. A punchy headline, with significant oversimplifications. For example, she makes it sound like science news is always aimed at scientists, and that they do not explain the science (I have several excellent counter examples). That doesn't mean there is not some very good points in there (e.g. put your dates at the top, cite your sources...) As a side note, I hate how her channel has become something which exemplifies much of what I dislike about the now typical youtube channels: Top ten lists, grossly overstated titles, "give me your opinion in the comments", the awful generic CGI backgrounds ... The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics.

rob_c 4y ago
Thank you for saying it
diognesofsinope 4y ago
> The other irony is that likely she does it for exactly the same reasons as why science media is often bad: economics. Can we all stop blaming 'economics'. Economics says people are largely self-interested, selfish and maximize their own utility (happiness-whatever). It's not 'economics', it's people. Labor unions are also maximizing their revenue.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Yes, the processes of incentives driving outcomes is economics.
- feet 4y ago
  You're assuming that the entire field of economics isn't bullshit
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > Economics says You mean, "many Economists with a simplistic, reductionist view of human societies' behavior say".

rob_c 4y ago

The article is simply glossing over the fact that a lot of "science news" is lies to make it sound like someone just invented the warp drive to sell stories. It's because the education system around us is so bad that if they mentioned half of these things (or heaven forbid basic stats) on the news people would either switch off or decry you as a modern day witch...

xiphias2 4y ago

I subscribed to Nature magazine, and I don't see that it ,,sucks so much''. The answer is simple: you get what you pay for. Also there are lots of high quality youtube channels for any specific area of science...some of my favourites: - Everyday Astronout (his interviews with Elon were awesome) - CrisprTalk (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8TW2xKYRqbLvfGaT783WQA/videos)... a retired guy with lots of lab experience going through clinical trial results, investing in CRISPR stocks and bashing ARK invest's stock picks - Modern Healthspan interview with Gregory Fahy (the channel has lots of other interesting videos, but I'm less interested in supplements and more about future research reversing aging). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_OTIP7kjo&list=PLkfzM7KJv6vY68Fvw1g7l9vN9NqhW7Fay

davrosthedalek 4y ago
Nature and Science took a big hit in my personal rating because they allow/encourage the publication of reviewer names for accepted papers. I think this will corrupt the review process in the long run. In addition with their clear money making agenda and limited preprint compatibility (this might have changed), I strongly prefer Physics Review Letters.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Why I am highly critical of Nature (and to somewhat lesser degree of Science) I do believe the review process needs much more transparency. I am not yet convinced that making reviews public will make much difference to the better, however saying it will corrupt the review process is completely missing how broken the process is right now, in particular for these high-impact journals. Some copernicus journals [1] (I have no association, never even published there) seem to follow some interesting ideas. [1] https://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/journals_by_subject.html https://publications.copernicus.org/open-access_journals/jou...
  - davrosthedalek 4y ago
    I don't think it's that broken in nuclear physics. sure there are bad reviewers, but it's on the editors to sort that out. But opening the door to "that reviewer reviewed us favorably, so we have to do the same" is not good. Edit: Can only speak of nuclear physics.

MichaelApproved 4y ago

In her video, she claims that linking to studies is the proper way to present news. Then she quotes a study and doesn’t link to it in the video description. She doesn’t link to this post either. I like the videos she makes explaining scientific concepts but her criticism videos tend to miss the mark with me.

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kosyblysk666 4y ago

colechristensen 4y ago

I’ve thought about doing news well on a small scale for a long time. Who wants to write freelance for me and how much do you want?

mrfusion 4y ago

FYI it’s actually all news. It’s just that you know some science and recognize it more there.

verisimi 4y ago

Is it because so much science is now theoretical or niche, with little practical application?

wolverine876 4y ago
I think the focus on 'practical application' is an attempt to analyze the problem of the challenge of communicating science, but it's a red herring. What's the practical application of discovering Pluto or black holes? Walking on the moon - maybe in decades, but now it has no practical effect.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Nothing new here, this has been a steadily increasingly problem: media outlets generally don't hire people with even a basic scientific eduction to do science journalism. A lot of this has to do with the 'expert propaganda' phenomenon - corporations and government have a list of so-called experts that they want the journalists to act as stenographers for, and the media corporations oblige by hiring ignorant journalists who will just repeat whatever they're told. This suits the interests of pharmaceutical corporations ('buy our wonderful new Vioxx drug! don't ask us about flaws in clinical trial design!), financial fraudsters ('our expert economists say get an adjustable rate loan! it's the way of the future!), and similar types. Here's a similar discussion from a decade ago, a rather defensive piece from a journalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-scientists-and-journalists-dont-always-play-well-together/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2011/08/08/why-sci... Corporate media is, more often than not, just a mouthpiece for state and corporate propaganda, and the types of journalists who succeed in that environment are just pliable weathervanes who do what their editors tell them to do, and the editors do what the owners tell them to do, and hey, meet the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos whose AWS got a $600 million CIA contract for web services, so no more investigative journalism like Top Secret America, please! As far as the main points Hossenfelder raises, i.e. basic concepts like original sources, range of uncertainties, margins of error, unquestioning reliance on press releases, alternative hypothesis, understanding of how mathematical models of physical phenomena are tested against observational data - well, that might force the public to think about what they're reading. That's not the job of the corporate media, they're not there to encourage critical thinking - they're there to take complex topics, simplify them to the point where a small child could understand them, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. That's the essence of propaganda tactics.

samhuk 4y ago
Are you implying that, historically, journalists either 1) had some basic education in what they are reporting about, or 2) actually wanted to educate themselves in what they are reporting about, and that today, increasingly, journalists don't or don't want to do either 1) or 2)? That is, at it's core, saying that journalists are, on average, getting more and more stupid. This seems a bit strange and unsubstantiated, but could very well be true. What would cause a gradual decrease in the intelligence of humanity's journalists? Or are things like science just getting more complex (more specialized) that an average journalists requires "too much" time to educate themselves about. That would then mean they aren't getting less intelligent, per se...

rexreed 4y ago

Tech news / "journalism" is even worse.

booleandilemma 4y ago

I think part of the reason is because there’s a disconnect between science and the rest of society. Science doesn’t work in 2 week sprints or fiscal quarters or election cycles. It’s not something that can be scheduled or forecasted. It’s slow and error-prone and there may just not be anything newsworthy for several years at a time.

einpoklum 4y ago

*edit:* Recalled the quote, thanks raphlinus This reminds me of the "Gell-mann amnesia effect": http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ220W/WhySpeculate.pdf http://www.sfu.ca/~easton/Econ220W/WhySpeculate.pdf Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

raphlinus 4y ago
If you're not able to remember, it seems like you're suffering from some form of amnesia. You know who wrote about amnesia in this context? Murray Gell-Mann, that's who!

bannedbybros 4y ago

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

I’m getting a bit tired of Sabine to be quite honest… Maybe it’s time for her to go back to sciencing instead of creating youtube videos?

11amxn11 4y ago

hatware 4y ago

I don't know where folks decided that if science is involved, corruption isn't possible. Science is the new religion.

ThomPete 4y ago

Because there isn't enough proper progress within the field of science so the media have to create news in order to have something to write about.

phlogisticfugu 4y ago

except https://www.sciencenews.org/ https://www.sciencenews.org/ doesn't suck. They're just not on YouTube

freediver 4y ago
Unfortunately, maybe only if you can get to the journalism itself through shoe ads first (which is what takes 1/3 of my screen when I open an article on climate change).
Jaruzel 4y ago
And they have an RSS feed. Nice. Added to my reader! Thx.

rayiner 4y ago

There is a saying: “those who can do, do, and those who can’t do, teach.” Maybe it would be fair to augment that with, “those who don’t understand a subject well enough to do or teach, report.” The problem is particularly bad in science journalism, but exists across the board. Financial journalism is really the only area I’ve seen where the journalists tend to have real backgrounds in the subject. And unsurprisingly financial journalism stands head and shoulders above other journalistic fields.

ReptileMan 4y ago
That is because there is actually audience willing to pay for the quality content. We really should solve how to pay for content problem. Subscription is not cutting it, but per article seems to be abandoned. Add driven drives everything to crap. Couple of years ago I was joking that Jezebel and EverydayFeminism dies because NYTimes became them with better spellcheck. Unfortunately not a joke anymore.
tensor 4y ago
This is an arrogant and toxic saying. Let's not repeat it let alone add to it please.
- zaphar 4y ago
  Someone made a statement of opinion without supporting evidence. You followed that up with another statement of opinion without supporting evidence. As a result no consensus was reached and this entire exchange went no where. Why do you think it was an arrogant and toxic statement? Do you disagree that financial journalism is better? Do you think finance journalism itself is toxic? Do you have evidence that a belief such as "finance jounalism is generally more excellent than others" is toxic in some way?
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    They're referring the first sentence, with the cliche phrase. I personally don't make it seriously, because half the "doers" I've met can hardly do shit.

physicsguy 4y ago

Because science is reaaaally hard to generalise for the public, and Universities love to put out press releases. Finding someone qualified to go to for comment is not straightforward. They’re not necessarily even going to be in your country. I’m a physicist by background and even when active in academia it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I did theoretical and computational physics research and understanding leaps forward in for e.g. experimental hardware would have got blank stares from me. For a journalist, who may have been out of academia for some time, a large amount just gets taken on trust from what the academics themselves say, because you haven’t got a hope of understanding the fine points of the research.

freework 4y ago
> it was hard for me to understand some papers in closely related sub fields, and that was with working experience in that area. I've noticed this too. The reason why I think this happens is because if you're an employed scientist, then the system is set up in such a way that you HAVE to publish, or else you lose your job. If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to write it in such a way that makes it hard to read, but not in such a way that makes it obvious it's gibberish.
- vapemaster 4y ago
  > If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible. Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare. In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...

swayvil 4y ago

Haphazard methodology. Profit driven. I think that covers it. If we want to deliver the scientific gospel to the laymen we need some kind of rigorous technical writing thing. Unless entertainment is literally our method and profit is literally our aim. Is it?

drewcoo 4y ago

Science news sucks because their audience is a science-illiterate public that doesn't really want to learn but feels it knows enough to make important decisions. To be eye-catching (ad-attractive) enough for widespread broadcast it needs to have human interest angles and show "both sides" (as if there are 2) and not alienate that ad-clicking audience. No matter how good the advice to reporters is, no matter how closely they follow that advice, science news will still suck.

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ReptileMan 4y ago

Well all news sucks lately. We are not paying for news but for infotainment.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. I don't think it's limited to being a for issue. The by and source (i.e., publisher / editor) as have an impact on quality.

omershapira 4y ago

Among my TV jobs, I was a science reporter in a highly rated news show in Israel. Younger, more educated audience, relatively long attention spans and all. Because the EP trusted my judgement, Science items on that show had 4 minutes max, which was very generous, considering that news items can be given 1:40-2:00 on 8pm news and 2:30 for late-night. During those 4 minutes, every box of daily journalism still had to be checked: • Is it clear? • Does it explain why it's news? • Is it informing people of an ongoing event they're familiar with? • If it's entirely new, are they given enough context to make independent judgement? Unfortunately, scientific content rarely checks these boxes. If you want to explain the LIGO gravitational waves discovery or the Higgs Boson discovery, you can't give enough background for the user to feel informed other than "scientists believe this is significant" - so it's only fit for print. If you want to explain a new discovery in 4 minutes, it better come with a demo, that demo better be rendered/filmed like a product video, or people lose interest. So the science you end up covering is either from highly funded labs (think labs in Harvard and MIT that have DOD/industry sponsorship), or venture-funded companies with whitepapers and cool demos. If you're lucky, you have a relationship with the labs, and you get to serve as their informal media adviser. I often met with professors for coffee to teach them to make press kits for their papers. As a researcher, if you do market your paper, you run the risk of the press distorting it, as OP said. tl;dr: science is slow and rigorous. News defers rigor to the extent permitted by law. Incentives follow.

zefei 4y ago

It's just that science is easy to verify for the people that know how. If you are actual expect of any other topics (thus can verify if their news is any good), you'll find the news for those topics is at best as bad as for science, if not much worse. News cannot be 100% faithful to the material it covers, and the more you understand about the topics, the more discrepancy you can see.

GeorgeTirebiter 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand your comment that science is 'easy to verify' - how would any of us verify that the LHC actually found the Higgs boson a few years ago? (10 year anniversary coming up on July 4th)
- Izkata 4y ago
  You're missing the "for the people that know how". I agree with GP: Most news is bad, but people can really only tell when it bumps up against something they know. News on science just has a bonus where research gets published separate from the news, and so even people outside the field can compare the two and point out exactly where the news is wrong.

ekianjo 4y ago

You could remove science from the title and it would still make sense.

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random_upvoter 4y ago

All news sucks that much, it just so happens that you know enough of the subject to recognize the suckage.

pixodaros 4y ago
Journalists can be pretty good at reporting local events and uncovering the relationships between local people ("this property developer's husband made a big loan to that town councilor before the councilor suddenly changed his vote to approve a development"). Where they almost always fail is analysis and domain knowledge. Gell-Mann amnesia describes the failures of technical reporting.
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Cupertino95014 4y ago

Sabine Hossenfelder is a great source to follow (and author of books to read). One of the absolute worst things about the pandemic was the deluge of garbage articles about COVID, like the ones she's talking about. "Someone somewhere found a correlation of X with Y!!!" gets reported as if it were Nobel-worthy. "Did it used to be different?" No, science reporting has always been garbage. But in the before times, the mainstream news still reported garbage, but there was less of it to report, and you could easily find quality reporting if you looked for it. Now there are many more "experts" vying for press time, and the press is able to disseminate their garbage much more effectively.

jelliclesfarm 4y ago

Because we have more bloggers than journalists these days. And the latter have to compete with the former for likes and eyeballs.

mattkrause 4y ago

As a counterpoint, I'm a scientist whose work occasionally gets media attention. I was definitely worried about my name being featured in the middle of absolute nonsense, but the experience has usually been good: very few of the journalists completely missed the mark. The "tone" didn't always match what I was trying to get across, but it was usually close to someone in the field's attitude. There were some minor errors and a lot of them come from a surprising source: many journals believe it's unethical to show "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the newsroom. Some scientific terms have nuances that aren't immediately obvious to people outside the field. For example, mine distinguishes between "inhibition" of neural activity, which involves specific molecular mechanisms (GABA, mostly) and suppressing it, which could be anything. This distinction probably isn't obvious to even attentive "general" fact-checker.

CWuestefeld 4y ago
many journals believe it's unethical to show "copy" (the complete article) to a source--or sometimes anyone outside the newsroom It seems like you didn't quite complete this thought. It sounds like your point is that inaccuracies creep in because the journalists won't give a chance to vet an article's accuracy to the people who have the expertise to do so?
- openknot 4y ago
  I'm not the same commenter, but I completely agree from previous experience in journalism. Many journalists who write about research findings are in the same publications who publish general news (e.g. national politics). So, many science journalists are held to newsroom policies where they can't share drafts with sources before publication, to avoid bias. This is highly relevant for sharing drafts with a politician, but much less relevant for sharing articles with a scientist. Some newsrooms do have exceptions for scientific expertise, or have wiggle room saying that experts can verify whether quotes or sections of the article are accurate, versus the whole draft. This is a decent compromise if a publication allows it, though I'm personally in favor of having a more trusting relationship between journalists and scientists for typical articles on research findings (unless the article is investigative). Well-funded magazines (e.g. The New Yorker) also get around this by having fact-checkers with strong scientific backgrounds. This is probably the best solution for editorial independence that avoids sharing drafts, but there's not a lot of money in media and writing as-is, so it's not a realistic solution for the vast majority of publications (especially when even big magazines have been cutting funding for their fact-checking teams, shifting more responsibility to the editors/journalists for accuracy).

wafriedemann 4y ago

News are irrelevant for your life. Period. That's why the news industry is the way it is. And that's why it is of no concern wether it is this way or not. The biggest benefit you can get is not to consume any news. Changing news has none.

cm42 4y ago

"It seems to be written for an audience which doesn’t know the first thing about science. But I wonder, is it just me who finds this annoying?" Nope, and that's basically the root cause: it's designed to get clicks and shares from people who Believe (rather than Understand) Science™

tintedfireglass 4y ago
People shouldn't believe in science, they need to believe in the scientific method... That is the peopblem with schools as they teach facts and not the methodology

6510 4y ago

Odd that no one mentioned SEO? Linking to anything in your article is bad, if people click on it they are not clicking on advertisements. If its a page not often linked to by high profile websites you are endorsing it. The target page (journal publication) might not be available to the crawler. It could be poorly formatted from a search engines perspective. But if it isn't paywalled the article about the publication is pretty much a less specific duplicate of the page you've linked to. Which one to rank higher? The duplicate or the original? Extra points if you copy the illustrations too. Ah, you've been using the big words now have you? These big unusual words must be important to the context of the article. The average casual reader most likely prefers English. You put a date at the top of your article? That means it is important today but less important on every day that follows. I'm sure I'm missing 20 other relevant "optimizations". edit: Try imagine what happens with the news website if it is dropped from the index because it doesn't follow the SEO guidelines. Is there any hope?

indymike 4y ago

Science is really hard to make into news for three reasons: 1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100 years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from how interesting the article might be. 2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in understanding add up over time, but really are hard to get excited about individually. Once in a while we get a huge leap, but most of the time, it's "we got a few more digits of pi calculated". It's really hard to extrapolate these tiny changes into anything that the average reader will even notice in their lifetime. 3. Ultimately, science has to compete for attention with wars, politics, sport, local, finance (ok, might be as boring as most science, but at least people are literally invested). So, it's hard. BTW - the author of the article does a great job making science more interesting. Would love to see more writers cover the subject at the level Sabine Hassenfelder does.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
On your first point about uncertainty, I think both scientists and non-scientists struggle with how to have a meaningful conversation where real world decisions and policies have to be made in the face of material uncertainty. I generally see two ways of dealing with this on the ley side, which is to either ignore it altogether or to write if the finding or result completely. Neither is really appropriate and I think it's due to humans not being well wired to appreciate how uncertain everything that we don't have uncertainty parameters for actually is. Establishing a probable interval doesn't actually affect the probability of a thing. On the academic side, the problem is that most academic are cowards. They see a disproportionate cost to being wrong, and culturally, are trained to always be able to give a 'right' answer, even if that answer is useless. Theres a kind of automoton language that is used by researchers that allows them to escape any real consequences that might extend from having an opinion. It's a kind of aloofness that pretends that the science is happening in some kind of white tower vacuum of pure intellectualism. And they aren't wrong from a social perspective, in that academia will enforce a serious cost to them for being wrong. To sum up, my broader point is that both journalists and academics tiptoe around and hide behind uncertainty far too much. Any issue worth having a conversation on is one where decisions will need to be made inspite of uncertainty. As well, everything is uncertain, and just because we haven't/ can't get an uncertainty on something, it shouldn't give you more confidence than something we can establish an uncertainty for.

bobthechef 4y ago

tehchromic 4y ago

The big news in Science (big S for the institution of) is the existential crises of the Anthropocene, the art and technology of sustainably occupying planet e, radically transforming human culture around primary support for the ecological planetary biosphere vs the old dominionist paradigm of human centered everything, and the fight to preserve the biological wealth of the planet against the inexorable onslaught of mass consumption and exploit, especially as it impacts global systems like atmospheric and ocean chemistry, threatening habitability of the surface. This news is very exciting! I think one can only call science news boring if one clings to merely the old idea of science as a simple methodology for validating laws/truth of reality rather than appreciating that Science is the institution of cultural realism and the modern religion to which we all subscribe, so much so that we take it for granted. This is the problem with "science news", is that it's news performed under the presumption that the methodology of scientific practice needs to be more explicit for it to be effective news. This is only true for folks who accept superficial obeisance towards science as significant equivalence for factuality.

spinaltap 4y ago

Well lady, too bad, you have a conflict of interest with the news writers. What you care about is the news, what they care about is how much traffic they get.

Helithumper 4y ago

Is is just me, or is this article missing links that it should have? > Exactly 5 million on exactly that day? Probably not. But if not exactly, then just how large is the uncertainty? Here’s an example for how to do it right, from the economist, with a central estimate and an upper and lower estimate. Where is the economist example? It's not linked or quoted or anything. > Here’s an example for how not to do it from the Guardian. This work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters. This isn’t helpful. Here’s the same paper covered by the BBC. This one has a link. That’s how you do it. The BBC Example isn't even linked (which I find hilarious bc the sentence is describing the BBC not linking the paper). I don't know what BBC example the author is discussing. > An example is this story from 2019 about a paper which proposed to use certain types of rocks as natural particle detectors to search for dark matter. What story? It's not linked.... Reading back to the top this appears to be a transcript, however it doesn't make much sense that only some of these parts are linked and as a result the transcript (for whatever reason) randomly includes links.

antisthenes 4y ago

Same reason most news suck. Journalists aren't subject matter experts and by definition will not understand the full depth of the scientific publication. And most won't even try to. They're happy to write their twitter-ized clickbaity headline and move on to the next article.

andreyk 4y ago

I can add my cents wrt AI coverage. First, remember the rule that 'most of everything sucks'. Is science coverage especially worse than politics, economy, etc.? Not sure. Secondly, over the years there have been more and more reporters who specialize in writing about AI, and whose articles are generally of very high quality. It's not as bad as it used to be, and I'd argue it's better than most people thing. Some context: I co-run the Last Week in AI newsletter and podcast, so I am exposed to a loooot of AI coverage.

Noughmad 4y ago

Simple answer: because you know enough about science to recognize how bad the news articles are. If you knew a lot about ice cream, you would be asking why ice cream news suck. All news suck.

vkou 4y ago

Does it? I'm not sure it sucks any more than regular news. Perhaps we just hold it to a higher standard.

graycat 4y ago

> Why does science news suck so much? Gee, back some weeks ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463927 I presented my opinion: "... the worst bottleneck in civilization, bad documentation of computer hard/software, ... " And my opinion would be similar on nearly all less important topics, that is, not really bottlenecks for civilization. Long my usual summary view has been that the MSM (mainstream media) has some traditions: Create narratives as in E. Bernays. Repeat those narratives as in Nazi Minister of Propaganda Dr. J. Goebbels and his famous "If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it.". Then have the media outlets gang up, pile on, form a mob, and repeat the most recently selected narratives over and over. Do this with deceptive "click bait" headlines to get eyeballs for ad revenue and, maybe, to push some specific political agenda. A little more generally, have the writing borrow from formula fiction and belle lettre, that is, with my view of such literature, create VEFEEE -- vicarious escapist fantasy experience emotional entertainment. The technique is to grab people by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, nearly never between the ears. Missing are, say, the standards of common high school term papers with careful quotes of credible, hopefully primary references, etc. Also usually missing is a goal of providing objective, credible information as needed by an informed electorate or credible information for any purpose, science, cooking, parenting, software development, much more in careers, finance, .... Also nearly totally missing is credible, meaningful presentations of quantitative data, e.g., statistical hypothesis tests with stated probabilities of Type I and Type II errors. Actually, far simpler than hypothesis tests, the media commonly is unable even to report percentages carefully. E.g., instead we get some "up 7.60%" without since when, measured how, by whom, reported where? And, why is this not just some case of cherry picking? What about corrections for inflation? What about over more points in time than just two? What about causes? While generally I'm outraged at the writing and content in the media, apparently some people like it. So, my condemnations have to be just my own opinions. E.g., my standard remark about the NYT and WaPo is that "On paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads." but lots of people like the NYT and WaPo and disagree with me. Maybe due to bad writing lots of old media outlets are losing readers and, thus, ad revenues and are on the way to massive change or just out of business, now to be replaced by new media on the Internet, media that gets to save on ink and paper. Maybe. I can wish but can't be very confident. Let's give the Internet and its new media a few more years and see if some greater variety of content sprouts up from the landscape.

nioj 4y ago

Reminds me of this satire piece: https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1 https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/s...

blhack 4y ago

Because people use "news" articles as a type of fashion. A fancy watch isnt' better at telling time, but it does signal both an alliance to a certain ideology, and the ability to display that alliance. Rolex isn't optimizing for time accuracy anymore, they're optimizing for that type of social signaling. Similarly, science journalism (and really, all journalism) isn't optimizing for dissemination of information, they're optimizing themselves as a fashion/signal.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

Science is hard, and you can usually make an exciting announcement about big discoveries. In physics we did not have any major discovery since the early XX century. By major discoveries, I mean ones I cant talk with my mom (a humanist and a lawyer) and make it exciting. Balls that could go though a wall? that's exciting. You travel fast and you age relatively less than someone who does not? Oh yeah. Higgs boson? Boring Something something black hole at 3 MM light years? what's a light year? OTOH you have areas such as biology where the announcements are revolutionary (about 3 extraordinary findings against cancer avery week) but there is a lot of money behind so the details are sparse. On my PhD thesis, the introduction was 5 lines long, stating that if you need an introduction you should probably not be reading this thesis but here are a few books you could start with. And of course the thesis was terribly boring for someone who is not in the field (even though it had "particles", "neural network" and other buzz words inside).

Blackstrat 4y ago

Politics. Look at what Scientific American has become. Everything has an agenda. True science news is hard to come by.