Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Step 1: Flurry of fearmongering articles that appeal to the prejudices of the target audience with logical hole large enough to drive a freight train through (usually correlation=causation/post-hoc reasoning or statistical silliness.)

Step 2: sell tons of papers, products, and ads to the credulous.

Step 3: point out logical flaw.

Step 4: sell tons of papers and ads to the incredulous.

Step 5: profiles of the people who were influenced by the original story, painting them as crazies (or are they visionaries? You, the reader, decide!)

Step 6: sell tons of papers and ads to the gawkers.

Final disposition: People get stupider as a result of reading the paper than they would have been by completely avoiding it, and they completely dismiss everything they read, relying instead on their prejudices and what they heard from a guy once.

edit: I've noticed the successful garbage health panics seem to be structured like sympathetic magic (like-with-like, metaphors, symbolic connections.) For example, "Study Finds Depression Causes Death in Close Relatives" won't work, but "Study Finds Depression Causes Heart Disease" does. I think of this one as "Study Finds Standing Up Prevents Lying Down."

Step 1: throw all your newspapers in the bin, cancel your subscriptions and point all of the major news sites' URL's to 127.0.0.1.

Step 2: start reading scientific journals and other high quality sources of information.

Step 3: call all of your friends idiots for not doing the same.

Step 4: begin to hate your life more and more because you can't identify with the appaling ignorance that surrounds you.

Pessimistic step 5: throw yourself off of a tall building.

Optimistic step 5: build a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

Final disposition: you are no longer a part of society at large.

Step 6: Realize that, however well-informed you may be in some narrow field, we are all woefully ignorant of so many other things that said knowledge is, in a broader scope, quite trivial, and that separating from society at large is just another symptom of said ignorance;)

Tried this, don't have enough time to get past step 2.

Avoid step 3. Separating lies from truth in the media is a full time job. Most people have other full time jobs, children, and mortgages. Be trustworthy and explain without condescension instead of calling people idiots.

Caveat: this will help you to inform the people around you about what you think is true, but it will work even better if what you are saying is silly and appeals to everyone's prejudices.

Uncritically reading every scientific paper you come across and taking the information in there for absolute truth is dangerous and a problem many untrained journalists have.

You need to have a background in sciences and a minimal understanding of statistics to properly judge the results - is the sample-size large enough, is it varied enough, did they use the correct statistical test for correlation - lots of papers out there are absolute crap (either unrepeatable results or missing mountains of needed information), published just because someone was friends with the editor or all peer-reviewers were asleep that day.

Note: Even the mythical Open Access doesn't help with this problem, as there too are editors deciding in favor of their friends and peer-reviewers gone fishing.

This is exactly why people are skeptical of science. They view it almost exclusively through the mass media filter. When you see massively conflicting stories on a monthly basis it's easy to conclude scientists are just 'making it up as they go' and believe what you want to believe.

The problem is there are plenty of scientists who are willing to lend their credibility to these sensationalist stories.

Every story has an interview with some expert from some university backing up the premise, because scientists are people too and some of them want their 15 minutes of fame like the rest of us.

I take it you've never spoken to a journalist.

Their job is not to present the findings in a balanced way. It is to present sharp, punchy, telegraphic prose that grabs a reader's interest and holds it long enough to justify the cost of the adjacent advertising.

Oh! And they need it done by 4pm sharp.

Conversations can go along these lines:

Journo: "What does the study say, Doctor Bloggs? Will people who sit more die sooner?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Well it's too early to say that for sure. It's only a preliminary result. There's no full randomised trial, it's a meta-study based on a few dozen other studies. "

Journo: "But what was the conclusion? Does sitting shorten life?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Well when the researchers controlled for known risk factors like age, heredity and so forth they found a correlation between sedentary time and lifespan. But it's only an early result, much more work has to be done."

Journo: "What does that mean in lay terms?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "It means that based on this study, people who sit for longer had a shorter life expectancy."

Journo: "Would you say that means that they died sooner than they otherwise would have?"

Dr Bloggs, PhD: "Sure, that's one way to put it."

Next day:

SITTING IS KILLING YOU SAYS DOC

Prominent local medical scientist Dr Blogg said yesterday that people who sit too much "die sooner".

"People who sit [have] a shorter life expectancy", he said.

His comments come after the publication of a report...

At no point has the journalist strictly lied about what Dr Bloggs said. He just left out that tedious fluffy sandbagging scientists always insist on and cut to the heart of the matter. The journalist here can source every word in the report.

Everything you ever say to a journalist can and will be published.

They are not your friends. They are not normal people who keep normal confidences. They do not observe social niceties or politeness in conveying what you said.

They will print only what makes for an interesting story. And that will only rarely be what you, the source, had in mind when you spoke to them.

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