Sports media > Prestige media (space aliens edition)

Sports media

Defector: Vibrations From “Interstellar Meteor” Actually From Local Truck; Or, Fact-Checking The Celebrity Scientist

Prestige media

Scientific American: Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding

Guardian: The alien hunter: has Harvard’s Avi Loeb found proof of extraterrestrial life?

And, of course, NPR. And NPR.

“All of this would be terribly exciting if it were true”

Sabrina Imbler at Defector tells the story:

How did Loeb manage to pinpoint the stretch of ocean where the microscopic fragments of a former fireball might have sunk five years ago? His team targeted a seven-mile region in the Pacific Ocean based on the obscured sensor data from the U.S. military satellites, which was released publicly through CNEOS, as well as data from a seismometer from Manus Island, located near where the meteor fell. All of this would be terribly exciting if it were true.

On March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, several scientists presented early evidence that directly refutes Loeb’s claims, Nature reported . . .

The second, funnier refutation, is directed at the seismic data Loeb examined to home in on the meteor’s landing spot. When Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, examined the ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station on Manus Island, he found no evidence of seismic waves from a meteor. Instead, he noticed the signal Loeb cites “changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” Fernando said in a press release, suggesting that the “alien sound” was actually a heavy truck driving to and from the hospital. . . .

If the sound of the meteor was merely a truck, what did the actual meteor sound like? In their preprint, Fernando’s team examined data from stations in Australia and Palau equipped with sensors to detect sound waves from nuclear tests and found waves that seemed to resemble a meteor hitting the atmosphere—more than 100 miles from the spot Loeb investigated. . . .

Hey, what’s going on here?

Imbler continues:

Loeb built an establishment career over decades publishing hundreds of papers on standard astronomical stuff—black holes, dark matter, etc.—and ascended to various directorships at Harvard. All this changed in 2017, when a cigar-shaped object named ‘Oumuamua soared through our solar system from another. . . .

Loeb published a paper suggesting ‘Oumuamua could be a form of space travel called a lightsail, and therefore a sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Since then, Loeb has pivoted to aliens, a focus that has skyrocketed his public profile. If you do not read Loeb’s blog, you can read Loeb’s books, read about Loeb in a series of glossy magazine profiles, listen to Loeb on Joe Rogan and other podcasts . . .

And some perspective:

None of this is surprising, of course, because this is what celebrity scientists do . . . . They preach from their pulpits, extrapolating bizarre connections from their putative fields to completely unrelated issues. They simply must go on Joe Rogan. . . . They leap at the chance to show their faces, no matter the context, which is how Neil deGrasse Tyson has made cameos no one asked for in such illustrious films as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, even playing the astrological sign Taurus in Jennifer Lopez’s self-financed $20 million dollar autofictional music video . . . They hog attention, both in fawning stories about their work and stories about the researchers who inevitably question their work. . . .

Imbler concludes:

No field of science should be associated with a face. It’s telling that a newcomer to the search for intelligent life like Loeb has become the figurehead for SETI in seven years when a researcher like Jill Tarter, a SETI pioneer who is the inspiration for the film Contact, is not mentioned once in the New York Times Magazine profile of Loeb, “How a Harvard Professor Became the World’s Leading Alien Hunter.” (Loeb infamously yelled at Tarter during a public webinar after she critiqued his characterization of the field that she worked in for more than 40 years.) When we give attention to celebrity scientists, even in the form of much-needed critiques, without spotlighting the researchers who are doing the real, grueling, longterm work that doesn’t always lead to sensational claims and is therefore left out of the discourse, we are still only promoting the celebrity scientist and their many money-making projects. . . .

So with that, let this be the first and last time I write anything about Loeb, whose work I only want to encounter after it has been translated and contextualized by his critics. And in the case of the spherules, Fernando told Scientific American, “I think they’ve found some sludge.”

Stick to sports

So . . . what happened? How did Scientific American, the Guardian, and NPR get conned? The answer is, they didn’t get conned. They wanted clicks, they got clicks. Many of the news media articles on this space aliens guy cover their butts, just a little, by pointing to skeptics. But not in a balanced way. The Scientific American article has three paragraphs about Loeb and only one paragraph about his skeptics, followed by an interview with Loeb featuring no tough questions. The Guardian article has a question mark in its title—good for them!—but the actual article, which is 16 paragraphs long, has only three and a half paragraphs expressing any skepticism. Etc.

Journalists have a reputation for skepticism. But, as we’ve discussed in the past in the context of Gladwell/Freakonomics/NPR/Ted/etc., credulity is a kind of superpower for a journalist. If you’re willing to believe, you can write these clickety-click stories with no pangs of conscience.

There’s also the scientist-as-hero thing, which I absolutely hate, especially when “Harvard” or “Nobel Prize” are involved.

So how did sports site Defector nail it? I think it’s because, if you’re a sports journalist, you get familiar with stories where rich guys make stuff up and get fawning media coverage. From that perspective, this Harvard dude with the space aliens isn’t so different from some zillionaire who greases the local politicians and press in order to get funding for a new stadium.

Last word

As a Reddit commenter put it:

I honestly find it impressive how Avi Loeb took a statistically quite impressive track record for a scientist and entirely trashed it within a few years.