20 ms·

Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

• Thoeu388 3y ago
  [flagged]
• droopyEyelids 3y ago
  One of my beliefs is that truth may have negative short-term consequences, but the long term benefits are worth it in the long run. So, wow- the facts presented here are depressing. Really a huge example of people in positions of authority blatantly misleading the public.
• jgeada 3y ago
  Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general. Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
  • mikebenfield 3y ago
    People have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all. What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
  • avgcorrection 3y ago
    Clearly social epistemology is something that you know nothing about and thus something that you should keep quiet about.
• Der_Einzige 3y ago
  Scientists should be skeptical of all source - including Journalists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jasonvorhe 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • papito 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • slily 3y ago
      Your comment reminds me of this line from the submission: "There’s also a generational divide in journalism, with younger journalists tending to be more openly left/progressive than their older peers — and tending to be more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news stories are complicated and it’s not particularly their job to pass moral judgment." This is probably true of the younger generations in general, not just journalists. Sadly any attempt at communicating a nuanced view makes you subject to vicious attacks from binary thinkers, who often miss the point and derail the discussion.
      • papito 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • dang 3y ago
          Could you please not post in the flamewar style like this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • jasonvorhe 3y ago
          [flagged]
        • mcpackieh 3y ago
          He hasn't said any of these things you're tarring him for. Instead of responding to things you imagine he might say, try to stick to the facts.
• adra 3y ago
  Sure? Due diligence is always important. I'm not implying that science and journal publishing, or journalism are in bad shape, but simply that scientific scholarships goal should be to eventually converge on a truth ( or more likely an exclusion of other opposing theories), whereas the goal of journalism to to seek a truthful point in time capture of a topic. Just because they're inherently different time scales to converge on truth, any given scientific discussion shouldn't be "thrown over the fence" with a low value copy pasta of the papers. I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists understand this general statement, but just because most individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little due diligence.
• mapt 3y ago
  The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work. The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false. As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards). "Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
  • vxNsr 3y ago
    [dead]
  • ctoth 3y ago
    [dead]
  • rossdavidh 3y ago
    Certainly you are correct that there are several different "lab" theory versions, and they vary by orders of magnitude in how plausible they are. However: "I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario." This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration. Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its implications than "China was researching bioweapons and released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which of those theories are remotely plausible, and which implausible? If only there were a profession, between scientists and the general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the work of the former...
• ke88y 3y ago
  Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. At university I majored in two STEM subjects but also took 10 courses in Philosophy, Art, History, Journalism, and Economics. Almost no one majoring in any of those fields except Econ took more than 2-3 STEM courses, and even then there a dedicated watered down courses to ensure those people could graduate (Algebra instead of Calculus, "Physics for Future Presidents", etc.). My high school education in the humanities was also far better than my high school education in STEM, which is typical. And the deplorable state of Mathematics education in US high schools acts as a hard constraint toward improving the situation, since you need a baseline of mathematics literacy before proceeding along any other path in STEM. How are journalists supposed to be productively skeptical when the vast majority of them don't receive anything remotely approaching a truly well-rounded education? Go read the proximal origins paper. How is a journalist who has never seen a derivative, has never taken BIO 101, and whose Science distribution credit was fulfilled by Physics For Future Presidents supposed to dive into the claims in that paper and critically evaluate the surrounding literature? They can't.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • MostlyStable 3y ago
    In the past, wasn't it normal for journalists to have a particular specialization (even if that's not the _only_ thing they did), like "science reporter" or something? It is obviously impossible for every reporter to become an expert on every single topic that they might ever cover, but it is not unreasonable at all to get enough of a background on a topic that you cover regularly to be able to ask intelligent questions. If news organizations were serious about this, they might actively look for people who _do_ have greater amounts of training/experience in a given field. It may be true that in the current journalism paradigm the kind of skepticism called for is impossible, but it is absolutely not true that this is a fundamental state of journalism and that reporters could never become capable of doing it.
    • ke88y 3y ago
      Ideally, but AFAICT that's not how it works. I have given a number of interviews to "Science" journalists, in two occasions even for science-focused publications. In each case I began the interview by asking the journalist to tell me about their coursework and self-study background so I can be sure to meet them where they are. In only one case have I met a science reporter who I'd consider minimally competent to report on science -- rather than eg write puff pieces -- and that reporter was educated in Europe.
• epistasis 3y ago
  But especially skeptical of pundits like Nate Silver.
  • zzzeek 3y ago
    Seriously, shouldn't they at least get Matt Taibbi's take also
    • epistasis 3y ago
      I'm sure Michael Schillenbergee has some opinions that he in no way financially benefits from spreading.
• MostlyStable 3y ago
  I wonder what he'd have to say about the article published on FiveThirtyEight in May of 2020 that prominently cites one of the authors of this very paper [0]. I don't think he was very heavily involved in the science-reporting side of fivethirtyeight (he's always very obviously been more on the sports and politics side), and since at this point since he's no longer affiliated with the site, it sort of doesn't matter, but I'm also pretty sure that he didn't just come to the belief espoused in this post recently. I wonder if there were ever internal discussions about the piece. [0]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-the-novel-coronavirus-developed-naturally-not-in-a-chinese-lab/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-scientists-think-th...
• biophysboy 3y ago
  One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that it will ever get “resolved”. We dont have sequence samples at the time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy where it needs to be sharp. In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate, not politics.
  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    There's really no reason to care about which of the two prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and we cannot force them to prevent a natural source without something stupid like extreme sanctions or war. So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • zmgsabst 3y ago
      A lab leak implies that we should cease funding work at WIV — and examine the officials responsible for doing so in the first place. Perhaps even reconsider our entire approach to pandemic research, if our decisions led to the worst pandemic in generations.
      • defen 3y ago
        > A lab leak implies that we should cease funding work at WIV WIV was defunded by the US 2 days ago https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-halts-funding-access-wuhan-lab-heart-covid/story?id=101499843 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-halts-funding-access-wuhan-...
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  Personally, I never accepted that a lab leak was out of the question. I simply didn't think it mattered during the early days of the pandemic response (to the everyday citizen) since it didn't influence safe hygiene and social distancing. It was used by conservative media as something for their base to get mad about and be mildly racist about (Wuhan flu). What was more egregious was Dr. Fauci's assertion that masking wouldn't help slow the spread, which he likely knew to be false and had said so to prevent a run on N95s. I get it, but that is a huge undermining of public trust.
• papito 3y ago
  There are professional journalists out there who in most organizations will get into hot water or lose their jobs if they fabricate news or sources. They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact checkers - this is the best we have. Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from @HotJerseyGirl1998.
• speak_plainly 3y ago
  One very obvious thing to consider is how a paper, whether it’s philosophy or physics, was funded and which grants the authors received and from who. So many conclusions and biases are driven by funding mechanisms, sometimes it’s corporate and sometimes it’s government but the devil is always in the details and there is no safe or superior source of funding.
• breakingrules 3y ago
  [dead]
• robot_no_421 3y ago
  Everyone should be skeptical of all sources. But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of. So while the title is technically true and I agree with the premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary at best and damaging at worst. Until we begin to be more skeptical in general and learn to distrust all the other mouthpieces vomiting lies every day, let's trust the scientists.
  • rossdavidh 3y ago
    The essence of science is not trusting an expert, but requiring evidence and repeatability. Scientists aren't more trustworthy than those other groups for no reason, it's because they work in a field where work can be double-checked. As the repeatability crisis has shown, many believe their work will not be double-checked, and once they believe that, they become less and less worthy of that trust.
    • robot_no_421 3y ago
      Right, that's why my first sentence was "everyone should be skeptical of every source".... But if I'm forced to trust someone (and most of us are on a daily basis), I'd rather trust the guys whose whole job revolves around the principle of "we require evidence and repeatable results before we believe you" than pretty much every other profession. Completely separate from my above point, I'd also say that I do believe scientists are on average more trustworthy than other career workers at a personal level. It's a profession that tends to attract people concerned with objective truth and rational logic. Just like how politics tends to attract those who want to work with people and the police force attracts people who are comfortable with violence. At least from my personal, anecdotal view.
      • rossdavidh 3y ago
        This all makes sense to me, and I partially agree. However, people whose whole job revolves around "you must provide evidence of something that gets published in a journal, on a regular basis, even if it is never of enough interest for anyone else to try to replicate it", with an extra helping of "if it's confirming people's biases enough to get you speaking gigs or a best-selling book, you get a pay raise", then you might over time start to attract a slightly different crowd.
• aredox 3y ago
  [flagged]
• zzbn00 3y ago
  Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact. But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature. But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what even research institutions increasingly need to survive it seems
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    "Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact." This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a different role.
• legitster 3y ago
  I respect this position on principal, but I also forget like we are equally glossing over the context in this specific case. In 2020, the lab-leak theory was specifically being promoted by people who were advancing the idea that Covid was a) an engineered bio-weapon b) required a national security response in lieu of a medical one. But if we really want to look back at 2020-2021, there were MUCH more egregious examples of "experts" wielding their credentials maliciously. School closures I think will be the most pertinent example for a while to come.
  • RyanAdamas 3y ago
    Incorrect, the lab-leak theory was specifically disregarded using the well-poisoning methods you described as the blame would be shifted to a wild-goose chase. Considering China went through SARS 10 years previous with hundreds of millions of patients to examine, combined with the influx of viral research into the country after that period, it is by no means a stretch to assume duplicity was at hand. A for-profit medical response is a conflation of the kind you are suggesting should have taken place.
    • legitster 3y ago
      At the end of the day, no one really should have cared that much where Covid came from in 2020. The only people who really cared were people who were trying to win a game of political football. This is equally true with the scientists in the Lancet letter as it was with politicians trying to win a pissing match with China.
  • pgrote 3y ago
    Sort of tossing the baby out with the bath water. If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly. Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
  • ctrlp 3y ago
    Both those ideas (a,b) are look to be vindicated. It does look like an engineered bio-weapon and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. And whether the people pointing to a lab leak were also demanding a national security response or opposing one, that is what happened, i.e., it was a national security response (big pharma white labeling and providing distribution for DoD subcontractors product). Simple as.
• matt3210 3y ago
  In 2023 I assume all news is biased or flat false. I assume all video is doctored or flat out generated. After one day I stopped consuming it all together as it was a pointless waste of time
• b8 3y ago
  Trust, but verify. This also reminds me of, "There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth".
• powera 3y ago
  It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts". The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments. This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Apparently the bozos are winning here.
  • threeseed 3y ago
    Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism. No different to any other random person on the street. That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping to any conclusions.
    • danenania 3y ago
      "Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism." Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political biases.
      • threeseed 3y ago
        Please provide sources that “many” experts have been corrupted. Otherwise the source of the perceived biases may be closer to home.
        • danenania 3y ago
          You could try reading tfa for a start. It includes sources.
  • jonnycomputer 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• guilhas 3y ago
  Clearly the media stakeholders had the narrative decided, and the journalists were forced to find the scientists that supported it and ignore or attack the scientists who opposed it Same for politics reporting The best way to stay informed is to read a book about something currently not on the news
• bell-cot 3y ago
  Cynical reaction: With how over-worked and under-resourced most journalists are these days, we're lucky when they have sources who might maybe actually know something or other about the subject at hand. Bigger picture: In the specific case of COVID, what might have helped most would be some really mature meta-journalism. A calm Walter Cronkite telling us that, for the most part, nobody was really sure of anything. Loads of "1mm wide, 1km deep" scientists were scrambling to do stuff outside of their usual niches, usually in a fraction of the time they'd normally need, and under all sorts of emotional and political pressures - which they had no experience whatever dealing with. The vast majority of 'em had zero experience whatever in communicating scientific results to the general public. And a small minority of 'em suddenly found that they loved the limelight - about the same way that some teenagers suddenly develop a taste for hard liquor - and would certainly not be sources of reasonable nor sober information. ...but with umpteen million people stuck at home during COVID, and consuming any & all available news about it - what incentive did the big (for-profit) media corporations have, to deliver any sort of sober, mature coverage?
  • coolliquidcode 3y ago
    COVID was one place where their lack of skepticism really came through. Early reports of how COVID spread would have been deemed unrealistic quickly based on a basic understanding of statistics. The early reports of how long the virus lived and how easily transmittable it was should have meant the virus would have spread to a high percentage of the population immediately. Pfizer saying the vaccine prevented transmission even though it is a leaky vaccine should have raised skepticism to incredible heights. Instead, media used these reports to create panic, fear and division. I highly doubt it takes too much work to regurgitate other news outlets, Pfizer, and government organization talking points.
• susanasj 3y ago
  I think, as with any politically charged topic, journalists are going to have biases. I don't think there is any particular solution to this except being conscious of those biases, particularly as they relate to career advancement and money. Money explains nearly everything about the issues in the American media ecosystem for me, not cultural factors like "some journalists are more open about being on the left". One writer that I followed nearly every day for the first 18 months of the pandemic was Derek Lowe at Science.org who runs a fantastic blog about drug discovery, and he has given his assessment of the origins debate a few times. The short answer is he doesn't know either unfortunately https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic---under-rug https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic--...
• jxramos 3y ago
  Don't be incurious, be curious and sensitive to what you understand and what you don't follow. There's a degree of humility involved where you honestly admit when you don't understand something and be vocal about it so people of good will can help fill in the blanks.
• andreygrehov 3y ago
  I agree. However, the problem lies far beyond the journalists' power. Let's take the latest investigation on the Biden family as an example. The IRS led the investigation for several years, and the IRS special agent provided a substantial amount of information pointing to bribes during their testimony. However, one of the political parties, including the FBI, showed no interest in finding the truth. This was evident from the type of questions that were asked. Why do they do that? Because they are protecting their own interests. When it comes to journalism, we can observe the exact same pattern. Journalists are not allowed to be skeptical because their skepticism could impact their company's ad revenue. When I worked at Huffington Post, I was not "allowed" to say anything negative about the then-President (Barack Obama). Even after the FBI was pressured to release all the Biden documents (FD-1023 - the one they were initially denying the existence of), the "reputable" news outlets remain predominantly silent. Ad revenue is a significant factor in this silence. They are protecting their own interests.
• Spinnaker_ 3y ago
  I don't think Journalists have the skills to be able to actually dig into and verify most types of science. So I don't think it's realistic to hold them to such a high standard. But they absolutely do have the skills to shape the narrative. And In this case they failed spectacularly. Many seemed overly eager to attack and destroy any who came to a different conclusion. It seems like they took glee in it. Their behaviour was embarrassing, and there appears to have been very little acknowledgement or self reflection of this.
• ctrlp 3y ago
  Nate Silver fundamentally misunderstands his own role in the information ecosystem. He and other journalists are primarily votaries to the mainline political myths of our time. This idea that they should be skeptical is laughable on its face. They can't do that, not meaningfully. Mostly, they can't actually think outside the religion, but even if they could they can't write skeptically without losing their careers. There is an Overton window, and journalists are the Cerberus of the ideological superstructure of our society. If you're not familiar, Cerberus guards the gates of the Underworld and ensures that the spirits of the dead cannot leave the Underworld and that the living cannot enter it. That's basically the function of "journalists". Mainline newspapers and their scribblers share all the limitations of the governing classes and they never willingly place themselves in minority positions.
  • rossdavidh 3y ago
    While there are some (many) like that, I don't believe that Nate Silver is one of them.
    • ctrlp 3y ago
      but why?
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  If you don't trust 'em, don't read 'em. The problem will solve itself.
• rvz 3y ago
  Goes without saying. "Trusted" sources can also spin stories to the general public and conflicts of interests can happen which the established media can close ranks to protect each other. Presenting all sides paints the entire picture.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• alphabet9000 3y ago
  the line about "The truth is never going to come out" is related to the uncertainty of whether or not it came from a lab, not (as the piece implies) having anything to do with "They also thought they were going to get away with it". it's very misleading and should be corrected
  • jonnycomputer 3y ago
    Yeah; they seemed skeptical that China would ever let the world know what actually happened, if something did escape.
• VintageCool 3y ago
  I have been upset with the NY Times for years because of their uncritical addiction to access journalism. * They held into the Abu Ghraib story for a year to avoid influencing the 2004 election. * They dismissed and discredited the story about DNS lookups between email servers at Trump Tower, Spectrum Health (DeVos / Erik Prince), and Alfa Bank (Russia) in 2016. * They uncritically repeated the Barr memo about the Mueller report. That one I couldn't believe -- there had been weeks of reporting about how Bill Barr had been hired/appointed to suppress the Mueller investigation. Then Bill Barr publishes a memo a few days before the report saying that it's no big deal, and the NY Times is publishing mea culpas about how they had done wrong by reporting on Trump/Russia connections exposed by the Mueller investigation?? Instead, it seemed like the New York Times liked getting scoops from their sources high up in government, and they didn't want to preserve those sources by not upsetting them.
  • stevenwoo 3y ago
    This and the Judith Miller WMD fictions to turbocharge Iraq war justification, and Maggie Haberman's sycophancy during Trump years all add to evidence not being the liberal bastion that people believe for some reason.
• jonnycomputer 3y ago
  I spent at least an hour reading through both the emails and the slack messages in this "expose", but I came away from it fairly certain that they are being portrayed unfairly, and I'm fairly surprised that Nate Silver has latched on to this. You have to both look at the time-line of the paper writing and the time-line of the conversations. By my reading, by the time the paper was being written, most of them had indeed come to the conclusion that (1) there was no evidence for an engineered virus, (2) that the data was consistent with both a leak from a lab (without engineering) or from exposure to animals, but that (3) the former was not as a priori likely, given what they knew about the kinds of research being done. You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They started with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved away from that view the more they learned.
  • Marazan 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • jonnycomputer 3y ago
    Also, paper writing is a collaborative effort, which does not imply that everyone on the paper agrees with every part of it 100%. e.g. if I get Jane on the paper because she knows the more than me about X, but we end up having a soft disagreement about X, I'm not walking away from the paper. Also ... authors have good reason to manage their interactions with journalists. They don't want to be used or misrepresented. Also, given the politics of the moment, they also had every reason to be cautious about what they said publicly.
  • aredox 3y ago
    Nate Silver has been blatantly wrong several times during COVID, has been schooled by actual scientists and is now on a personal vendetta against them. He is ready to fan the flames of science-bashing because his fragile yet enormuous ego has been hurt. That tells all that you need to know about him. (Don't believe me? He has never apologised nor shown a little bit of humility after being corrected. That's who he is.)
• avenido 3y ago
  "They also thought they were going to get away with it. 'The truth is never going to come out', wrote Rambaut in one message." He took that statement way out of context. They were looking for the best explanation and given that their assumption of "the truth" about a lab leak wouldn't avail itself, they felt they needed to go on what would be a plausible scenario - a natural evolution of a virus.
• roody15 3y ago
  “ The Times fired their Pulitzer Prize-winning coronavirus reporter in middle of the pandemic — a reporter who saw the lab leak theory as credible — and replaced him with another reporter who dismissed discussion of the lab leak as “racist”.” This about sums up the state of modern journalism today .. sadly.
  • throwawwydd 3y ago
    [flagged]
• johntfella 3y ago
  Hanson's idea (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/gamble.html https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/gamble.html) of a betting market for science could be an interesting model for journalism. Probably easier said than done.
• swayvil 3y ago
  Consider the knowledge quality gradient. Ordered high to low. 1) see it yourself. 2) heard it from a friend. 3) bullshit.
• mquander 3y ago
  As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes, there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality. Truth-seeking is time-consuming and will always be inherently trading off against other local incentives, like writing quickly, writing exciting things, and writing things that your audience will like. If almost all journalists have to bust their ass just to survive, a truth-seeking culture won't thrive. I think there are three main ways I can see things getting better: 1. Governments and academia have lots of money, but the money gets fed into a system of incentives that make academics not that good at either truth-seeking or popularizing their own work. This could change. 2. There is a large population of smart people who collectively can do a lot of truth-seeking and writing in their spare time, without needing to make money from it. However, right now there's not a particularly coherent way that those people can work together and produce collective information that is as easy to find and understand as mainstream media outlets. Improving technology to let amateurs work together and aggregate their opinions could be powerful. 3. The funding model for journalism could continue to evolve so that people who choose to do so can more directly fund truth-seeking journalism. Crowdfunding and self-publishing platforms are in this direction. This seems to me like it's already working fairly well in some cases to fund people's work, but then the attention market is not great at highlighting the more reliable voices, which is similar to the problem in point #2.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  Journalists these days are generally not hired for their incredulity. They're hired based on a track record of not deviating from their employer's political and financial priorities, regardless of the evidence. These are businesses, not public services. They owe their existence to dishonest and manipulative presentations of the qualities of third-party products that they sandwich between their own content. Lets go back to the days where media outlets were open about their editorial stances, rather than hiding them behind a veil of white-coated objectivity. Propagandists should stop pretending to be doctors, and just be honest propagandists. Putting it all on Democrats isn't completely fair, although I get how bitter Silver is that they sanctified him when he told them what they wanted to hear and condemned him when the data pointed the other way. It could have just as easily been the Republicans in control of those institutions now if the party weren't so hostile to minorities. That hostility cut them off from dominance of the nonprofit sector, which serves to convert the money of governments (i.e. the will of elected officials) and oligarchs into media messages. They're stuck with thinktanks and veteran's organizations, although they sometimes find openings in patient's rights nonprofits (run by pharmaceutical companies.)
  • jimbokun 3y ago
    The Republicans absolutely have their own media organizations, just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's biased towards Republican interests. It's just that the expectations are so low for them no one is surprised when they report things with an obvious slant or just factually wrong.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      > The Republicans absolutely have their own media organizations Everybody has their own media organizations. > just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's biased towards Republican interests. This is both the law of averages, and also not relevant even if you had a good reason for saying it. I'm not saying the Republicans are any more honest than the Democrats (god forbid.) The Democrats are generally pushing for the same policies as the Republicans, except in matters that split their bases; we're still living in Reagan's world. Democrats are dominant now because they control nonprofits that are funded by the government and because they are supported by more billionaires. No other reason. 20 years from now it could be the Republicans in that position. It isn't like they don't have the ability; their takeover of state governments and redistricting is basically the same sort of tactic.
• Marazan 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 3y ago
    Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. You may not owe Nate Silver better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• kzz102 3y ago
  It seems to me that the authors of the paper, in anticipation that writing scientifically (that they don't believe the lab leak hypothesis, but it cannot be disproven) will be misinterpreted by journalists and the public, resorted to write in more certain terms. I disagree with the authors. Scientists should not try to control the reaction to their publication. I also don't think this cast a good lights on the journalists at all. The nature of the issue is that even if the scientists had been precise in what they wrote, what they wrote would have been distorted and misrepresented.
• cbeach 3y ago
  The answer is plurality within the scientific community. During the Covid authoritarian period, scientists like Dr Robert Malone were evicted from society because they didn’t toe the government line on support for mRNA vaccination. I’m not saying Malone and co were right, necessarily, but the way they were shut down and demonised suggested to me that we stopped doing real scientific enquiry for a couple of years and succumbed to corporate lobbying and government over-reach.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  This is actually an excellent article. If you look at why he says the lab-leak theory was problematic for these "journalists" (and the quotes are deliberate), none of the reasons are "it isn't true": 1. It could cause a political backlash 2. It could upset China and undermine research collaborations 3. It could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory But in fact, the journalist's only legitimate question is "is it true?" The consequences of reporting on it are not their concern. There was a time when journalists thought that way, or at least made a show of it. That time might have been a few brief decades, but it was there.
• t0bia_s 3y ago
  Journalist shouldn't be surprised why there is huge drop in trust in mainstream media. Covid exposed perfectly how terrible quick journalism is.
• runesofdoom 3y ago
  While he's certainly careful to hedge (much like the scientists he's critizcizing), Mr. Silver's argument boils down to, "I think four scientists published a technically correct but politicially motivated paper, so from now on journalists should consider peer-reviewed publications by reputable PhD's as the equivalent of Johnnie RedHat posting on Twitter".
• RomanPushkin 3y ago
  They should be skeptical of this source as well.
• xbar 3y ago
  I, for one, am skeptical of everyone who still calls themselves a journalist.
  • no_butterscotch 3y ago
    Yes, journalists used to speak truth to power. Now they work on behalf of the power. And they don't just work on behalf of power, they are power themselves, and it isn't the people's power despite their claim to being "the voice of the people".
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
      > Yes, journalists used to speak truth to power. How do you know that? Certainly it happened sometimes, and it still happens sometimes, but was it ever common? Maybe journalists like to tell stories about the times journalists did really good work and they deliberately leave out all the many more times they didn't. Media tropes of principled gumshoe journalists breaking important stories are probably not representative of what it was typically like.
    • avgcorrection 3y ago
      > Yes, journalists used to speak truth to power. So people say. If you don’t trust journalists then why should you trust their history telling about the-way-things-were?
  • unethical_ban 3y ago
    This level of cynicism is the cause of the downfall of society. Journalism is as necessary as government. As necessary as speech itself. Particularly in the age of perfect facsimiles of audio/photo/video evidence facilitated by AI, webs of trust and reputable sources of information will be as important as ever. It is dangerous and wrong to insult the profession as an idea. None of this is to say that journalism is flawless any more than government or society is flawless. But it is necessary.
    • avgcorrection 3y ago
• thewanderer1983 3y ago
  "“trust the science” or “trust the experts” is usually right." This statement and general belief is antithetical to science. Dr. Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying talk about this misconception of science on their Darkhorse podcast all the time. Dr Brian Keating nicely summarises this issue in this short video https://youtu.be/gAqq72m-ipo https://youtu.be/gAqq72m-ipo You should "trust the scientific method" when done correctly.
  • antisthenes 3y ago
    > This statement and general belief is antithetical to science. No, it's not. 99% of the population doesn't have the cognitive ability to independently verify whether a scientific publishing has had rigorous checks on its scientific method and methodologies and samples were selected appropriately. In this scenario, you should trust the science and/or experts, unless other experts have verified that the findings are garbage and/or something was fabricated. What's really antithetical to science is when people present sources as having equal weights. Joe Rogan vs Meta-analysis of 30 studies does not have the same weight.
    • thewanderer1983 3y ago
      You missed the point about science being solved and the view around consensus. I'm guessing you didn't watch the short video.
• truSo 3y ago
  Experts, politicians, and CEOs are also humans with mouths to feed and bills to pay: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-flawed-science-and-xenophobia/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-msg-got-a-bad-rap-f...
• stainablesteel 3y ago
  define journalist: 1. an independent youtuber, who gives their opinion, can admit their bias, and is able to operate on good faith while allowing open discussions with people they disagree with 2. a corporate "journalist" who's integrity has become second rate in the age of the internet, who uses language as an instrument to get people to admit what they want them to admit in the most petty way possible i can agree with 1, i don't think 2 fits the definition anymore. it used to be the best we had for a few decades, but that age is over now. i don't think 1 has any problem with admitting what should be an area of skepticism. however, i don't think that 2 is actually a journalist as they're not motivated to share information, they're instead motivated by the narratives of their employer
  • no_butterscotch 3y ago
    Yes this. Additionally (1) has no "higher caste" mentality. Whereas (2) often believe themselves to be the anointed truth-sayers of a secular world. Generally speaking they don't live up to that promise.
  • 0dayz 3y ago
    1. Is as likely if not even more likely to be biased because they got multiple incentives such as their personal ego, clout, vendetta, financial and more. A journalist is not just someone asking questions, it's someone able to do a report and crucially be source critical which is a skill, 90% of so called journalists on YouTube do not do this. 2. This definition makes no sense and it sounds more like you're confusing reporter and investigator.
• jarjoura 3y ago
  Journalists have always been best at reporting the facts given to them, even without understanding intent and all the other nuance surrounding those facts. So we as readers should never take what you read at 100%. I don't think that will ever change. I love this little quote from "Michael Crichton"[1] as it's so true. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344530-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344530-briefly-stated-the-g...
• yosito 3y ago
  And readers should be skeptical of journalists. And everyone should be skeptical of everyone. Skeptical thinking should be a way of life.
• not2b 3y ago
  The danger with "be skeptical of all sources" is that it puts all the sources, including the trained scientists, the cranks, and the corporate shills trying to spin things their way on the same level. They wind up saying what everyone says, mixing in the good arguments with the bad ones, and saying "we'll have to leave it at that". One thing that can help is figuring out peoples' financial motivations. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, whose salary is depending on not understanding something?
• BMc2020 3y ago
  Late to the game, but actual experts explain in great detail why it wasn't a 'lab leak' here. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1019/ https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1019/ From ASM Microbe in Houston, Texas, Vincent speaks with Eddie Holmes about the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into humans in the Huanan Market in Wuhan, absence of evidence for other origins, and his work on the virosphere.
  • oneshtein 3y ago
    Can you point to exact moment in the video, because video is long and I cannot find the argument against lab leak.
    • BMc2020 3y ago
      There's also an mp3 link http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV1019.mp3 http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV1019.mp3 So you can download it to your phone and listen during your commute.
      • ricksunny 3y ago
        Wow, you found a self-reinforcing quote from one of the co-authors of the very paper in question. C̶u̶t̶e̶ Edit: Recognizing this forum frowns on snark, I will be more stoic. Whenever citing quotes in this debate, take but half a moment to observe the name of who is doing the talking; each side of the debate has an exceedingly finite set of vocal participants putting their scientific standing on the line, and, rightly or wrongly, their positions don't tend to change once made & vocalized. So in a debate about whether person-X should have said thing-Y, it's epistemically distractibg (to oneself at least) to then go on to uncritically look at what person-X subsequently said on thing-Y as if it's unbiased, disinterested support of the position they also happened to hold earlier.
• rustedspoon 3y ago
  This is not possible in my opinion, even if they are knowledgeable, skeptical, ask every right question. Everyone including journalists are career oriented and if you want to progress in career you need to write articles a certain way which will include bias
• tomhoward 3y ago
  A few years ago I started undertaking practices to let go of emotional attachments, which I discovered after a lengthy and difficult period trying to figure out how to overcome some major life challenges. I’ve been doing these practices consistently now for about 11 years. Even after all that time, I’m not at all free of emotional attachments; I’m working through some very deep career-related ones right now. But that’s by the by. One of the things you start to learn when you spend enough time doing this work is that people’s emotional attachments are way more powerful than people’s ability to reason and see logic. One you see it, you can’t unsee it. I now notice it all the time, in journalism, on Twitter, on podcasts, here on HN, and anywhere contentious topics are being discussed, people who are regarded as being as “rational” and “scientific” in their worldview will routinely argue positions that are logically absurd but they won’t be able to see it, due to their emotional attachment to the conclusion. And often their interviewer or debating parter – even if they’re somewhat in opposition – won’t notice and call them out on it because they have the same attachment to the position. I’ve come to believe that science and logic really doesn’t hold much sway in society at all; we have positions/conclusions that are largely predetermined via people’s egos and emotional attachments, then scientific data is cherry-picked to form a "rationalisation" that feels just valid enough to pass under people's radar.
  • jdog1076 3y ago
    Do you mind referencing the specific practices?
  • MaxHoppersGhost 3y ago
    Very well said. What’s sad is how hard it is to get people to recognize they’re doing this, and no one thinks they do it heven though everyone is guilty of it. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s destroying society’s trust.
  • krainboltgreene 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • _ywdj 3y ago
• PKop 3y ago
  And everyone should be skeptical of journalists too.
• jamesgill 3y ago
  Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts. —Carl Sagan
• Solar19 3y ago
  Social psychologist here. There's a profound lack of cognitive activity in American journalists, and what I'd call legacy leftist media especially. I don't think we can explain what happened here without reference to their off-the-charts partisan political bias. I've never seen anything like it. It really matters to them that a Republican said something, or takes a particular view. In this case they swarmed on Sen. Cotton, who made the most mundane comments saying it was possible it was a lab leak, that it was worth investigating, etc. Leftist media like the NYT and WaPo falsely linked him to a "bioweapon" "conspiracy theory". The bioweapon trope stuck like construction adhesive – I see MSNBC activists like Hasan and the Atlantic editor still pushing it. As far as I know, no prominent Republican has ever asserted that it was a bioweapon, suggested it was likely to be, or treated it as a major option. We also see a historical revisionism (Hasan again), where they falsely assert a racial narrative where Trump first speaks of a China virus, then leftist media fabricate their "debunked bioweapon conspiracy" narrative as some sort of justified deception as a triage against "racism" or what have you. Trump didn't say anything about a China virus until several months after leftist media fabricated their narrative. There's a profound prejudice and malice toward outsiders/non-leftists that makes objectivity impossible here, especially if those outsiders are Republicans/"the right". And all dissent and rigor is being coded as "right-wing" and "far right" by leftist media now – even longtime leftists and Democratic voters are being falsely tagged that way, if they say, call for schools to reopen, oppose censorship, note the lack of good evidence for mask efficacy (any type of mask, either direction), note that natural immunity outpunches the mRNA shots, etc. Left-right framing is devastating, primes a binary sorting. I also think it's a big problem that leftist ideology has no commitment to integrity or cognitive independence. Humans generally don't display integrity when tested without an explicit commitment to it. Leftists aren't rewarded for it. It's not extolled and championed in their culture. It's easy to imagine a culture where it is, with a good virtue ethics that is more important than political ideology. ## Reading papers I agree that journalists and just humans generally should read the damn papers. Those of you who say they can't should first go read some of these papers first. There's too much distance between people's views and reality, including the reality of academic papers. I'm convinced that the most savagely stupid human artifacts are found in journals like Science and Nature. It's very common for social science studies and papers to be fully invalid or simply false. Fraud is trivially easy in academia, is not seriously investigated most of the time, and academics are unfamiliar with the word "audit". But you can detect catastrophic invalidity by just reading a paper in many cases. For example, here's a recent Nature paper on misinformation, ironically. It's completely false, invalid, and also fraudulent for good measure. Discovering the fraud requires reading a separate paper, since they don't disclose details of their method in this paper, details that make it fraudulent (they rigged their dataset, a dataset which is invalid and unusable anyway). We're not trained to deal with the infinite variability and arbitrariness of social science methods, so if you assume peer reviewed papers must be basically okay and valid, you'll be fooled. I also recommend blocking out all stats – they seem to bedazzle and fool readers, give papers a scientific sheen. Block out the stats, read the words, think about what stats would be valid given the words, then unveil what they did. This paper is a good test. I'll leave it open ended, no clues: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34769-6#sec15 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34769-6#sec15 Now here's a vivid example of a false claim in the opening sentence of a paper in Science, a journal run by a maniacal political partisan: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar3067 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar3067 There are more false claims in the body. The opening sentence is stunning – gun violence is not a leading cause of death in the US. It's not even close (it's a Top 10 list, and it's in the top 15 that year). It's not actually a category in the CDC's list, but a subset of homicides, which is also not a leading cause of death. (Nor are "guns" the leading cause of death for children, a popular, stunning bit of misinformation – journalism is in awful shape.) So we have a plainly false claim to open a journal article in Science. They won't retract or correct. (Note that their editor rails against the NRA "and its minions" and touts the promise of "science" to discover something useful re: firearms to push for his authoritarian policy preferences. Yet he publishes false claims and won't correct or retract them. Science indeed.) Finally, here's a great and devastating example of idiocratic collapse. It's just one paragraph, the opening. Who among you can figure out what he did? Solve for his X. You need to be able to solve an exponential equation. That's your only clue. Ignore his obvious error in the text of calling a tiny number a large number. How did he get that number? https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-188550/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/global-w... Once you understand the gravity of what he did, you might want to retreat to a cave or something. That stupidity of this savagery could be published in major American outlets is damning. Note it might take you weeks to process it. In fact, it might be hard to articulate what he did. You'll see what I mean, and his words are actually broken in a way that will contribute to the problem. (Not all strings of words are meaningful, and his aren't.) I communicated with Gavin Schmidt, the head climate scientist at NASA, about this and he understood the core problem. But he wouldn't contact Rolling Stone to tell them it was wildly false and invalid to get them to retract. (They won't correct or retract their hoaxes without lots of pressure, if they advance leftist ideological narratives.) I'm not sure Gavin solved for X though. I wanted to see if he would do it without prompting. The climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy had no clue – she didn't even know the 20th century mean offhand, which still confuses me. I can't possibly be more versed in climate science than an actual climate scientist, but it's possible she's an outlier (her website touts awards of Most Important People, a huge red flag). Can anyone solve for X? What's the nature of what he did? These are just some examples of how bad things are out there. This political ideology is devastating to science and reason, and a bunch of people seem to be assuming that someone else is paying attention and gatekeeping. You can model the consequences in your head.
• TrispusAttucks 3y ago
  "Journalist" are paid to tell a narrative not the truth. The four estate is dead don't kid yourself.
• LAC-Tech 3y ago
  I short-circuit the whole process by just not trusting journalists.
• lbeltrame 3y ago
  To be fair, some scientists made fools of themselves and their (and mine!) profession when speaking to the media. And most of the time journalists treated them as infallible priests handing down absolute truths (like when someone mistook relative risk reduction for proportion of patients responding to a drug... in an EU national newspaper). I even saw falsehoods (yes, falsehoods) on immunity appearing on mainstream papers ("Omicron bypasses vaccines" - totally false): at some point I thought my immunology textbooks would self-combust. More on topic, even though I tend towards the natural origin hypothesis, there's not enough evidence to show that it is the only possible idea, and that at least a leak (I think bioengineering is far less likely) is possible. And personally I think (of course, that's just my opinion) the whole debate is there due to the Fauci controversy about GoF research, not necessarily about the actual virus. Shutting down debate like this was never a good idea and in fact reinforced the conspiracy theory supporters. Because people are people, and despite the uncertainty, they started treating lack of evidence as "facts".
• lyu07282 3y ago
  The real problem with the lack of skepticism in journalism is not science but foreign policy, literally the death of more than a million people (in the case of the iraq war) can directly be attributed to journalist malpractice and there has been ZERO change or recognition of their structural failure, its exactly the same deeply incurious journalists parroting often harmful propaganda today.
  • guerrilla 3y ago
    That's because they didn't fail. They succeded massively. That is exactly what they were hired for.
• danjac 3y ago
  Above all, journalists should be skeptical of Nate Silver.
• verisimi 3y ago
  Individuals should be skeptical of all sources including journalists. The question to ask is 'what personal experience have I got off the claim that is being made?' Is it possible that I am just being steered by consensus, where consensus is presented in print and on screen by journalists? Is whatever-it-is just an idea/theory supported by 'experts say' or is any evidence presented that can be verified/tested? When I test the idea, have do I agree with the conclusions? Etc. The scientific method should be applied personally in one's life.
• Roark66 3y ago
  To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career. This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a bunch of random people that landed in this job because they failed in others. Unless we find a solution to increase the quality of journalism or replace it with something else I doubt democracy as a system will be anything more than a facade over oligarchy or even worse dictatorships. What is the solution? It has to be country specific, but one common theme has to be better wages for journalists to attract talent and much more strict requirements for professional conduct to filter out those unable to do it right. Both have to happen at the same time.
  • tiznow 3y ago
    "most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career." Well this is braindead. I assure you most journalists want to be journalists more than anything else -- that's the only reason to hang around in that industry.
    • concordDance 3y ago
      I recommend using "wrong" rather than "braindead". You're less likely to get people's backs up and more likely for them to be receptive. (Plus, it's less hurtful)
    • pydry 3y ago
      My impression is that it's nowadays a poorly paid career of choice for the propertied upper classes for whom the job is an identity and means of social signaling and only incidentally an income. Same as acting - perhaps easier to get into though. They were for sure a lot more talented when there existed such a thing as a working class journalist. They probably also had more resources available to them to do real journalism - before tech took the lion's share of the advertising pie.
    • marttt 3y ago
• ksec 3y ago
  >Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists Readers should be skeptical of all sources including Journalists.
• Solar19 3y ago
  I think we've made a huge mistake in our notions of "experts", especially the blind assumption that we need experts to tell us something on every arbitrary issue. On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway). There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know. It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on. For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons). YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.) (https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/aug/11/examining-false-claims-got-rand-paul-marjorie-tayl/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/aug/11/examining-fal...) Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have. The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021). It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why): "A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people."" (https://www.foxnews.com/media/social-media-users-demand-apology-msnbc-rachel-maddow-vaccines https://www.foxnews.com/media/social-media-users-demand-apol...) Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized. So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this. It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization. We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something. It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)
• beginning_end 3y ago
  I really liked the interview with the three scientists in the "Decoding the Gurus" podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak/id1531266667?i=1000603693959 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-worobey... (Interview starts roughly 33 min into the episode).
• Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]