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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I know the inclination is to change link baity headlines but I think the original hed, "The media is ruining science", is far more to the point than the current hed, "Scientific community making an effort to end the stream of misleading articles". The problem is most definitely rooted in the media, which not only disseminates misinterpretations, but also provides harmful incentives to scientists and journals to cheapen their work.

Furthermore, unlike what the current hed implies, there's not much evidence that there's a concerted systemic effort by the scientific community to fix this, nevermind "end" it. I'm not saying they don't want things to improve, I'm saying I don't see a concerted, organized effort to make significant improvement.

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Ok, we changed the title to a phrase from the article that doesn't claim anything about who is to blame.

I had the opposite reaction, which is that the problem is most definitely not rooted in the media. The problem is with science itself, which is fundamentally broken as a community.

I agree that the media are maybe perpetuating certain problems, or are providing dysfunctional incentives, but the root problem is with the scientific and academic community, not the media.

Scientists run the journals that have gone amok, are in charge of the tenure processes that reward outdated practices, and run the grant systems that are broken. Universities' public relations departments bait media to hype their scientists' findings. Etc. etc. etc.

I was an exchange just now where this played out with a project. I don't want to get into details, but the media were pushing hard for a misleading--and blatantly unethical--way of pushing something to the public. So you could blame the media. But anyone who knows anything about the situation knows that certain PIs groom things, arguably over years, to produce this very type of outcome, in part because they can sit back and reap the benefits while claiming to wash their hands of any responsibility when this happens. They manipulate the situation, and then push the blame onto others, including the media, when it suits their interests.

Obviously not everyone is like this, but it's naive to believe it's not a systemic problem.

Scientists don't (typically) run journals, publishing companies do. Scientists just write and review papers for free, and they have to pay for access. That's hardly "running" anything.

Scientists do tend to decide who gets grants, but most people I know don't consider those decisions to be too bad per se. The main problem is that the lack of funds causes grant award rates to be so low that very good candidates can be left out, plus when resources are so low the random factors inherent to assessment become too important (with a 50% acceptance rate, a very good project may score lower than it would deserve but still get in, while with a 10% acceptance rate if a single panel member dislikes your project you are likely out).

Not saying that the scientific community doesn't have its share of the blame for its problems, but an important part of the blame is political as well. And scientists are too busy trying to survive in an extremely competitive environment to try and change things by themselves. Honestly I think most of science's problems would be solved just by allocating (significantly) more money to science. Then maybe we would actually worry about doing good science and incentivizing others to do so, rather than about finishing our reviews ASAP so we have time to hastily write another journal article that we need to score points for grants/tenure and not bite the dust. A degree of competitiveness is good, but competitiveness in science is now absolutely over the top and creating all kinds of evil incentives.

Isn't blaming everything on the media a bit too one-sided and simplistic?

We live in an era where diversity of media sources have exploded. Media companies compete fiercely with one another for clicks, readers, and ad revenue.

Perhaps the root problem is the media behaves the way it does because its consumers and the structure of the market makes it impossible for it not to.

TL;DR: click-baity and inaccurate news exists as a reflection of consumer preference

I don't think the media are solely to blame, big picture wise, but for the scope of what this article covers, I think focusing on the media is appropriate. This is not to say that science can't revamp conventions and practices on their end. And there's not a perfect balance between media freedom and media scrutiny of science.

That said, one could make the argument that it's not the media's fault that in any given month, a photogenic (and perhaps blonde) woman has been kidnapped or murdered. However, it is the media's fault when they saturate the airwaves and print with such incidents at the detriment of other news and information, even if readers gobble it up.

Feedback loops strike again.

The fault is in the interaction between media and the audience. People tend to react better to some content than to another, which leads to that content making more money, which leads to more of such content. The process is optimizing for exploiting cognitive biases and heuristics the audience uses.

Now the question is - what's easier to tackle? Issues with brain architecture that would require medical interventions we barely can imagine to correct, or business incentives of the media companies?

Aren't both brain architecture issues?

Corporate incentives are built around converting avarice into societal progress and a are incentivized to find the shortest path to that profit.

It's probably easier to make laws for one of those scenarios though.

Corporate incentives are built around converting avarice into societal progress

I don't see how you can turn that into a "brain architecture" issue.

Shareholders want to see profit increase. If other firms find ways of making more money with fewer morals, then the pressure on your firm to do the same increases, until you either succumb, or get bought over.

Shareholders are driven by the same dopamine system that normal people are, and are unlikely to sit by and change their incentives for the sake of morals.

The people pushing journalists to drop long form, in favor of revenue and attention generating articles with lower costs are shareholders, correctly responding to clear market incentives.

Theres an excellent article from mother jones which provides a possible solution to this problem (its been shared on HN but there was no discussion when I found it) http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/08/whats-missing-from-...

A bit, yes, because the actors are humans too. But the core of the issue is more game-theoretic - shareholders cannot all coordinate to avoid taking some "shortest paths" that end up with unwanted consequences. Tackling this, hard as it is, is still easier than rocket neurosurgery.

By this would you mean things like business incentives and tax breaks?

What you're describing is therefore a failure of journalistic ethics. An important part of any set of professional ethics is not giving the consumer what they want, if what they want violates a standard of the profession; in this case, that means having a significant chance of being true.

On the other hand, that professional behavior has a difficult time competing with unprofessional behavior is unsurprising, as is that professional behavior is hard to maintain.

I think this is absolutely true, and that consumers have themselves to blame for all kinds of bad stuff they buy.

But it is also true opinion polls show journalists are trusted only about as much as estate agents. And rightly so.

Media professionals sometimes see themselves as noble experts standing outside the internet echo chambers, and able to judiciously filter info-cacaphony to the benefit of the public.

They aren't.

> Media professionals sometimes see themselves as noble experts standing outside the internet echo chambers, and able to judiciously filter info-cacaphony to the benefit of the public.

OTOH, to the extent that journalists view themselves in this light, it helps them enforce and maintain some sort of standard for themselves.

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