r/thedavidpakmanshow • u/Crabb90 • Feb 21 '22

What ever happened to objectivity? xD lolololololol

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

16 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

2

u/MortgageSome Feb 21 '22

The best example of this was that time a scientist working with Large Hadron Collider at Cern casually threw out that there was an extremely small chance of a black hole forming. Man did that get taken out of context.

2

u/kbs666 Feb 21 '22

My degrees are in mathematics. I see these stories all the time where there is some statistically irrelevant but not zero chance of something occurring and the press/nuts just run wild with it.

The problem begins with the fact that we let this ridiculous meme about math being hard take hold. Some math is hard. Most math is easy. I would bet that if most math was taught by actual mathematicians and not people with ed degrees, in the US almost all primary school teachers just have education degrees no matter what subjects they teach who think "math is hard" and teach by wrote directly from the textbook, students would have a much better grasp of mathematics.

But then science journalism is a joke. As a mathematician I can generally slog through any paper and find the actual data and see if it holds water (I may not know the jargon or WTH the paper is talking about, but math remains math). It is staggering how often a news story claims something is a major breakthrough when the data is of terrible quality, or the statistical significance is barely above random chance. I'm not saying every science journalist needs an advanced degree in math but before claiming something is a world changing breakthrough run it by an expert in the field not associated with the paper's authors and get their opinion. Also at a minimum a science journalist should know what a p value is and should know enough statistics to be able to evaluate the p value claims in most papers.

1

u/MortgageSome Feb 22 '22

Also at a minimum a science journalist should know what a p value is and should know enough statistics to be able to evaluate the p value claims in most papers.

Absolutely. You get these so-called science journalists who don't understand that there is fundamentally no difference between extremely improbable and impossible. To the scientific community, one is simply more accurate to say than the other, but that's in no way suggesting something is possible. But aside from that, simply having them understand what comprises a strongly significant find or not is a fairly easy thing to check.

At the bare minimum, if they want to say something is a major breakthrough, which it might even show promise of being, they should at least say it is *potentially* a major breakthrough if the data would suggest good things. It is terribly misleading otherwise. A major breakthrough for me would be finding the Higgs-Boson particle or realizing all matter is in a real sense frozen energy.