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ZapperZ submitted a new PF Insights post
Fake News and Science Reporting
Continue reading the Original PF Insights Post.
Fake News and Science Reporting
Continue reading the Original PF Insights Post.
(Source: http://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x - Homepage of the Max-Planck institute in Greifswald, which operatesWendelstein 7-X is the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type. Its objective is to investigate the suitability of this type for a power plant.
stevendaryl said:You're absolutely right, that people should not be satisfied with a news story about some event without checking into sources.
stevendaryl said:people come away with a false impression just because they only read the headline.
Greg Bernhardt said:People don't have time to fully read anything these days. Marketers know this extremely well and craft catchy and sometimes down right deceiving headlines. It's the problem with news information being a business. Social media has made it worse.
I have read a quotation posted by my nephew on the US election, determined to influence opinions. As I've looked up the sources of that article, I've found the first seven sources have been a self-quotation of formerly posted statements on the same website and the eighth has been a FOX news report ...Greg Bernhardt said:I'm willing to bet extremely few people outside the relevant specialty give any time to investigating sources.
mfb said:Flow chart for claims of major proofs:
Is it sent to one of the leading journals?
-- No: It is not a valid proof
-- Yes: Did it pass peer review?
-----In progress: It is probably not a valid proof
-----No: It is not a valid proof
-----Yes: It gets interesting. Did a mathematician find a flaw within 2 years?
--------Yes: It is not a valid proof.
--------No: It is probably a valid proof.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016...eate-tabloid-science-headline-five-easy-stepsSo, without further ado, the recipe for transforming a modest developmental biology paper into a blockbuster story, as it played out yesterday in the media:
- Take one jargon-filled paper title: "Mice produced by mitotic reprogramming of sperm injected into haploid parthenogenotes"
- Distill its research into more accessible language. Text of Nature Communications press release: Mouse sperm injected into a modified, inactive embryo can generate healthy offspring, shows a paper in Nature Communications. And add a lively headline: "Mouse sperm generate viable offspring without fertilization in an egg"
- Enlist an organization to invite London writers to a press briefing with paper’s authors.
Headline of Science Media Centre press release: "Making embryos from a non-egg cell"- Have same group distribute a laudatory quote from well-known and respected scientist:
“[It’s] a technical tour de force.”- Bake for 24 hours and present without additional reporting. Headline in The Telegraph: "Motherless babies possible as scientists create live offspring without need for female egg," and in The Guardian: "Skin cells might be used instead of eggs to make embryos, scientists say."
You are not the average reader :)fresh_42 said:I have read a quotation posted by my nephew on the US election
I've never before read so much "quotes" of questionable content than in this year's campaigns. Even if I didn't search for their origin doesn't mean I believed them. Mostly I took it as an entertainment.Greg Bernhardt said:You are not the average reader :)
But how many of the members of the general public will (i) do that and (ii) be able to understand the technical details of the paper?
Share with your friends and social media links below the article content :)JorisL said:This needs to be trending all over the internet.
That is true: It is a research reactor designed to test the plasma. It had test plasmas already. Now they are installing a better divertor, with the aim to increase the plasma pressure and pulse duration afterwards. At no point do the articles claim that the reactor would have had fusion reactions or other similar wrong things. Calling Wendelstein 7-X a "fusion reactor" is misleading, but that is done by the scientific community as well.People will think that the stellerator is now working and they’re moving on to the next phase.
Journalism adapts to whatever the target audience wants to read. If many people prefer fake/misleading news over actual news (for whatever reason: sounds better, fits better to their world view, ...), then they get fake/misleading news.fresh_42 said:IMO weak journalism is the real danger to our modern democracies.
Sounds a bit like the hen-egg-paradox. I seriously doubt, that worse journalism leads to better orders.mfb said:Journalism adapts to whatever the target audience wants to read. If many people prefer fake/misleading news over actual news (for whatever reason: sounds better, fits better to their world view, ...), then they get fake/misleading news.
At least for one of the magazines I can tell that quality deteriorated in the last decade. So less quality doesn't imply better order figures. Thus it is at least questionable, that people like to read bad journalism.mfb said:What does that plot show, apart from the general decline of printed newspapers and some different historic development of those two particular newspapers?
But neither does the simple claim thatmfb said:But even then there are many things that can influence the success of a newspaper, reducing that to a single number does not work.
This might apply to media like FOX news, The Sun or similar with an automatic high demand, but I doubt that this simple rule of economy also applies to markets with lower demands without adjustments in form of restrictions or initial values. Adam Smith isn't the cure for everything.mfb said:Journalism adapts to whatever the target audience wants to read.
mfb said:A nice article!
I'm not sure if Wendelstein was the best example:
That is true: It is a research reactor designed to test the plasma. It had test plasmas already. Now they are installing a better divertor, with the aim to increase the plasma pressure and pulse duration afterwards. At no point do the articles claim that the reactor would have had fusion reactions or other similar wrong things. Calling Wendelstein 7-X a "fusion reactor" is misleading, but that is done by the scientific community as well.
I have seen far worse news on similar websites.
How do you stay informed?john101 said:Anyway, the lack of news has made me fitter, healthier and happier with a greater enthusiasm for life. I don't think ignorance in this way is bliss but it is way more amusing.
Wendelstein did more than checking the magnetic field already, and without a scientific education it is hard to follow the details of that. "Wendelstein tests things about fusion, they did some tests of their new machine, the tests were successful" is already something correct to take away.ZapperZ said:They ALL had different answers EXCEPT for the most important part, which was the verification of the magnetic field, which was the whole point of the publication that was cited.
fresh_42 said:But neither does the simple claim that
This might apply to media like FOX news, The Sun or similar with an automatic high demand, but I doubt that this simple rule of economy also applies to markets with lower demands without adjustments in form of restrictions or initial values. Adam Smith isn't the cure for everything.
stevendaryl said:To broaden the discussion about an informed public slightly, it's interesting to consider that the flip side of believing fake news is disbelieving real news. Those two seem like opposites--extreme gullibility on the one hand, and extreme cynicism on the other. But they work together (sometimes within the same person) to make the public uninformed. The problem is that it is very difficult for the layman to know what information is authoritative and what is not. You could take the point of view that we should be skeptical of everything, but I don't see how that is a practical answer. If my doctor tells me that taking a certain drug will save my life, I don't have the training or the time to do my own research and find out if that's really true. I could Google for the drug on the internet, and see if my doctor's opinion seems to be the consensus, but that doesn't really tell me whether it's true, or not, unless I have some confidence in medical consensus. The world is an incredibly complicated place, and we don't personally have the time or ability to understand it without relying on others.
dkotschessaa said:Skeptical doesn't mean you don't believe anything. It just means you don't believe anything without evidence and good argument.
The bolder the claim, the higher the demand should be on the reasoning and evidence. If the story says "man hit by car walking down the street" I think this is fairly plausible and I'm not going to run to the named intersection looking for the blood stains. If the article says "man stumbles into a black hole created by grad students in university parking lot" then I'm going to be doing some fact checking. (Actually I wouldn't believe that at all, but I'm exaggerating a bit!)
Also cynicism is not the same as skepticism. Cynicism (in its modern usage) typically involves a negative spin. "Man donates $50,000 to charity" becomes "Big deal, he probably has billions so it's no big deal to him."
dkotschessaa said:BTW, when it comes to medical stuff, i find that I'm able to develop an opinion by reading a few studies about effectiveness, despite the fact that I don't have a medical background. Again, a small amount of quantitative literacy comes into play here. Was it tested? Was there a control group? Peer reviewed? Double blind? How big was the sample? I don't need to know the mechanics of the drug.. just "is there some probability this will work, and does it outweigh the potential complications?"
stevendaryl said:The question is: What counts as a good argument?
Yes, but the notion of what's plausible and what's not depends on a background of knowledge. If people don't share that background, then they will have different notions of what's plausible. Some stories, such as the possibility of getting hit by a car, presumably we have personal experience that tells us that it is plausible. But if you go beyond things that you have direct experience with, you have to rely on indirect knowledge to tell you what's plausible.
Yes, there is a difference, but they both contribute to doubt in similar ways. (If you're cynical about the honesty or motivations of the reporter, or the researcher, then you are more likely to be skeptical about his claims.)
stevendaryl said:I guess, without being an expert, you can see warning signs about a claim's believability, if you read the original sources. But for a lot of claims that are made routinely, the original sources are hard or impossible to come by.
john101 said:I don't seek to stay informed except in the particular things I'm personally interested in like real life real time matters like 'is it so quiet because it's a public holiday' or 'what was that noise', why is there no '?' available' and so on.
I live in a relatively quiet little town outback. Whatever things I get informed in are a result of people mentioning them in conversations. The beauty out here is that if it's not the weather or the state of farming there is generally little else talked about. I have one friend (who knows I don't want to be informed) who has sometimes great difficulty not informing me but generally manages.
For science news I find this forum enough.