9 ms·

Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

50 points by h2odragon 3y ago

easytiger 3y ago
Most people who today call themselves scientists do not meet my philosphical and historical understanding of that vocation. Indeed for almost none of them is it a vocation.
eYrKEC2 3y ago
I'll do you one better -- I'm skeptical of journalists as well.
temptemptemp111 3y ago
[dead]
Taters91 3y ago
No duh
madeofpalk 3y ago
this was discussed considerably four days ago fyi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818896
paul7986 3y ago
And readers should be skeptical of much of the for profit media that's out there that's not talking about the weather forecast in the next few hours. Even more so of what they see on social media Tiktok, Reels, etc ... I let some of those fake (negative) to probably real videos of Spirit Airlines think I'd never fly with them (pushing those videos on Tiktok surely helps their pricier competitors). Yet I booked about ten flights in the last 5 months with them and packed light (clothes in bookbag) and for me I'll always fly Spirit. No difference minus saving hundreds of dollars; their refund policy is awful just don't cancel. Overall what to believe online and in the media (my parents or aunts are now too afraid to go visit NYC cause of Fox news) isn't always easy. Have to judge for yourself I think.
Zetice 3y ago
Ugh. Nate, why? Nate (and you, dear reader) should know better than this. What a person is willing to say under oath (or in a peer reviewed paper) is what they're able to defend. What they say in slack chats or emails is completely different, and not in any way beholden to anything approaching the same level of rigor. It should matter, a lot, that even a group of scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review. If these folks couldn't do it, maybe there's a reason; it's simply not supported by observations/facts.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  I guess some people just think we should have a climategate-type scandal every now and then to clean the sinuses or something?
- wredue 3y ago
  Besides that, even if Covid did lab leak, that doesn’t lend any credibility what-so-ever to the rest of the lab-leak conspiracists who claim that the vaccine is just a 5g killbot. Personally, I don’t find “china is suppressing information, and there was ventilation changes happening” compelling evidence for a lab leak, but that’s what their evidence is.
  - eindiran 3y ago
    > [E]ven if Covid did lab leak, that doesn’t lend any credibility what-so-ever to the rest of the lab-leak conspiracists who claim that the vaccine is just a 5g killbot. No one operating in good faith is conflating these ideas.
    - myko 3y ago
      I took the comment about 5g killbot to really mean human engineered, which there is zero evidence of. Reasonable people since COVID happened considered that a leak is possible, but there is no evidence of it, and that the virus is definitely not human engineered. I would like to see data on how many believe the 5g conspiracies, though. I have a cousin, a former nurse (fired for refusing to vaccinate) who absolutely does believe this and shares her opinion on it constantly. She also thinks the vaccines have killed more people than the covid virus, and has a pretty large social media following / echo chamber of evangelicals around this.
mc32 3y ago
>”“we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.” That has to be a dog whistle/canary right there. At such an early stage of an investigation it’s highly unusual to consider a common scenario implausible out of hand.
nyc_data_geek1 3y ago
Above all, be skeptical of Nate Silver.
- adw 3y ago
  Nate Silver? More like Nate Bronze. (Enough of the cheap shots). He's a mid-level data scientist who writes competently and has turned that into a very successful contrarian/thinkfluencer career. The work is mediocre, but the results are excellent. There are two lessons here: * trust "charty" press coverage about as much as you trust onboarding projections from your most recent data science hire – in other words, positively correlated with the underlying but my no means definitive. Polling companies generally publish their methods; you can use that to make calls on their individual methodological rigor; * being 7/10 at two things (in this case, data science and writing) is in many cases more valuable than being 9/10 at one thing _if you can find the right niche_, which Nate Silver did. 538 is the outcome of a very, very well-timed pivot from sports analytics into political analytics. (With legalized gambling in the States, I suspect the pivot these days should be the other direction).
adolph 3y ago
Better than blind skepticism is starting with epistemology, or the nature of knowledge, with a special emphasis on how knowledge is created and transmitted. Like many I've been influenced by "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch in this regard. https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359 https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans... Examining one's personal epistemology is a significant task because it is the input to one's "mind set," defined in the below podcast with Dr. Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford, as "a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information." https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-56-dr-alia-crum-science-of-mindsets-for-health-performance-huberman-lab/ https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-56-dr-alia-cru...
asifgnionio 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. This is libel. You can read the exchange for yourself. https://web.archive.org/web/20230722093206/https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1679098392587255809 https://web.archive.org/web/20230722093206/https://twitter.c... The researcher clearly means that the truth is never going to come out of China. He says they have no good evidence of a lab leak. Yet Nate Silver perverts this into a confession of a coverup. If I were Rambaut, I'd lawyer up.
fabian2k 3y ago
There is one sentence in the paper this is about (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) that I think overstates the conclusion: > we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible But the paper itself really isn't about any type of lab-based scenario, the actual content only applies to an engineered virus as in the hypotheses that this is either a bioweapon or an experiment that accidentally escaped. The hypothesis that this could be a virus collected for the lab and then accidentally released can't be addressed at all by the paper. To me this is more like clumsy writing, but I can understand if you read this as a paper overstating its conclusion. But it's really not something that would mislead anyone even quickly skimming the paper. The parts Nate Silver complains about look to me more like the kind of difference you'd expect between internal, informal chat and what you write in actual publications. I'd expect scientists to speculate wildly at first, then collect data and evaluate what that data actually means.
webnrrd2k 3y ago
There was no definitive proof of the orgin of C-19. So, at the time it was appropriate to be suspicious of the lab leak theory, just like it was appropriate to be suspicious of a wet market orgin. It just takes time to work all this stuff out. Studies can be done wrong, people have motivated reasons, etc... IIRC, at the time, the lab-leak theory was dismissed due to two main reasons: 1.) "bigger claims require better evidence" and 2.) The Trump/MAGA crowd had tied the lab leak to some fairly extreme and racist conspiracy theories. Yes there were very suspicious coincidences, plus china shutting down any investigation into the orgins of the epidemic. But there was no smoking gun, no definitive proof of a lab leak. For example, no lab worker came forward and claimed responsibility for the leak. Also, to further address point 2, there was an increase in hate crimes against asian-americans. See: Raising Awareness of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents the COVID-19 Pandemic Given all that, I think that it was appropriate to be very cautious about the lab leak hypothesis. [0] PDF, https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download
- myko 3y ago
  It's still appropriate to be skeptical, as there still isn't evidence of a lab leak. Also, the conspiracies touted by trumpers included human engineering of the virus _and_ a leak, they were tied together.
wolverine876 3y ago
Don't we recognize the form of these sorts of arguments by now (ones like Silver's)? * Piles of evidence that nobody has time to review (and thus we must rely on the author, whose credibility somehow increases by having evidence - even though readers rely purely on the author's word) * Extreme one-sidedness of the claims (completely, indisputably, bad) * The neat fit with a politically inflammatory issue, particularly a conspiracy theory, but presented naively - as if the author doesn't mean to take sides. 'I'm just reporting the facts.' * The hyperbole and other emotionally inflamed rhetoric, which leaves no room for serious, nuanced analysis. When I see that form, I don't begin to believe it anymore. I've seen enough, wasted enough of my life. People say, 'well then can you prove it wrong?' I can't, and relying on my lack of time (and reach) is part of how propaganda works - it's far easier to lie than to find the truth. Sometimes that's the intent of piles of evidence. The fact that I can't (or you can't) disprove it is not reason to trust something - are you kidding? It's 2023 and you're still trusting things on the Internet by default? It's true that I might miss a few things, but I miss far more by wasting time trying to study these issues and certainly by allowing myself to trust what very often turns out to be BS.

50 points by h2odragon 3y ago

Most people who today call themselves scientists do not meet my philosphical and historical understanding of that vocation. Indeed for almost none of them is it a vocation.

eYrKEC2 3y ago

I'll do you one better -- I'm skeptical of journalists as well.

temptemptemp111 3y ago

[dead]

Taters91 3y ago

No duh

madeofpalk 3y ago

this was discussed considerably four days ago fyi https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36818896

paul7986 3y ago

And readers should be skeptical of much of the for profit media that's out there that's not talking about the weather forecast in the next few hours. Even more so of what they see on social media Tiktok, Reels, etc ... I let some of those fake (negative) to probably real videos of Spirit Airlines think I'd never fly with them (pushing those videos on Tiktok surely helps their pricier competitors). Yet I booked about ten flights in the last 5 months with them and packed light (clothes in bookbag) and for me I'll always fly Spirit. No difference minus saving hundreds of dollars; their refund policy is awful just don't cancel. Overall what to believe online and in the media (my parents or aunts are now too afraid to go visit NYC cause of Fox news) isn't always easy. Have to judge for yourself I think.

Zetice 3y ago

Ugh. Nate, why? Nate (and you, dear reader) should know better than this. What a person is willing to say under oath (or in a peer reviewed paper) is what they're able to defend. What they say in slack chats or emails is completely different, and not in any way beholden to anything approaching the same level of rigor. It should matter, a lot, that even a group of scientists who believed a lab leak idea was plausible couldn't muster up an argument that would hold up under peer review. If these folks couldn't do it, maybe there's a reason; it's simply not supported by observations/facts.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
I guess some people just think we should have a climategate-type scandal every now and then to clean the sinuses or something?
wredue 3y ago
Besides that, even if Covid did lab leak, that doesn’t lend any credibility what-so-ever to the rest of the lab-leak conspiracists who claim that the vaccine is just a 5g killbot. Personally, I don’t find “china is suppressing information, and there was ventilation changes happening” compelling evidence for a lab leak, but that’s what their evidence is.
- eindiran 3y ago
  > [E]ven if Covid did lab leak, that doesn’t lend any credibility what-so-ever to the rest of the lab-leak conspiracists who claim that the vaccine is just a 5g killbot. No one operating in good faith is conflating these ideas.
  - myko 3y ago
    I took the comment about 5g killbot to really mean human engineered, which there is zero evidence of. Reasonable people since COVID happened considered that a leak is possible, but there is no evidence of it, and that the virus is definitely not human engineered. I would like to see data on how many believe the 5g conspiracies, though. I have a cousin, a former nurse (fired for refusing to vaccinate) who absolutely does believe this and shares her opinion on it constantly. She also thinks the vaccines have killed more people than the covid virus, and has a pretty large social media following / echo chamber of evangelicals around this.

mc32 3y ago

>”“we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.” That has to be a dog whistle/canary right there. At such an early stage of an investigation it’s highly unusual to consider a common scenario implausible out of hand.

nyc_data_geek1 3y ago

Above all, be skeptical of Nate Silver.

adw 3y ago
Nate Silver? More like Nate Bronze. (Enough of the cheap shots). He's a mid-level data scientist who writes competently and has turned that into a very successful contrarian/thinkfluencer career. The work is mediocre, but the results are excellent. There are two lessons here: * trust "charty" press coverage about as much as you trust onboarding projections from your most recent data science hire – in other words, positively correlated with the underlying but my no means definitive. Polling companies generally publish their methods; you can use that to make calls on their individual methodological rigor; * being 7/10 at two things (in this case, data science and writing) is in many cases more valuable than being 9/10 at one thing _if you can find the right niche_, which Nate Silver did. 538 is the outcome of a very, very well-timed pivot from sports analytics into political analytics. (With legalized gambling in the States, I suspect the pivot these days should be the other direction).

adolph 3y ago

Better than blind skepticism is starting with epistemology, or the nature of knowledge, with a special emphasis on how knowledge is created and transmitted. Like many I've been influenced by "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch in this regard. https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Transform-World/dp/0143121359 https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Infinity-Explanations-Trans... Examining one's personal epistemology is a significant task because it is the input to one's "mind set," defined in the below podcast with Dr. Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford, as "a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information." https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-56-dr-alia-crum-science-of-mindsets-for-health-performance-huberman-lab/ https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-56-dr-alia-cru...

asifgnionio 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. This is libel. You can read the exchange for yourself. https://web.archive.org/web/20230722093206/https://twitter.com/mbalter/status/1679098392587255809 https://web.archive.org/web/20230722093206/https://twitter.c... The researcher clearly means that the truth is never going to come out of China. He says they have no good evidence of a lab leak. Yet Nate Silver perverts this into a confession of a coverup. If I were Rambaut, I'd lawyer up.

fabian2k 3y ago

There is one sentence in the paper this is about (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) that I think overstates the conclusion: > we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible But the paper itself really isn't about any type of lab-based scenario, the actual content only applies to an engineered virus as in the hypotheses that this is either a bioweapon or an experiment that accidentally escaped. The hypothesis that this could be a virus collected for the lab and then accidentally released can't be addressed at all by the paper. To me this is more like clumsy writing, but I can understand if you read this as a paper overstating its conclusion. But it's really not something that would mislead anyone even quickly skimming the paper. The parts Nate Silver complains about look to me more like the kind of difference you'd expect between internal, informal chat and what you write in actual publications. I'd expect scientists to speculate wildly at first, then collect data and evaluate what that data actually means.

webnrrd2k 3y ago

There was no definitive proof of the orgin of C-19. So, at the time it was appropriate to be suspicious of the lab leak theory, just like it was appropriate to be suspicious of a wet market orgin. It just takes time to work all this stuff out. Studies can be done wrong, people have motivated reasons, etc... IIRC, at the time, the lab-leak theory was dismissed due to two main reasons: 1.) "bigger claims require better evidence" and 2.) The Trump/MAGA crowd had tied the lab leak to some fairly extreme and racist conspiracy theories. Yes there were very suspicious coincidences, plus china shutting down any investigation into the orgins of the epidemic. But there was no smoking gun, no definitive proof of a lab leak. For example, no lab worker came forward and claimed responsibility for the leak. Also, to further address point 2, there was an increase in hate crimes against asian-americans. See: Raising Awareness of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents the COVID-19 Pandemic Given all that, I think that it was appropriate to be very cautious about the lab leak hypothesis. [0] PDF, https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download

myko 3y ago
It's still appropriate to be skeptical, as there still isn't evidence of a lab leak. Also, the conspiracies touted by trumpers included human engineering of the virus _and_ a leak, they were tied together.

wolverine876 3y ago

Don't we recognize the form of these sorts of arguments by now (ones like Silver's)? * Piles of evidence that nobody has time to review (and thus we must rely on the author, whose credibility somehow increases by having evidence - even though readers rely purely on the author's word) * Extreme one-sidedness of the claims (completely, indisputably, bad) * The neat fit with a politically inflammatory issue, particularly a conspiracy theory, but presented naively - as if the author doesn't mean to take sides. 'I'm just reporting the facts.' * The hyperbole and other emotionally inflamed rhetoric, which leaves no room for serious, nuanced analysis. When I see that form, I don't begin to believe it anymore. I've seen enough, wasted enough of my life. People say, 'well then can you prove it wrong?' I can't, and relying on my lack of time (and reach) is part of how propaganda works - it's far easier to lie than to find the truth. Sometimes that's the intent of piles of evidence. The fact that I can't (or you can't) disprove it is not reason to trust something - are you kidding? It's 2023 and you're still trusting things on the Internet by default? It's true that I might miss a few things, but I miss far more by wasting time trying to study these issues and certainly by allowing myself to trust what very often turns out to be BS.