One of the problems I have with journalism is that too often style takes precedence over precision. This is obviously fine for fiction books, less so with non-fiction although who can tell the difference these days, and should be less and less acceptable as you go from monthly magazines, to the weeklies, to the dailies, until you get to real-time 24/7 news that should be all facts, all the time.

Har har.

As an example, here is a Washington Post article about the Dutch food industry described the Netherlands as “a bit bigger than Maryland”. The article’s whole point is how much food can be produced in a tight space, so having the readers understand how big or small the country of Nethelrands actually was is important. I have ties to both of these places and some sense of their relative sizes, and I always thought the Netherlands to be more than a bit bigger than Maryland. My adopted home state may take a while to drive across, but since it’s being eaten by the Commonwealth of Virginia from one corner and the Chesapeake Bay from the other, there isn’t much land there.

To confirm my suspicion I went to Wikipedia, which said that the land area of Maryland was 25,314 km² while the Netherlands had 41,865 km² total area, 18.41% of which was water, yielding 31,457 km² of land — a full 25% more than Maryland. ⊕ If if you wanted to be more conservative you could say that Maryland was 20% smaller than the Netherlands, but that is not the comparison WaPo made. See also how percentages change with different framing — caveat lector. If I thought a meal cost $35 with tax but then the bill showed $43.75 I’d be asking for an explanation, and so would WaPo writers.

Or is 25% margin of error good enough, if you are to preserve the tired journalistic trope of comparing one thing to another? Because this is a clear case of precision being sacrificed to the gods of style: at 25,314 km² Maryland truly is the closest to the Netherlands of all the states of the Union and also has the benefit of being in WaPo’s local domain. The next closest, West Virgina, is at 62,259 km² twice the size of the Netherlands. Or rather — let’s not make the same sacrifice here — almost twice the size.

On the other hand, this is a 2-year-old article and who cares anyway? While I did stop paying attention to the newspaper noise a while ago, I still leave space for it to change my perception — which this article would have done were the relative sizes within a single-digit percentage of each other. But then I check, and nope, another disappointment.

(↬Marginal Revolution)

Yesterday I came upon an article about the increasing disconnect between US wealth and GDP growth and this morning I read this personal account of the egg freezing process, and all I can think about now is that both could be the same thing: taking from the future. For better or worse.

Hah: U.S. Sues Apple, Accusing It of Maintaining an iPhone Monopoly.

I can only hope this is a case of an unfortunate headline, not the actual substance of the lawsuit. What would be next, suing BMW for maintaining a BMW monopoly?

I thought we got rid of this nonsense last year, but apparently not. Remember, it’s never too late to resurect Swatch Internet Time.

The Medical Journal of Record The New York Times. The link is to a gift article. has an excellent story on Kawasaki disease out today which reminded me of Balkan endemic nephropathy, another rare disease with an unusual and infectious disease-like distribution. ⊕ Note that prevalence and distribution are where the similarities end. Kawasaki disease is a vasculitis (inflammation of the blood vessels) that affects children and young adults. Balkan endemic nephropathy caused your kidneys to shrivel up and stop working, and affected the middle-aged and the elderly. It had no known cause back when I was in medical school (which was — gasp — 20 years ago), but it has since been tied to accidental consumption of a certain plant. Well, accidental in the Balkans but intentional in China, where it was used in some traditional medicines and could cause “Chinese herbs nephropathy”, which was like the Balkan version on speed. Note that I am referring to both BEN and CHN in the past tense, but should probably temper my enthusiasm: even though we know what’s causing them and how to prevent them, their prevalence has decreased but is not zero.

The genetic revolution has been great for many aspects of medicine, but it has also made us a bit lazy. The promise of the late 1990s and the early 2000s has been that we would fine the genetic cause of most diseases, and would be only a step away from solving them. While we certainly found many genetic disorders, most of the are in the ultra-rare category and tied to newly-established diseases that were previously only described as syndromes. The “big” diseases — hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, major depression and the like — are as unknown as ever, their cause described as “multifactorial” which is code for “we don’t know”. Stomach ulcers were also thought to be multifactorial until we found out they were mostly caused by a bacterium. A similar thing seem to be happening with multiple sclerosis, which seems to be caused by a virus, one that was mostly thought to be an unavoidable nuisance but is now a vaccine target.

But haven’t we already discovered all the big bad bugs? I sincerely doubt it. We have trouble identifying even larger organisms Also a gift link, this time to The Washington Post. I’m on a roll today. — there could be hundreds of disease-causing creatures and substances that we don’t yet know about because we can’t see them, can’t grow them, and/or don’t know where to look. And we terrifyingly bad at looking for anything but the obvious — there are parts of our own anatomy that we’ve discovered just recently.

So, I know that we will find the cause of Kawasaki disease and can only hope that it will be soon. I also hope that we will find the one main cause of the obesity epidemic. Add in essential hypertension and psychiatric disorders in there. Much money has been spent on discovering the genetic factors of these diseases. Now that we know that genes play but a small part in most of them, maybe it’s time to reallocate the funds.

Among many consequences of covid-19, the rise and fall of Citizen Science has been one of the more amusing ones to watch. It has fallen from grace significantly since its 2020 peak, when everyone was an expert on cloth versus surgical versus N95 masks and “did their on research” on which one was best for them. As with any progressive idea, it soon became adopted by the other end of the American political spectrum who “did their own research” on vaccines and genomic integration of mRNA. So it goes.

Another type of science also thrived during covid-19 but unlike the Citizen sort it is now stronger than ever. It began with daily updates on covid-19 incidence and mortality, usually from the same source, when every Twitter user became an expert on data visualization and every media outlet had a “data journalist” job posting. It now continues with a daily stream of (predominantly) opinions presented as hard facts, backed by pretty graphs above and a list of sources below. I speak of course of Journalist Science.

Before I go into why — spoiler alert — I don’t think Journalist Science is a net positive, a disclaimer: I like and respect many “data reporter”-type people, the Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch probably most of all. FT has a clear and known bias toward capitalism and markets, which makes it one the most legible sources of news around; it is in fact the only newspaper I subscribe to. And I’ve linked to Burn-Murdoch’s reports many times, even on this blog. His covid-19 charts, small multiples in particular, were the peak of data visualization and deserved to be included in Edward Tufte’s latest book. So when looking for examples of why Journalist Science is bad, I will use the Financial Times as the prime example: not because they are particularly bad but because they are one of the best newspapers around, and even they don’t get it right.

This article and the reaction to it is what got me to question the concept. It was about the diverging political paths of kids these days: girls becoming every more liberal, boys turning more and more conservative, in four “developed” countries (South Korea, US, Germany and the UK). On the day it came out, two of my friends who don’t know each other thought something was fishy, and both linked to an act of Citizen Science attempting to debunk it. The attempt failed, not through any fault of the citizen doing it but because the original sources were opaque, and the ways in which they were combined were unclear.

Before the pandemic, most data visualization exercises had a single source: a Gallup poll, a think tank’s projection, or just a CIA Factbook piece of miscellany. Covid-19 seems to have eased data journalists into looking at more than one source, combining them into the same graph, correcting for this or that anomaly that is bound to occur in any large data gathering exercise, all in order to perform a feat that is impossible to distinguish from actual science and in fact is proper science by any reasonable definition. This drift from painting pretty pictures to doing research proceeded over months and years, with each change explained in a footnote, and with the public familiar enough with the numbers that any particular graph did not need special introduction.

By the time covid became old news, the drift was complete: data journalists became data scientists in everything but the name, with an editor instead of a PI and retweets, likes and view counts instead of citations. As problematic as academic research is — and look no further than this very blog for a few thoughts on the rot — Journalist Science is even worse and let me count a few of the ways how:

1. It does not provide its methods in sufficient detail to be reproducible;
2. It is driven by editorial policy, making it even more prone to publication bias than Academic Science;
3. Said editorial policy picks topics to which the readership will be receptive, leading to high degree of confirmation bias;
4. Unlike academic publications and pre-prints, there is minimal to no cross-talk with other researchers, making any one publication a “dead-end” for anyone interested in the topic.

Two things absent from my list of problems are lack of peer review and lack of statistician input, the first because we don’t really need it, the second because we do but I see no evidence that journalists are any worse at statistics than doctors, molecular biologists, psychologists, or anyone else writing research papers who isn’t an actual statistician.

So how to fix this? A good start would be to publish the actual work of science you did, either as a preprint or as a full-blown academic publication — thought that would be overkill. This is the approach taken by Nassim Taleb: if you have something scientific to say, write a paper instead of a Twitter thread. BioRxiv and medRxiv are two well-respected depositories accepting papers of any length, but outlets like the FT produce enough research that they may as well have a preprint server of their own. This would ensure that at least some amount of rigor was given to the methodology, and would enable dialogue.

Less likely would be for newspapers to pre-register their studies, or at least name the Journalist Science articles that were considered but turned down. Least likely? Have the data journalists dedicate their considerable knowledge and talent to describe, enlighten and criticize the body of scientific work that’s already there, or alternatively dedicate themselves full to science and call themselves scientists. The uncomfortable middle ground that Journalist Science straddles is contributing greatly to the reputational decline of both of its components.

The DC Mayor is not looking good at all this week. Writing about the crime in DC, I may have hinted, several times, that it’s the District Council’s bad lawmaking which led to the great crime wave of 2023. Well, a pseudononymous but (a bit too) well-informed Substack writer has recently outlined why that just isn’t so: most of the responsibility falls on the executive branch, that is to say the Mayor and her office. Ineffective council members are but convenient scape goats. Go figure.

I wish King Charles the best in light of his cancer diagnosis. Reading some of the old coverage of his health issues I noticed that both of his parents had “old age” listed as the cause of death. Any certifying MD that tried to pull that over here would have had the paperwork returned in an instant.

🌎 The Washington Post: “Watch the Earth breathe for one year”. No, seriously, watch it. One of the best works of data art I’ve seen, beautiful and scary.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.