Did you read the article? There's going to be a paper published tomorrow in Nature and the MIT scientists who wrote it will be doing a press conference. This Brian guy is just amplifying the news - he's not the author of the study.
Yes, I read the article. The discovery does sound compelling. I'm commenting on his amplification strategy ("Signs of Life discovered on Venus") rather than just presenting the facts ("Phosphine detected in Venus atmosphere").
I prefer my science news without a hype man but the author seems to take quite the initiative on Quora: "However we must deploy Occam's Razor and suggest the simplest explanation and the evidence suggests the simple explanation is biological sources, life."
It's pretty sensationalized and coordinated like a PR campaign.
If you watch the video on his Twitter feed, the scientists themselves seem to focus on the science and don't claim to have "discovered life on Venus", so they do seem well intentioned. And their discovery certainly does sound interesting and potentially significant.
“Signs of life” has more information content than “Phosphine” - I had no idea that Phosphine is a sign of life, and that is a completely objective description of it from my new understanding. A sign of life does not mean life.
My understanding is that the presence of it strongly implies life on Venus. Just because people have a prior on that doesn't mean the evidence is inherently weak. If it turns out there is bacterial life on Mars and on Venus (both potentially the case) people who claimed we needed "extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims" will look conservative in retrospect.
Good journalism (and any information sharing) is about delivering meaning, not just facts. Facts divorced of context tend to lack meaning to all but those that fully understand their context, because they're prone to misunderstanding.
It's completely appropriate to center a headline around the likely meaning of the phosphine discovery rather than the discovery itself, because almost nobody is an astrobiologist. The scientists who study this stuff are just as compelled by the question of life on other planets as a layperson, because its discovery would be extremely meaningful to us as a species.
The question is not whether headlines should be represented as facts or their meaning, its whether the meaning that is presented is supported by the facts. In this case, it seems warranted.
