I spent at least an hour reading through both the emails and the slack messages in this "expose", but I came away from it fairly certain that they are being portrayed unfairly, and I'm fairly surprised that Nate Silver has latched on to this. You have to both look at the time-line of the paper writing and the time-line of the conversations. By my reading, by the time the paper was being written, most of them had indeed come to the conclusion that (1) there was no evidence for an engineered virus, (2) that the data was consistent with both a leak from a lab (without engineering) or from exposure to animals, but that (3) the former was not as a priori likely, given what they knew about the kinds of research being done.
You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They started with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved away from that view the more they learned.
The lead author of Proximal Origin wrote this in slack on April 17, a month after the letter had been published in Nature Medicine:
"Okay, so about the current news. Is there any reason to believe that they might be onto something, or is it all smoke and mirrors? Eddie Holmes - any insights on the China side? The main things from my perspective:
1. Bioweapon and engineered totally off the table
2. If there is no engineering and no culturing, then it means that somebody magically found a pre-formed pandemic virus, put it in the lab, and then infected themselves. The prior on that vs somebody coming into contact with an animal source infected with the virus is as close to zero as you can get. Humans come into contact all the time with SARS-like CoVs, but the likelihood of somebody finding exactly that pandemic virus and infecting themselves is very very low (make no mistake - if they did find that pandemic virus. then they would get infected if they grew it in the lab - but the likelihood of them finding it in the first place is exceedingly small (or so one would hope - otherwise, good luck World avoiding future pandemic).
3. But here's the issue - I'm still not fully convinced that no culture was involved. If culture was involved, then the prior completely changes - because this could have happened with any random SARS-llke CoV of which there are very many. So are we absolutely certain that no culture could have been involved? What concerns me here are some of the comments by Shi in the SciAm article ("I had to check the lab" etc) and the fact that the furin site 1s being messed with in vitro. Yes, it loses it but that could be context dependent. Finally, the paper that was shared with us showing a very similar phenomenon (exactly 12bp insertion) in other CoVs has me concerned...
I really really want to go out there guns swinging saying "don't be such an idiot believing these dumb theories - the president is deflecting from the real problems" but I'm warned that we can't fully disprove culture {our argument was mostly based on the presence of the O-linked glycans - but they could likely play a different role... We also can't fully rule out engineering (for basic research) - yes, no obvious signs of engineering anywhere, but that furin site could still have been inserted via gibson assembly (and clearly creating the reverse genetic system isn't hard - the Germans managed to do exactly that for SARS-CoV-2 in less than a month)."
And:
"Shi didn't do any GOF work that I'm aware of - but GOF work isn't the concern here. She did A LOT of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses from bats (in BSL-2) and that's my main concerning scenario (we cite several of those in the paper - if you have a look at those original publications, it's definitely concerning work, no question about it - and is the main reason I have been so concerned about the 'culture' scenario)."
I don't think much more needs to be said. The above messages are self-explanatory.
Also, in the accompanying press release from Scripps, Kristian Andersen says:
“These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2.”
In that April slack conversation, the lead author expressed strong, persistent concern about a lab cultured virus that had adapted and become pandemic-ready through that process. Lab culturing = lab manipulation.
Authors have taken their names off papers for much less.
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
Pretty standard scientific writing. I think the lesson is don't trust journalists and the general public to not blow what you're saying out of proportion and assign it more certainty than you intended.
Lab leak is possible, sure. But keep in mind every horrible disease humanity has faced up until the early part of the 20th century came about before microbiology labs even existed. Historically, a zoonitic origin is extremely likely.
Imagine if polio or smallpox or leprosy popped up today, you'd have every Joe internet theorizing how it came from a lab in whatever country it appeared in first. I guess back in the day they used to say it was punishment from God. The Spanish flu, God out there smiting the Spaniards.
> Historically, there have been far, far more documented lab leaks of SARS-CoV than there have been animal-human jumps
No. First of all, there were many jumps of SARS from animals into humans, over a period of months in which the markets containing infected animals were open. Second, while there were a few leaks of SARS-CoV after it had been discovered and was being grown in large quantities (these leaks were recognized immediately, too), there is no precedent for a previously unknown coronavirus leaking.
> It is very possible that the virus was both zoonotic in origin, and leaked from the lab.
Not really. If the virus is natural in origin (which is a certainty now) and completely unknown before the initial outbreak (also a virtual certainty now), the chance that it somehow entered a lab, unknown, and then exited again are basically zero, compared to the chance that it spilled over in any one of the many millions of daily interactions between humans and wild or farmed animals.
They were selling farmed wild animals that we know can carry SARS-CoV-2 at the Huanan market, and that's where the initial outbreak was centered. In contrast, there's zero evidence for a lab leak, and not for lack of searching. There's simply no evidence that anyone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had or knew about this virus before the outbreak, and we have a very good idea of what the WIV was researching.
> First of all, there were many jumps of SARS from animals into humans, over a period of months in which the markets containing infected animals were open.
Can you point me to one or two cases you are talking about, please?
They may be referring to the study below [0]. This showed that several genetic variants (lineages) of SARS-CoV2 were identified in infected people associated with the market, indicating 1) that the virus was already circulating among people before the epidemic took off, and 2) that there was more than one transmission event.
Note that no comparable data associates SARS-CoV2 with the lab in Wuhan.
>we inferred separate introductions of SARS-CoV-2 lineages A and B into humans from likely infected animals at the Huanan market (38). We estimated the first COVID-19 case to have occurred in November 2019, with few human cases and hospitalizations occurring through mid-December. [...] the evidence presented here that lineage A, like lineage B, may have originated at the Huanan market and then spread from this epicenter into the neighborhoods surrounding the market and beyond.
>We show that SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity before February 2020 likely comprised only two distinct viral lineages, denoted “A” and “B.” Phylodynamic rooting methods, coupled with epidemic simulations, reveal that these lineages were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans. The first zoonotic transmission likely involved lineage B viruses around 18 November 2019 (23 October to 8 December), and the separate introduction of lineage A likely occurred within weeks of this event.
For the rec, comment I'm replying to highlights two simultaneously released papers that both include 4 of the 5 authors of the 2020 paper, Proximal Origins, that is in question by the Nate Silver piece that headlines this HN post. (The 5th author, Lipkin's "view has changed":
"The revelation that the WIV was working with SARS-like viruses in subpar safety conditions has led some people to reassess the chance that SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged from some type of laboratory incident. “That’s screwed up,” the Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who coauthored the seminal paper arguing that covid must have had a natural origin, told the journalist Donald McNeil Jr. “It shouldn’t have happened. People should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has changed.”
SARS repeatedly spilled over into humans during 2002-2003, until the markets were shut down and the infected animal populations were culled. A review on SARS [0] describes how many independent clusters of SARS popped up over a period of months, spread across different markets in the Pearl River Delta:
> Between November 2002 and February 2003, the first cases or clusters of SARS appeared in several independent geographic locations in the Pearl River Delta region in southern Guangdong, and suggested multiple introductions of a virus or similar viruses from a common source. Several of the early cases were reportedly associated with occupations that involved contact with wildlife, including handling, killing and selling wild animals as well as preparing and serving wildlife animal meat in restaurants (Xu et al. 2004). Moreover, a study of early SARS cases (i.e. those with disease onset prior to January 2003) compared to those identified later in the outbreak found that 39% of early-onset cases were food handlers, whereas only 2%–10% of cases between February and April 2003 were associated with this occupation.
The review goes on:
> It was observed that early cases of SARS occurred independently in at least five different well-separated municipalities in Guangdong Province. The study also found that early patients were more likely than later patients to report living near a produce market, but not near a farm, and nine of 23 (or 39%) early patients were food handlers with probable animal contact.
The review also discusses how many SARS spillover events were not recognized at the time:
> Several studies revealed a higher than normal seroprevalence of SARS-CoV antibodies among wild animal traders. Guan et al. (2003) found that eight of 20 (40%) wild animal traders sampled from a market in Shenzhen, Guandong, in 2004 had anti-SARS-CoV antibodies in comparison to 1 from 20 (5%) vegetable traders from the same market. Yu et al. (2003) analysed serum samples taken on May 4, 2003 from animal traders in three different live animal markets in Guangzhou. Out of 508 animal traders surveyed, 13% had antibodies to SARSCoV; 72% of traders of masked palm civets ( Paguma larvata ) were seropositive. Interestingly, none of the animal traders had SARS or atypical pneumonia diagnosed during the SARS outbreak in Guangdong, suggesting asymptomatic infection by SARS-CoV or a closely related SARS-like coronavirus.
SARS probably spilled over countless times into humans during 2002-2003, because there was a large population of farmed animals that had it, and very little was done to cut off the spillover source for months.
This is a key difference from SARS-CoV-2. This outbreak was detected much more quickly (because of China's experience with SARS), and the very first thing the authorities did was to close the Huanan market and crack down on farms that raise the types of animals that are most likely to be involved in the spillover.
There were countless spillover events for the original SARS. To this day, it's not known precisely how many SARS spillover events there were, because they were so numerous and tracing was so poor back then. In a different comment in this thread, I cited a review article that goes over the evidence for widespread spillover events of SARS in 2002-2003.[0]
The gist of it is that SARS popped up independently at numerous markets, dotted across the Pearl River Delta. SARS infection was very common among palm civet traders in the region (it's even possible that most of them became infected).
The lab leaks came later, after huge interest emerged in the new virus and it started to be cultured in large quantities in many labs. Those leaks were extremely rare compared to the spillover events, they were immediately detected, and they led to much stricter lab security practices. But the relative probability of a novel virus that nobody even knows they have initially leaking from a lab vs. spilling over from large animal populations that host the virus is basically nil.
You're mixing up animal > human transmission, and zoonotic events. They are not equivalent. Human SARS spike protein RBD could bind palm civet ACE2, but not vice versa. Palm civets (and other animals) could act as reservoirs for human SARS, (as well as non-human SARS, which contributed to the zoonotic event), but that's not the same as a new virus jumping species. It's more like getting rabies from a raccoon.
It's possible that the original SARS jumped 3 times total, based on the genetic evidence, but the later two we don't really know because of the hinam -> animal route. Still, with the number of laboratory acquired infections of SARS-CoV-2, it doesn't really tip the scales.
If rabies were a novel virus that had never infected humans before, you could make the comparison. SARS was a novel virus, which spilled over into humans in a very similar manner to SARS-CoV-2 (wild animal markets in a major Chinese city).
> It's possible that the original SARS jumped 3 times total, based on the genetic evidence
As the review I cited explains, the epidemiological and serological evidence makes clear that SARS independently jumped over to humans at many different locations, over the course of months.
> It's possible that the original SARS jumped 3 times total, based on the genetic evidence
You're saying animal -> human transmission of a human virus is equivalent to animal -> human transmission of a new virus. Those are two *extremely* different things. The palm civet SARS spike protein RBD did not gain the ability to bind human ACE2 many times. In fact, the evidence for that seems to only be a single time. The remaining two suggested origin events show mutation of the existing virus, followed be retransmission across species barriers.
Those are two completely different types of events.
> You're saying animal -> human transmission of a human virus is equivalent to animal -> human transmission of a new virus.
You're making up an entirely arbitrary distinction.
> The palm civet SARS spike protein RBD did not gain the ability to bind human ACE2 many times.
You have no idea if this is the case. Most of these small outbreaks were not analyzed in detail (or even known about until well after the fact). The evidence shows that the virus was able to jump from animals to humans numerous times, and possibly spread in small clusters.
No, they're two very different things, because one involves an adaptation. Once adapted, the rules of the game for cross-species transmission events are completely different.
Or do you maintain that a combination cross-species transmission and adaptation to the new host is as common as cross-species transmission of already-adapted viruses?
I see that you're trying to imply that SARS-CoV-2 was pre-adapted to humans, while SARS wasn't, so this is going in a conspiracy-theory direction.
I guess the Wuhan Institute of Virology also produced a special deer-adapted version which they released into the wilds of North America, and a mink-adapted version they released on farms in Denmark, and a hamster-adapted version, and a cat-adapted version, and on and on. Both SARS and SARS-CoV-2 have shown an ability to infect a range of different species.
You haven't made a coherent point yet. You're trying to draw a distinction between zoonosis and animal-to-human transmission. The former literally means the latter.
And then claiming that the numerous independent clusters of SARS that popped up in wild animal markets across the Pearl River Delta aren't examples of zoonosis?
There are numerous cornaviruses that infect humans as well as bats and birds, and have done so for thousands of years at least. Animal-to-human transfer of novel viruses is by far the most common cause of novel epidemics.
>Many human coronaviruses have their origin in bats.[75] The human coronavirus NL63 shared a common ancestor with a bat coronavirus (ARCoV.2) between 1190 and 1449 CE.[76] The human coronavirus 229E shared a common ancestor with a bat coronavirus (GhanaGrp1 Bt CoV) between 1686 and 1800 CE.
My point is that we don't have any documented anything for the first couple hundred thousand of years of humanity's existence, and we encountered the most horrific viral and bacterial infections, many of which caused unthinkable mass deaths. They were so awful we attributed them to God(s) as punishment for our bad behavior. None of them have documented microbiological origins. Some would have some from spontaneous mutation in humans and many would have come from animals. They are de facto not lab leaks, so the fact that we have some lab leaks documented in the last few decades isn't really convincing. There is nothing there that makes a zoonotic origin less likely.
Here's a scientist who said we couldn't dismiss the lab leak, and asked for more research, which he did.
The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.
That article is from 2021, but he stands by it in 2023:
"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."
Edit:
2 things.
It's important to rule out that the idea that this could only be engineered, which would imply a definite lab origin. That is why engineered viruses come up. A non-lab leak is certainly plausible, and a lab leak is not ruled out.
There are labs all over China, there are markets all over China. The overlap of cities having both is significant. Viruses appear in larger, denser population centers. The "next thing" was very likely to appear in a city with a lab. The thing is, it's not very close to the lab. There's a large cluster around the market.
Lab theory doesn't have much going for it. It's not actually that close to the epicenter. There are labs everywhere. SARS is widely studies.
Sure some viruses have long incubation periods, but that would show as far less of a tight cluster around the market. Your hypothesis seems to be that it spread from lab distantly because of incubation time, then stopped spreading distantly once it reached the market? That does not make sense.
>Your hypothesis seems to be that it spread from lab distantly because of incubation time, then stopped spreading distantly once it reached the market? That does not make sense.
It's not my hypothesis, I'm just pointing out the evidence is circumstantial and the language used by virologists is precisely engineered to lump together strong evidence that proves one thing (that the virus was zoonotic in origin) with weak evidence they want to claim proves another thing (that it couldn't have been a lab leak). It's dishonest language and it drives me nuts, because people aren't sheep or idiots, can find the inconsistencies, and will further have their trust in institutions eroded.
This whole debacle reeks even more when you look at the timeline. These claims were coming out before even that circumstantial evidence was available, when this really truly was just a best guess because it's how we think the last SARS operated.
My personal opinion is that:
1) We'll never have any better evidence than what we have now (so we'll never have any good evidence, short of the Chinese govt being hacked)
2) It doesn't really matter because both are plausible and so our safety models should include both
3) The thing of real importance here isn't what is being debated, but rather how the debate itself was performed, and what it says about authority, institutions, honesty, and elitism in the scientific community.
> 3) The thing of real importance here isn't what is being debated, but rather how the debate itself was performed, and what it says about authority, institutions, honesty, and elitism in the scientific community.
This! This is the point of Silver's piece. Whether or not the virus escaped a Wuhan lab, the summary dismissal of the hypothesis as an conspiracy of cranks, without engaging on the facts, _reinforces the legitimacy of crank-fueled conspiracies_.
I'm being very precise to avoid conflating lab leak and natural origin. There is a possibility those are the same thing. The virus could have been discovered in nature, brought to a lab, and leaked. I personally find this whole debate pretty boring, but it really worries me how frequently people mix this up. These two things are not exclusive. Argument in favor of one does not invalidate the other.
Re: a few specific points.
>The early cases are clustered around the market. I know the market and the lab are "close" on a global scale, but the details matter. They are 30km apart, about a 45 minute drive in traffic. Looks about as clear as John Snow's map of cholera outbreaks in London.
This is a bit of a trap. From that article:
>What about cases near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is more than 10 miles from the market? "There are no cases around the WIV," Worobey says. "If the outbreak did start in the lab, the bottom line is, it would be odd for it not to be spreading from there rather than from elsewhere."
The thing here to consider is that, lets say someone gets an accidental exposure. There's an incubation period, in which you are not shedding. Then you move around. Epidemiological data only shows where the first human-to-human transmission happened, not where the animal-human jump happened. Since you aren't immediately infectious after contracting the virus.
Re:
>"What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion."
SARS-CoV (the original) notoriously escaped a Beijing lab, not once, but twice.
SARS-CoV also has the added advantage of being much easier to track, because the symptoms are so severe. With SARS-CoV-2, the symptoms are so mild, it's unlikely most people would think it was anything but a cold. Whether someone that worked at a virology institute would think that is a matter of some debate, but people have died from laboratory exposures before because they thought they had a benign illness, so it certainly has happened.
The problem is, people aren't having a genuine discussion. The communication goes something like this: someone says something about lab leak, and gets shut down by saying "the science says animal origin was more likely". The scientists are saying "the data says this was likely an animal to human transmission". But if you dig in on either of those points, things get shakier and shakier. The data that the virus evolved in animals, strong. The data that the virus evolved in any one specific species - less strong. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species that was in the wet market, even weaker. The data that the virus evolved in an animal species at the wet market, and then jumped from animals to humans at the wet market? Basically non-existent - circumstantial at best.
The only piece of data in that tree that would directly contradict the lab leak hypothesis is that last little bit of data. But it all gets wrapped up and packaged into the wordplay of "the data says the virus jumped to humans from animals", probably unintentionally by some, intentionally by others. The wet market hypothesis began because SARS had been found to transfer at a wet market in the past. But, that data has never been super convincing to begin with (this type of data never is, it was a full year after SARS-CoV 1 that antibodies were detected in civets), and there was no direct evidence of the wet market with SARS-CoV-2, so the hypothesis started out as pattern matching with an n=1 (SARS-CoV the original). Whereas, pattern matching with n=4 (or more) for lab leak works just as well.
Also frustrating is that not being able prove one hypothesis doesn't de facto validate the other. The hypotheses aren't even totally orthogonal! Only in very specific cases are they orthogonal, and those cases contain the weakest evidence of all the evidence in all categories.
The featured article is talking more about the conversation, and the nuances of the conversation, than it is the absolute truth of the matter. There will never be an answer, other than that "both are possible".
Re: the "spirit" of your point, if you will, which I interpret at something like "there are many more species than just humans, therefore most viruses evolve in other species and jump to humans", I certainly agree, but then we went and tipped the scales pretty badly by rounding up these viruses and putting them in close proximity to humans. And while we've been recording data, there have been far more lab leaks than there have been zoonotic events. So that argues that in the 20th and 21st centuries, we have, artificially, changed that calculation.
Nate Silver has been blatantly wrong several times during COVID, has been schooled by actual scientists and is now on a personal vendetta against them.
He is ready to fan the flames of science-bashing because his fragile yet enormuous ego has been hurt. That tells all that you need to know about him. (Don't believe me? He has never apologised nor shown a little bit of humility after being corrected. That's who he is.)
The science done by actual scientists. The ones that write:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another."
that Nate Silver is now twisting into "the scientists lied, don't trust them" because they had the intellectual curiosity to imagine alternative scenarios in a Slack channel.
This is a somewhat flippant take of mine, but is emblematic of a lot of Nate Silver's posting during the pandemic, which is that epidemiologists are all hyper risk adverse ninnies, and we're clearly at the end of the pandemic.
I've quit twitter and that stupid website now won't allow people to see tweets if you're not logged in, so I guess you'll just have to search "Nate silver wrong" by yourself, big guy...
Also, paper writing is a collaborative effort, which does not imply that everyone on the paper agrees with every part of it 100%. e.g. if I get Jane on the paper because she knows the more than me about X, but we end up having a soft disagreement about X, I'm not walking away from the paper.
Also ... authors have good reason to manage their interactions with journalists. They don't want to be used or misrepresented. Also, given the politics of the moment, they also had every reason to be cautious about what they said publicly.
Be surprised no more, there's an apparent garbage shute for lots of "journalists" and pundits where something unspoken about modern times bothers them enough that they just flip into being total nutjobs, riding on their previous respectability to keep eyes on them. Silver is part of a long tradition including Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, heck even the Dilbert guy of people who used to make sense, saw "something" that REALLY bugged them and they just threw it all away to become unintelligible cranks. Makes ya think.
Their ideas are perfectly coherent and consistent within their own framing. Just because you look at the world through a different frame, doesn't mean that these people are saying things that are unreasonable
I agree with your description of what these correspondents consensus seemed to be at the time of writing.
I don't see how this is at all consistent with that the paper claimed - "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible", nor how it was portrayed by the media - "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin".
The phrase "is not likely" imo should have been substituted for "is not plausible", though I am not sure everyone else interprets the phrase "not plausible" as meaning something like "almost certainly not true"; they could have meant it as, something like, "the least likely of all the possibilities, by a fair margin." Sure, I'd have preferred if they had been explicit, by giving their estimate of the probability of each possibility explicitly.
"the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario"
As an understatement, I don't think the authors accurately conveyed what their priors on the origin really were, nor what data they encountered to so dramatically shift these priors.
My only response would be (1) to point to the date of when he said that compared to the date of the final manuscript, and the all the conversations that occurred n between. I think that was from sometime in January. (2) we shouldn't read over-much into an off-the-cuff slack message, ostensibly shared with a small number of individuals, with his impressions and thoughts at the time. The purpose of those discussions is to bang ideas off the wall. In any case, I don't expect good scientists to rigidly hang on to an idea. I expect good scientists to evolve their thinking as they learn.
But you may be right that the published paper did not speak to what their particular priors were when they started out. I'm not certain that we should expect it to either. A lot of times you start off with ill-formed half-ideas, and while they may be where you started off from, the utility of sharing that starting point might cause more confusion--or even spread more misinformation--that do good.
A few years ago I started undertaking practices to let go of emotional attachments, which I discovered after a lengthy and difficult period trying to figure out how to overcome some major life challenges.
I’ve been doing these practices consistently now for about 11 years. Even after all that time, I’m not at all free of emotional attachments; I’m working through some very deep career-related ones right now. But that’s by the by.
One of the things you start to learn when you spend enough time doing this work is that people’s emotional attachments are way more powerful than people’s ability to reason and see logic.
One you see it, you can’t unsee it. I now notice it all the time, in journalism, on Twitter, on podcasts, here on HN, and anywhere contentious topics are being discussed, people who are regarded as being as “rational” and “scientific” in their worldview will routinely argue positions that are logically absurd but they won’t be able to see it, due to their emotional attachment to the conclusion. And often their interviewer or debating parter – even if they’re somewhat in opposition – won’t notice and call them out on it because they have the same attachment to the position.
I’ve come to believe that science and logic really doesn’t hold much sway in society at all; we have positions/conclusions that are largely predetermined via people’s egos and emotional attachments, then scientific data is cherry-picked to form a "rationalisation" that feels just valid enough to pass under people's radar.
> I’ve come to believe that science and logic really doesn’t hold much sway in society at all
Not directly. It's not like our politicians are having better discussions than the Ancient Greeks. We have satellites though, so that's cool.
Math, science, all that, they don't have much power just through words. They need an avenue like technology to get leverage. Cure polio or make a billion dollars trading securities. Then you have some sway.
People who believe themselves to be more intelligent than others have an easier time rationalizing anything just to maintain that image. It’s just arrogance in my view.
One way to detect this is to see how many public apologies, corrections, withdrawals, opinion reversals they have done in public. There aren’t too many front page news that sound like “Shit, I guess I was wrong about my position, I apologize for my condescending comments…”
Very well said. What’s sad is how hard it is to get people to recognize they’re doing this, and no one thinks they do it heven though everyone is guilty of it. I don’t know what the answer is but it’s destroying society’s trust.
"Here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."
I'm not "stoic" or much into any other "ism", and don't particularly align with many other people in "STEM" fields.
The practices I've discovered came after many years of experiencing debilitating emotional and physical pain, which is now mostly resolved, though not completely, hence the ongoing work.
That it's common for people to be influenced more by cognitive biases and other emotional patterns than logic is not exactly a novel or controversial notion, but it's easily forgotten, particularly by people who self-describe as "rationalist" (which I very much don't).
Anyway, I frequent HN in the hope of avoiding sneery comments like this one, which seems to break the guidelines.
I’m not sure if it is meant to make me aware of anything I wasn’t already aware of, but for the record, I’ve spent much of the past 10+ years thinking about the pros and cons of this work and wrestling with the risks/pitfalls she describes (as well as eschewing stoicism for pretty much those reasons).
One of the biggest changes from doing this work is that I’ve become less repressed and more compassionate and emotionally available, as well as being more committed to working to overcome societal injustice and dysfunction.
The biggest error a considered, good-faith journalist typically makes is "Presenting both sides" without comment when one of them is an established consensus with abundant supporting evidence. If you go looking for a fringe outside perspective on an issue, or the motivated reasoning of somebody who stands to gain by a bit of sophistry, you will probably eventually be able to find one presented by a PhD. That is not how research is supposed to work.
The biggest error made in the COVID origin story has been the hilarious ineptitude and imprecision of the actual hypothesis being forwarded, something that appears even in this article's metacommentary on the matter - all the various sorts of "lab leaks" that might have occurred are conflated, as if they were one idea that might be true or false.
As long as we are conflating all lab leaks, when I say an undetected contagion that happened to be on a bat they captured might have accidentally walked out of the lab in somebody's nasal cavity, you are free to hear that China bioengineered a weapon and unleashed it on its own people in the interest of striking out at 'Murica, demanding immediate geopolitical reprisals & a violent purge of the Chinese-American population (something a significant fraction of the country was very receptive towards).
"Lab Leak: True or false?" Both the same idea because we haven't bothered to specify. When a far-right politician does this it's clearly to sell the population a villain and sell themselves as somebody who will take revenge, and then be able to motte and bailey themselves back to the other position when the center-right gets uncomfortable with the level of racism. When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
Certainly you are correct that there are several different "lab" theory versions, and they vary by orders of magnitude in how plausible they are. However:
"I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario."
This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
Which is important, not least because "our propensity to pay China to do our research at the lowest cost has resulted in a virus leaking out of the lab" is very different in its implications than "China was researching bioweapons and released one". How is an ordinary person supposed to know which of those theories are remotely plausible, and which implausible?
If only there were a profession, between scientists and the general public, whose job was to help the latter understand the work of the former...
> This, is damning evidence regardless of any of that. Nothing remotely like this was being presented by mainstream newsmedia, perhaps because nothing remotely like it was being presented to them by the scientists they talked to. There was no version of a lab origin theory that was being presented as worthy of consideration.
You have to acknowledge this is incredibly weak logic. “A thing is possible, therefore it happened.” Is this molecular evidence the Furin Cleavage Site? Cause that was peddled basically as a lie - they occur in nature just fine, it’s also used in research.
I’m unaware of any compelling evidence for the lab leak theory, but I will acknowledge it’s basically impossible to disprove. We don’t know where most diseases arose (or where they came from) - it’s just we mostly don’t care, unlike with COVID.
Note that all of this is deeply problematic, EVEN IF the truth is that the virus was a normally evolved bat coronavirus that got to Wuhan through some method that did not involve a lab in any way. The dichotomy between what they were saying in public, and what they were saying to each other in private, severely undercuts the idea that they are who the public should be trusting for advice on this topic.
I don't know that I've ever heard such a violent "woosh" as the goalposts were moved. Going from "obviously happened, consistent with evidence" to "the problem is the way it was discussed in private" is just... wow.
I wonder how this would play out if we transposed it to any other field. If I was interviewed and asked if So-And-So had proved P=NP, I'd just say "almost certainly not" knowing that any other response would require an amount of nuance that wasn't going to be conveyed - despite having plenty of private conversations that "yeah, P=NP is total possible and it'd be interesting because...". And that's a pretty theoretical problem with immediate real world impact, and relatively little new being discovered day-to-day.
I'd be shocked if there was any non-trivial topic discussed in any field where the internal debate _isn't_ broader and more nuanced in private than what is conveyed in public interviews. That's a natural consequence of communicating to a population with less expertise than the speaker, IMO.
...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.
You forgot to mention the lefts position. They usually used the lab-leak theory to ridicule, mock and even have careers ended for those who dared to propose it as plausible.
As so many of our media outlets lean to the left, the mocking and ridiculing was clearly ubiquitous.
And when it started to look like lab leak theory had some merit, media just went silent on the matter.
SO I disagree hard with that it's a right or far right tool to sell hero worship.
Journalism has turned to absolute shit and anything that comes from the perceived "other" side must be instantly mocked without any investigation or partisan integrity. And should the "other" side show merit there will either be silence or continued mockery along the lines of "even a broken clock is right twice a day" .
Left and right equally guilty.
Journalism is a joke. Maybe it always was and it's just these past 3 years that made so many of us realise exactly what a sh**show it actually is.
This is especially true for the medical scientists who could not get their shit together during the crisis and seemed to have a pissingcompetition of who could recommend the most intrusive, obnoxious guideline that conflicted the most with what any other "expert" scientist recommended.
Masking toddlers, banning sitting on public park benches, banning children from playgrounds. Banning walking outdoors in company. Masking while standing up in a restaurant to take it off while sitting down.
Banning sports, isolating the elderly to the point of driving them to insanity and severe cognitive decline.
DENYING AEROSOL SPREAD. That one is my personal pet peeve with the scientific community.
The embarrassing list is endless.
My own trust in medical expertise, that is, the one I see in the news. Is at an all time low.
I ofc listen to my personal MD. But if she'd proclaim something in the media I'd probably never listen to her again and switch doctors.
An incredibly dumb take by someone who has no idea what he's talking about.
The Hershey factory in question is the Huanan market - you know, the place where they were selling wild animals, where the initial cases were heavily clustered around. It's not the research institute on the other side of the city that never even had a closely related virus in the first place.
Yah Stephen hit him on that point, he counters with Austin Texas and the nightly bat flocking behavior which is true. There’s all kinds of bats in Houston Texas too.
> When a non-affiliated journalist does this, it's a high-stakes professional failure, a display of carelessness that plausibly has a body-count.
I haven't seen any non-affiliated journalists doing this. I've seen right-wing journalists doing it, fitting whatever they can find into their ten times stepped-on John Birch worldview. What I've seem far more of is administration-connected journalists characterizing whatever position that they support censorship of in its most extremist, unhinged, obviously factually-incorrect form. Radical right-wingers insist that they're the only option other than current Democratic party orthodoxy, and Democrats agree with them 100%.
Journalists these days are generally not hired for their incredulity. They're hired based on a track record of not deviating from their employer's political and financial priorities, regardless of the evidence. These are businesses, not public services. They owe their existence to dishonest and manipulative presentations of the qualities of third-party products that they sandwich between their own content.
Lets go back to the days where media outlets were open about their editorial stances, rather than hiding them behind a veil of white-coated objectivity. Propagandists should stop pretending to be doctors, and just be honest propagandists.
Putting it all on Democrats isn't completely fair, although I get how bitter Silver is that they sanctified him when he told them what they wanted to hear and condemned him when the data pointed the other way. It could have just as easily been the Republicans in control of those institutions now if the party weren't so hostile to minorities.
That hostility cut them off from dominance of the nonprofit sector, which serves to convert the money of governments (i.e. the will of elected officials) and oligarchs into media messages. They're stuck with thinktanks and veteran's organizations, although they sometimes find openings in patient's rights nonprofits (run by pharmaceutical companies.)
Yes additionally journalists are a sort of priestly caste in our secular society.
I'm personally not a fan as there's a lot of self-anointed representation by journos: "We're the voice of the people!" No you are not my voice! You are not elected! You are the voice of advertisers, your business and your political interests!
WaPo runs “Democracy dies in darkness” while parroting the absolute lie that was Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian Dissinformation”… that imo takes extra arrogance beyond just “we’re the voice of the people” or CNN’s “This might be illegal for you to read but we can because we are trained journalists”.
>Insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop is fake is a trap. So is insisting that it’s real.
That's not saying it's Russian disinformation. Just that it's unconfirmed to be either disinformation or real. (Which, at the time, was the correct assessment.)
That’s fun that after their initial reporting [0] they left some wiggle room out while saying that it couldn’t possibly be verified except for all the ways it was verified long after the election.
The initial reporting days earlier didn’t use the exact phrase “Russian Disinformation” it did take a least half a dozen times say Russian Intelligence.
The Republicans absolutely have their own media organizations, just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's biased towards Republican interests.
It's just that the expectations are so low for them no one is surprised when they report things with an obvious slant or just factually wrong.
> The Republicans absolutely have their own media organizations
Everybody has their own media organizations.
> just as likely to get the facts wrong in a way that's biased towards Republican interests.
This is both the law of averages, and also not relevant even if you had a good reason for saying it. I'm not saying the Republicans are any more honest than the Democrats (god forbid.) The Democrats are generally pushing for the same policies as the Republicans, except in matters that split their bases; we're still living in Reagan's world. Democrats are dominant now because they control nonprofits that are funded by the government and because they are supported by more billionaires. No other reason.
20 years from now it could be the Republicans in that position. It isn't like they don't have the ability; their takeover of state governments and redistricting is basically the same sort of tactic.
> and because they are supported by more billionaires. No other reason.
If we take the 2022 House races, republican's House PAC received $79 million from 42 billionaires or their spouses, while democrat's House PAC received only $20 million from 17 billionaires or their spouses.
The numbers might play a little differently if you look at all donations to party affiliated PACs and individual campaigns but it doesn't seem like it reverses the overall trend.
>The Democrats are generally pushing for the same policies as the Republicans, except in matters that split their bases; we're still living in Reagan's world.
I don't think this is true anymore. See what Lina Khan was appointed to do and is doing with the FTC. It's the first step in a long road of undoing decades of Reaganism.
To be skeptical they first need competency to understand both sides of the argument. Unfortunately the longer I observe the work of journalists the more I become convinced,except few individuals, most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career.
This is a huge threat to democracy that one of the most important functions in society (to inform) has been "outsourced" to a bunch of random people that landed in this job because they failed in others.
Unless we find a solution to increase the quality of journalism or replace it with something else I doubt democracy as a system will be anything more than a facade over oligarchy or even worse dictatorships.
What is the solution? It has to be country specific, but one common theme has to be better wages for journalists to attract talent and much more strict requirements for professional conduct to filter out those unable to do it right. Both have to happen at the same time.
"most people that become journalists do so because they failed in their primary choice of career."
Well this is braindead. I assure you most journalists want to be journalists more than anything else -- that's the only reason to hang around in that industry.
+1, former and trained journalist here. I would say all the best journalists I know in person (many of them among the very best ones in my country) have almost exclusively had journalism as their primary choice of career.
What separates top level and (as a cynical metaphor or stereotype) "screwed up former musician, now a critic and journo, lost in life" level journalists is that the former ones really-really understand the ethics of journalism. They make well-grounded, extremely careful ethical decisions, and they are able to make them fast.
As a side note, in my country, I'd say ethical reasoning in journalism has reached a higher level during the post-pandemic years (and, now, the war in Ukraine). I think journalists' grasp of science (scientific reasoning) has improved quite a bit as well during this same period.
Obviously, everything can always be better (also, 90% of everything is not-so-good), but todays' best journalism is actually pretty decent, isn't it.
I recommend using "wrong" rather than "braindead". You're less likely to get people's backs up and more likely for them to be receptive. (Plus, it's less hurtful)
My impression is that it's nowadays a poorly paid career of choice for the propertied upper classes for whom the job is an identity and means of social signaling and only incidentally an income.
Same as acting - perhaps easier to get into though.
They were for sure a lot more talented when there existed such a thing as a working class journalist.
They probably also had more resources available to them to do real journalism - before tech took the lion's share of the advertising pie.
If they're not skeptical, *by definition* they're not journalists.
We need to stop giving credit where is *not* due. As it is, we're doing a version of "everyone gets a trophy". That's fine for kids. But if they want to be called a journalist they need to earn it (i.e., meet the criteria).
Furthermore, solo bloggers aside, this also falls on the editors and publishers. If some hack - notice I didn't say journalist - writes something that fails to meet the criteria then that should not be published. Full stop. But that's not what's happening. Instead we get less and less quality as the hacks drink their own Kool Aid.
The current situation is Orwellian. The hacks call themselves journalists. The journalists call the hacks journalists. The rest of us call the hacks journalists. There is zero incentive for the hacks (and associated editors and publishers) to fix their QA problem. Zer. Oh.
If your pet barks, do you call it a cat? Well, the same attention to detail should apply to journalists and journalism.
That is the start to fixing the problem. Stop letting bullshit get passed off as anything but what it is.
>Unless we find a solution to increase the quality of journalism or replace it with something else I doubt democracy as a system will be anything more than a facade over oligarchy or even worse dictatorships.
Very poignant observation. I really see no way that _any_ system will work for the masses for the long run. Even if the 'best' system is in place it will soon morph into a facade that ends up being a propaganda piece of the ruling class.
‘Journalist’ should be a profession like ‘medical doctor’ or ’structural engineer’ or ‘electrician’ or ‘architect’. Anyone can still write anything and publish it wherever they want. But the words ‘News’ and ‘Journalist’ become legally protected. If you want to claim that what you have written is ‘News’ and that you are a ‘Journalist’ you have to be registered with a professional body and you have to sign every article that you write and claim as ‘news’. This signature is like a checksum that can be verified to check that a story hasn’t been changed and that the person who wrote it takes responsibility for it. You submit this to a register kept by your professional body. Mistakes and retractions are also kept on file there. If you make a lot of mistakes or consistently ignore standard practices like not using multiple sources or verifiable sources you will loose your right to claim to be a ‘Journalist’ and all your past articles would be called into question. You can still say or write whatever you want but you lose the right to call it news and claim you are a journalist. I think something like that would protect freedom of speech but also give a sense of responsibility to the profession. A bad doctor can accidentally kill a good few people over thier career but a bad journalist can incite war or unrest that could potentially kill many more people. E.g. WMDs in Iraq that didn’t exist.
In reply to downvotes: Interesting… Is it the idea of regulation that you disagree with? Do you also think that professionals like Structural engineers, Electricians and Doctors shouldn’t be regulated? Or is it the idea of protected words ‘e.g ‘Medical Doctor’ or ‘Prescription’?
If i might speak on some behalf, an adjacent question is what would a political agenda in structural engineering registration and certification look like? Then, what would a political agenda in the registration of journalists look like? It feels sorta like regulatory capture. Why would we allow the government or some central organizing body to determine who is legally allowed to report on them. Because introducing certifications turns it into a legal proceeding, possibly prosecutable with possibly steep penalties. Then we've just provided the infrastructure to jail dissenting journalists on a silver platter.
Maybe if the world was in a better state we could trust anyone with the literal power over speech but have you seen the uproar over even corporate pseudo-control that exists now? Imagine a world where a President, instead of removing unfavorable journalists from his press conferences, revokes those journalists certifications and then jails them the next time they try to do their job.
Okay, so it wouldn't be the president who has that power, who would you pick? Name a person who you trust with control over investigative speech itself. That's where all the downvotes are coming from. You can't just say, what if we regulated journalism legally. You have to also introduce a system that doesn't immediately descend into hell or people are gonna be way against you
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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...
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Silver isn't arguing for-or-against the lab leak hypothesis here.
> To be clear, I’m not sure how COVID originated either. I’d “buy” the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood [...] and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other.
This post is his commentary on leaked communications demonstrating that the authors of the paper themselves didn't believe the contents of the paper. This has nothing to do with a medical background or what the CDC believes; media savviness is precisely the qualification required here.
His citations for those claims about the authors are 3 substack blogs and something called "usrtk.org" which seems to exist largely to spread covid origin rumors.
I'm going to go out on a limb a suggest that he's already made up his mind and much like Fox Mulder, he just wants to believe.
> We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public.
None of Public, Racket News, The Intercept, or The Nation are Substack blogs, nor are they publications that exist largely to spread COVID origin rumours.
But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
So while the title is technically true and I agree with the premise of the article, the article itself is wholly unnecessary at best and damaging at worst. Until we begin to be more skeptical in general and learn to distrust all the other mouthpieces vomiting lies every day, let's trust the scientists.
The essence of science is not trusting an expert, but requiring evidence and repeatability. Scientists aren't more trustworthy than those other groups for no reason, it's because they work in a field where work can be double-checked. As the repeatability crisis has shown, many believe their work will not be double-checked, and once they believe that, they become less and less worthy of that trust.
Right, that's why my first sentence was "everyone should be skeptical of every source"....
But if I'm forced to trust someone (and most of us are on a daily basis), I'd rather trust the guys whose whole job revolves around the principle of "we require evidence and repeatable results before we believe you" than pretty much every other profession.
Completely separate from my above point, I'd also say that I do believe scientists are on average more trustworthy than other career workers at a personal level. It's a profession that tends to attract people concerned with objective truth and rational logic. Just like how politics tends to attract those who want to work with people and the police force attracts people who are comfortable with violence. At least from my personal, anecdotal view.
This all makes sense to me, and I partially agree.
However, people whose whole job revolves around "you must provide evidence of something that gets published in a journal, on a regular basis, even if it is never of enough interest for anyone else to try to replicate it", with an extra helping of "if it's confirming people's biases enough to get you speaking gigs or a best-selling book, you get a pay raise", then you might over time start to attract a slightly different crowd.
> But out of the myriad of various opinions coming from politicians, CEOs, propagandists, flat out out idiots, and everything else in between, scientists are arguably the class of truth sayers you should be least skeptical of.
If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same?
I think that scientists are more likely to abuse the trust because it's implicit. You can't expect to abuse someone's trust in you (e.g. as a scientist) if you don't expect people to trust you. All the people you listed as untrustworthy are obviously untrustworthy, which is what makes them not a serious risk. Saying "I really want to trust scientists" is the same as saying "If you want to exploit me, use a scientist to do it." I don't think you need to look any further than the Tobacco industry to see why blindly trusting scientists is not a viable mitigation to propaganda.
I don't really have a good answer for how to make a good decision when you're ignorant (trusting scientists would make this easier), and we're all ignorant about most things. Being skeptical doesn't give you good knowledge, it just mitigates absorbing bad knowledge. So you're kinda stuck if you need to e.g. make a risk based decision about COVID and you don't trust scientists.
>If the CEO of a gambling company said, "Gambling is good." Do you think that would be more or less effective propaganda that if the CEO paid someone else, let's say someone in a white lab coat, to say the same?
Difference is that a the guy in the lab coat has to conduct experiments on it, get them peer reviewed, publish a paper on it, and lay out all the assumptions and methodologies before it's actually "science". So it's not as simple as getting a guy in a lab coat to say it. Especially when all the other guys in lab coats are saying "that guy is lying and his methodology is garbage".
edit: Global warming would have been a better example. You can point to scientists on "both sides" that each say the other is wrong. No amount of "blindly trust scientists" makes it better.
I don't trust scientists, in particular doctors, when they're effectively bought by big pharma.
I don't care if you have ten degrees from Harvard Medical School if you also take a 7 figure paycheck from big pharma, you're a big pharma rep as far as I'm concerned.
Same with economists who shill for various groups, and so on.
I suppose I can trust astrophysicists because so far we have no evidence they've been bought by alien civilizations.
As a former scientist, I would say scientists who talk to the media are much less trustworthy than scientists in general, and scientists in fields frequently featured in the media are much less trustworthy than the rest.
Nate Silver fundamentally misunderstands his own role in the information ecosystem. He and other journalists are primarily votaries to the mainline political myths of our time. This idea that they should be skeptical is laughable on its face. They can't do that, not meaningfully. Mostly, they can't actually think outside the religion, but even if they could they can't write skeptically without losing their careers.
There is an Overton window, and journalists are the Cerberus of the ideological superstructure of our society. If you're not familiar, Cerberus guards the gates of the Underworld and ensures that the spirits of the dead cannot leave the Underworld and that the living cannot enter it. That's basically the function of "journalists". Mainline newspapers and their scribblers share all the limitations of the governing classes and they never willingly place themselves in minority positions.
Cynical reaction: With how over-worked and under-resourced most journalists are these days, we're lucky when they have sources who might maybe actually know something or other about the subject at hand.
Bigger picture: In the specific case of COVID, what might have helped most would be some really mature meta-journalism. A calm Walter Cronkite telling us that, for the most part, nobody was really sure of anything. Loads of "1mm wide, 1km deep" scientists were scrambling to do stuff outside of their usual niches, usually in a fraction of the time they'd normally need, and under all sorts of emotional and political pressures - which they had no experience whatever dealing with. The vast majority of 'em had zero experience whatever in communicating scientific results to the general public. And a small minority of 'em suddenly found that they loved the limelight - about the same way that some teenagers suddenly develop a taste for hard liquor - and would certainly not be sources of reasonable nor sober information.
...but with umpteen million people stuck at home during COVID, and consuming any & all available news about it - what incentive did the big (for-profit) media corporations have, to deliver any sort of sober, mature coverage?
COVID was one place where their lack of skepticism really came through. Early reports of how COVID spread would have been deemed unrealistic quickly based on a basic understanding of statistics. The early reports of how long the virus lived and how easily transmittable it was should have meant the virus would have spread to a high percentage of the population immediately. Pfizer saying the vaccine prevented transmission even though it is a leaky vaccine should have raised skepticism to incredible heights. Instead, media used these reports to create panic, fear and division. I highly doubt it takes too much work to regurgitate other news outlets, Pfizer, and government organization talking points.
As long as the business model of journalism is running on fumes, there isn't going to be a renaissance in journalism quality. Truth-seeking is time-consuming and will always be inherently trading off against other local incentives, like writing quickly, writing exciting things, and writing things that your audience will like. If almost all journalists have to bust their ass just to survive, a truth-seeking culture won't thrive.
I think there are three main ways I can see things getting better:
1. Governments and academia have lots of money, but the money gets fed into a system of incentives that make academics not that good at either truth-seeking or popularizing their own work. This could change.
2. There is a large population of smart people who collectively can do a lot of truth-seeking and writing in their spare time, without needing to make money from it. However, right now there's not a particularly coherent way that those people can work together and produce collective information that is as easy to find and understand as mainstream media outlets. Improving technology to let amateurs work together and aggregate their opinions could be powerful.
3. The funding model for journalism could continue to evolve so that people who choose to do so can more directly fund truth-seeking journalism. Crowdfunding and self-publishing platforms are in this direction. This seems to me like it's already working fairly well in some cases to fund people's work, but then the attention market is not great at highlighting the more reliable voices, which is similar to the problem in point #2.
One thing that dulls my interest in this debate is my doubt that it will ever get “resolved”. We dont have sequence samples at the time of covids origin. China is never going to cooperate on giving more circumstantial evidence. So we cant really do any phylogenetic or epidemiological analysis at the level of spatial precision that this would require. The data is extremely fuzzy where it needs to be sharp. In my opinion, this is the real thing stalling this debate, not politics.
There's really no reason to care about which of the two prevailing theories are right, because they have the exact same outcome: Whether it came from the chinese lab or the chinese wet market, china will not let anyone know, and they have no intention of letting anyone else tell them how to prevent it in the future. We cannot make them run their bio labs safer, and we cannot force them to prevent a natural source without something stupid like extreme sanctions or war.
So instead, we could look at the ways we utterly fucked up when presented with a novel pathogen that we absolutely could have handled better. But oddly nobody who is so gung ho about punishing china for covid seems to want to look at that. Wonder why
Yeah I guess I contradicted myself somewhat. Im specifically referring to the domestic politics that Nate Silver is talking about, not Chinese politics.
I’m really not sure what you mean. There is literally zero evidence supporting a lab leak, while there’s multitudes of evidence of multiple contact leaps in the market.
Was there a time when the lab leak theory had the same credibility as it being naturally occurring in poor unsanitary market conditions? I’d personally say no, but for the sake of argument, forgetting basic tenants like “the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one”, let’s say that early on, both had little measurable credibility.
Now though, early contact tracing shows the earliest contractions are clustered to the market, and that the virus leaped across species multiple times during early phase. This is not a coincidence and it is also not what we’d expect from a lab leak.
The lab leak theory is conspiracy theory. Full stop.
This sounds like "your theory is outside the Overton window, you are not allowed to think this". The simplest version of the lab leak theory is not a conspiracy, it is very literally the opposite: "never ascribe to conspiracy what is adequately explained by incompetence". We had warnings, in writing, about the very lab in question, from western scientists, that the safety standards there were insufficient.
No. There is evidence to support that it naturally occurred through contact tracing due to the large clustered concentration of outbreak within the confines of the market.
There is no evidence to support a lab leak.
This is not “your theory is outside the Overton window”. It is you attempting to shift the Overton window intentionally.
Theres definitely lots of evidence: COVID on surfaces, animals that can catch COVID photographed in the market, cases surrounding/emerging from this point. But the smoking gun would be a covid positive sample from one of the animals, which we can’t get. This is what I mean by the evidence always being a little cloudy.
- we know of the US funding collection of coronaviruses at WIV; and research on them using humanized mice
- we know that the closest genetic match is a thousand miles away
- we’ve been unable to identify the precursor in an animal, unlike other pandemics
That strongly implies that directed evolution on a collected sample via repeated infection of humanized mice is responsible for COVID.
Contrary to your claims, there’s evidence against a zoonotic origin — no precursor, high human infectivity (of alpha) that rapidly decreased in the wild (in delta and omicron), unusual genetics around the furin cleavage, etc.
Two of the points are lack of evidence; these would be more compelling to me if I felt that our viral surveillance was robust. The first point is circumstantial like the wet market evidence.
Good evidence would be covid positive samples. We cant go back in time and collect this.
I mean the answer is obvious to me: reputational “skin in the game”. Lab leak is an extremely specific assertion that someone else could easily criticize.
Out of an infinite number of possibilities that are encompassed by "we lack the data to answer the question", you picked lab leak as a strawman, which is very interesting.
I think, as with any politically charged topic, journalists are going to have biases. I don't think there is any particular solution to this except being conscious of those biases, particularly as they relate to career advancement and money. Money explains nearly everything about the issues in the American media ecosystem for me, not cultural factors like "some journalists are more open about being on the left".
One writer that I followed nearly every day for the first 18 months of the pandemic was Derek Lowe at Science.org who runs a fantastic blog about drug discovery, and he has given his assessment of the origins debate a few times. The short answer is he doesn't know either unfortunately https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/origins-pandemic--...
“ The Times fired their Pulitzer Prize-winning coronavirus reporter in middle of the pandemic — a reporter who saw the lab leak theory as credible — and replaced him with another reporter who dismissed discussion of the lab leak as “racist”.”
This about sums up the state of modern journalism today .. sadly.
I wonder what he'd have to say about the article published on FiveThirtyEight in May of 2020 that prominently cites one of the authors of this very paper [0]. I don't think he was very heavily involved in the science-reporting side of fivethirtyeight (he's always very obviously been more on the sports and politics side), and since at this point since he's no longer affiliated with the site, it sort of doesn't matter, but I'm also pretty sure that he didn't just come to the belief espoused in this post recently. I wonder if there were ever internal discussions about the piece.
It seems to me that the authors of the paper, in anticipation that writing scientifically (that they don't believe the lab leak hypothesis, but it cannot be disproven) will be misinterpreted by journalists and the public, resorted to write in more certain terms.
I disagree with the authors. Scientists should not try to control the reaction to their publication.
I also don't think this cast a good lights on the journalists at all. The nature of the issue is that even if the scientists had been precise in what they wrote, what they wrote would have been distorted and misrepresented.
I don't think Journalists have the skills to be able to actually dig into and verify most types of science. So I don't think it's realistic to hold them to such a high standard.
But they absolutely do have the skills to shape the narrative. And In this case they failed spectacularly. Many seemed overly eager to attack and destroy any who came to a different conclusion. It seems like they took glee in it. Their behaviour was embarrassing, and there appears to have been very little acknowledgement or self reflection of this.
I respect this position on principal, but I also forget like we are equally glossing over the context in this specific case.
In 2020, the lab-leak theory was specifically being promoted by people who were advancing the idea that Covid was a) an engineered bio-weapon b) required a national security response in lieu of a medical one.
But if we really want to look back at 2020-2021, there were MUCH more egregious examples of "experts" wielding their credentials maliciously. School closures I think will be the most pertinent example for a while to come.
Incorrect, the lab-leak theory was specifically disregarded using the well-poisoning methods you described as the blame would be shifted to a wild-goose chase. Considering China went through SARS 10 years previous with hundreds of millions of patients to examine, combined with the influx of viral research into the country after that period, it is by no means a stretch to assume duplicity was at hand. A for-profit medical response is a conflation of the kind you are suggesting should have taken place.
At the end of the day, no one really should have cared that much where Covid came from in 2020. The only people who really cared were people who were trying to win a game of political football. This is equally true with the scientists in the Lancet letter as it was with politicians trying to win a pissing match with China.
If anyone posited alternate origins except what was the accepted leading thought of the time, they were ostracized across many segments of society. It became one of the things you couldn't discuss publicly.
Many topics became like this during covid including your mention of school closures. Weird time.
Both those ideas (a,b) are look to be vindicated. It does look like an engineered bio-weapon and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that conclusion. And whether the people pointing to a lab leak were also demanding a national security response or opposing one, that is what happened, i.e., it was a national security response (big pharma white labeling and providing distribution for DoD subcontractors product). Simple as.
From ASM Microbe in Houston, Texas, Vincent speaks with Eddie Holmes about the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into humans in the Huanan Market in Wuhan, absence of evidence for other origins, and his work on the virosphere.
Wow, you found a self-reinforcing quote from one of the co-authors of the very paper in question. C̶u̶t̶e̶
Edit:
Recognizing this forum frowns on snark, I will be more stoic. Whenever citing quotes in this debate, take but half a moment to observe the name of who is doing the talking; each side of the debate has an exceedingly finite set of vocal participants putting their scientific standing on the line, and, rightly or wrongly, their positions don't tend to change once made & vocalized.
So in a debate about whether person-X should have said thing-Y, it's epistemically distractibg (to oneself at least) to then go on to uncritically look at what person-X subsequently said on thing-Y as if it's unbiased, disinterested support of the position they also happened to hold earlier.
Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact.
But there is also another good point in the post: scientist need to be full and frank in their scientific writing. Selectively reporting results creates a huge problem in the literature.
But unfortunately this creates rather less hype which is what even research institutions increasingly need to survive it seems
"Very much so, and especially since a scientific paper that was published (after peer review) means that it is of interest to other scientist, not that it is a fact."
This is leaving out important nuance. You are right that it doesn't mean it's fact. It does mean though that other qualified researchers in the same field didn't find important flaws in there study. They didn't reproduce it, but from what's in the paper itself, it looks solid. This is a big difference to plainly finding it "interesting". I'm not certain to what degree "interesting" is even part of the review process by the peers for most journals or to what degree that falls to a different role.
There are professional journalists out there who in most organizations will get into hot water or lose their jobs if they fabricate news or sources.
They will have biases, they will make mistakes, but most of them will do at least some due diligence, and together with fact checkers - this is the best we have.
Accept that and move on - or sit there and tell yourself that "nothing is true, nothing is real". Get your news from @HotJerseyGirl1998.
"They also thought they were going to get away with it. 'The truth is never going to come out', wrote Rambaut in one message."
He took that statement way out of context. They were looking for the best explanation and given that their assumption of "the truth" about a lab leak wouldn't avail itself, they felt they needed to go on what would be a plausible scenario - a natural evolution of a virus.
While he's certainly careful to hedge (much like the scientists he's critizcizing), Mr. Silver's argument boils down to, "I think four scientists published a technically correct but politicially motivated paper, so from now on journalists should consider peer-reviewed publications by reputable PhD's as the equivalent of Johnnie RedHat posting on Twitter".
One very obvious thing to consider is how a paper, whether it’s philosophy or physics, was funded and which grants the authors received and from who. So many conclusions and biases are driven by funding mechanisms, sometimes it’s corporate and sometimes it’s government but the devil is always in the details and there is no safe or superior source of funding.
Sure? Due diligence is always important. I'm not implying that science and journal publishing, or journalism are in bad shape, but simply that scientific scholarships goal should be to eventually converge on a truth ( or more likely an exclusion of other opposing theories), whereas the goal of journalism to to seek a truthful point in time capture of a topic. Just because they're inherently different time scales to converge on truth, any given scientific discussion shouldn't be "thrown over the fence" with a low value copy pasta of the papers.
I think the vast majority of journalists and scientists understand this general statement, but just because most individuals are doing the right thing, you should always be wary of the reputational failings of relying on a source with little due diligence.
Journalists have always been best at reporting the facts given to them, even without understanding intent and all the other nuance surrounding those facts. So we as readers should never take what you read at 100%. I don't think that will ever change.
I love this little quote from "Michael Crichton"[1] as it's so true.
The danger with "be skeptical of all sources" is that it puts all the sources, including the trained scientists, the cranks, and the corporate shills trying to spin things their way on the same level. They wind up saying what everyone says, mixing in the good arguments with the bad ones, and saying "we'll have to leave it at that". One thing that can help is figuring out peoples' financial motivations. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, whose salary is depending on not understanding something?
the line about "The truth is never going to come out" is related to the uncertainty of whether or not it came from a lab, not (as the piece implies) having anything to do with "They also thought they were going to get away with it". it's very misleading and should be corrected
Don't be incurious, be curious and sensitive to what you understand and what you don't follow. There's a degree of humility involved where you honestly admit when you don't understand something and be vocal about it so people of good will can help fill in the blanks.
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Personally, I never accepted that a lab leak was out of the question. I simply didn't think it mattered during the early days of the pandemic response (to the everyday citizen) since it didn't influence safe hygiene and social distancing. It was used by conservative media as something for their base to get mad about and be mildly racist about (Wuhan flu).
What was more egregious was Dr. Fauci's assertion that masking wouldn't help slow the spread, which he likely knew to be false and had said so to prevent a run on N95s. I get it, but that is a huge undermining of public trust.
Individuals should be skeptical of all sources including journalists.
The question to ask is 'what personal experience have I got off the claim that is being made?'
Is it possible that I am just being steered by consensus, where consensus is presented in print and on screen by journalists? Is whatever-it-is just an idea/theory supported by 'experts say' or is any evidence presented that can be verified/tested? When I test the idea, have do I agree with the conclusions? Etc.
The scientific method should be applied personally in one's life.
Hanson's idea (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/gamble.html) of a betting market for science could be an interesting model for journalism. Probably easier said than done.
Clearly the media stakeholders had the narrative decided, and the journalists were forced to find the scientists that supported it and ignore or attack the scientists who opposed it
Same for politics reporting
The best way to stay informed is to read a book about something currently not on the news
This is not possible in my opinion, even if they are knowledgeable, skeptical, ask every right question. Everyone including journalists are career oriented and if you want to progress in career you need to write articles a certain way which will include bias
I agree. However, the problem lies far beyond the journalists' power. Let's take the latest investigation on the Biden family as an example. The IRS led the investigation for several years, and the IRS special agent provided a substantial amount of information pointing to bribes during their testimony. However, one of the political parties, including the FBI, showed no interest in finding the truth. This was evident from the type of questions that were asked. Why do they do that? Because they are protecting their own interests.
When it comes to journalism, we can observe the exact same pattern. Journalists are not allowed to be skeptical because their skepticism could impact their company's ad revenue. When I worked at Huffington Post, I was not "allowed" to say anything negative about the then-President (Barack Obama). Even after the FBI was pressured to release all the Biden documents (FD-1023 - the one they were initially denying the existence of), the "reputable" news outlets remain predominantly silent. Ad revenue is a significant factor in this silence. They are protecting their own interests.
Goes without saying. "Trusted" sources can also spin stories to the general public and conflicts of interests can happen which the established media can close ranks to protect each other.
To be fair, some scientists made fools of themselves and their (and mine!) profession when speaking to the media. And most of the time journalists treated them as infallible priests handing down absolute truths (like when someone mistook relative risk reduction for proportion of patients responding to a drug... in an EU national newspaper). I even saw falsehoods (yes, falsehoods) on immunity appearing on mainstream papers ("Omicron bypasses vaccines" - totally false): at some point I thought my immunology textbooks would self-combust.
More on topic, even though I tend towards the natural origin hypothesis, there's not enough evidence to show that it is the only possible idea, and that at least a leak (I think bioengineering is far less likely) is possible.
And personally I think (of course, that's just my opinion) the whole debate is there due to the Fauci controversy about GoF research, not necessarily about the actual virus.
Shutting down debate like this was never a good idea and in fact reinforced the conspiracy theory supporters. Because people are people, and despite the uncertainty, they started treating lack of evidence as "facts".
This level of cynicism is the cause of the downfall of society.
Journalism is as necessary as government. As necessary as speech itself. Particularly in the age of perfect facsimiles of audio/photo/video evidence facilitated by AI, webs of trust and reputable sources of information will be as important as ever.
It is dangerous and wrong to insult the profession as an idea.
None of this is to say that journalism is flawless any more than government or society is flawless. But it is necessary.
Journalism is necessary in the sense that thought control is necessary in (nominally) democractic societies. See Walter Lippmann and others. (This comment is not an endorsement of that worldview.)
You didn’t craft an argument. You just made a statement/assertion. Do you get to be lazy simply because your statement is the conventional wisdom? While I don’t get the same privilege?
A premise of your assertion—that one lives in a democracy—fails in the case of the US (a popular country I hear) since a Princeton study shows that there is zero correlation between the policy preferences of 90% of Americans and the policies that are actually enacted.
But the Walter Lippmann sense of propaganda is still relevant since the News is meant to herd the beliefs of that Political Class—the top 10%. See for example the book Manufacturing Consent.
To state that the US isn't an effective democracy doesn't counter the argument that journalism as a mechanism for an informed populace is necessary for an effective democracy.
It seems what I'm saying is "proper journalism is important" and I can't tell if you're saying "we don't have proper journalism in the US" or "There is no such thing as effective journalism".
First of all I won’t give credit to institutions that simply don’t work that way (“we don't have proper journalism in the US”).
Second of all the locus of what democracy is and how it functions would obviously be with the people if we took the concept seriously/were practicing it seriously. It would not be with people like the intelligentsia, the elites, or (here) the presserati; to indirectly suggest that a necessary component of “democracy” would be a distant entity called the Media which people—the entities with the supposed power—are supposed to passively consume information from by way of newspapers, the TV, and YouTube is a perversion.
A privilege of those in power is that they decide how to deliberate, how to reach consensus, and how to wield it. There are by definition no gatekeepers who arbitrarily decide what “informed” means and then revoke the faux power of the people when they decide they don’t meet it.
The problem of “an informed populace” reveals itself as a fake one in a hypothetical actually existing democracy since it is in the best interest of people in power to be informed about what they are deliberating about, simply because they then can effectively use their power. Contrast with the status quo where you could spend dozens of hours each election cycle and only have a minuscule effect—or perhaps no effect at all—as you get to pick on of the elite-filtered candidates.
Of course what is often revealed on this topic is that many consider the above to be total nonsense. Instead they don’t want democracy but “elite democracy”: the elites make most of the decisions and then the mass of people get to help resolve elite internal feuds once in a while by way of votes. (This is what we nominally call “democracy”.) But they cynically call this form of governance “democracy” for blatant propaganda purposes. The real term is used in technical discussions while “democracy” is used when they just want to communicate the sense of “our great free and egalitarian form of governance”.
And they don't just work on behalf of power, they are power themselves, and it isn't the people's power despite their claim to being "the voice of the people".
How do you know that? Certainly it happened sometimes, and it still happens sometimes, but was it ever common? Maybe journalists like to tell stories about the times journalists did really good work and they deliberately leave out all the many more times they didn't. Media tropes of principled gumshoe journalists breaking important stories are probably not representative of what it was typically like.
I have been upset with the NY Times for years because of their uncritical addiction to access journalism.
* They held into the Abu Ghraib story for a year to avoid influencing the 2004 election.
* They dismissed and discredited the story about DNS lookups between email servers at Trump Tower, Spectrum Health (DeVos / Erik Prince), and Alfa Bank (Russia) in 2016.
* They uncritically repeated the Barr memo about the Mueller report. That one I couldn't believe -- there had been weeks of reporting about how Bill Barr had been hired/appointed to suppress the Mueller investigation. Then Bill Barr publishes a memo a few days before the report saying that it's no big deal, and the NY Times is publishing mea culpas about how they had done wrong by reporting on Trump/Russia connections exposed by the Mueller investigation??
Instead, it seemed like the New York Times liked getting scoops from their sources high up in government, and they didn't want to preserve those sources by not upsetting them.
This and the Judith Miller WMD fictions to turbocharge Iraq war justification, and Maggie Haberman's sycophancy during Trump years all add to evidence not being the liberal bastion that people believe for some reason.
Skepticism by the unqualified is just denial of expertise. Whatever Mr Silver's qualification on statistics, it does not render him any sort of expert on contagious pathology nor on coronaviruses in general.
Skepticism is warranted when one has an underlying knowledge basis to interpret new statements, put them into context of the existing models and detect something amiss. Without that foundation, what being called skepticism is just an assertion of one's lack of knowledge. Dunning-Kruger effect in spades.
People have to make judgments about which experts in which fields to trust. Should I believe a Catholic priest (or a Muslim imam, or a Jewish rabbi) when it comes to questions about the nature of the universe? What about when it comes to questions of ethics? They are experts, after all.
What about psychology? I am by no means an expert in psychology, but I'm also well aware that there is a big crisis in that field, where apparently most results can't be replicated, and there seems to be a lot of both outright data manipulation and just sheer incompetence with statistics on the part of researchers. But should I just uncritically accept results in that field? Again, I'm not an expert, so apparently I'm not allowed to be skeptical.
This is actually an excellent article. If you look at why he says the lab-leak theory was problematic for these "journalists" (and the quotes are deliberate), none of the reasons are "it isn't true":
1. It could cause a political backlash
2. It could upset China and undermine research collaborations
3. It could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory
But in fact, the journalist's only legitimate question is "is it true?" The consequences of reporting on it are not their concern.
There was a time when journalists thought that way, or at least made a show of it. That time might have been a few brief decades, but it was there.
I think we've made a huge mistake in our notions of "experts", especially the blind assumption that we need experts to tell us something on every arbitrary issue.
On all the recent issues, you can and should engage with reality directly. They're all compact in scope and source materials. There's not a lot to read re: COVID origin arguments, mask efficacy, etc. For example, with masks there's hardly any research, no randomized trials in America, only one in the West (that isn't good enough to use anyway).
There's no secret knowledge on these issues, nor are there any priestly intellectual capacities. Moreover, COVID origin isn't centrally a scientific question as much as a forensic/investigatory issue. Reality is exogenous to academic journals, and this question is structurally exogenous. For example, that Fauci and friends funded research at the Wuhan lab and had an unusually severe conflict of interest by our customary standards is an important fact, one that we don't need peer-reviewed research to know.
It would be worthwhile to model the cognition of "experts" when they address these issues and formulate their opinions and statements. We can easily see in many cases that there's not anything proprietary or extravagant going on.
For example, Sen. Rand Paul was censored and condemned by leftists for saying that cloth masks don't work, or "do anything", which I take to mean reduce COVID spread (in either direction). He's likely correct, though we don't know because we haven't done the trials for any mask type (we don't need trials for all questions, but we need them for mask efficacy for several reasons).
YouTube censored his videos (media interviews). Politifact, a leftist activist/censorship outfit, purported to debunk him by citing an animation of a mask (on the New York Times website). An animation. (And it was an animation of an N95, but treating an animation of any mask as evidence is savagely stupid, truly idiocratic.)
Politifact also cited an "expert". He was a random doctor in Minnesota, a pediatrician. Doctors aren't experts on mask efficacy, much less for a specific pathogen, much less a new pathogen. They're not experts on arbitrary biomedical or epidemiological topics. This experts thing is starting to look like a mystical superstition that will get us all killed. *The experts on scientific questions are the people who conduct research on those questions.* Since there's hardly any research here, there are hardly any experts on this question, and more importantly, we can just read the research and ask whatever questions we have.
The doctor lamented "lies" about masks. He didn't cite any research. I'd bet thousands of dollars he hadn't read any of the few journal articles on the subject at the time (August, 2021).
It turned out he was just a maniacal leftist activist on Twitter, a man who had called for two different Republican politicians to resign in just the previous couple of weeks, for being "traitors" and "liars", retweeted that the governor of Massachusetts "hates children and science". There was no reason for Politifact to cite or know of the existence of a random Minnesota pediatrician, other than he was a Twitter maniac who would give them the quotes they wanted. The Politifact activist who wrote the piece exclusively "debunks" claims by non-leftists or that are incongruous with current mandatory Democratic Party narratives. He stopped fact checking Rachel Maddow when she infamously claimed that the COVID shots prevent infection and transmission, (it's not clear that leftists are aware, even in July 2023, that the shots don't do these things, and why):
"A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them, the virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else," she added with a shrug. "It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people.""
Politifact never fact-checked the above, just stopped checking Maddow altogether, giving her a free pass. Note that Biden made the same wildly false claims, and to my knowledge has never corrected or apologized.
So the "experts" thing is getting in the way, obscuring reality, preventing us from thinking clearly. You'll also see bizarre citations of the CDC, of some anonymously written CDC webpage, a page full of errors and false citations (their science of masking page), with no stated methodology (e.g. meta-analysis with inclusion criteria). There's no need to just cite other people's opinions, and whether any organization is reliable is an empirical question. The CDC's reliability cannot simply be assumed, and because there's so little research we can just read it, then look at what the CDC says and ask any questions we have. (The CDC doesn't have its own research or data on mask efficacy, which they'd have to publish if they did – they ran no trials. They only cite outside research, have been stunningly lazy, incurious, and misleading.) Certainly, journalists should do this.
It's critically important to not outsource our cognitive activity or our connection with reality. We're dealing with a mass stupidity situation here, where there's very little sign of cognition, much less intellect, on these topics. We've got people unaware that an arbitrary reduction in pathogen population doesn't necessarily reduce infection risk (masks), that we don't know the long-term or even short-term effects of brand new pharma, that finding traces of raccoon dog material mixed with COVID virus on a surface doesn't mean anything at all, that men are much stronger and faster than women even of the same weight, etc. This is not a scientific civilization.
We're seeing too many at-a-distance arguments about experts and science and "who to trust" on issues that can be navigated efficiently with a few key background facts, good alertness, and a 110 IQ. We've got to get people to read, because it's clear even journalists aren't. Just read the damn papers first, and then we can talk about whether we need experts to tell us or explain something.
It's also troubling that we've got a political ideology that explicitly demonizes asking questions. Leftists have a trope of "just asking questions" that they use to marginalize anyone who, well, asks questions that deviate from mandatory narratives and beliefs or is willing to think independently. It's a very bad sign for an ideology to have that kind of dogma, and if you were going to have that trope in your ideology, you'd need to fortify it against its obvious propensity toward bias and motivated reasoning by building a robust framework that differentiates between villainous and sincere questioners, creating lots of room for rigor and curiosity. Leftists haven't done that, with predictable results. (Trying to build the framework would likely illustrate that you need to just get rid of the trope and not marginalize questions at all.)
Social psychologist here. There's a profound lack of cognitive activity in American journalists, and what I'd call legacy leftist media especially. I don't think we can explain what happened here without reference to their off-the-charts partisan political bias. I've never seen anything like it.
It really matters to them that a Republican said something, or takes a particular view. In this case they swarmed on Sen. Cotton, who made the most mundane comments saying it was possible it was a lab leak, that it was worth investigating, etc.
Leftist media like the NYT and WaPo falsely linked him to a "bioweapon" "conspiracy theory". The bioweapon trope stuck like construction adhesive – I see MSNBC activists like Hasan and the Atlantic editor still pushing it. As far as I know, no prominent Republican has ever asserted that it was a bioweapon, suggested it was likely to be, or treated it as a major option.
We also see a historical revisionism (Hasan again), where they falsely assert a racial narrative where Trump first speaks of a China virus, then leftist media fabricate their "debunked bioweapon conspiracy" narrative as some sort of justified deception as a triage against "racism" or what have you. Trump didn't say anything about a China virus until several months after leftist media fabricated their narrative.
There's a profound prejudice and malice toward outsiders/non-leftists that makes objectivity impossible here, especially if those outsiders are Republicans/"the right". And all dissent and rigor is being coded as "right-wing" and "far right" by leftist media now – even longtime leftists and Democratic voters are being falsely tagged that way, if they say, call for schools to reopen, oppose censorship, note the lack of good evidence for mask efficacy (any type of mask, either direction), note that natural immunity outpunches the mRNA shots, etc. Left-right framing is devastating, primes a binary sorting.
I also think it's a big problem that leftist ideology has no commitment to integrity or cognitive independence. Humans generally don't display integrity when tested without an explicit commitment to it. Leftists aren't rewarded for it. It's not extolled and championed in their culture. It's easy to imagine a culture where it is, with a good virtue ethics that is more important than political ideology.
## Reading papers
I agree that journalists and just humans generally should read the damn papers. Those of you who say they can't should first go read some of these papers first. There's too much distance between people's views and reality, including the reality of academic papers. I'm convinced that the most savagely stupid human artifacts are found in journals like Science and Nature.
It's very common for social science studies and papers to be fully invalid or simply false. Fraud is trivially easy in academia, is not seriously investigated most of the time, and academics are unfamiliar with the word "audit". But you can detect catastrophic invalidity by just reading a paper in many cases. For example, here's a recent Nature paper on misinformation, ironically. It's completely false, invalid, and also fraudulent for good measure. Discovering the fraud requires reading a separate paper, since they don't disclose details of their method in this paper, details that make it fraudulent (they rigged their dataset, a dataset which is invalid and unusable anyway). We're not trained to deal with the infinite variability and arbitrariness of social science methods, so if you assume peer reviewed papers must be basically okay and valid, you'll be fooled. I also recommend blocking out all stats – they seem to bedazzle and fool readers, give papers a scientific sheen. Block out the stats, read the words, think about what stats would be valid given the words, then unveil what they did.
There are more false claims in the body. The opening sentence is stunning – gun violence is not a leading cause of death in the US. It's not even close (it's a Top 10 list, and it's in the top 15 that year). It's not actually a category in the CDC's list, but a subset of homicides, which is also not a leading cause of death. (Nor are "guns" the leading cause of death for children, a popular, stunning bit of misinformation – journalism is in awful shape.)
So we have a plainly false claim to open a journal article in Science. They won't retract or correct. (Note that their editor rails against the NRA "and its minions" and touts the promise of "science" to discover something useful re: firearms to push for his authoritarian policy preferences. Yet he publishes false claims and won't correct or retract them. Science indeed.)
Finally, here's a great and devastating example of idiocratic collapse. It's just one paragraph, the opening. Who among you can figure out what he did? Solve for his X. You need to be able to solve an exponential equation. That's your only clue. Ignore his obvious error in the text of calling a tiny number a large number. How did he get that number?
Once you understand the gravity of what he did, you might want to retreat to a cave or something. That stupidity of this savagery could be published in major American outlets is damning. Note it might take you weeks to process it. In fact, it might be hard to articulate what he did. You'll see what I mean, and his words are actually broken in a way that will contribute to the problem. (Not all strings of words are meaningful, and his aren't.)
I communicated with Gavin Schmidt, the head climate scientist at NASA, about this and he understood the core problem. But he wouldn't contact Rolling Stone to tell them it was wildly false and invalid to get them to retract. (They won't correct or retract their hoaxes without lots of pressure, if they advance leftist ideological narratives.) I'm not sure Gavin solved for X though. I wanted to see if he would do it without prompting. The climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy had no clue – she didn't even know the 20th century mean offhand, which still confuses me. I can't possibly be more versed in climate science than an actual climate scientist, but it's possible she's an outlier (her website touts awards of Most Important People, a huge red flag).
Can anyone solve for X? What's the nature of what he did?
These are just some examples of how bad things are out there. This political ideology is devastating to science and reason, and a bunch of people seem to be assuming that someone else is paying attention and gatekeeping. You can model the consequences in your head.
Perhaps it's because I'm not a native speaker but I have no idea what you're trying to tell me. I'm trying to take the most positive interpretation and that you're saying that you're putting me into some right-wing lunatic fringe corner that's somehow pro-Russia? I honestly don't know. And... you never asked a question?
Perhaps read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, especially where it's about comments. I'm not the best example of always following them myself but I'm having a hard time extracting anyting of value from your comment. Sorry.
Your comment reminds me of this line from the submission:
"There’s also a generational divide in journalism, with younger journalists tending to be more openly left/progressive than their older peers — and tending to be more Manichean in dividing the world between good and evil rather than proceeding from the notion that people and news stories are complicated and it’s not particularly their job to pass moral judgment."
This is probably true of the younger generations in general, not just journalists.
Sadly any attempt at communicating a nuanced view makes you subject to vicious attacks from binary thinkers, who often miss the point and derail the discussion.
Interesting. So we should probably have a more nuanced discussion about the Holocaust, yes? Hitler had his complicated reasons for it, and we need to be able to see his point of view.
You know, at some point, if you try to see "both sides" like this, you are going to lose the plot.
The answer is plurality within the scientific community.
During the Covid authoritarian period, scientists like Dr Robert Malone were evicted from society because they didn’t toe the government line on support for mRNA vaccination.
I’m not saying Malone and co were right, necessarily, but the way they were shut down and demonised suggested to me that we stopped doing real scientific enquiry for a couple of years and succumbed to corporate lobbying and government over-reach.
In 2023 I assume all news is biased or flat false. I assume all video is doctored or flat out generated. After one day I stopped consuming it all together as it was a pointless waste of time
1. an independent youtuber, who gives their opinion, can admit their bias, and is able to operate on good faith while allowing open discussions with people they disagree with
2. a corporate "journalist" who's integrity has become second rate in the age of the internet, who uses language as an instrument to get people to admit what they want them to admit in the most petty way possible
i can agree with 1, i don't think 2 fits the definition anymore. it used to be the best we had for a few decades, but that age is over now. i don't think 1 has any problem with admitting what should be an area of skepticism. however, i don't think that 2 is actually a journalist as they're not motivated to share information, they're instead motivated by the narratives of their employer
1. Is as likely if not even more likely to be biased because they got multiple incentives such as their personal ego, clout, vendetta, financial and more.
A journalist is not just someone asking questions, it's someone able to do a report and crucially be source critical which is a skill, 90% of so called journalists on YouTube do not do this.
2. This definition makes no sense and it sounds more like you're confusing reporter and investigator.
Yes this. Additionally (1) has no "higher caste" mentality. Whereas (2) often believe themselves to be the anointed truth-sayers of a secular world. Generally speaking they don't live up to that promise.
The real problem with the lack of skepticism in journalism is not science but foreign policy, literally the death of more than a million people (in the case of the iraq war) can directly be attributed to journalist malpractice and there has been ZERO change or recognition of their structural failure, its exactly the same deeply incurious journalists parroting often harmful propaganda today.
It is astonishing how many people are saying that Nate Silver must be wrong here, because he is going "against the experts".
The damning comments are those made by the experts! But, because the disliked Nate Silver is involved, clearly the only fault is in the reporting of the comments.
This hagiography of anyone who claims to be a credentialed expert is contrary to everything Hacker News believed in a decade ago. Apparently the bozos are winning here.
Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism. No different to any other random person on the street.
That doesn't mean he's wrong of course but this is a subject where right now everything is conjecture and hard proof may never be found. So cautious restraint is needed before jumping to any conclusions.
"Nate Silver has no relevant qualifications, experience or anything of merit to justify people taking onboard his opinion without a healthy dose of skepticism."
Compared to who? Many of the people who supposedly do have the qualifications to discuss covid's origin appear to have been corrupted by career/financial incentives and political biases.
"“trust the science” or “trust the experts” is usually right."
This statement and general belief is antithetical to science. Dr. Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying talk about this misconception of science on their Darkhorse podcast all the time. Dr Brian Keating nicely summarises this issue in this short video https://youtu.be/gAqq72m-ipo
You should "trust the scientific method" when done correctly.
> This statement and general belief is antithetical to science.
No, it's not. 99% of the population doesn't have the cognitive ability to independently verify whether a scientific publishing has had rigorous checks on its scientific method and methodologies and samples were selected appropriately.
In this scenario, you should trust the science and/or experts, unless other experts have verified that the findings are garbage and/or something was fabricated.
What's really antithetical to science is when people present sources as having equal weights.
Joe Rogan vs Meta-analysis of 30 studies does not have the same weight.
You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They started with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved away from that view the more they learned.