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Comment by ke88y | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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-podca...

>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.

A lot of it depends on who (as in, which group of scientists) is doing the considering.

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.

> one way ANOvA is just a t-test

If there are only two groups, yes. There are often more than two groups.

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.

The die hard masking advocate is your example? Wow

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.

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.

Alternatively leverage LLM and feed the papers to the LLM, massage for impact, tweak for demographics and print and publish my dude

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.

> It's a very exploitative industry dominated by soulless conglomerates.

Sounds like a good reason to do a worker cooperative where money is important but stability of the whole is key component, so their decisions are often to keep united.

I think the industry as a whole isn't in a great spot. It was in a death spiral before Trump brought some temporary relief (through endless controversies), but I'm not sure if they were able to keep that momentum going.

Nobody pays for news anymore, and that was before GPT. Even worker coops need a source of income. At this rate I'd be surprised if the industry survives at all...

I think this is a chicken/egg dilemma, because if you could peek into an alternate universe where every journalist was a fully qualified professional in a STEM field, suddenly the power dynamics in the whole industry would shift because every journalist could credibly say "treat me right and pay me well, or I'll have a different, better job tomorrow."

> It may be decades before you pay off student loans

Easy fix there. Stop requiring degrees. Carl Bernstein failed out of college.

Science reporting is one of those things that I think a formal education could actually help with. Especially since much of the job is dealing with academics and interpreting their jargon and unspoken assumptions for the public. Those are three very different cultures (academic sciences, journalism, mainstream) and it's not trivial to flow between them. Most readers don't have even a rudimentary grasp of scientific methods or statistics.

A large part of our curriculum was looking at the challenges of science communications (especially in regards to climate, but also cultural conflicts, land use, blah blah). The background context in the field was super helpful as a news reader. I can't imagine trying to write good stories with sensible context without that sort of understanding.

Could someone self-learn it? Probably. But I think the risk there is blindly falling into some tribe or another and becoming another controversial screaming head (and some would use the same argument against formal academia).

The more I learned about the field, the more I saw it as a no-win scenario. :/

I went to a very academic uni and my professor grumbled that while our students were all "clever" none of us knew how to make a poster. Which is also kind of important when you're doing research and presenting your findings

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.

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.

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

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-sci...

For some. My mother had a pretty solid biology and medical background before covering medical news.

There isn't enough money in journalism anymore to sustain this.

Colleges really need to upgrade STEM requirements for liberal arts.

At my alma, science/engineering required 18 arts credits while arts required only 6 science/math credits.

They can't. Liberal arts classes are taught at such a massively lower level that this requirement would mean STEM courses would have to be dumbed down or liberal arts majors couldn't pass. Lots of failed STEM majors in history class, but did you ever run into a failed liberal arts major in diff eq?

I went to a UK uni but my observation was that the curve was much narrower and forgiving for humanities and then much broader for STEM. So this meant it was much more straightforward to get a top grade in STEM but on the flipside it was easy to objectively fail.

Whereas for humanities it was extremely opaque what it took to get a top mark but most people would get a decent mark. And almost no one fails.

In the US it's just A's all the way. If you want to see where the problem comes from, just look at the average GPA in a teaching degree program! Standards are in the past here. They are even dumbing down math class now in the name of "equality."

> and that reporters could never become capable of doing it

I disagree for any current reporters who were selected by going to journalism school rather than by gaining expertise and then turning to journalism.

J-school in general is probably a poor criterion. Someone who has just done a bunch of reporting (and other things) isn't really less qualified to do journalism that someone with a J-school degree.

I'm not saying they are; if anything I'm saying the exact opposite.

One of the problems is that journalism just doesn't pay very well in general.

So news organizations may look for people with more experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in paying for that news/writing themselves.

I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of the people who write on deep technical topics either don't need the money or are doing it as a sideshow of their day jobs.

(Which, if they write for independent news organizations can be an issue. The WSJ reporter who basically uncovered the Theranos scandal quit because he couldn't give public speaking engagements.)

It doesn't pay well enough now.

30 years ago a BSc could accept a slightly lesser salary for more wide social-cache and more excitement working on magazine features and still afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood. It was dollar-a-word work at the time. Expenses too if you were good.

Pick any magazine-story-becomes-romance from the 80s, 90s, 00s (e.g. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) to relive the glory days.

Now, no science grad could make that choice.

Yeah. I do occasional contract work these days and $1 to $1.50 a word for stuff I'm not being paid for anyway by my day job is OK--and pretty much my floor. Ends up being a couple hundred dollars per hour.

But that's really not a random online pub rate.

Journalism was pretty much never a super high-paying profession for most but, as you say, it could be a solid middle-class job which it mostly isn't today absent other or related income sources (which tend to be difficult given ethics rules). And working for the NYT, WSJ, Time, or Newsweek certainly had a cachet as an often Ivy League grad.

There are still specialists but probably not as many as newsrooms have been cash strapped.

NPR had a bunch of economic reporters and they’re mostly ok but they still get a ton of stuff wrong, so it’s not a great solution either.

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-ad66f...

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.

> 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.

Journalists love reporting on flat Earthers even though their beliefs have no impact on anything in the real world:

https://news.google.com/search?q=%22flat%20earth%22&hl=en-US...

Realistically, journalists like to report on fringe or weird beliefs so they can laugh at the people holding them, and dislike reporting on serious disagreement with things they want to be true.

Agree that almost nobody is reading the papers, outside of random tweeters and bloggers. Journalists might as well start, though. Reading obscure documents is a part of the job, classically at least.

You can still look at credentials.

If there is disagreement among people with appropriate background, experience, and education, it can be reported as a legitimate disagreement. The journalist should be evaluating the credentials of sources, but not what they say, and not on the basis of whether the journalist personally agrees with them.

> 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.

Correct. Part of the problem is that there is disagreement about whether a disagreement exists. Cranks believe that there is a vigorous debate about flat-earth/evolution/climate change, and scientists don't.

Do how does one (journalist) objectively determine whether an issue is settled or not?

Great comment.

One thing I'll add: if you don't have specific training in the field in question, just ignore any use of "scientific consensus" to justify an argument.

The "scientific consensus" trope is just dressed-up appeal to authority, and even if there is such a "consensus", it's almost never broad enough to be applicable to whatever pop-science journalism thing you're reading.

Also, even within the hallowed halls of academic science, most scientists are just repeating things they've heard other people say. Unless the "consensus" is amongst scientists who have spent their entire career studying the specific question (and by "specific", I mean...hyper specific, not just "in the same field", and certainly not something meaningless like "epidemiology"), this kind of thing just devolves into a popularity contest. You'd be shocked by how many PhDs just confidently repeat whatever silly thing they saw that morning in the New York Times.

Also, since I'm already seeing the meme appear...people are waaaaay too worried about "amplifying fringe voices" these days. News flash: if you don't know what you're talking about, then you can't possibly know what you should or should not be "amplifying". Stick to what you know, be modest about what you don't know (which is most things), and let the facts sort themselves out over time. Science only works if contrarians get a voice.

> Science only works if contrarians get a voice.

This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.

Sometimes a contrarian is right and the accepted consensus is wrong. But that doesn't happen only because the contrarian position is contrarian, it's because the contrarians brought receipts. They applied proper scientific rigor and came up with a falsifiable theory that fits empirical observations and is sufficiently predictive. They also set out to disprove their hypothesis.

Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit. It's far easier to spam stupid contrarian ideas than to produce real rigorous scientific output.

As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

> This is more of the rather tired "contrarians are always right" meme that seems to crop up constantly on HN.

No, it isn't. I literally did not say that, I didn't mean that, I don't believe that, and trying to spin it that way is a tortured way of reading the very sentence you quoted.

Contrarians don't have to be right to require a voice for the system to work.

> Not all contrarians need a "voice". It's not worth anyone's time to rebut yet another unfounded and stupid perpetual motion theorem or electric universe bullshit.

The point is, you aren't smart enough to know the difference. Nobody is. The way I know that science is working is because I can see the all the disagreements and judge for myself. Efficiency isn't the goal.

But since you're concerned, I spend exactly zero percent of time time worrying about perpetual motion or electric universes. Even if I did spend time on this, that's my choice, and who are you to tell me otherwise?

Folks who want to protect "my time" from "unfounded theories" are rarely as interested in in my time as they are about censoring things they don't like.

> Efficiency isn't the goal.

Well, it shouldn't be. But in case your research is informing "urgent" policy decisions, it's hard not to get frustrated and just want those who disagree to shut up.

In most things science I doubt you can "judge for yourself". In a field where you have some expertise, perhaps.

At least I don't have the knowledge (not just technical but also the lingo-related aspect) to read any paper or judge between any different positions on non-trivial things.

That's fair, but that means it's all the more dangerous to blindly accept things as facts. The field is important too; the more objectively data can be gathered and analyzed, the more trustworthy the research is. There are always issues, of course.

"Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

> Science only works if contrarians get a voice.

I completely agree, but it's counterintuitive. There's a part of me that thinks "science == reproducible, observable fact". But it really is much more (er, less) than that. It'd be nice if there was a different word for the "not irrefutable" parts (i.e. almost all of it).

I'm not sure what scientific thing would be reported on in popular media, there was a scientific consensus that was reported on and was wrong. Anything from the past 3 or so decades you can point to?

I agree with your prescriptions, but worry the point might've slipped by.

> READ the papers

The point of my original comment is that most journalists don't have the educational background required to do this. And everything else flows downstream of that problem.

The issue is not that they can't do it, they just don't want to. Journalists with no science background are happy to write quite technical fact checks of articles - even articles written by scientists - when those articles are contradicting something the journalists are already invested in.

And often the problems don't need specialist knowledge to spot. The before/after images purporting to be of surgery in this article can be detected as fraud by anyone:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

No expertise needed. Blatant stuff like that is more obvious than we'd hope.

The issue is that journalists could do better if they wanted to, but they don't want to and there's no system of incentives in place that would make them want to. There's no such thing as a journalism license they could lose, and publishing nonsensical science articles doesn't hurt their careers in any way because nobody expects better of them. After all, they're just journalists with no STEM education...

Even if you somehow forced science journalists to all get STEM dual majors, it still wouldn't make them care. They'd still take the path of least resistance and pump out slop. The only way to make them care is to put them under editors that enforce standards. But how do you make a publication care enough to hire editors that care? Even state funded university press departments notoriously sloppy. If they can't uphold standards, I doubt any organization can.

I don't think you have any idea of the kind of time pressures journalists are under, and how little time they have to devote hours or days of deep research to each and every story they work on. At best you can get that for a large story if you're an investigative journalist, but very few have that privilege.

All of the journalists I know personally would love to have more time to dig into stories, to do more background research, to spend more time following them up, and to get to understand a subject more deeply. None are given that opportunity in today's high pressure, short-staffed, and cut-to-the-bones newsrooms.

wrt 1., there are an unfortunate number of cranks for every discipline. It would be funny to see journos publish the emails that every faculty member who releases their email in the university phonebook gets as Serious Disagreement* though.

it's rare for "layman" to find true errors in papers, and you weren't a layman when you did your investigation, as you say in the article.

That said, 90% of all papers contain at least one important error that brings the conclusions into question. Note that even great papers that established long-accepted truths contain important errors, see both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Controvers... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

Similarly, the original 3D structure of DNA from W&C was actually "wrong" but I truly doubt any laymen (laypeople) could have determined that by reading the original paper (which is a paragon of clear and simple scientific reporting).

Although it's true I wasn't a layman, it turned out my own expertise in bot fighting had no utility to reviewing the paper. The review was done as a "layman", because the sociological subfield of twitter bot research has nothing to do with bots :( Anyone could have written that and actually most of the paper takedowns in that subfield are done by a team of a CS prof (with no specialism in bots) and a data journalist.

Understood. At best, though, I think these takedowns are based primarily on "technical invalidation": identification of one or more faults in logic, presumption, study design, or execution, which brings enough question to the results/conclusions that it's best just to assume the paper isn't worth reading.

(put another way: many papers that contributed what appears to be new, true knowledge contain factual errors, some of them invalidating, yet the paper turned out to be correct, in terms of its conclusions, in the long run)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

But isn't that a journalist's job description?

>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.

> 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.

multiple sources as well. present contrasting viewpoints

Agreed, need some more flat earth points of view instead of all these spherists.

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.

"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.

> You don't have to understand it to write a story about what they said.

Pretty much the silliest thing I've heard today!

"Dr. Scientist, you said that vaccines promote herd immunity describe your evidence for that claim"

"Dr. Scientist, you said that mRNA vaccines aren't going to mutate humans, describe your evidence for that claim"

"Dr. Scientist, you predicted this year is hotter than ever, but back in February it was -20. Why did you lie?"

There are an infinite numbers of terrible questions you could ask as a reporter, if you don't have expertise. You need some degree of knowledge to talk about a subject, the only debate is how much.

I have often asserted that one of the reasons the lab leak hypothesis has so much backing in the wider press vs. most epidemiologists and virologists I know is that it moves the pandemic back into a realm in which they are experts.

Nate Silver is much more comfortable asserting his opinion about this than I am, because, as an infectious disease epidemiologist who primarily focuses on the stochastics of disease emergence and disease extinction, my expertise is a good two weeks after when either a zoonotic jump or a lab leak would take place. Take that for what you will.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

True that - and we are back to the CP Snow "Two Cultures" pamphlet (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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Based on most of the lawyers I know? Poorly.

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

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.

Yes, I'm aware. I'm making an analogy to the entire project of journalism. Do you want to argue the point?

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, aren’t we asking for too much then?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Maybe start there.

> Big question: HOW?

Independent, transparent and publicly available journalism (open to critics) simplifies things a lot.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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