A heuristic for sorting science stories in the news by David Spiegelhalter.
From the post:
Dominic Lawson’s article in the Sunday Times today[paywall] quotes me as having the rather cynical heuristic: “the very fact that a piece of health research appears in the papers indicates that it is nonsense.” I stand by this, but after a bit more consideration I would like to suggest a slightly more refined version for dealing with science stories in the news, particularly medical ones.
“Ask yourself: if the study had come up with a negative result, would I be hearing about it? If NO, then don’t bother to read or listen to the story”
(emphasis in the original)
…
This is a great post and deserves to be read in full.
After reading it, how would you answer this question: Would you use the same criteria for social media reports?
Granting there is a lot of noise in some social media streams but at the same time, there are some that are quite high quality.
As far as the “mainstream” news, you are dumber for having heard it.