Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I found the attempted humorous article "Here are the subjects our [science] reporters enjoy covering the least" to be very revealing of typical reporter attitudes

> How could [discovering exoplanet] not be dramatic? If you're an actual f$@!%%# astronomer, that's how. Because then you'd feel compelled to drone on for page after page of details on the different telescopes you used, and the software pipelines the data went through, and how everything was normalized to... Exoplanets, which are BRAND NEW WORLDS UNKNOWN TO US get announced with excessive details on Monte Carlo sampling and Markov chains. I would not have thought it possible to suck the life out of stories like these, but the people who have chosen to make this their life's work manage.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/here-are-the-subject...

In other words: "Why do these eggheads spend so much time worrying about whether the things they think they know are actually true when they could be talking about how it makes them feel?"

Seems like the "journalist" does not understand the role of academic artifacts (such as published papers) or science in general. Most academics are not trying to drive excitement in the general population with their research, but rather appeal to their peers, who by the very nature of their job must evaluate methodology and formal approaches to ascertain the quality of the findings. Sensationalizing your research before it has attained general acceptance in your discipline (or ever) might be fine with regard to PR, but terrible for your overall academic career.

That's a little too purely social - a better explanation might be that scientists care a lot more about being right than the public, because if the public gets something wrong they have careful scientists to set them straight, but if the scientists collectively get something wrong they'll just be wrong forever. As a result the measures of certainty matter far more than the statements themselves, because a mild-mannered truth that is indeed true is perfectly valuable while a bombastic claim in which nobody knows how confident they should be is perfectly worthless.

I think both of you are basically in agreement.

> Editor's note: On a more serious note for you scientists. We love you guys, we love what you do, and we understand why these things have ended up the way they are. Thanks for being patient while we vent.

I think you are just misunderstanding discussion of why covering science is hard in a form of writing readers enjoy, for actually criticizing scientists for doing what they do.

Lots of lazy journalists want their subjects to write their copy for them. They prefer PR departments, marketing pros, and savvy self-promoters who do as much of the work for them as possible. My wife occasionally gets contacted by publications in her field that want to feature or just mention her work. She used to send every publication a similar blurb talking about the work in her own professional voice, but over the years she figured out that they either borrow extensively from what she sends them or don't include her at all. Now if she wants the coverage she checks out the publication and sends them something customized for their audience and writing style, and they always use it.

Did you mean to reply to the 9to5mac article about the Bloomberg hardware expert Joe Fitzpatrick concerns about the Supermicro story? If so I do not understand your comment

"They’re not outright wrong, but they are theoretical"

The source is upset that his technical jargon and long-winded explanation didn't make the final article. That's the connection to the above post. If you are a non-technical reader, and you had to read the raw transcript of a hardware guy telling you about firmware updates, you'd fall asleep. The point here is that the journalist cut out that stuff, which maybe makes the story less accurate, but the point of the story is still preserved.

That doesn't seem like a good summary. The bigger criticism is IMHO this:

> When the piece was published, he was expecting to read about how this specific hack was achieved. Instead, he said, Bloomberg appeared to be parroting the precise theory he had outlined.

It's a summary of the above poster and why they said it. It answers the question of why the post was written. I don't have any stake in this.

I think you are misreading it. The source is upset because his long winded explanation /did/ make the article, but evidence that his explanation was anything other than theorizing did not.

he was expecting to read about how this specific hack was achieved. Instead, he said, Bloomberg appeared to be parroting the precise theory he had outlined

I don’t read that as jealousy, but surprise that his theory became fact in the story.

But you're claiming the opposite of what happened.

Yea, I did. I agree my comment was tangential to the article title, but the idea is that the overconfidence in these sorts of stories might be at least partially attributable to journalists overemphasizing importance/impact/emotions to the detriment of accuracy/skepticism. (I actually said something to this effect when I first wrote my comment, then removed it because I felt like I was editorializing too much.)

The relation of journalists to the truth is quite similar to the relation of used car salesman to road safety; I am sure every used car salesman can tell you a story about the clunker he didn't sell. (The big difference is, that for some reason newspapers don't go on and on and on about how important used car salesman are for democracy.)

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