Journal Links and Writing Science Articles

[Buster's Uncle]

Whoa; it's my pill-time, and I'm not even going to finish my daily browsing in the next hour.  -On the plus side, I may have turned the corner on a problem that might turn it into a big asset instead, developments depending; so, yay me.

[Lorizael]

Sorry for checking out for a couple days. I am reading and absorbing what you're saying but don't have anything intelligent to say about it yet. I haven't thought about it in terms of being a gatekeeper, but I guess that really is in line with my thinking. You talk about media feeding particular narratives (mass shooters, outrageous politicians, etc.), which leads to people thinking that's all there is to a particular subject. Like, mass shootings suck, but the plurality of gun deaths are suicides. Why aren't we talking about that?

On the science writing front, I get a little agitated that most physics/astronomy reporting is about dark matter/dark energy/black holes/quantum funny business/particle accelerators/string theory, because this leads to people thinking that's all there is to the fields. The largest field in physics is condensed matter physics, and those physicists are busily plugging away at stuff that is not influenced one iota by the Higgs boson or string theory. I suspect this bias toward speculative, cutting edge stuff leads people to think physics/astronomy is (a) unmoored from reality and nothing more than baseless theorizing and/or (b) too heady and bizarre for mere mortals to understand. Both attitudes are unhelpful.

[Lorizael]

Oh, also, I saw that Johns Hopkins has a mostly online graduate science writing program and decided to check it out and start an application. I entered my basic info but didn't submit or upload any essays or writing samples, and yet half an hour later I got a call from admissions wanting to set up an interview to discuss the program, my application, etc. So they are apparently really into working with people through the application process, or they're desperate...

Anyway, that means I'll be busy with writing an application essay and preparing writing samples. For the MIT program, I just used some of my more polished pieces from my blog. None of those really look like the kind of concise, widely accessible write-ups we've been talking about in here and which I should have a handle on. So I maybe really should pick from one of your links and see what I can do in that arena.

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd]
Journalism is just plain bad at the big picture and the long view - there's always the next edition/episode to move on to, and never enough time to do anything true justice - even at news magazines and other venues that can afford to employ an investigative reporter taking over a month on a story in-depth do better, but rarely well enough, soon enough.  TV is most hopeless of all, the broadcast networks not having time to even give you all the headlines they should - and 24 hour cable is a massive waste of 24 hours, rarely bothering to bring up anything CBS didn't have to time mention.

Now I really do need to tell my high school principal story, and how horrifically they blew that.  I also have met a kid who later shot 13 people at school, and have some minor privileged information through a family connection by marriage, and --- they didn't get it all opposite-wrong, exactly, but there was a LOT of scrofulous speculation about the kid's dad and --- my sister-in-law nearly had a stroke in front of me watching CNN, and there was just some awful bullcrap reporting went down.

And yeah; obviously, this underpinnings stuff has very direct relevance to your science reporting goals.

---

Well, if you can work out something with Johns Hopkins financially and all - I'm not actually qualified to teach this, and it's probably a very good idea.  I figure I can help you get off to a good start, though, and would be very glad to sorta consult and help with homework and stuff.

[Lorizael]

Yeah, I certainly don't expect you to teach me a whole class. But I appreciate your insight and experience. And this is fun.

[Buster's Uncle]

It is.


Monkeys, btw.

I wanted to mention that anything who can learn 600 words and carry on a conversation isn't an animal, as traditionally defined.  Killing a great ape for bush meat is murder, IMO, and cannibalism-adjacent.  I've read transcripts of Koko conversations that struck me as, without any exaggeration, about the level of sophistication of my I.Q.-of-30 stepcousin.  Now, there's nothing wrong with we, collectively, taking a greater interest in the welfare and rights of a dim member of our own species, but HE has all the legal rights of a human being, and indeed some of the legal rights of an adult, which means my uncle always gets to vote twice.  Meanwhile, Koko and all the other apes in intelligence studies who, again, are about as bright and have minds capable of language and conversation -which surely makes them some sort of PEOPLE- have zero rights, and I reckon that's a profound wrong.

If I was looking to get into science journalism myself, I'd definitely try to educate myself on the anthropology/primatology/zoology intelligences studies, what-have-you, enough to be able to read the relevant journals and pitch all the ape, especially ape intelligence, stories possible.  Open advocacy might tend to be counterproductive, but using the gatekeeper function to put the evidence out there in people's faces over and over all the traffic will bear and make the conclusion inescapable wouldn't be.  -ALSO?  People love monkeys, and monkey stories won't be hard to sell to editors/venues.  Monkey stories I copy/paste here do better for drawing eyes on Facebook than a lot of things, up there with how I expect the Neanderthal story I'm about to post to do. (Which you should read, not least for being largely about science journalism issues.)

I would just strongly urge you, given your science-writing interests/agenda, to look into that, a morally-important issue that shining lot of light on could really do some good.

[Buster's Uncle]

When my mom was a little girl, they had chickens, and she noticed one of the ways chickens are very stupid while throwing out feed.  Throw out a handful - all the chickens run over and start pecking - fine.  Quickly throw out a second handful, and ALL the chickens leave the unfinished first handful and run to the second.

The analogy is pretty obvious in a journalism context - and I'm half serious whenever I talk about The Group Mind.  I've seen a sort of mob psychology going on everywhere I looked my entire life, there being some social cue thing in the air for our social species that I tend not to even know is there, let alone understand.  (It is a stupid, stupid thing, the Group Mind, and frequently hateful/vicious, certainly when it takes notice of me.)  -And you came in already seeing a lot of the problem to that when the gatekeepers are all doing it in concert, which they most certainly do.  Journalism tends to draw brighter-than-average people, but collectively, in no way resistant to groupthink, rather to the contrary - as various brands of opinion leaders, they do of lot of leading each other around in feeding frenzies and virtually masturbatory exercises/ news circle jerks.


-My boiz from the old days in WPC OT probably remember that Bad Journalism is a long-running bugbear of mine - I tend to bring these sorts of issues up a lot when the community finds something in current events interesting to discuss, which you've probably seen here a few times.  You've unleased a monster...

[Buster's Uncle]

-And this is getting a bit afield, but the #MeToo movement and the High School students protesting for sanity in our policies re: murder tools both make me a little twitchy, even though I strongly agree that men being horrible pigs are bad, and so are murder tools everywhere.  -I wish the former hadn't nailed Charley Rose and Kevin Spacey, but that's not my problem with it; it's just that both movements are setting off my Group Mind detector - it looks to me like a lot of pile-on mob psychology going on, and --- I won't be surprised if both movements end up going way too far -again, not because I have reservations about either cause- and causing more harm than good, if the later even turns out to have any staying power and achieves anything.  Call it the French Revolution Effect, as a great example of the Group Mind going so way too far that they end up with Napoleon, and all the political murder being for nothing.  (It's a fundamental problem with revolutionary movements -witness how Lenin perverted Marx, leading to Stalin- not knowing when to ease off on the killing, but it's definitely also a mob psychology problem and something responsible mass communications gatekeepers need to be aware of and wrestle with how to handle.)  Journalism has a way of being about life the universe, and everything, in the end, when it's done responsibly with awareness of the power wielded for good or evil.

[Buster's Uncle]

-And I don't get why an awards show is polluting my science news at all -not stuff like that isn't typical- but then, I don't get why people watch awards shows at all.  I don't get a lot of things, sportsball being a great example, and resent it being shoved down my throat always, everywhere.  There IS a journalism/mass media group mind issue to that.

[Buster's Uncle]

Today I've had the "feel like talking at length to Momma for no particular reason" random event trigger, and am way behind again.  Burned non-trivial time on some posts, too, and I only just wrapped up with 'Poly, the third place I look after here.   

If I'm going to let you down on doing the editor stuff to your writing, I need to at least go dig up the two-pager I wrote when I was editor of the campus paper trying to train a completely green staff, and see what can be done with scanning an old dot-matrix printer document.  It's only, like, two pages, and covers easily 90% or more of the hardcore journalism style stuff you need to write for any venue that even cares.  With that much, junk I've already posted, and being available for discussion and questions and all-around help -and anything else strikes me to essay about going forward- I can hand you over to Johns Hopkins with a not-terribly-guilt-laden conscience.

You can do it.  You have the tools(talent) and can learn the technology.

If you never end up writing science for money, I'm determined it won't be because I didn't do enough - I'll step up my game if Johns Hopkins don't.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Which is not officially giving up on doing the editor stuff, mind; just, adjusting to a mood swing ATM and finally admitting the prospects are dicey.  That procrastination cycle stuff is real, for them of us who are troubled with it...

[Lorizael]

(Currently working on a piece about optical interferometers that can resolve the surfaces of distant stars, because I was struck by inspiration. It's hard to discuss interferometers without going into at least a little math (unless you just say: an array of telescopes act like one telescope as big as the distance between them), so I'm trying to figure out how to do this for a lay audience. Anyway, I haven't been inspired to write anything in months, so I'm going with it.)

Re: monkeys, animal cognition (and cognition in general) is very fascinating to me and I'd certainly like to shine some light on that. The moral/advocacy aspect of it is something I'd like to avoid in general, though. I'm much more interested in giving people (a) the tools required to debate something thoughtfully and (b) the facts required to participate in the debate. This is where the philosophical side of me comes in. It's too easy for me to take an issue like animal rights and explode it into an entire discussion of other minds, AI, epistemology, and skepticism, at which point the very practical question of how we should treat animal X seems (to me) distant and meaningless.

Those are all things I want to write about (desperately at times), but I know from experience (Poooooooly) how unproductive that's been for me. I feel significantly more confident in my capacity to explain cool science stuff than my capacity to get people to take philosophy seriously.

[Buster's Uncle]

On that last - The greater Civ community of which we are part draws a lot more engineers than literary types.  Nerds have a dangerous affinity for immature trash 'philosophies' like objectivism, and anything that tries to examine degree instead of kind is too subtitle for their dichotomous nerd world-view.  Nerds don't tend to do nuance at all, as any innate impulses towards that tend to make you not a nerd.

Re: monkeys, animal cognition (and cognition in general) is very fascinating to me and I'd certainly like to shine some light on that. The moral/advocacy aspect of it is something I'd like to avoid in general, though. I'm much more interested in giving people (a) the tools required to debate something thoughtfully and (b) the facts required to participate in the debate. This is where the philosophical side of me comes in. It's too easy for me to take an issue like animal rights and explode it into an entire discussion of other minds, AI, epistemology, and skepticism, at which point the very practical question of how we should treat animal X seems (to me) distant and meaningless.

Isn't that what I said?

I'm a ferocious carnivore from a social conservative background (and make no mistake, I AM a social conservative, albeit one like Rusty, who takes a libertarian attitude towards what sins of others are MY problem -and we share a basic awareness of our incomplete knowledge of The Other- and is why he and I can talk politics so profitably, despite having drawn some wildly divergent conclusions - we still have that common base) and I'm not coming from an animal rights place at all; can talk = people, in my book, and that makes it one of the most important moral issues there is.  Just put that basic science out there w/o slant, but choose to do those stories whenever you can, and SHINE that light, son!

[Lorizael]

Yeah. I'm just pointing out that my angle here is probably slightly different from yours. From my ever-expanding, all-consuming, telepathic, techno-blob perch, making a difference in the world is focused more on making us better thinkers than on, like, reducing poverty or other actually important things.

[Buster's Uncle]

I oppose your blob to the death, BTW, (but not the techno - though I think we do need to be wiser about it, not to go all Riffkin on you.)

-I said wiser and not smarter by design - they're related, not interchangeable.  Nerds are good at smart -except the dumb ones, a distinction mundanes don't see much- not so much wise.