Science is really hard to make into news for three reasons:
1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100 years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from how interesting the article might be.
2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in understanding add up over time, but really are hard to get excited about individually. Once in a while we get a huge leap, but most of the time, it's "we got a few more digits of pi calculated". It's really hard to extrapolate these tiny changes into anything that the average reader will even notice in their lifetime.
3. Ultimately, science has to compete for attention with wars, politics, sport, local, finance (ok, might be as boring as most science, but at least people are literally invested).
So, it's hard. BTW - the author of the article does a great job making science more interesting. Would love to see more writers cover the subject at the level Sabine Hassenfelder does.
On your first point about uncertainty, I think both scientists and non-scientists struggle with how to have a meaningful conversation where real world decisions and policies have to be made in the face of material uncertainty.
I generally see two ways of dealing with this on the ley side, which is to either ignore it altogether or to write if the finding or result completely. Neither is really appropriate and I think it's due to humans not being well wired to appreciate how uncertain everything that we don't have uncertainty parameters for actually is. Establishing a probable interval doesn't actually affect the probability of a thing.
On the academic side, the problem is that most academic are cowards. They see a disproportionate cost to being wrong, and culturally, are trained to always be able to give a 'right' answer, even if that answer is useless. Theres a kind of automoton language that is used by researchers that allows them to escape any real consequences that might extend from having an opinion. It's a kind of aloofness that pretends that the science is happening in some kind of white tower vacuum of pure intellectualism. And they aren't wrong from a social perspective, in that academia will enforce a serious cost to them for being wrong.
To sum up, my broader point is that both journalists and academics tiptoe around and hide behind uncertainty far too much. Any issue worth having a conversation on is one where decisions will need to be made inspite of uncertainty. As well, everything is uncertain, and just because we haven't/ can't get an uncertainty on something, it shouldn't give you more confidence than something we can establish an uncertainty for.
While I don’t disagree with anything you said, I think it’s more a supply and demand thing. Many(most?) people seem to value certainty over truth, in fact some people seem to think one is an indicator of the other and uncertainty is a form of weakness.
I like this article probably better because they didnt d approach it this way, but they seem to miss out on why many people consume science media and what those expectations are. See every discussion about COVID in the media ever.
1. Error and uncertainty. The news like concrete facts, not (paraphrased from the article), "3 months plus or minus 100 years". Also, a lot of science does not hold up over time. It takes a long time to explain uncertainty and it also dilutes from how interesting the article might be.
2. Science is mostly boring. Incremental, tiny improvements in understanding add up over time, but really are hard to get excited about individually. Once in a while we get a huge leap, but most of the time, it's "we got a few more digits of pi calculated". It's really hard to extrapolate these tiny changes into anything that the average reader will even notice in their lifetime.
3. Ultimately, science has to compete for attention with wars, politics, sport, local, finance (ok, might be as boring as most science, but at least people are literally invested).
So, it's hard. BTW - the author of the article does a great job making science more interesting. Would love to see more writers cover the subject at the level Sabine Hassenfelder does.