[hn_throwaway_99]

> implicit calls for the FDA to Do Something and ban the tests (not an iota of cost-benefit considered nor any self-reflection about whether we want the FDA involved in anything at all these days)...

This is true in so many areas of journalism but lately seems especially egregious in the NYT. And I don't really blame them, as the incentives for any individual reporter are just too great - having the government make a major policy change based on your article is basically the brass ring for an investigative reporter.

I basically can only use these types of articles as a jumping off point for my own research, as I usually find the moralizing conclusion the article comes to as unsupported.

[nohuck13]

"the incentives for any individual reporter are just too great - having the government make a major policy change based on your article is basically the brass ring for an investigative reporter"

Yep, this is the framing I came here looking for.

Investigative journalists live in the same asymmetrically-incentivized world as social science researchers. If the reporter had looked into the phenomenon and concluded "yeah, boring technical logic pretty much works as expected here" then there's no story.

[nohuck13]

I wonder if the NYT editorial staff receives zillions of these pitches from their reporters purporting to reveal nefarious phenomena, and most of them turn out benign. It's fun to imagine that the NYT editorship is actually exceedingly good at detecting these outrage-false-positives before publication, but the base rate of outrage-true-positives is just so low that you have to expect some to make it to publication.

I'd like to imagine there's an investigative-journalism-editor-news somewhere, and they're discussing this discussion saying "bah, these clowns are making sweeping generalizations about editorial standards based on only a false positive; this is totally specious with no mention of the prior distribution or sensitivity vs specificity trade-offs"