Post No.: 0921
Furrywisepuppy says:
A good academic paper will acknowledge the limitations of its own study, such as the assumptions made and relied upon, any missing data, the participant dropout rate and reasons, the lack of single or double blinding, the small sample size or any sampling biases. The authors may even accept that the results are inconclusive, offer alternative interpretations of the data themselves, and demonstrate an awareness of which questions their study was designed to answer and were answered, and which weren’t.
Yet many of those who report on these studies will fail to explain these crucial details as they aim to generate the most over-hyped, over-simplified and over-extrapolated headline possible. So it’s typically not the fault of the scientists or authors of the original research but those in the media who disseminate that research for a mass audience.
Results might be taken out of context or cherry-picked, or tentative results can be made to sound more concrete. So it can help to read the original research paper if you can get hold of it. Ask how it supports or contradicts the overall body of literature on the same issue too? Understand that scientists and journalists can have biases as well, like vested interests in presenting certain outcomes or telling stories that fit in with mainstream research, or simply hyping up stories to attract more eyeballs.
Journalists occasionally make inferences and ostensibly plausible and coherent conjectures but that can break down at any time – yet they won’t always write up their updated or corrected stories unless they’re pressured to, or these won’t always get published, or if they do then they might end up somewhere in the wilderness pages rather than the prominent spaces of a paper or news site.
Unfortunately, when an article makes a mistake – corrections or retractions are usually only written in small print at the footnotes or addendums of an article or buried deep inside a paper, and they seldom receive as much or as prime coverage or get shared as much on social media as the original mistake (e.g. they seldom make the ‘shock, horror’ or ‘this is the secret’ front page headlines that the original story did). To protect their image as a reliable news outlet while fulfilling their duty to correct themselves, the media outlet will quietly put any corrections or retractions somewhere hidden and in small. We seldom return to an article a week or even an hour after we’ve read it to be able to later notice those corrections or retractions appended to that article. Therefore most people who had read and believe in the original mistake don’t get to read the amendment.
Corrections technically concern factual errors that don’t take away from the main point of an article. Retractions technically concern factual errors that do.
A ‘this thing cures cancer!’ story is far more emotive than an ‘actually, sorry, this thing doesn’t cure cancer after all’ story if it’s later found to be incorrect. So science stories that report amazing findings will receive massive media attention. But if they’re later debunked, relatively few or no media outlets will shout about the corrections or retractions as loudly.
Some media outlets will only bother to correct or retract their erroneous statements if they’ve been told to. Sometimes falsehoods aren’t therefore corrected at all, especially if an outlet has a political bias it is trying to maintain and no one comes, or has the resources, to sue them.
Scientific theories should really always be taken as ‘provisionally the best we currently know according to the current overall weight of evidence we’ve collectively found so far, which could possibly update in the future’ anyway. Certainly all predictive theories are merely provisional because we do not know what we do not know – we cannot foresee the future with absolute 100% confidence.
The pool of human knowledge constantly grows and refines, and although it can be arguably imagined that one day we’ll find the answers to all of our most fundamental scientific questions, it’d certainly be naïve to think that this time has already come when even the smartest scientists around the world today admit to not knowing the answers to many age-old questions. In fact, more questions still pop up than are answered. So we need to constantly keep up with the latest science and be prepared to change our minds, possibly again and again, for science is no doctrine or religion. Do note however that, as Post No.: 0908 pointed out, the latest findings don’t always automatically override everything that has ever been discovered before, due to spurious or chance results that cannot be successfully replicated.
Early journalistic breaking news also first needs to be verified before it’s relied upon. For instance, parts of the media might go on a celebrity witch-hunt. Yet even if no charges are ultimately made against an accused individual (for the lack of evidence) then they’re let go but said to be pending ‘no further action’ without the same amount of fanfare being made about that as the explosive accusations. This echoes how corrections or retractions in general seldom make as big headlines as the original bold but incorrect statements.
There are pros and cons to being famous – you receive privileges for being recognised but your privacy is invaded, and although you shouldn’t get special treatment, you shouldn’t be made a special example of either. Woof.
Some social media content creators believe they’re superb amateur sleuths who can do better at solving true crimes than the proper authorities, or they believe that the proper authorities are precisely trying to cover something up in a conspiracy – so much that some creators will even physically visit crime scenes and interfere with the proper investigations (all for creating some content!) They weren’t there, they didn’t know the people involved, yet they still feel they’ve got to speculate in public as if they know better than those who were closer to the situation.
We can all believe we’re suddenly experts on a subject because we know a bit about something, to the point of challenging even real experts in their fields. I mean, we should question everything and everybody but from a position of curiosity and scepticism instead of arrogance. We can all be too incompetent to recognise how incompetent we are, for the knowledge required to make a sound judgement is the same as that required to recognise whether a judgement is sound, whether assessing oneself or recognising the competence of someone else (e.g. bad drivers are poor at predicting their own performances on reaction time tests, unskilled readers are less able to properly rate their own text comprehension, and socially-inept people are unaware of their own fuzzy faux pas – they’re so bad at something, they don’t recognise how bad they are). This is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
We’re eager to uncover major revelations that no one else has uncovered before. If we’re a source of vital information for our community, we gain attention and respect, hence why gossip is powerful – as well as dangerous. Discovering a conspiracy often has an element of ‘I’m more astute than all the masses of ‘sheeple’ out there’, but if one has made a mistake then one has just ended up following something false oneself i.e. many times it’s the ‘sheeple’ calling others ‘sheeple’. Many of those who accuse the other side of spreading fake news and propaganda are actually the ones who are spreading it. Many who believe they ‘see the world as it really is’ have actually fallen for untruths or ‘alt-facts’.
We can believe that if we don’t personally understand something then it must be a load of made-up nonsense. We can confuse opinions as facts, and facts as ‘one opinion against another’ and ‘it depends on who asks’. We can think we’re clever by quoting quotes that are really claptrap rather than profound (e.g. ‘the true self is non local – it is nowhere and now here at the same time’).
…There are a few basic steps to deconstructing a news story. Firstly summarise the main points of the story. After you’ve read an article or watched a video, think about what was promised or inferred in the headline, title or introduction to it – a clickbait headline or thumbnail that doesn’t really match the article or video’s content gives you a clue to the credibility of that story or content, and perhaps media outlet or social media account overall.
Evaluate sources of information using an IMVAIN (independent, multiple sources, verified, authoritative, informed and named) or CRAAP (currency/timeliness, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose) analysis.
Then assess the direct and indirect evidence themselves.
Assess the level of transparency – if a reporter says that a source gave them a piece of information then is that source cited so that you can check it/them out? Or if they’re kept anonymous then is it satisfactorily explained why? Whenever a reporter shares something – how do they know what they think they know, and if they don’t know this answer then why?
Look for the context to see where and how the story fits into or helps explain the bigger picture (e.g. the background information, history, culture, etc. – these should be explained within the article). Does a story about an individual’s situation relate to the bigger picture or is it just an idiosyncratic and one-off event? Are other people in a similar situation? These contexts help us to better understand the systemic issues at large (if there is a wider story at all).
Search for missing key information – have they answered who, how, what, why, when and where? These are basic questions for a news story and if any key information is missing then is there a satisfactory explanation for it? You might then need to look elsewhere for this information yourself if it’s missing.
And lastly evaluate the fairness of yourself – evaluate your own biases as well as their fairness. So go beyond the coverage and question your own assumptions, preconceptions, biases and leanings too.
Governments don’t always ‘follow the science’ (e.g. when the UK government claimed that ‘behavioural fatigue’ was the reason to delay a lockdown in 2020) but governments or official medical advice seldom tell people to go on fad diets, try some ‘wonder ingredient’ or try out unproven complementary therapies, for instance, yet a lot of people will try them – hence a lot of people would rather follow the media or businesses than the government. I’d say that, overall, most hypes, fears and misinformation are perpetuated not by politicians but by the media nowadays – although some politicians might capitalise on them.
Many people still believe that it’s fundamentally unsafe to reuse plastic bottles, and they spread and perpetuate this belief on social media. Even the world’s largest independent cancer research organisation Cancer Research UK makes it clear that there’s no good scientific evidence to support a link between using plastic water bottles and developing cancer. Dioxins aren’t found in plastic water bottles, and thus don’t leach from them if left in hot vehicles; although other chemicals might depending on the type of plastic used, but still these wouldn’t be in high enough concentrations to cause people harm. Whenever claims go straight to mass media without first or ever going through the reputable scientific journals and peer review processes – that’s a clue they’re probably not trustworthy. And indeed this plastic bottle rumour began as a deliberate hoax.
Now the free press for the most part works pretty well. But akin to how bad news generally dominates the headlines or like how we ignore all the times we’re pain-free but suddenly and consistently we’ll register all our sore knees, aching tails and other maladies – when the media get things right, it’s considered a ‘non-event’, yet it’s always considered worth drawing attention to the times they misrepresent something. The occasional flaw thus doesn’t mean we can never trust anything the media says.
Woof!
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