>I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves
Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet. The thing to keep in mind when trying to understand this is that absolutely __everyone__ responds to incentives. With a news organization, no matter what that organization is or their goals, the chief incentive is readership, not accuracy or anything else. Not saying that the writers are anything other than well intentioned and honest or that they don't care deeply about the truth, but the reality of mortal existence is to maximize behaviors that you believe benefit you.
A news org is benefited by people reading what they say, not by being right. Reddit/twitter/HN often is a better source of truth because people often post because they have a desire to be heard, be understood, share information, tell the truth or some other reason that does not involve selling ads against you reading what they say.
> Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet.
I've experienced the opposite, though, too.
Posts with thousands upon thousands of upvotes and a little comment with a dozen saying "this is entirely wrong, and here's a bunch of proof, and here's an expert explaining it properly".
That's not really the opposite. That comment with the correction is a part of the submission that's being upvoted.
I do this myself, too: if the discussion underneath a HN submission rescues an otherwise bad article, or even develops into a completely unrelated but interesting tangent, I'll happily upvote it. Sometimes the only value of the submitted article is in the discussion it starts - but that still makes the particular submission valuable.
>I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient if scientists were writing press releases themselves
Agree, and I think everyone here has experienced the phenomenon where someone on reddit/HN/twitter has explained something far better than a media outlet. The thing to keep in mind when trying to understand this is that absolutely __everyone__ responds to incentives. With a news organization, no matter what that organization is or their goals, the chief incentive is readership, not accuracy or anything else. Not saying that the writers are anything other than well intentioned and honest or that they don't care deeply about the truth, but the reality of mortal existence is to maximize behaviors that you believe benefit you.
A news org is benefited by people reading what they say, not by being right. Reddit/twitter/HN often is a better source of truth because people often post because they have a desire to be heard, be understood, share information, tell the truth or some other reason that does not involve selling ads against you reading what they say.