Scott Kelly’s medical monitoring has spawned some bad press coverage | Hacker News Reader

Scott Kelly’s medical monitoring has spawned some bad press coverage

arstechnica.com

176 pointsBerislavLopac48 comments

> Live Science...Business Insider...CNN...Daily Mail

They all got this horribly wrong, but a lot of people who understand enough about biology to know why will still trust their coverage of other areas they are less expert in. Michael Crichton called it Gell-Mann Amnesia. [0]

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann#Quotes_about_...

Which is why I don't read or watch those news orgs.

Here's the problem, every non subject specific media company I've tried getting my news from is guilty of being horrifying wrong like this on one story or another. Generally they seem to do so with fairly high frequency. So my alternatives are read and to some extent trust them anyways, or just not get news on topics I'm unfamiliar with.

I'm increasingly convinced that any organization without a specific 'beat' is hopeless. Not only are they bad at the topic, it's hard to spot because they're good at newswriting - often you'd have to already know the story to catch the errors.

I've got half a dozen tech news sources I kind of trust (as in, trust that I can usually spot their errors) - Ars, Techdirt, and their ilk are all at least useful. WaPo/NYT/etc are largely subject-specific to US politics, but in denial about it, so that's workable. Physics and biology news I'm largely reduced to reading blogs and asking friends.

I've found ways of making this work for lots of things, but medicine and foreign affairs are the two that give me fits.

Medicine, like social psychology, is full of headlines reading "X causes Y!" over studies finding "X correlates with Y at p=0.30". I end up just reading the damn studies myself, which is obviously not efficient or trustworthy.

And foreign affairs is basically hopeless. I'm easily 5 removes away from facts at when reading an English-language story about, say, Saudi domestic politics. There's effectively no 'ground truth' to access, because every source I can compare to has its own issues. It's honestly sort of baffling when I hear people talk about those topics like they're fully-informed; I'm not sure how anyone who isn't an actual expert in the specific foreign affair in question works up that kind of confidence.

Some people at least read through many sources on the same issue, maybe they're all in English but some will dig deep into sources and from multiple points of view.

I think it's possible to do, just takes time.

It's certainly a better approach than trying to find one trustworthy source in isolation; there's a lot to be said for an adversarial system of newsreading.

With non-Western affairs, I try this but feel like I still struggle with obscured facts and deep-seated agendas. The errors and biases in multiple accounts of a domestic issue can often be subtracted out, but English coverage of complex foreign issues has bigger complications. Distinct authors work from the same erroneous primary source, or all make the same cultural misunderstanding on the same point, or all lack key context that wasn't international news.

Coverage of topics like the war in Syria is often mind-bendingly bad, and I end up running down primary sources even when I can trust them, just for context. (A concrete example: many stories about refugees in Raqqa listed populations and areas that would have left the surviving city more densely populated than Kowloon, but no one seemed to bother doing that division.)

It's vastly better than it used to be, though. Total inaccuracy is much less of a threat in a world pervaded by English-speaking internet users. I feel surrounded by sloppy, unhelpful media, but I at least have enough information to get that feeling. Stories like the Western media's misunderstanding of the USSR in the 1930s give some perspective on what it looks like to be so comprehensively wrong that you can't even tell there's a problem.

This article is a perfect example of why that doesn't work. All the journalists are working from the same source, and copying from eachother, so they all make the same fundamental mistakes.

It helps filtering for intentional spin, but not much with reporters just being flat out wrong.

That's an interesting quote from Crichton. I think the safest assessment of any given publication is to regard its credibility as only being as good as its worst story. Like Crichton said, should we really take CNN seriously in any subjects if they're saying space turned Scott Kelly into a mutant?

I would hope the average HN reader has a higher capacity for critical thought than a binary decision to blackball an entire news source. if you really do what you are saying here you won't read any source on anything, ever.

Regarding a source's credibility and ignoring it outright are two different things entirely. I was just agreeing with Crichton that publications need to be held to a consistent standard across all areas of coverage.

That's a fair distinction. I would apply that reputation to the author and possibly aggregate that for the outlet though. I don't think it's as easy as judging CNN as a whole based on a single piece.

The media's track record of covering anything scientific is pretty horrendous. Because of that, I am a massive fan of the proliferation of smaller science-based youtube channels/blogs that cover science well.

I think old school media is really adapting pretty horribly in most areas of news coverage, which is why I have altered my diet to more long form, smaller channel sources and I've been happier for it.

The media's coverage about topics we know about is a good reminder that it's probably roughly as good on topics we don't know about :)

I'm optimistic that the internet will allow small, topic-focused media to flourish.

See also the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

I just read that, and I love it. HN has introduced me to named conventions that I have been loving: Betteridge's law, Hitchen's razor, and now the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

You know Hanlon’s Razor and Heinlein’s Razor? Then there’s Finagle’s law (well known) and my favorite correlary, O’Toole’s: “The Perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

http://muchow.dk/ttrttc/?p=565

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law

Betteridge’s law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

My personal favorite is Poe’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law?wprov=sfti1

It seems like Betteridge's Law has been catching on among the better sort of journalist. The NYT recently ran "Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?", and I shook my head in anticipation of another article wildly overselling a weak claim. Instead, it was a measured piece cataloging excess hype on the topic and problems with commonly-cited loneliness studies. The author eventually arrived at "loneliness is a real concern, but not an epidemic".

Which is all tangential, but it's great to finally see a journalist write a yes/no headline and actually notice that the answer is 'no'.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/opinion/sunday/loneliness...

Learning the proper names for these concepts has been a huge benefit of reading HN.

I've been collecting them for the past few years and now have enough for a bingo card.

Absolutely agree. Does anyone have a compiled list of these types of concepts?

My list in reverse chronological order:

baumol's cost disease,

Chesterton's fence,

Berkson's paradox,

goodhart's law/Campbell's law,

Gell-Mann Amnesia affect,

Ship of Theseus,

The Zeigarnik effect,

Conway's law,

selection bias

heffindal index,

Betteridge's law of head lines,

survivorship bias,

bayes theorem

black swan,

Dunbar number,

Anscombe's quartet,

false positive/false negative,

fundamental attribution bias,

type 1 type 2 thinking,

grok,

simpson's paradox,

Hawthorne effect,

dunning kruger,

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,

flynn effect,

Moving the overton window,

Sturgeon’s law

cobra effect, bikeshedding

Since you're keeping a list: it's "Herfindahl".

That's what I get for just copy pasting a personal note. Thanks for the fix.

Most of the concepts HN members love to use to sound well educated while arguing on the internet are in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

I sort of have the opposite reaction. These days it seems like people are so eager to trot out one of these phrases with a "look-how-informed-I-am" attitude, whether or not it's genuinely applicable.

If I'm talking about the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" in daily conversation, I'm just gonna describe it like Crichton does in the quote, since naming it properly is going to result in having to explain it anyways, and the whole thing just comes across as being a bit self-important.

Checkout https://legiblenews.com -- It updates once a day, sourced from Wikipedia.

I completely agree with this and have often thought the same.

The ease of content creation and marketing has been an absolute boon to making better content available on almost all topics. From better pop science and math, to better long-form science and math, and even to just better commenting on news because you're getting commentary from experts who are directly involved.

It's a great time for content.

News article titles:

> 7% of Scott Kelly's DNA was changed due to his year in space

> Humans and chimps share 96% of the same DNA

Seeing as how Scott Kelly is not severely mutated (or dead, as the article says), this should be an indication that something is wrong with the reporting.

Yes. I haven't actually read any of the articles with that 7% headline as it seemed to me that they likely got something completely wrong - I've seen plenty of videos/photos of Scott Kelly since he got back to Earth and he was clearly not horrifically deformed or unhealthy in any way (nor has anyone who's spent significant time on the ISS come back that way).

I heard about this on NPR yesterday afternoon. In their interview, this bit of misinformation was specifically called out:

> Now, there's been a little bit of misinformation about this study. Scott is still Mark Kelly's identical twin. And he did not have 7 percent of his genes altered by space travel.

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/594062986/nasa-study-finds-as...

Sure. But the headline leads the reader in a different direction despite "change" not meaning what people think it means: "NASA Study Finds Astronaut's Genes Changed While In Space"

I notice something in the NASA press release that is getting less attention, but I find fascinating. Apparently it was found that Scott Kelly's telomeres lengthened in space. It's hypothesized this is due to caloric restriction and exercise aboard the ISS, but it's noted that they returned to near-normal length shortly after he landed. Perhaps these are some effects of microgravity or radiation? Could space tourism become an anti-aging industry? I did some further searching on aging studies on the ISS and found only one as yet incomplete Japanese study of nematodes

I agree this seems much more important than the everything else that's been said about this issue. Even TFA could be faulted for not expanding on this point.

I'm no biologist, but a good demonstration of the extent to which the same genes can have differing expression is found by considering the variety across all the specialised cells in your body. Your brain cells and muscles carry the same DNA, but it is expressed very differently. If this is possible, then clearly more subtle changes are possible without altering the DNA also.

This to me is one of the most discouraging parts of mainstream media. "Old" stories get articles written about them as if they are new news. This is probably why social media has become where some people get their news.

It's frustrating on several levels.

Letting stories 'age' a bit is actually good, it makes detailed coverage with expert input possible. But we've somehow ended up in this idiotic double-bind where not only are year-old stories being run as current news, they're still written up at "reporting live" quality levels.

"Speed, accuracy, pick one" would still be one more merit than we actually get.

Discussion of the story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16589412.

I had skimmed over the titles of the other coverage, but actually read this one. Good job, OP.

You mean journalists just printed a bunch of nonsense they didn’t understand and never made any effort to learn the material so they could report accurately? No... never! ;-)

And CNN did this? Oh my gosh it is so out of character!

I feel like the author is nitpicking here. 7% of genes didn't change but 7% of genes exhibited different "genetic activity levels" ? What does that mean ? Not being a biologist, it sounds to me that .... genes changed...

The claim being made is that 7% of his DNA changed, not his genes.

A 'gene' is a distinct set of DNA nucleotides. What changed were 7% of his gene's expression levels, across time. Which is not a particularly remarkable finding. If approximately the same 7% of genes changed for most astronauts after x months in space, then that would be more interesting. The 7% change is a n of 1 experiment.

No. They're completely different things. Genes are a cookbook. Gene expression ("activity levels") is cooking. You don't need to rewrite the cookbook every time you want to cook something different, you just pick a different recipe from the book. Gene expression changes all the time. That's how you can have different types of cells even though they all share the same DNA. And that's how your cells can adapt to changing conditions. Including changing your diet. Or spending a year in space.

That's a great explanation -thanks !

The genes did not change, the expression did.

The blueprints for building a classic Ferrari doesn't change, but depending on the handcraft of each person who touches the car, it changes. Easiest way to explain that.

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