9 ms·

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 cours

by 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.

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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.
  - Given_47 3y ago
    Yea that’s my main frustration with overall journalism. The one subject where I’d consider myself in the 99th percentile of knowledge (more of a reflection of the sample) is basketball and it drives me up a wall the number of Medill type, classically trained journalists who write about a thing they barely understand. It’s such a disservice to the audience and borderline blatant misinformation
  - ricksunny 3y ago
    Yes, and Ashley Rindsberg covers the science-writer / sci-journo divide well, a divide which I was not hip to prior: "The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists." https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-science-journals https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-sci...
- huffmsa 3y ago
  For some. My mother had a pretty solid biology and medical background before covering medical news.
- 3y ago
ctrlp 3y ago
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
- coeneedell 3y ago
  This line in the tractatus is not about the individual’s knowledge it’s about the entire research programme’s ability to know something fundamentally unknowable. In particular Wittgenstein was referring to logical philosophers talking about metaphysics, which evades logical positivism. Even then he wasn’t against the practice of metaphysics, only the attempt to describe it with hard logic.
  - ctrlp 3y ago
    Yes, I'm aware. I'm making an analogy to the entire project of journalism. Do you want to argue the point?
thrashh 3y ago
You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself. Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).
- ke88y 3y ago
  > You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself. Well then, I guess we at least agree on the following: today we have science "reporting" done by "journalists" who will write about findings reported in publications that they haven't read and self-admittedly can't read. I suppose we can agree to disagree about the usefulness of that reporting and the potential harm of that reporting. > Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice). You are missing the word ALSO. As in, you do so by reading and evaluating the source and then ALSO considering the surrounding context. Palace intrigue isn't something that should be ignored, but it also shouldn't be the entire story.
taeric 3y ago
Often the best way to be productively skeptical is to ask questions and get more sources? It can be frustrating for some scientific figureheads, but the adage of "no dumb questions" came to be for a reason. And don't get led astray by looking for "productivity." So much advancement is lost on the alter of efficiency and productivity. Yes, if you know the correct next move to make, do it. But don't discount exploration and general play.
- ke88y 3y ago
  But who? And what questions do you ask? Without a baseline, you're poking around in the dark. Or knocking on the same 20 doors at the same 20 universities, and all those people talk to each other and they and their students all sit on each others' grant review committees. Etc. And when two scientists disagree about the evidence, how do you determine whether one of them is a total quack? Or do you just report everything that everyone says as long as they say big words you don't know? It's really easy to be unproductively skeptical. Never believe anything. Everything is a lie or a conspiracy. That's not particularly productive, though, because although it protects you from lies and bad actors it will never get you to the truth.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Sorry, I meant to be more explicit there. I don't believe in "full productivity" in the search for things. You will, by necessity, waste some time. Do try and make sure you aren't completely poking around in the dark. But also don't feel bad if you find out you were. I do hate that I'm posting this in this thread. At large, I get the impression that the "coverup" is being blown out of proportion. I also can't deny that a lot of the dismissals earlier were heavy handed. Such that some topics and inquiries have somehow become toxic. But, at large, most "quack" theories don't have to be fully dismissed by other scientists. They are more easily explained with other ideas. It can be frustrating for some of them, as I'm sure many are tired of hearing about "UFOs" and such. But for a lot of crazier ideas, the "dismissal" can quite literally be "that necessarily leads to enough other things that we are not seeing, that I just can't bring myself to believe it right now." This does require, though, that asking the questions is not done in such a way to paint a contest. Try to build the questions in such a way to expand ideas.
stevenAthompson 3y ago
[flagged]
- wk_end 3y ago
  Silver isn't arguing for-or-against the lab leak hypothesis here. > To be clear, I’m not sure how COVID originated either. I’d “buy” the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other. This post is his commentary on leaked communications demonstrating that the authors of the paper themselves didn't believe the contents of the paper. This has nothing to do with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
  - stevenAthompson 3y ago
    His citations for those claims about the authors are 3 substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors. I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.
    - wk_end 3y ago
      > We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
      - stevenAthompson 3y ago
        He doesn’t link any of those. Only the blogs and the conspiracy site.
obscurette 3y ago
Although I'm not really sure it's a global issue, but at least here in Eastern Europe you just have no time to dig in deeper in any subject as journalist. I've seen local academic institutions trying to support journalists to specialize on science reporting more than 10 years now, but all have left saying that pressure to produce just more text is too intense. Old school investigative journalism just doesn't exist any more.
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Well, now they can have chatGPT save them so much time that they can do quality research, right?
oatmeal1 3y ago
I'm not sure existing journalists could do it, but perhaps this can act as a call to action for a scientist to start a blog or YouTube channel that analyzes scientific discoveries, and/or fact checks existing journalists' interpretations of scientific literature.
- Given_47 3y ago
  I’m sure there r random blogs devoted to that lol. Which is y I aggressively bookmark niche sites cuz by definition gold mines r very much not discoverable
matt3210 3y ago
The idea that the normies could do real science is pure projection
swexbe 3y ago
The answer is more people with a background in STEM should go into journalism. Sadly, that sort of specialization is expensive and the public's willingness to spend on news seems to have gone down.
- incangold 3y ago
  YouTube and Medium are awash with scientists doing journalism- there’s plenty of supply. Maybe the answer is that people without a STEM background should get out of science journalism? The question mark is genuine- would this be a bad thing for some reason? Not that scientist journalists don’t also make mistakes of course- I’ve seen plenty, usually due to covering topics outside their own specialty.
  - swexbe 3y ago
    That's true, but most medium articles & blogs are experts writing for other experts. I guess what's missing is broadly experts writing for laymen.
legitster 3y ago
Academia has sold itself and the world that it is only scrutinizable unto itself. But this was not always the case. If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.
- jfengel 3y ago
  That was easier to do 50 or 100 years ago. The longer we do science, the more we already know. Finding something novel gets harder and harder. It becomes less and less likely that you can find it without having spent a long time learning what's already known. Academics certainly could be better writers and communicators now, but non-scientists cannot expect to understand most work that required years of education before they could perform it. The public can be given a rapid education in it when it matters, but that rapid education isn't going to put them in a position to critique the work. And when the public mistakes that rapid education for a superior grasp of the topic, it becomes a huge drain on the academics' time to correct the misconceptions.
  - legitster 3y ago
    Maybe this is true for some of the advanced sciences. But when it comes to some of the topics that get the most news coverage (psychology, public health, economics) you're not dealing with controlled experiments. So much of it is just random sampling and double blind studies. This work is good. But none of this work is particularly complicated or hard to understand - and so much of the "education" is busy work or learning the "inside baseball" of how to get meaningful results and how to get published. When we are talking about "trust the scientists" no one is really arguing that nuclear scientists or aeronautical engineers don't know what they are talking about. We're really talking about whether we should listen to an epidemiologist just because they have spent so much time looking at these studies (often conflicting!) that they can squint their eyes when they look at a set of data and give a more qualified off-the-cuff opinion.
- vondur 3y ago
  As the fields have become more and more specialized over the years, and the technology has increased, it's gets more difficult to write about subjects without using jargon and more complicated visualizations. As mentioned in other comments, having journalists with a science background would definitely help.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they report on court cases? They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes? They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news? They're supposed to be experts at reporting, which works out to mean experts at finding out about topics that they don't already know about.
- ke88y 3y ago
  > Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they report on court cases? Journalists have roughly the same undergraduate educational background as lawyers and receive a half-decent education on the high level basics of the American legal system in civics courses. > They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes? Crashes themselves often don't require any amount of aviation expertise. > They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news? Mostly poorly, which is why eg Bloomberg's retail news business exists, and most of those folks have some financial background.
- coolliquidcode 3y ago
  They do it very incompetently. The quality of reporting anymore is ridiculously low. It's not about being an expert in the subject but having a fundamental understanding and being logically minded enough to perform fact based and critically thought out reporting. Now everything is so trashy, economics is how they can bash their least favorite company or billionaire, law reporting is one-sided story telling for bashing or cheerleading someone in court, same with politics. It's mostly story telling anymore geared for entertainment or outrage.
- nradov 3y ago
  Well that explains why most reporting on aviation and financial issues in the mainstream media is such garbage. I mean I'm hardly an expert in those areas but even I can tell that the stories are crap in terms of missing key facts, not asking relevant questions, drawing bad conclusions, and pushing biased narratives. Fortunately there are some YouTube channels where I can get good information on those topics, although they aren't typically labeled as journalists and don't work for media companies.
nonameiguess 3y ago
Even if you get a STEM education, at least at the undergrad level, it tends not to include anywhere near enough hands on research to learn much about experimental methods that would help you assess the validity of study designs when reporting on a new paper that just got published. And even when you have that, experimental methods tend to be extremely specific to the field of study. I almost think it would be better if virtually everyone, even if you're not a STEM major, taking at least a course on hierarchy of evidence and how particular study designs attempt to demonstrate causation, along with some basic statistical literacy. But I was listening to a very good breakdown of the aspartame history this morning and the host was going on about criticisms of some of the early studies showing cancer in rats dealing with exactly how randomization works when you're dealing with multiple litters from the same gene line and why they usually terminate the rats early instead of waiting for natural death, and these are things you could never possibly know unless you specifically have a background in rodent studies. I was a biology major and still didn't know any of this stuff.
mike_hearn 3y ago
They don't have to shoot for perfection. The bar has sunk so low even very basic techniques can yield huge improvements in trust: 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine. 2. READ the papers. Journalists never do this. I cannot express how frequently you can spot scientific fraud by just reading the underlying papers, even as a layman. If you lack expertise maybe you'll miss 90% of the tricks but catching 10% of them is still sufficient to notice something is wrong, and often you don't need any special training. Here are some of my own investigations of bad papers - it's often obvious and most of it doesn't require expertise to spot. https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... 3. Hold sources to account when it's proven that they were misleading you. Report on bad behavior to discourage it next time. 4. Be willing to report stories dug up by other people, even when they make Team University look bad. Note how the reporting Silver refers to hasn't been covered by legacy media outlets even though you don't need to be a scientist to understand what they're saying and how damning it is. In reality this stuff is easy. Nobody is asking for the NYT to engage in professional peer review of newly published papers. Just not assuming anything a professor says is gospel truth would be a good start, but there seems little chance of that happening :( Journalists depend so heavily on academics for rent-a-quote services and a constant flow of stories that getting tough would be biting the hand that feeds them.
- thorncorona 3y ago
  > 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine. This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is flat, whether climate change is real, etc. > 2. READ the papers. Literally nobody reads the papers. A huge amount of news isn't even investigated. A large number of news these days is regurgitated from other sources.
CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
I don't write articles on subjects I don't understand no matter how much paper money is thrown at me. Maybe start there.
andreygrehov 3y ago
> Big question: HOW? Independent, transparent and publicly available journalism (open to critics) simplifies things a lot.
grammers 3y ago
Exactly. In addition, how would you gather any information at all if there's no one to trust. Yes, fake news are a huge problem, but we need reliable sources to gather information.
- andreygrehov 3y ago
  You don't need a reliable source. Maximizing the chances that a source is reliable is good enough. This can be achieved by maximizing the number of journalists attacking the same problem. The process must be transparent and publicly available / open to critics. People (non-journalists, readers) will point out if something smells suspicious.
scythe 3y ago
>Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the journalist writing the article is a qualified science journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning their education with partial credentials. Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is agitating to create such an infrastructure. Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball: a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and in America, that's saying something.
blitz_skull 3y ago
Simple: Stop believing it’s true just because a scientist said it. You don’t need a STEM degree to stop propagating theories before they’re proven.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  Yes. The whole point of science is that you do not have to believe anything just because a scientist said it. Only thing that matters is the validity of their data, whether the data truly backs their interpretation, and if the findings can be replicated.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Wouldn't that mean that Galileo and Newton's discoveries would have had little to no impact? For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't have a detailed education in the subject could really contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright because the authors made egregious errors in the study design or data collection (where data scientists/statisticians who don't work in the field can still be very useful), but for most modern physics or medical research, there are literally hundreds of years of well-established theory and practice that you absolutely need to know before dismissing ideas that don't make sense. This is especially important in areas like infectious disease.
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    Oh boy. Well for starters Newton and Galileo didn’t have the internet. That’s 80% of this misinformation problem. And GP was talking about how journalists can be skeptical. No one is suggesting journalists should be debunking all new science findings—merely that they should be very skeptical when reporting about those findings.
jimbokun 3y ago
This is true for everything a journalist might cover. They are not the expert, but still need to strive to find the truth of an issue they can relay to the public. In this case, the underlying skill is, how do you detect and expose a cover up of inconvenient facts? I don't know the answer to that question. But seems like a core skill of a journalist, regardless of the field being investigated.
mettamage 3y ago
So wait, I could make a career in being a software engineering style type of journalist? I just don’t think they would care, would they? If anyone is reading it working as such, feel free to humor me by shooting me an email (in my profile). I studied psychology (bachelor), business (bachelor), computer science (master) and game-design (master). I also did some course work related to journalism (though very limited, I only read The Elements of Style). I worked as a teacher (mostly in programming, though one lecture on rhetorics in a rhetorics class) and as a software engineer. Let me know! I’m up for a chat as I might be a good fit and able to help more accurate reporting on AI and software in general.
- zztop44 3y ago
  Yep that’s all great but the key to being good at journalism is being a good journalist. Take Matt Levine. His background as an M&A attorney and investment banker clearly informs his journalism and makes it better. But no one would give a shit about that if he wasn’t a good writer consistently writing good, interesting writing.
  - mettamage 3y ago
    So, aren’t we asking for too much then?
SoftTalker 3y ago
> 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? Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face value. Assume you're being bullshitted. You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.
- newsclues 3y ago
  multiple sources as well. present contrasting viewpoints
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    Agreed, need some more flat earth points of view instead of all these spherists.
- cactusplant7374 3y ago
  > Assume you're being bullshitted. > You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying. Isn't that what the Covid vaccine skeptics did? It didn't turn out that great and made journalists look like conspiracy theorists in some cases.
- ke88y 3y ago
  Again, without a baseline educational background, doing so in a way that's productive -- ie anything more than running around like a chicken with its head cut off -- is impossible. There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know which questions to ask, to know which people to ask, is all highly suspect.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    "Dr. Scientist, you said X. Describe the evidence for that claim?" "Dr. Scientist, are you aware of claim Y, which seems at odds with what you are saying? Explain why claim Y is wrong?" Write it up. You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said. That's what "reporting" is.
Natsu 3y ago
> Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. This right here is why I've mostly stopped listening to journalists and try to find primary sources regarding thee scientific papers, scientists, legal rulings, etc. in question instead of playing a game of telephone where people reinterpret everything to fit whatever story they're tying to tell me. It's also why I have been finding Wikipedia less useful these days, since they have an explicit policy of citing secondary sources instead of primary sources and I find those far less useful.
robomartin 3y ago
> Big question: HOW? Simple: If they are not equipped to understand what they are going to write about, they should refrain from adding noise to the conversation. The potential to add nothing but noise or cause damage is great. Interestingly enough nobody would ever propose that, say, a fashion journalist report on surgical procedures or a range of other subjects. How is this problem not obvious in other domains? It's interesting to watch the difference between a reporter/journalist on any TV news show and, say, the people working at a financial news network like CNBC. In the latter case, they have to have a serious body of knowledge just to open their mouths. If you plucked your average reporter/journalist and put them into that seat, they would sound like complete morons because they just would not know what they are talking about.
techx 3y ago
A news outlet can hire scientists to call out shady scientific paper, many scientific paper have obvious bad conclusions, or not following basic scientific rules, that can be detected even if the scientist reviewing is specialized in another fields.
sn9 3y ago
Ezra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufeckci about basically this because she's had an unusually good track record for a non-specialist on lots of topics, and it really comes down to being statistically literate and putting in the work: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-zeynep-tufekci-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...
- harry8 3y ago
  >really comes down to being statistically literate A lot of people writing scientific papers aren't statistically literate. It also seems that what was considered first rate methodology even a decade ago is now considered deeply unreliable.
  - a123b456c 3y ago
    A lot of it depends on who (as in, which group of scientists) is doing the considering.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      Most scientists who don’t have grad level math education fail miserably in understanding statistics. Even the top ones. I was the statistics expert in my lab when doing my PhD and I had no business being one. All I was good at was calling out that one way ANOvA is just a t-test and when they should just stick to non parametric methods.
      - CrazyStat 3y ago
        > one way ANOvA is just a t-test If there are only two groups, yes. There are often more than two groups.
- Jun8 3y ago
  Also helps that Tüfekçi got her undergraduate degrees at good universities in Turkey which means she had to go through and score well on the grueling university entrance exams.
throwaway14356 3y ago
Gary Stevenson was surprised no one wanted to publish his article. They already had an economist one said. He argued he could walk into large financial institutions and they would immediately hire him for millions, the staff economy writer wouldn't make it past the reception - but he should be the one to write all of the articles to inform the public?
soldeace 3y ago
At least for this particular case it was not a matter of teaching journalists statistics or anything STEM-related. If it weren't for the leaked messages, we'd never hear about it. Epistemic sincerity and a good notion of statistics are important for sure, but giving whistleblowers legal cover and a means of releasing this kind of material is just as important.
m463 3y ago
It is unfortunate that money is a tool that makes society materially efficient but doesn't value certain members of society appropriately. This means not only Journalists, but also Teachers and just about every sort of regulator who can be bought.
- ThunderSizzle 3y ago
  Another problem is that many teachers aren't worth much money at all. How do parents ensure the teachers worth it get their tax dollars, and not some sleazy pedophile whose hiding behind the teachers union? Until that is solved to sufficient satisfaction, even good teachers will be paid crap.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    Is "sleazy pedophile hiding behind the teachers union" a significant occurrence that warrants paying teachers poorly? If that is even a stated reason for low pay, it seems more like fearmongering. Pay teachers well and punish the slim minority who do immoral things.
wrp 3y ago
> Big question: HOW? By asking OTHER specialists. In the 1970s/80s of my experience, journalism was much higher quality than now, but reporters were still notoriously ignorant of technical subjects. Standard procedure for a reporter was to contact one or two outside specialists to comment on the case. A good reporter wasn't expected to have expert knowledge, but just to be an accurate "reporter" of what experts said.
- ricksunny 3y ago
  And what if the 'other specialists' participate in a sci-bubble (grant review committees, peer review in-group) with the reporter's source in question? Relevant scientific niches for affirming credibility are too small for everyone not to already know each other through b̶a̶i̶j̶i̶u̶ i̶n̶ a̶ b̶a̶t̶c̶a̶v̶e̶ pre-existing co-opetitive relationships.
dbsmith83 3y ago
Thinking out loud here and this might be a terrible idea, and maybe at the risk of snubbing journalism majors, but what if the dependency was inverted? As in, what if, instead of having journalists who take a few classes here and there in various subjects, we instead had people who majored in subjects who also took some journalism classes, so they could write on subjects within the field? What I mean is, instead of having a journalist who took an intro chem series writing about chem topics, we had people who majored in chemistry with a few journalism classes writing the articles instead? You might say "well people who majored in their science field probably want to work in that field", but I'd say look no further than at the amount of science degree people doing dev work. Something something, a trained ai chatgpt-like tool might also help bridge the gap to journalism? Perhaps a pay gap would also need to be addressed.
- regular_trash 3y ago
  You basically described Hamilton Morris from Vice. He does a great job at covering psychoactive substances. Although he does at times seem to be an active proponent instead of giving an unbiased perspective. Regardless, it's refreshing to hear qualified people give their opinion and reportings on things than it is to listen to those that don't understand what they are commenting on.
- peteradio 3y ago
  Alternatively leverage LLM and feed the papers to the LLM, massage for impact, tweak for demographics and print and publish my dude
- solardev 3y ago
  I was an environmental science and sustainability major in college, along with a journalism minor. I enjoyed journalism but prior year classmates who worked the local beats would always share their nightmare career stories. Terrible pay, zero respect, long hours, poor benefits, constant downsizing, writing on deadline... for how important a job it is, it's terrible how they treat their writers. Who's going to want to do that? Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for journalists, but the overwhelming majority of them get the short end of the stick. It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates. Put it this way. I dabbled in coding in college, doing some WordPress stuff. After two years I was paid better than most journalists after a decade. Granted dev work is really overpaid (especially before 2023) but journalism has been really underpaid, and getting worse all the time, so the difference was quite stark. One has you doing almost no work for tremendous pay and benefits. The other has you working your ass off every week and weekends for nothing, with very little growth opportunities too. It may be decades before you pay off student loans. It's not a livable wage in most areas. Want better journalism? We gotta treat our journalists better.
ecf 3y ago
STEM students need to be heavily incentivized. When the world goes to shit I can guarantee the journalism majors aren’t going to be solving our global warming crisis. I mean, they’re already failing their one job of spreading awareness.
34679 3y ago
By talking to multiple sources, preferably ones who are not employed by the same company. If a chemist makes a claim, ask other chemists about it and publish their responses along with the original claim. The personal opinions of the journalist aren't needed or desirable.
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
This is a false barrier to critique of the scientific establishment. Many foundational questions can always be asked about the claims that scientists make, such as, how is research funded, where are the moral hazards, who benefits from certain conclusions, is the data open sourced, how are dissenting opinions treated, has repeatability been demonstrated, why is fraud not a concern, etc. Simple and rational questions can go a long way here.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Those aren't foundational questions, though, they're circumstantial evidence. They don't get at whether the scientists did a good job or not. "Why is fraud not a concern" is kinda useless in proving fraud. Maybe they help you feel a bit more or less confident? I think reading a paper and asking "okay, what did they actually do, and how could it go wrong" might be a good start, or better yet asking some other scientist who know the field about that?
  - rgrieselhuber 3y ago
    They are the questions that journalists should be asking in order to do their jobs. There are real political and economic consequences to the impact of science today, especially when funded by special interests.
ajkjk 3y ago
It's just that it's not true "receiving education" is a requirement for "being intelligent". Get journalists who can do it. Don't hire ones who don't? Like... I didn't study music or history in college but I know a lot about them. Because I'm not a dumbass and I read books. Being literate on subjects when it's your job to be should not be a high bar.
refurb 3y ago
Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. 1. By talking to a variety of experts 2. Purposefully seeking out alternative narratives or skeptics among reputable scientists. 3. Following up on criticisms that pop up across multiple, well regarded skeptics. 5. Challenging the original scientist based on input from these skeptics. 6. Transparently reporting on responses to these challenges. Instead today we get: 1. Scientist makes claim 2. Reporter parrots the talking points
ljosifov 3y ago
True that - and we are back to the CP Snow "Two Cultures" pamphlet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures). Looks to me that still STEM people learn much more of humanities, then humanities learn of STEM. To say "I'm illiterate" is shameful (in places that still have illiterate people - thankfully not many and ever less) in a way that in many - even developed - countries to say "I'm innumerate" is not. Shows up frequently (recently in the UK, on the belated subject of teaching maths), quite literate public figures publicly proclaim "I'm rubbish at maths" as if it's a badge of honor, not something to be ashamed of and worked on to be remediated. The quality of online learning materials is mind boggling, never been better. For humanities maybe teaching logic and logical thinking (modus ponens, modus tollens, quantifiers like "none, some, at least one, at most one, all") in the context of public discussion, argument, public debate maybe more effective and receptive. It's fair to acknowledge that maths with abstract symbols and all that is too hard for most people and there maybe better way of teaching. Ditto data, distributions and statistics - that is I think a new can of worms (and we still struggle with the old one).

by ke88y 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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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.
- Given_47 3y ago
  Yea that’s my main frustration with overall journalism. The one subject where I’d consider myself in the 99th percentile of knowledge (more of a reflection of the sample) is basketball and it drives me up a wall the number of Medill type, classically trained journalists who write about a thing they barely understand. It’s such a disservice to the audience and borderline blatant misinformation
- ricksunny 3y ago
  Yes, and Ashley Rindsberg covers the science-writer / sci-journo divide well, a divide which I was not hip to prior: "The deeper phenomenon at work, however, is that in the U.S. a large number of professionals who cover science for general readers and for news publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal are not—and do not pretend to be—journalists per se. They are science writers whose field is science communications—a distinction with a huge difference. They see their role as translating the lofty work of pure science for a general audience, rather than as professional skeptics whose job is to investigate the competing interests, claims, and billion-dollar funding streams in the messy world of all-too-human scientists." https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-science-journals https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/treason-sci...
huffmsa 3y ago
For some. My mother had a pretty solid biology and medical background before covering medical news.
3y ago

ctrlp 3y ago

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

coeneedell 3y ago
This line in the tractatus is not about the individual’s knowledge it’s about the entire research programme’s ability to know something fundamentally unknowable. In particular Wittgenstein was referring to logical philosophers talking about metaphysics, which evades logical positivism. Even then he wasn’t against the practice of metaphysics, only the attempt to describe it with hard logic.
- ctrlp 3y ago
  Yes, I'm aware. I'm making an analogy to the entire project of journalism. Do you want to argue the point?

thrashh 3y ago

You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself. Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice).

ke88y 3y ago
> You don’t judge a source by reading the source itself. Well then, I guess we at least agree on the following: today we have science "reporting" done by "journalists" who will write about findings reported in publications that they haven't read and self-admittedly can't read. I suppose we can agree to disagree about the usefulness of that reporting and the potential harm of that reporting. > Usually you do so by considering the context in which the source is made and then you might consult someone who can read the source (who also needs to be judged based on the context in which they are giving you advice). You are missing the word ALSO. As in, you do so by reading and evaluating the source and then ALSO considering the surrounding context. Palace intrigue isn't something that should be ignored, but it also shouldn't be the entire story.

taeric 3y ago

Often the best way to be productively skeptical is to ask questions and get more sources? It can be frustrating for some scientific figureheads, but the adage of "no dumb questions" came to be for a reason. And don't get led astray by looking for "productivity." So much advancement is lost on the alter of efficiency and productivity. Yes, if you know the correct next move to make, do it. But don't discount exploration and general play.

ke88y 3y ago
But who? And what questions do you ask? Without a baseline, you're poking around in the dark. Or knocking on the same 20 doors at the same 20 universities, and all those people talk to each other and they and their students all sit on each others' grant review committees. Etc. And when two scientists disagree about the evidence, how do you determine whether one of them is a total quack? Or do you just report everything that everyone says as long as they say big words you don't know? It's really easy to be unproductively skeptical. Never believe anything. Everything is a lie or a conspiracy. That's not particularly productive, though, because although it protects you from lies and bad actors it will never get you to the truth.
- taeric 3y ago
  Sorry, I meant to be more explicit there. I don't believe in "full productivity" in the search for things. You will, by necessity, waste some time. Do try and make sure you aren't completely poking around in the dark. But also don't feel bad if you find out you were. I do hate that I'm posting this in this thread. At large, I get the impression that the "coverup" is being blown out of proportion. I also can't deny that a lot of the dismissals earlier were heavy handed. Such that some topics and inquiries have somehow become toxic. But, at large, most "quack" theories don't have to be fully dismissed by other scientists. They are more easily explained with other ideas. It can be frustrating for some of them, as I'm sure many are tired of hearing about "UFOs" and such. But for a lot of crazier ideas, the "dismissal" can quite literally be "that necessarily leads to enough other things that we are not seeing, that I just can't bring myself to believe it right now." This does require, though, that asking the questions is not done in such a way to paint a contest. Try to build the questions in such a way to expand ideas.

stevenAthompson 3y ago

[flagged]

wk_end 3y ago
Silver isn't arguing for-or-against the lab leak hypothesis here. > To be clear, I’m not sure how COVID originated either. I’d “buy” the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other. This post is his commentary on leaked communications demonstrating that the authors of the paper themselves didn't believe the contents of the paper. This has nothing to do with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
- stevenAthompson 3y ago
  His citations for those claims about the authors are 3 substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors. I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.
  - wk_end 3y ago
    > We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
    - stevenAthompson 3y ago
      He doesn’t link any of those. Only the blogs and the conspiracy site.

obscurette 3y ago

Although I'm not really sure it's a global issue, but at least here in Eastern Europe you just have no time to dig in deeper in any subject as journalist. I've seen local academic institutions trying to support journalists to specialize on science reporting more than 10 years now, but all have left saying that pressure to produce just more text is too intense. Old school investigative journalism just doesn't exist any more.

dr_dshiv 3y ago
Well, now they can have chatGPT save them so much time that they can do quality research, right?

oatmeal1 3y ago

I'm not sure existing journalists could do it, but perhaps this can act as a call to action for a scientist to start a blog or YouTube channel that analyzes scientific discoveries, and/or fact checks existing journalists' interpretations of scientific literature.

Given_47 3y ago
I’m sure there r random blogs devoted to that lol. Which is y I aggressively bookmark niche sites cuz by definition gold mines r very much not discoverable

matt3210 3y ago

The idea that the normies could do real science is pure projection

swexbe 3y ago

The answer is more people with a background in STEM should go into journalism. Sadly, that sort of specialization is expensive and the public's willingness to spend on news seems to have gone down.

incangold 3y ago
YouTube and Medium are awash with scientists doing journalism- there’s plenty of supply. Maybe the answer is that people without a STEM background should get out of science journalism? The question mark is genuine- would this be a bad thing for some reason? Not that scientist journalists don’t also make mistakes of course- I’ve seen plenty, usually due to covering topics outside their own specialty.
- swexbe 3y ago
  That's true, but most medium articles & blogs are experts writing for other experts. I guess what's missing is broadly experts writing for laymen.

legitster 3y ago

Academia has sold itself and the world that it is only scrutinizable unto itself. But this was not always the case. If you read scientific papers from 50 or 100 years ago, they are surprisingly readable. There also used to be much more involvement from "lay-scientists" and hobbyists.

jfengel 3y ago
That was easier to do 50 or 100 years ago. The longer we do science, the more we already know. Finding something novel gets harder and harder. It becomes less and less likely that you can find it without having spent a long time learning what's already known. Academics certainly could be better writers and communicators now, but non-scientists cannot expect to understand most work that required years of education before they could perform it. The public can be given a rapid education in it when it matters, but that rapid education isn't going to put them in a position to critique the work. And when the public mistakes that rapid education for a superior grasp of the topic, it becomes a huge drain on the academics' time to correct the misconceptions.
- legitster 3y ago
  Maybe this is true for some of the advanced sciences. But when it comes to some of the topics that get the most news coverage (psychology, public health, economics) you're not dealing with controlled experiments. So much of it is just random sampling and double blind studies. This work is good. But none of this work is particularly complicated or hard to understand - and so much of the "education" is busy work or learning the "inside baseball" of how to get meaningful results and how to get published. When we are talking about "trust the scientists" no one is really arguing that nuclear scientists or aeronautical engineers don't know what they are talking about. We're really talking about whether we should listen to an epidemiologist just because they have spent so much time looking at these studies (often conflicting!) that they can squint their eyes when they look at a set of data and give a more qualified off-the-cuff opinion.
vondur 3y ago
As the fields have become more and more specialized over the years, and the technology has increased, it's gets more difficult to write about subjects without using jargon and more complicated visualizations. As mentioned in other comments, having journalists with a science background would definitely help.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they report on court cases? They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes? They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news? They're supposed to be experts at reporting, which works out to mean experts at finding out about topics that they don't already know about.

ke88y 3y ago
> Most journalists aren't experts on the law, either. How do they report on court cases? Journalists have roughly the same undergraduate educational background as lawyers and receive a half-decent education on the high level basics of the American legal system in civics courses. > They aren't experts on aviation safety. How do they report on airplane crashes? Crashes themselves often don't require any amount of aviation expertise. > They aren't experts on economics. How do they report financial news? Mostly poorly, which is why eg Bloomberg's retail news business exists, and most of those folks have some financial background.
coolliquidcode 3y ago
They do it very incompetently. The quality of reporting anymore is ridiculously low. It's not about being an expert in the subject but having a fundamental understanding and being logically minded enough to perform fact based and critically thought out reporting. Now everything is so trashy, economics is how they can bash their least favorite company or billionaire, law reporting is one-sided story telling for bashing or cheerleading someone in court, same with politics. It's mostly story telling anymore geared for entertainment or outrage.
nradov 3y ago
Well that explains why most reporting on aviation and financial issues in the mainstream media is such garbage. I mean I'm hardly an expert in those areas but even I can tell that the stories are crap in terms of missing key facts, not asking relevant questions, drawing bad conclusions, and pushing biased narratives. Fortunately there are some YouTube channels where I can get good information on those topics, although they aren't typically labeled as journalists and don't work for media companies.

nonameiguess 3y ago

Even if you get a STEM education, at least at the undergrad level, it tends not to include anywhere near enough hands on research to learn much about experimental methods that would help you assess the validity of study designs when reporting on a new paper that just got published. And even when you have that, experimental methods tend to be extremely specific to the field of study. I almost think it would be better if virtually everyone, even if you're not a STEM major, taking at least a course on hierarchy of evidence and how particular study designs attempt to demonstrate causation, along with some basic statistical literacy. But I was listening to a very good breakdown of the aspartame history this morning and the host was going on about criticisms of some of the early studies showing cancer in rats dealing with exactly how randomization works when you're dealing with multiple litters from the same gene line and why they usually terminate the rats early instead of waiting for natural death, and these are things you could never possibly know unless you specifically have a background in rodent studies. I was a biology major and still didn't know any of this stuff.

mike_hearn 3y ago

They don't have to shoot for perfection. The bar has sunk so low even very basic techniques can yield huge improvements in trust: 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine. 2. READ the papers. Journalists never do this. I cannot express how frequently you can spot scientific fraud by just reading the underlying papers, even as a layman. If you lack expertise maybe you'll miss 90% of the tricks but catching 10% of them is still sufficient to notice something is wrong, and often you don't need any special training. Here are some of my own investigations of bad papers - it's often obvious and most of it doesn't require expertise to spot. https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... 3. Hold sources to account when it's proven that they were misleading you. Report on bad behavior to discourage it next time. 4. Be willing to report stories dug up by other people, even when they make Team University look bad. Note how the reporting Silver refers to hasn't been covered by legacy media outlets even though you don't need to be a scientist to understand what they're saying and how damning it is. In reality this stuff is easy. Nobody is asking for the NYT to engage in professional peer review of newly published papers. Just not assuming anything a professor says is gospel truth would be a good start, but there seems little chance of that happening :( Journalists depend so heavily on academics for rent-a-quote services and a constant flow of stories that getting tough would be biting the hand that feeds them.

thorncorona 3y ago
> 1. Report the fact that disagreement exists. Phrased differently, stop taking academics at their word when they claim there's a consensus. Do some basic web searches to find people who disagree. Get quotes from them. Stress on the word people; not just other academics but literally anyone disagreeing on scientific grounds eliminates the claim of consensus. Bloggers are fine. This is how you get journalists to report disagreements that don't exist in reality. For example, whether the earth is flat, whether climate change is real, etc. > 2. READ the papers. Literally nobody reads the papers. A huge amount of news isn't even investigated. A large number of news these days is regurgitated from other sources.

CrzyLngPwd 3y ago

I don't write articles on subjects I don't understand no matter how much paper money is thrown at me. Maybe start there.

andreygrehov 3y ago

> Big question: HOW? Independent, transparent and publicly available journalism (open to critics) simplifies things a lot.

grammers 3y ago

Exactly. In addition, how would you gather any information at all if there's no one to trust. Yes, fake news are a huge problem, but we need reliable sources to gather information.

andreygrehov 3y ago
You don't need a reliable source. Maximizing the chances that a source is reliable is good enough. This can be achieved by maximizing the number of journalists attacking the same problem. The process must be transparent and publicly available / open to critics. People (non-journalists, readers) will point out if something smells suspicious.

scythe 3y ago

>Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. First, you need a way to communicate to the reader that the journalist writing the article is a qualified science journalist. Then, to satisfy that, you need an appropriate curriculum and a governing body to manage the accreditation of science journalism programs. Then, to make that practical, you need to support certificate programs for journalists beginning their education with partial credentials. Overall, this is hard, and it's not clear if there's real demand for qualified science journalists and the articles that they would, in theory, write, which means that nobody is agitating to create such an infrastructure. Journalism, at least right now, is a little bit like baseball: a small fraction do very well, and most scrape by on a starvation wage. The common refrain is that the "glut" of people with science degrees should supply plenty of qualified science journalists, but most of them have lower-risk career opportunities, and people who go into science usually aren't the risk-avid sort. You're better off becoming a teacher, and in America, that's saying something.

blitz_skull 3y ago

Simple: Stop believing it’s true just because a scientist said it. You don’t need a STEM degree to stop propagating theories before they’re proven.

jimbokun 3y ago
Yes. The whole point of science is that you do not have to believe anything just because a scientist said it. Only thing that matters is the validity of their data, whether the data truly backs their interpretation, and if the findings can be replicated.
dekhn 3y ago
Wouldn't that mean that Galileo and Newton's discoveries would have had little to no impact? For modern endeavors, it's hard to see how anybody who didn't have a detailed education in the subject could really contribute in a useful way to debunking junk science. I can see this happening for papers that can be dismissed outright because the authors made egregious errors in the study design or data collection (where data scientists/statisticians who don't work in the field can still be very useful), but for most modern physics or medical research, there are literally hundreds of years of well-established theory and practice that you absolutely need to know before dismissing ideas that don't make sense. This is especially important in areas like infectious disease.
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  Oh boy. Well for starters Newton and Galileo didn’t have the internet. That’s 80% of this misinformation problem. And GP was talking about how journalists can be skeptical. No one is suggesting journalists should be debunking all new science findings—merely that they should be very skeptical when reporting about those findings.

jimbokun 3y ago

This is true for everything a journalist might cover. They are not the expert, but still need to strive to find the truth of an issue they can relay to the public. In this case, the underlying skill is, how do you detect and expose a cover up of inconvenient facts? I don't know the answer to that question. But seems like a core skill of a journalist, regardless of the field being investigated.

mettamage 3y ago

So wait, I could make a career in being a software engineering style type of journalist? I just don’t think they would care, would they? If anyone is reading it working as such, feel free to humor me by shooting me an email (in my profile). I studied psychology (bachelor), business (bachelor), computer science (master) and game-design (master). I also did some course work related to journalism (though very limited, I only read The Elements of Style). I worked as a teacher (mostly in programming, though one lecture on rhetorics in a rhetorics class) and as a software engineer. Let me know! I’m up for a chat as I might be a good fit and able to help more accurate reporting on AI and software in general.

zztop44 3y ago
Yep that’s all great but the key to being good at journalism is being a good journalist. Take Matt Levine. His background as an M&A attorney and investment banker clearly informs his journalism and makes it better. But no one would give a shit about that if he wasn’t a good writer consistently writing good, interesting writing.
- mettamage 3y ago
  So, aren’t we asking for too much then?

SoftTalker 3y ago

> 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? Ask questions. Ask "why" a lot, don't take things at face value. Assume you're being bullshitted. You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying.

newsclues 3y ago
multiple sources as well. present contrasting viewpoints
- TheCleric 3y ago
  Agreed, need some more flat earth points of view instead of all these spherists.
cactusplant7374 3y ago
> Assume you're being bullshitted. > You don't need to deeply undestand a subject to make someone back up what they are saying. Isn't that what the Covid vaccine skeptics did? It didn't turn out that great and made journalists look like conspiracy theorists in some cases.
ke88y 3y ago
Again, without a baseline educational background, doing so in a way that's productive -- ie anything more than running around like a chicken with its head cut off -- is impossible. There were journalists on the COVID vaccine beat for ove a year who had never taken a Bio 101 course, let alone self-studied undergraduate level genetics. They lacked the fundamental background required to assess evidence, to know which questions to ask, to know which people to ask, is all highly suspect.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  "Dr. Scientist, you said X. Describe the evidence for that claim?" "Dr. Scientist, are you aware of claim Y, which seems at odds with what you are saying? Explain why claim Y is wrong?" Write it up. You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said. That's what "reporting" is.

Natsu 3y ago

> Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. This right here is why I've mostly stopped listening to journalists and try to find primary sources regarding thee scientific papers, scientists, legal rulings, etc. in question instead of playing a game of telephone where people reinterpret everything to fit whatever story they're tying to tell me. It's also why I have been finding Wikipedia less useful these days, since they have an explicit policy of citing secondary sources instead of primary sources and I find those far less useful.

robomartin 3y ago

> Big question: HOW? Simple: If they are not equipped to understand what they are going to write about, they should refrain from adding noise to the conversation. The potential to add nothing but noise or cause damage is great. Interestingly enough nobody would ever propose that, say, a fashion journalist report on surgical procedures or a range of other subjects. How is this problem not obvious in other domains? It's interesting to watch the difference between a reporter/journalist on any TV news show and, say, the people working at a financial news network like CNBC. In the latter case, they have to have a serious body of knowledge just to open their mouths. If you plucked your average reporter/journalist and put them into that seat, they would sound like complete morons because they just would not know what they are talking about.

techx 3y ago

A news outlet can hire scientists to call out shady scientific paper, many scientific paper have obvious bad conclusions, or not following basic scientific rules, that can be detected even if the scientist reviewing is specialized in another fields.

sn9 3y ago

Ezra Klein interviewed Zeynep Tufeckci about basically this because she's had an unusually good track record for a non-specialist on lots of topics, and it really comes down to being statistically literate and putting in the work: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-zeynep-tufekci-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/04/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

harry8 3y ago
>really comes down to being statistically literate A lot of people writing scientific papers aren't statistically literate. It also seems that what was considered first rate methodology even a decade ago is now considered deeply unreliable.
- a123b456c 3y ago
  A lot of it depends on who (as in, which group of scientists) is doing the considering.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Most scientists who don’t have grad level math education fail miserably in understanding statistics. Even the top ones. I was the statistics expert in my lab when doing my PhD and I had no business being one. All I was good at was calling out that one way ANOvA is just a t-test and when they should just stick to non parametric methods.
    - CrazyStat 3y ago
      > one way ANOvA is just a t-test If there are only two groups, yes. There are often more than two groups.
Jun8 3y ago
Also helps that Tüfekçi got her undergraduate degrees at good universities in Turkey which means she had to go through and score well on the grueling university entrance exams.

throwaway14356 3y ago

Gary Stevenson was surprised no one wanted to publish his article. They already had an economist one said. He argued he could walk into large financial institutions and they would immediately hire him for millions, the staff economy writer wouldn't make it past the reception - but he should be the one to write all of the articles to inform the public?

soldeace 3y ago

At least for this particular case it was not a matter of teaching journalists statistics or anything STEM-related. If it weren't for the leaked messages, we'd never hear about it. Epistemic sincerity and a good notion of statistics are important for sure, but giving whistleblowers legal cover and a means of releasing this kind of material is just as important.

m463 3y ago

It is unfortunate that money is a tool that makes society materially efficient but doesn't value certain members of society appropriately. This means not only Journalists, but also Teachers and just about every sort of regulator who can be bought.

ThunderSizzle 3y ago
Another problem is that many teachers aren't worth much money at all. How do parents ensure the teachers worth it get their tax dollars, and not some sleazy pedophile whose hiding behind the teachers union? Until that is solved to sufficient satisfaction, even good teachers will be paid crap.
- vacuity 3y ago
  Is "sleazy pedophile hiding behind the teachers union" a significant occurrence that warrants paying teachers poorly? If that is even a stated reason for low pay, it seems more like fearmongering. Pay teachers well and punish the slim minority who do immoral things.

wrp 3y ago

> Big question: HOW? By asking OTHER specialists. In the 1970s/80s of my experience, journalism was much higher quality than now, but reporters were still notoriously ignorant of technical subjects. Standard procedure for a reporter was to contact one or two outside specialists to comment on the case. A good reporter wasn't expected to have expert knowledge, but just to be an accurate "reporter" of what experts said.

ricksunny 3y ago
And what if the 'other specialists' participate in a sci-bubble (grant review committees, peer review in-group) with the reporter's source in question? Relevant scientific niches for affirming credibility are too small for everyone not to already know each other through b̶a̶i̶j̶i̶u̶ i̶n̶ a̶ b̶a̶t̶c̶a̶v̶e̶ pre-existing co-opetitive relationships.

dbsmith83 3y ago

Thinking out loud here and this might be a terrible idea, and maybe at the risk of snubbing journalism majors, but what if the dependency was inverted? As in, what if, instead of having journalists who take a few classes here and there in various subjects, we instead had people who majored in subjects who also took some journalism classes, so they could write on subjects within the field? What I mean is, instead of having a journalist who took an intro chem series writing about chem topics, we had people who majored in chemistry with a few journalism classes writing the articles instead? You might say "well people who majored in their science field probably want to work in that field", but I'd say look no further than at the amount of science degree people doing dev work. Something something, a trained ai chatgpt-like tool might also help bridge the gap to journalism? Perhaps a pay gap would also need to be addressed.

regular_trash 3y ago
You basically described Hamilton Morris from Vice. He does a great job at covering psychoactive substances. Although he does at times seem to be an active proponent instead of giving an unbiased perspective. Regardless, it's refreshing to hear qualified people give their opinion and reportings on things than it is to listen to those that don't understand what they are commenting on.
peteradio 3y ago
Alternatively leverage LLM and feed the papers to the LLM, massage for impact, tweak for demographics and print and publish my dude
solardev 3y ago
I was an environmental science and sustainability major in college, along with a journalism minor. I enjoyed journalism but prior year classmates who worked the local beats would always share their nightmare career stories. Terrible pay, zero respect, long hours, poor benefits, constant downsizing, writing on deadline... for how important a job it is, it's terrible how they treat their writers. Who's going to want to do that? Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for journalists, but the overwhelming majority of them get the short end of the stick. It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates. Put it this way. I dabbled in coding in college, doing some WordPress stuff. After two years I was paid better than most journalists after a decade. Granted dev work is really overpaid (especially before 2023) but journalism has been really underpaid, and getting worse all the time, so the difference was quite stark. One has you doing almost no work for tremendous pay and benefits. The other has you working your ass off every week and weekends for nothing, with very little growth opportunities too. It may be decades before you pay off student loans. It's not a livable wage in most areas. Want better journalism? We gotta treat our journalists better.

ecf 3y ago

STEM students need to be heavily incentivized. When the world goes to shit I can guarantee the journalism majors aren’t going to be solving our global warming crisis. I mean, they’re already failing their one job of spreading awareness.

34679 3y ago

By talking to multiple sources, preferably ones who are not employed by the same company. If a chemist makes a claim, ask other chemists about it and publish their responses along with the original claim. The personal opinions of the journalist aren't needed or desirable.

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

This is a false barrier to critique of the scientific establishment. Many foundational questions can always be asked about the claims that scientists make, such as, how is research funded, where are the moral hazards, who benefits from certain conclusions, is the data open sourced, how are dissenting opinions treated, has repeatability been demonstrated, why is fraud not a concern, etc. Simple and rational questions can go a long way here.

skybrian 3y ago
Those aren't foundational questions, though, they're circumstantial evidence. They don't get at whether the scientists did a good job or not. "Why is fraud not a concern" is kinda useless in proving fraud. Maybe they help you feel a bit more or less confident? I think reading a paper and asking "okay, what did they actually do, and how could it go wrong" might be a good start, or better yet asking some other scientist who know the field about that?
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  They are the questions that journalists should be asking in order to do their jobs. There are real political and economic consequences to the impact of science today, especially when funded by special interests.

ajkjk 3y ago

It's just that it's not true "receiving education" is a requirement for "being intelligent". Get journalists who can do it. Don't hire ones who don't? Like... I didn't study music or history in college but I know a lot about them. Because I'm not a dumbass and I read books. Being literate on subjects when it's your job to be should not be a high bar.

refurb 3y ago

Big question: HOW? Most journalists in the USA receive basically zero scientific education. 1. By talking to a variety of experts 2. Purposefully seeking out alternative narratives or skeptics among reputable scientists. 3. Following up on criticisms that pop up across multiple, well regarded skeptics. 5. Challenging the original scientist based on input from these skeptics. 6. Transparently reporting on responses to these challenges. Instead today we get: 1. Scientist makes claim 2. Reporter parrots the talking points

ljosifov 3y ago

True that - and we are back to the CP Snow "Two Cultures" pamphlet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures). Looks to me that still STEM people learn much more of humanities, then humanities learn of STEM. To say "I'm illiterate" is shameful (in places that still have illiterate people - thankfully not many and ever less) in a way that in many - even developed - countries to say "I'm innumerate" is not. Shows up frequently (recently in the UK, on the belated subject of teaching maths), quite literate public figures publicly proclaim "I'm rubbish at maths" as if it's a badge of honor, not something to be ashamed of and worked on to be remediated. The quality of online learning materials is mind boggling, never been better. For humanities maybe teaching logic and logical thinking (modus ponens, modus tollens, quantifiers like "none, some, at least one, at most one, all") in the context of public discussion, argument, public debate maybe more effective and receptive. It's fair to acknowledge that maths with abstract symbols and all that is too hard for most people and there maybe better way of teaching. Ditto data, distributions and statistics - that is I think a new can of worms (and we still struggle with the old one).