4 ms·

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

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.
    - throwaway5752 4y ago
      Yes, but this isn't "science reporting". It's a single site, the Scottish Sunday Post, that reported on a single pre-print paper with a small data set from a single research group on a boat doing some sampling and analysis in the Caribbean. "Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
- makomk 4y ago
  Debunking also doesn't undo the original damage because most people will never see the debunking. For example, a while ago a paper about the oceans supposedly heating up much more than previously estimated hit a lot of news sites and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 The article currently at that link is not what was there at the time, it's essentially a retraction that almost none of the HN readers who saw the original will have seen. That paper had an estimate of ocean warming that was much higher than that found using actual widespread physical measurements of ocean temperature, based on a weird indirect calculation from global CO2 and O2 levels in the atmosphere. It turns out they'd massively underestimated the error bars on their weird indirect estimate and it was just far too inaccurate to actually conclude that ocean warming was substantially higher than the direct measurements. (Which is not at all surprising really.) Now go and read the HN comments on that science at the time, they're quite something given the subsequent context...
aaron695 4y ago

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.
  - throwaway5752 4y ago
    Yes, but this isn't "science reporting". It's a single site, the Scottish Sunday Post, that reported on a single pre-print paper with a small data set from a single research group on a boat doing some sampling and analysis in the Caribbean. "Science reporting" is not analogous to "the police" since the police are a single entity. Let's leave aside, as we know from recent tragedies, that we know the police lie in the media frequently. But by the same standard, this is a problem of the general public confusing random publications in a Scottish newspaper as science reporting. Let me know when this happens in Nature. I don't think the science desks at the BBC or the NYTimes would have even published this, either. Those are the science media. Calling this science reporting is a category error.
makomk 4y ago
Debunking also doesn't undo the original damage because most people will never see the debunking. For example, a while ago a paper about the oceans supposedly heating up much more than previously estimated hit a lot of news sites and HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352506 The article currently at that link is not what was there at the time, it's essentially a retraction that almost none of the HN readers who saw the original will have seen. That paper had an estimate of ocean warming that was much higher than that found using actual widespread physical measurements of ocean temperature, based on a weird indirect calculation from global CO2 and O2 levels in the atmosphere. It turns out they'd massively underestimated the error bars on their weird indirect estimate and it was just far too inaccurate to actually conclude that ocean warming was substantially higher than the direct measurements. (Which is not at all surprising really.) Now go and read the HN comments on that science at the time, they're quite something given the subsequent context...

aaron695 4y ago