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I was grateful and surprised to see the article start off immediately with a meta-remark on the collusion between pop science media and academics. It recalled one my frustrations during grad school in the late 2000s: student researchers striving for recognition and journalists sexing up our stories that misinformed the public.

This feedback loop explains a great chunk of why we on HN spend so much time knit-picking through stories on e.g. Wired. What we read is not so much "reporting," but designs-by-committee of researchers doing things they think the public wants/needs and reporters bending stories toward what they think the public wants and needs.




All news is like that. When they cover stories we actually know something about we see that its all misinformed BS, but then for some strange reason, on other issues, we're perfectly happy to have every thing voxplained to us. (or the NY times is gospel if that floats your boat) Michael Chrichton:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”




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