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At this point I believe almost 0% of “science” news I see. This headline so so insanely outrageous I knew it had to be wrong. Between pre-prints, overly enthus

• puffoflogic 4y ago
  > an ever increasing portion of the public doesn’t believe in science It's incredibly myopic to state first that you don't believe in the science news you hear, and yet somehow you (a) believe the news you hear about how much of the public believes in science, which itself would appear to be [social] science news, and (b) have apparently discounted the probability that the public just like you doesn't believe in science news. Really, it's not myopic, it's xenophobic and bigoted.
  • dunefox 4y ago
    Xenophobic and bigoted? Where are you getting that from? Certainly not from the grandparent. Did you just want to use big words?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • shitpostbot 4y ago
• not2b 4y ago
  Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees.
  • MBCook 4y ago
    I agree. They’re a site I trust much more than a random news site, and this isn’t the first “No, incredibly stupid science thing isn’t true” piece they’ve had to write lately. Re-reading my comment it may be unclear what I meant. So to state it plainly it was the original claim I knew was bunk.
  • AceJohnny2 4y ago
    Definitely worth the subscription.
  • clairity 4y ago
    no, not only is that an irrational appeal to authority, but ars spent the last two years fearmongering over covid for clicks just like all the other news sites. this story is also fishing for clicks, just from a contrarian perspective (relative to their audience) to keep things fresh.
    • mempko 4y ago
      Ok, but over a million people in the US died from covid and even more with permanent damage.
      • clairity 4y ago
        3.5M people died last year in the US. as usual, heart disease and cancer were the overwhelming leaders. covid claimed ~460K, but that's "deaths involving covid", not "from covid". there is no evidence of "permanent damage" from covid. a novel contagion of any kind will exhibit its highest mortality rates at the beginning of its epidemic incursion, and eventually reach steady state. from all indications, the steady state of covid will follow its coronavirus predecessors and settle at negligible death rates. heart disease and cancer will continue to kill millions into the foreseeable future. that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
• wsinks 4y ago
  Serious question - how do you engage with new studies and find value? Or do you? I'm trying to rejigger what my info pipelines look like and I'm looking for ideas. I like hearing about new stuff, but you're right that I just can't trust a science headline.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    Read them. Abstract and conclusions. The middle if it seems interesting, followed by looking for related research to confirm the conclusions. Most people don't have the skills to do this, we need better science journalism.
    • biomcgary 4y ago
      We need better incentives for science journalism than clicks and ad dollars. The problem is obvious, but the solution is not. (We also have an incentive problem for science, but that is another problem.)
  • gus_massa 4y ago
    Use the press article to get a general understanding. Ignore the part about how it will fix all the problems in the world. Take a look at Wikipedia. Read the abstract of the research article and look for the most important graphic / table. Does it support the abstract of the article? Does it even support the caption of the figure? Ctr+F for some keywords, like "control group", "exclusion criteria", "almost statistically significant". Try to find out if they are using some "interesting" method to filter the data. Use some back of the envelope statistic, like comparing the difference, variance and Sqrt(N). Count how many results are statistically significant and how many are reported. How many implicit results are not reported? Also, are there some results with an incredible small error? There are just too many predatory journals and bad journals with a peer review that is a joke. Unless it's a journal in your area, just ignore the journal and look at the data. And even some serious journals publish bad articles. I use a modified version of the crackpot index were the article starts with +5 points https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html In god we trust, all others must bring data.
  • 4y ago
• williamcotton 4y ago
  From “Nullius in verba” to “Believe in science”…
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    I’m positive that the person who downvoted has somehow misinterpreted my pithy statement so perhaps I should explain myself. “Nullius in verba” is the original motto of the Royal Society, arguably the birthplace of modern science. It roughly translates to “take no one’s word” and encouraged an epistemological worldview based on empiricism. This was situated in a world where truth of all matters was primarily dictated by authority, even those of the natural philosophies. The truths of science were to be experienced in the laboratory just as the truths of a cake recipe were to be experienced in the kitchen. The person that I am responding to is lamenting the fact that there is a certain expectation that one must “believe in science”. This is in direct contrast to “nullius in verba”.
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      The usefulness of science as a means to discover things about the universe is a pretty solid belief. Believing in whatever is said by a random person claiming to be a scientist is less solid. Believing in what is reported in general news media as being the discovery of said random people is rather gelatinous.
• pwenzel 4y ago
  Perhaps the article was meant to be published 20 years from now.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway5752 4y ago
  Please do not conflate "science" with "science media". Honestly, since this is really just a shadow discussion of the same Reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of_bad_science_reporting_no_we_havent/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w2x10v/beware_of... and https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_teams_research_finds_atlantic_plankton_all/ https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/w1ahrq/scots_tea...) we should all just come out front and say "A bunch of people overreacted to single non-science source of bad and un-peer-reviewed research". The fact it was debunked so quick is a credit to the science ecosystem. The fact that a bunch of dopes piled onto the original report without any due diligence is the problem. That is a problem worth unpacking - how information is distributed and our poor general education in critical thinking and evaluation of source materials.
  • MBCook 4y ago
    I’m not. I understand this is purely a media issue. I don’t think most people do. And I don’t care if it was debunked in a day or two. It’s not 1980. It spread very far in that time. And given how outrageous the claim was (and the knock on effects we should be seeing if it was true) no outlet should have ever published it in the first place without further review.
    • throwaway5752 4y ago
      But bad information or misinformation can't be debunked instantly, nor will they able to be. If we require that, we will have an unstable system. Therefor, we have to train people otherwise.
      • MBCook 4y ago
        news consumers should be the last line of defense. Not the first. If the police tell the media they shot someone in a robbery it gets reported. It’s reasonable to assume that’s not fake. If police say they shot 5,700 people during a robbery at a McDonalds this morning, no one would report that uncritically. They’d look for some kind of confirmation because the story is so far out there. That’s what I expect of science reporting. At least the most basic cursory check. I’m not asking for the media to duplicate studies themselves. But blindly reporting what someone tells you uncritically is likely to lead to obvious mistakes like this.
• coldpie 4y ago
  You "just" need to find good science news outlets. Ars Technica is one of them. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast is another. I'm sure there are plenty more.
  • nomel 4y ago
    And, most importantly, never trust a press release from a university.
    • OrderlyTiamat 4y ago
      I feel like now that we're at this point the fight is all but lost. Trusting science on the one hand yet "never [trusting] a press release from a university" on the other do not go together well. We should be much much more harsh on overenthusiastic acience journalists, press releases, overly broad claims and bad research practices. That should in my opinion include consequences for the reputation of not just the individual journalists or scientists, but the whole information chain that is responsible for the publishing of rubbish science.
  • ipspam 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• anotherrandom 4y ago
  The very fact that we are saying we need to "believe in" science illustrates our society's problem perfectly
• daniel-cussen 4y ago
  So after graduating High School with terrific math scores, I started realizing...I can't count. Now I could of course but I frequently erred, I was better at counting at 6 when I would spend all day counting to 100. One kid counted to 1000, that was cool. That was something we'd do, is count. But the skill had atrophied. I had to learn how to count again, practice counting, and cool thing is I can now count--with about the same level of error I had as in late high school--to 18, 20, 30, 32, 37 the way most people can count instantly when there's 6 or less. I made a game to practice. But back to the point: yeah too many people blurt stat. They didn't count right. Just blurt stat.