7 ms·

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

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.
- Closi 4y ago
  Weather news is ok if you are outside the weather industry - but to those in the industry the forecasts are simplistic and biased, and the news doesn’t generally cover developments in forecasting technology or technique. The broader topic of climate in popular news is known to be a total shit show however (not just science, also policy etc). For what it’s worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to wild stabs in the dark.
  - areoform 4y ago
    Which ones were the best, in your opinion?
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  Until weather reporting became mostly automated, most news agencies had a policy of never reporting a chance of rain as being less than 20%. If it was 8%, it was always rounded up to 20%. If you remember seeing "20% of rain" excessively most of your life, this is why. Some of them still do this, especially with on the air reports by a human.
  - dtech 4y ago
    That actually sounds like good practice, due to humans not having good intuition about chance. Most people will interpret "8% of rain" as "it's not going to rain", and then be mad at the "inaccurate" weather report if it rains the next day.
- Planktonne 4y ago
  > But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.
  - ghaff 4y ago
crispyambulance 4y ago
It's true, many of the problems Sabine Hossenfelder cited about science news apply just as well to news about any topic. But is the news categorically "bad"? No. Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists, stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on with those topics. Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect the general public to spend the time and effort to read them. There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives, but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening and satisfy some curiosity.
padolsey 4y ago
> We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia", that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the whole story. There are different incentives at play. Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the research domain. It is in universities' interests to present research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight. Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because consequences and causalities are hard. I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news = ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-by-domain basis.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Any form of communication is lossy The only differentiator is to what degree. Gell-man amnesia is stating that all news has a high degree of it, not exactly equal amounts.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
- raphlinus 4y ago
  I think the operative trope is more Sturgeon's Law than Gell-Mann Amnesia. I had a period where I was reading obsessively about Covid, including reading papers and listing to TWiV (which is very informative but requires a massive time commitment). What I found is that the best of the science journalists (Helen Branswell, Jon Cohen, Kai Kupferschmidt, Amy Maxmen, Ed Jong) were excellent, writing with a deep understanding of the subject material and providing useful context. The median news story was just awful, and the WSJ and NYT opinion pages were for the most part a dumpster fire ("There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave'" is a masterpiece, chef's kiss). I've generally found the same thing is true in other domains. Seek out writers who know their stuff. They exist, they're just not consistently the most popular.
Gimpei 4y ago
I think this is true to some extent. The fundamental problem is that the majority of journalists are generalists with training mostly in writing. This may have worked in the past, but the world has become very specialized. Generalized knowledge with a hermeneutical approach to discovery just doesn’t cut it. Media organizations seem to have realized this when it comes to law where many analysts are now lawyers, and in medicine to a certain extent as well. But not in the social or hard sciences.
- amelius 4y ago
  The good news is that we're about to have AI that can make anybody a geat writer, including any researcher whose reporting the general public finds boring and incomprehensible.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    I believe that, when I see it. What I expect, is more wordy gibberish, that gives the impression of high level writing, but is not.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Nah, we've got AI that avoids the need for a researcher because instead of taking time to read the material you can use it as inputs to a neural network and get a near-instant response in the form of paraphrases of the key points and other statements which aren't true but involve enough relevant terms in syntactically correct English to get past a subeditor...
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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mjw1007 4y ago
But it's hard to know whether or not this is true. There's no obvious reason to suppose that journalism is doing equally badly in all fields. I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or worse than what I am. And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much more effort in there. (Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I think it's bad for different reasons.)
areoform 4y ago
Good investigative journalism is usually quite the opposite. Some of my favorite pieces have times, dates, who, what, where etc and are firmly rooted in data. There’s also a new sub-field that explores topics through data and they’re usually quite excellent. Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it’s difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite example is the article series about illegal plutonium experiments by the US Government on civilians where they injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children with plutonium just to see what would happen. The articles forced disclosure from the US Govt. in the form of an executive order and led to the book, The Plutonium Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files > The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere. You should be able to read it here, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/868709 https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/86870... Another great example is the assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program by the NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc... It’s a beautiful example of great journalism. If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and were about events that had happened in the past. It’s much more difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the “all news is bad” perception comes from. News can be great. Given enough time and research.
deleted 4y ago
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gradschoolfail 4y ago
It’s true! If you happen to be an expert hacker, you realize that Hacker News is pretty horrible too.
solardev 4y ago
I dunno if that's strictly true. Many fields can be reasonably covered with some minimal training. The hard sciences, though, are constantly changing so much that even practitioners in the same field of science can barely keep up in peer review... much less scientists from other disciplines, and much less poorly-paid journalists without dedicated science training. And these days, so many of the findings are subtle and perhaps somewhat interesting in a purely scientific sense, but have to be hyped up in marketing dept PRs to make the general news cycle at all. The issue compounds when poorly trained, poorly paid journalists interview scientists and then misreport and misquote their findings, leading to a loss of a trust, the next interview being less detailed, etc. It's a vicious cycle of dumbing down and hyping up, all to fit our clickbait-sized attention spans. Is there an easy way around it? I doubt it. You're essentially reporting bleeding-edge findings from leading PhDs flailing under a publish-or-perish model, to an audience who mostly has not touched science since middle school (if even then). People don't even know why they should CARE about science, much less what your margins of error and P-values are, etc.
- feet 4y ago
  Maybe reporters just shouldn't be reporting on every little paper but rather universities should have a media department with scientists that handles press releases so they don't suck ass
  - davrosthedalek 4y ago
    Having seen the PR disasters from CERN, I'd say we need less PR releases.
    - feet 4y ago
      Yea because those were undoubtedly worse than your average scientific reporting from whatever Times? Honestly, come on
      - davrosthedalek 4y ago
        The problem is that they caused that reporting. No PR about superluminal neutrinos, no hysterical reporting about them. This would have given the community time to find the bad connection which caused the bad data.
dimal 4y ago
I’ve been ignoring most news since about mid January. My thought was that if it’s important enough, I’ll find out eventually, and I’ll reduce the amount of information noise going into my brain. That’s turned out to be true. But another unexpected effect was that it’s become much easier to spot bad news outside of my expertise. I’m center-left, and find it pretty easy to pick out nonsense from the right, but looking at centrist and left wing news now (even “good” sources) is horrifying. What passes for reason is astounding. I think that without the daily firehouse of bias reinforcement, it’s really helped me to see that, yeah, all news is really really terrible, and probably does more harm than good.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
- Veen 4y ago
  Perhaps the motive is that we want to see better science reporting and are dismayed when the media fails to do its job of producing accurate and informative journalism.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    No. "Science reporting is bad" is fine and the criticism is constructive. But there are always chuckleheads in the comments smugly sowing distrust in all news media, journalism, and independent free press.
    - Veen 4y ago
      Who cares what the chuckleheads are saying? Better to ignore them and focus on substantive criticism. Attempting to divine the motives of morons is a waste of time and it distracts from issues that really do matter (of course, for some, that's exactly the point of focusing on the stupidities of extreme positions—they divert attention from genuine problems).
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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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.

Closi 4y ago
Weather news is ok if you are outside the weather industry - but to those in the industry the forecasts are simplistic and biased, and the news doesn’t generally cover developments in forecasting technology or technique. The broader topic of climate in popular news is known to be a total shit show however (not just science, also policy etc). For what it’s worth, I work in Supply Chain and articles around that in the last year range from vaguely accurate to wild stabs in the dark.
- areoform 4y ago
  Which ones were the best, in your opinion?
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
Until weather reporting became mostly automated, most news agencies had a policy of never reporting a chance of rain as being less than 20%. If it was 8%, it was always rounded up to 20%. If you remember seeing "20% of rain" excessively most of your life, this is why. Some of them still do this, especially with on the air reports by a human.
- dtech 4y ago
  That actually sounds like good practice, due to humans not having good intuition about chance. Most people will interpret "8% of rain" as "it's not going to rain", and then be mad at the "inaccurate" weather report if it rains the next day.
Planktonne 4y ago
> But science is different for sure and the journalism on it sucks because getting to the point where you even understand the problem might require years of preparation. This is not at all unique to science; people tend to assume this about their own fields, not realising that it actually applies to most of them.
- ghaff 4y ago

crispyambulance 4y ago

It's true, many of the problems Sabine Hossenfelder cited about science news apply just as well to news about any topic. But is the news categorically "bad"? No. Certainly there are awful news outlets, terrible journalists, stories which never get the treatment they deserve, and a downward spiral of sensationalism and disinformation. But journalism still serves a purpose. Someone can still read news articles about topics which they aren't expert in and still be reasonably informed about the basics of whatever is going on with those topics. Are things going to get oversimplified, improperly cited, or have background material glossed over or omitted? sure, but one simply can't write academic papers in a newspaper and expect the general public to spend the time and effort to read them. There ARE some long form news outlets that take deeper dives, but they have a decidedly academic feel to them, which is fine for audiences who are motivated for that but these just don't fly with regular folks who just want to know what's happening and satisfy some curiosity.

padolsey 4y ago

> We just don't notice it outside our area of expertise. This is a common trope - and has a name - "gell-man amnesia", that people raise again and again, but I don't think it's the whole story. There are different incentives at play. Journalists are sometimes investigators, sometimes storytellers, and other times just mediators. The article mentions the exagerations and unique incentives at play in the research domain. It is in universities' interests to present research in a certain way. Journalists, as well, are incentivised to create juicy headlines for mainstream consumption, but not always and not consistently. Sometimes it's necessary to simplify, but that doesn't mean truth is completely lost. Detail is not always necessary for insight. Sometimes as well, a news domain is suffiently well understood to be applied as intended; e.g. traffic, weather, crimes in general, matter-of-fact reporting of sequenced real-world events. But then we get nth-order insights: e.g. geo-political reporting from "this thing happened" to "the implications are...", and those necessarily lose some truth because consequences and causalities are hard. I'd say, generally, things are not so simple as "news = ~lossy". Some domains suffer from bad reporting more than others, and it's worth inquiring why that occurs on a domain-by-domain basis.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Any form of communication is lossy The only differentiator is to what degree. Gell-man amnesia is stating that all news has a high degree of it, not exactly equal amounts.
logicalmonster 4y ago
raphlinus 4y ago
I think the operative trope is more Sturgeon's Law than Gell-Mann Amnesia. I had a period where I was reading obsessively about Covid, including reading papers and listing to TWiV (which is very informative but requires a massive time commitment). What I found is that the best of the science journalists (Helen Branswell, Jon Cohen, Kai Kupferschmidt, Amy Maxmen, Ed Jong) were excellent, writing with a deep understanding of the subject material and providing useful context. The median news story was just awful, and the WSJ and NYT opinion pages were for the most part a dumpster fire ("There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave'" is a masterpiece, chef's kiss). I've generally found the same thing is true in other domains. Seek out writers who know their stuff. They exist, they're just not consistently the most popular.

Gimpei 4y ago

I think this is true to some extent. The fundamental problem is that the majority of journalists are generalists with training mostly in writing. This may have worked in the past, but the world has become very specialized. Generalized knowledge with a hermeneutical approach to discovery just doesn’t cut it. Media organizations seem to have realized this when it comes to law where many analysts are now lawyers, and in medicine to a certain extent as well. But not in the social or hard sciences.

amelius 4y ago
The good news is that we're about to have AI that can make anybody a geat writer, including any researcher whose reporting the general public finds boring and incomprehensible.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  I believe that, when I see it. What I expect, is more wordy gibberish, that gives the impression of high level writing, but is not.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Nah, we've got AI that avoids the need for a researcher because instead of taking time to read the material you can use it as inputs to a neural network and get a near-instant response in the form of paraphrases of the key points and other statements which aren't true but involve enough relevant terms in syntactically correct English to get past a subeditor...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mjw1007 4y ago

But it's hard to know whether or not this is true. There's no obvious reason to suppose that journalism is doing equally badly in all fields. I can ask someone who's an expert in a different field, and they might say "yes, it's terrible there too", but maybe what they're thinking of as "terrible" is considerably better or worse than what I am. And it seems clear that journalists in general are much more interested in some fields than others. I don't think it makes sense to assume that coverage of (say) party politics is as bad as coverage of science, because they're surely putting much more effort in there. (Coverage of party politics is probably bad too, but if so I think it's bad for different reasons.)

areoform 4y ago

Good investigative journalism is usually quite the opposite. Some of my favorite pieces have times, dates, who, what, where etc and are firmly rooted in data. There’s also a new sub-field that explores topics through data and they’re usually quite excellent. Such pieces often turn into books or a series because it’s difficult to condense it all into one article. My favorite example is the article series about illegal plutonium experiments by the US Government on civilians where they injected poor (and mostly minority) people and dying children with plutonium just to see what would happen. The articles forced disclosure from the US Govt. in the form of an executive order and led to the book, The Plutonium Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plutonium_Files > The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy and federal agencies then made available records dealing with human radiation experiments, as a result of Welsome's work. The resulting investigation was undertaken by the president’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and it uncovered much of the material included in Welsome's book. The committee issued a controversial 1995 report which said that "wrongs were committed" but it did not condemn those who perpetrated them.[3] The final report came out on October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, when much of the media's attention was directed elsewhere. You should be able to read it here, https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/868709 https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/86870... Another great example is the assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program by the NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuc... It’s a beautiful example of great journalism. If you notice both pieces took a lot of time to compile and were about events that had happened in the past. It’s much more difficult to do this with breaking news, which is where the “all news is bad” perception comes from. News can be great. Given enough time and research.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gradschoolfail 4y ago

It’s true! If you happen to be an expert hacker, you realize that Hacker News is pretty horrible too.

solardev 4y ago

I dunno if that's strictly true. Many fields can be reasonably covered with some minimal training. The hard sciences, though, are constantly changing so much that even practitioners in the same field of science can barely keep up in peer review... much less scientists from other disciplines, and much less poorly-paid journalists without dedicated science training. And these days, so many of the findings are subtle and perhaps somewhat interesting in a purely scientific sense, but have to be hyped up in marketing dept PRs to make the general news cycle at all. The issue compounds when poorly trained, poorly paid journalists interview scientists and then misreport and misquote their findings, leading to a loss of a trust, the next interview being less detailed, etc. It's a vicious cycle of dumbing down and hyping up, all to fit our clickbait-sized attention spans. Is there an easy way around it? I doubt it. You're essentially reporting bleeding-edge findings from leading PhDs flailing under a publish-or-perish model, to an audience who mostly has not touched science since middle school (if even then). People don't even know why they should CARE about science, much less what your margins of error and P-values are, etc.

feet 4y ago
Maybe reporters just shouldn't be reporting on every little paper but rather universities should have a media department with scientists that handles press releases so they don't suck ass
- davrosthedalek 4y ago
  Having seen the PR disasters from CERN, I'd say we need less PR releases.
  - feet 4y ago
    Yea because those were undoubtedly worse than your average scientific reporting from whatever Times? Honestly, come on
    - davrosthedalek 4y ago
      The problem is that they caused that reporting. No PR about superluminal neutrinos, no hysterical reporting about them. This would have given the community time to find the bad connection which caused the bad data.

dimal 4y ago

I’ve been ignoring most news since about mid January. My thought was that if it’s important enough, I’ll find out eventually, and I’ll reduce the amount of information noise going into my brain. That’s turned out to be true. But another unexpected effect was that it’s become much easier to spot bad news outside of my expertise. I’m center-left, and find it pretty easy to pick out nonsense from the right, but looking at centrist and left wing news now (even “good” sources) is horrifying. What passes for reason is astounding. I think that without the daily firehouse of bias reinforcement, it’s really helped me to see that, yeah, all news is really really terrible, and probably does more harm than good.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Veen 4y ago
Perhaps the motive is that we want to see better science reporting and are dismayed when the media fails to do its job of producing accurate and informative journalism.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  No. "Science reporting is bad" is fine and the criticism is constructive. But there are always chuckleheads in the comments smugly sowing distrust in all news media, journalism, and independent free press.
  - Veen 4y ago
    Who cares what the chuckleheads are saying? Better to ignore them and focus on substantive criticism. Attempting to divine the motives of morons is a waste of time and it distracts from issues that really do matter (of course, for some, that's exactly the point of focusing on the stupidities of extreme positions—they divert attention from genuine problems).

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago
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