Monthly Archives: September 2026

Data Comes From Papers

Leave a reply

There’s a lovely resource that I suspect most non-physicists don’t know about. It’s called the Particle Data Group, and its interactive site PDGLive.

If you want to know the most up-to-date information on a subatomic particle, PDGLive has your back. From their home page, you can click on familiar particles like photons (\gamma), electrons (e) or gluons and find the best info experiments have provided on properties like their mass and charge. It’s a great place to get an authoritative number for any particle physics property you’re interested in.

Of course, scientists don’t just accept one authoritative answer for anything, even whether Pluto is a planet. That’s why each measurement in PDGLive comes with an arrow you can expand to see a table of past measurements, which you can compare to.

Each measurement comes with a link to a source. And each source is not an experiment webpage, or some entry in a database. It’s a document, a publication, a paper.

In fact, PDGLive itself is just a website version of a paper, the Particle Data Group’s “Review of Particle Physics”. Click enough times, and you’ll find sections of a pdf on the site, explaining their reasoning for picking this experiment over that, emphasizing this or the other thing.

People talk about papers as how academics persuade one another, or how they show off and establish credit. But papers are also just a way to organize data. Each time an experiment figures something out, all of their reasoning and procedures are summarized together with the numbers they got. And anyone who reports those numbers to you will include a link, so you can go back, and check where the number came from.

It probably feels a bit weird, all of these numbers and technical details bottoming out in an archaic practice of writing down words for other human beings. But it means that all of the richness of the process is there somewhere, linked together and collated by the same social forces that keep track of credit, all in one navigable whole.

So when you run into a number, spare some thought for where it came from. You can probably find out.

Everybody Who Isn’t ”Viewers Like You”

Leave a reply

Last week, I talked about how truthseekers get paid. But truth-tellers and truth-seekers are different things.

Consider educational kids’ shows on public television.

Nobody who works on Sesame Street is out there uncovering new letters and numbers. Bill Nye’s show wasn’t bringing analysis fresh from the lab.

The purpose of these shows is to educate. The purpose of education is to change minds.

So who pays for educational kids’ shows on public television?

If you’re from the US and watched PBS growing up, you remember one answer: “viewers like you!” US public television is supported by donations, ordinary people across the country who want it to keep on educating kids.

But you also might remember the lists of names that came before “viewers like you”. Some of those were things like “the Department of Education” or “a grant from the National Science Foundation”: government programs, in other words. Others were philanthropists and private foundations. Some were tied to companies, like the Intel Foundation, or Juicy Juice.

All of these groups, from government departments to donors, are trying to change kids’ minds. They support specific shows on specific topics, where they want kids to be better-informed. The same groups have the same kind of impact on schools. For example, I remember in elementary school we all learned to play a recorder, because a wealthy donor had given the school recorders out of the idea that music education was especially important.

For a truth-seeker like a journalist, accepting that kind of funding would be a problem. Grants for journalists tend to support things like travel, letting journalists learn more about specific topics, not pre-judging the conclusion. But children’s television is about truth-telling, not truth-seeking, so our standards are different. We trust the people making children’s television to care about whether they’re telling the truth. And because the topics aren’t new, we don’t usually worry about their judgement being biased.

All this is rather obvious. But now, consider science YouTube.

Some science YouTubers seem to have a mission much like children’s television. They’re there to teach, not to make independent judgements. They don’t search for truth on their own. And some of them are funded by educational grants, much like children’s television.

Others are a bit more like journalists, or even activists. People follow them for their opinions, to hear their assessment. They’re trying to be truth-seekers.

On YouTube, it’s not always obvious which is which.

There’s a particular group of philanthropists called Effective Altruists, and many of them are concerned about AI. So in between funding things like anti-malaria bed nets, some of them are giving grants to YouTubers to make educational content about AI-related risks.

Apparently, they reached out to Sabine Hossenfelder, which was a bad idea. Sabine Hossenfelder’s followers aren’t just looking for education on known facts. They’re looking for her judgements, her literal bullshit-rating on ideas. And so while she’s paid by “viewers like you”, she’s not really the type to get paid by that type of grant.

What I want to emphasize, and what looked like it was getting lost in the discussion, was that their pitch would have been totally reasonable for other YouTubers. Educators do occasionally get grants to educate on specific topics. This is in fact a totally normal thing. Some YouTubers are educators first and foremost, they aren’t there as truth-seekers, but truth-tellers, with a real difference in how careful they need to be about bias.

Some YouTubers are different from other YouTubers. News at 11.

Paying the Truthseekers

Leave a reply

Academics and journalists have a lot in common, at least in principle.

Whether you’re a reporter or a professor, your job is to go out into the world and figure out the truth. You’re supposed to be careful, to check and correct for how you might be wrong. And at the end of the day you’re supposed to communicate what you found.

The differences mostly come in how you’re paid.

You could imagine some sort of pure truthseeker, paid purely by how well they tell the truth. People would ask them to find out the truth about something, and pay them for the service. And the truthseekers with the best track record would get the most clients. But neither profession really works like this.

Journalism comes closest. Once upon a time, people bought newspapers in order to be the first to know when something important happened. While there’s still a little bit of that going on (I guess this is what Bloomberg Terminals are for?), it’s a lot less central because of the internet. Now, there are hundreds of ways to find out about things, from a multitude of news sites to social media. More and more, people expect to be able to get information for free.

In that environment, the news has to compete not on the facts themselves, but on how it presents them. People pay for news that’s curated well to match their interests, or news that feels more respectable. And more than either of those, they pay for news that’s entertaining. So while truthseeking skills pay, writing skills often end up mattering more. In a sense, it’s why it’s possible for me to do journalism at all. I was trained in the academic truthseeking tradition, not the journalistic one. I got into journalism by impressing editors with my writing, not my ability to suss out the truth.

That academic truthseeking tradition is quite different, in part because the rewards for it are much more indirect. Academics pay comes from two main sources: research grants, and student tuition. Students are mostly there to learn old facts, not new ones, so that source of money supports research only in so far that students believe that a successful researcher with time for research will also be a better teacher.

Research grants, in principle, pay for truthseeking. But they’re typically paid by governments, which often don’t have a clear idea of what they’d like to learn, since the more practical questions are already being researched by private companies. So the decision gets delegated out to other academics, who have a vague shared sense of what’s worth knowing and what’s not. Accuracy should have an impact: that is, it should be easier to get grants if you’re better at finding the truth. But in practice, unless someone does so badly they trigger a scandal, academics don’t usually get things all that wrong. So grants are mostly based on other factors.

Paying someone purely to deliver the truth, not to entertain or match a culture, seems tricky. You could imagine sci-fi scenarios. What if we could track the logic people used to make decisions, and demand payment if those decisions were based on facts we uncovered, like a journalist getting a percentage of every short made in response to bad news they dug up about a company? What if governments paid in proportion to how valuable academic ideas turned out to be, centuries after they were discovered, and modern-day academics sold shares in that future payout to fund themselves? What if prediction markets something something?

For the moment, academics and journalists are both in a weird middle space. They’re truthseekers, still, by culture and inclination and desire. But they’re paid for something else.