Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists
Social psychologist here. There&#x27;s a profound lack of cognitive activity in American journalists, and what I&#x27;d call legacy leftist media especially. I don&#x27;t think we can explain what happened here without reference to their off-the-charts partisan political bias. I&#x27;ve never seen anything like it.<p>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.<p>Leftist media like the NYT and WaPo falsely linked him to a &quot;bioweapon&quot; &quot;conspiracy theory&quot;. 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.<p>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 &quot;debunked bioweapon conspiracy&quot; narrative as some sort of justified deception as a triage against &quot;racism&quot; or what have you. Trump didn&#x27;t say anything about a China virus until several months after leftist media fabricated their narrative.<p>There&#x27;s a profound prejudice and malice toward outsiders&#x2F;non-leftists that makes objectivity impossible here, especially if those outsiders are Republicans&#x2F;&quot;the right&quot;. And all dissent and rigor is being coded as &quot;right-wing&quot; and &quot;far right&quot; 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.<p>I also think it&#x27;s a big problem that leftist ideology has no commitment to integrity or cognitive independence. Humans generally don&#x27;t display integrity when tested without an explicit commitment to it. Leftists aren&#x27;t rewarded for it. It&#x27;s not extolled and championed in their culture. It&#x27;s easy to imagine a culture where it is, with a good virtue ethics that is more important than political ideology.<p>## Reading papers<p>I agree that journalists and just humans generally should read the damn papers. Those of you who say they can&#x27;t should first go read some of these papers first. There&#x27;s too much distance between people&#x27;s views and reality, including the reality of academic papers. I&#x27;m convinced that the most savagely stupid human artifacts are found in journals like Science and Nature.<p>It&#x27;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 &quot;audit&quot;. But you can detect catastrophic invalidity by just reading a paper in many cases. For example, here&#x27;s a recent Nature paper on misinformation, ironically. It&#x27;s completely false, invalid, and also fraudulent for good measure. Discovering the fraud requires reading a separate paper, since they don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>This paper is a good test. I&#x27;ll leave it open ended, no clues: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-022-34769-6#sec15" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41467-022-34769-6#sec15</a><p>Now here&#x27;s a vivid example of a false claim in the opening sentence of a paper in Science, a journal run by a maniacal political partisan: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.aar3067" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1126&#x2F;science.aar3067</a><p>There are more false claims in the body. The opening sentence is stunning – gun violence is <i>not</i> a leading cause of death in the US. It&#x27;s not even close (it&#x27;s a Top 10 list, and it&#x27;s in the top 15 that year). It&#x27;s not actually a category in the CDC&#x27;s list, but a subset of homicides, which is also not a leading cause of death. (Nor are &quot;guns&quot; the leading cause of death for children, a popular, stunning bit of misinformation – journalism is in awful shape.)<p>So we have a plainly false claim to open a journal article in Science. They won&#x27;t retract or correct. (Note that their editor rails against the NRA &quot;and its minions&quot; and touts the promise of &quot;science&quot; to discover something useful re: firearms to push for his authoritarian policy preferences. Yet he publishes false claims and won&#x27;t correct or retract them. Science indeed.)<p>Finally, here&#x27;s a great and devastating example of idiocratic collapse. It&#x27;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&#x27;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?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;politics-news&#x2F;global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-188550&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rollingstone.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;politics-news&#x2F;global-w...</a><p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t.)<p>I communicated with Gavin Schmidt, the head climate scientist at NASA, about this and he understood the core problem. But he wouldn&#x27;t contact Rolling Stone to tell them it was wildly false and invalid to get them to retract. (They won&#x27;t correct or retract their hoaxes without lots of pressure, if they advance leftist ideological narratives.) I&#x27;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&#x27;t even know the 20th century mean offhand, which still confuses me. I can&#x27;t possibly be more versed in climate science than an actual climate scientist, but it&#x27;s possible she&#x27;s an outlier (her website touts awards of Most Important People, a huge red flag).<p>Can anyone solve for X? What&#x27;s the nature of what he did?<p>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.