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Remember all the threads recently about fake news? "The Midland Basin Wolfcamp Shale Is Not Worth $900 Billion - That's Not How Resource Economics Works" http

by diafygi 10y ago

Remember all the threads recently about fake news? "The Midland Basin Wolfcamp Shale Is Not Worth $900 Billion - That's Not How Resource Economics Works" http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/11/18/the-midland-basin-wolfcamp-shale-is-not-worth-900-billion-thats-not-how-resource-economics-works/#7dd018a72197 http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/11/18/the-midla...

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
HackerNews needs to take steps to prevent fake news from skewing people's perspectives /s Edit: I really was being sarcastic. This is the current response towards Facebook and I was trying to demonstrate how silly it is.
draw_down 10y ago
I don't think that is quite what is meant by "fake news" but I take the point.
- phonyBologna 10y ago
  Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintenance of unsophisticated world views.
  - draw_down 10y ago
    But I wouldn't classify this as any of that, it's just regular old inaccurate.
    - phonyBologna 10y ago
      So, yeah, "fake news" is more like this other sort of thing: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive. Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with. Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news? Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed? Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published. Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with. Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil? But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!
smsm42 10y ago
Frankly, I resent the trend to call anything one disagrees with or find some problem with "fake news". Fake news is specific phenomenon and this has nothing to do with it. True that the 900B estimate is nothing to do with actual monetary value of the deposit - it's just a size estimate expressed in terms most understandable by common person. Maybe it is misleading - though quantifying "a real lot of oil" to make it comprehensible is not an easy task, and writing "well, there's lots of oil but we have no idea if we can get to it and how much would that cost" is a bad headline. But the correction that 900B figure is just a sort of "car analogy" to estimate the size and not the actual worth is true. It does not mean original article is "fake news" - it's true news, just using one somewhat misleading illustration.
- gozur88 10y ago
  I didn't find the headline misleading. It's no different than when people say there's $10 trillion in platinum out in some asteroid. People understand there are extraction costs.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
rdtsc 10y ago
I thought "Fake News" was lizard people or ancient aliens. Are we using "Fake News" for oil price estimates now? Heck, by this metric CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, NYT, WP all are fake news outlets. What are the real news then?
enraged_camel 10y ago
Just because something is wrong doesn't mean it is fake.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
I'm pretty sure you have the best intentions but I think you're making a critical mistake here. There is a distinct difference between insufficiently researched news or biased news (likely what we have here) and propaganda (aka "fake news"). The legitimization of propaganda sources is an enormously serious problem which shouldn't be watered down by confusing it with other journalistic problems.

by diafygi 10y ago

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

HackerNews needs to take steps to prevent fake news from skewing people's perspectives /s Edit: I really was being sarcastic. This is the current response towards Facebook and I was trying to demonstrate how silly it is.

draw_down 10y ago

I don't think that is quite what is meant by "fake news" but I take the point.

phonyBologna 10y ago
Eh, the way I see it, this whole thing with the "fake news" (because propaganda's a dirty word), is more about willful ignorance and the insulation and maintenance of unsophisticated world views.
- draw_down 10y ago
  But I wouldn't classify this as any of that, it's just regular old inaccurate.
  - phonyBologna 10y ago
    So, yeah, "fake news" is more like this other sort of thing: https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-analysis https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an... https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became... I feel like there's something more interesting going on here. Like, more to the point that there's this unstoppable reality that people are reading the stories they find attractive. Whether the goal of the stories was to game a compensation system, by forming a click-bait content-farming advertisement ring, and whether it was a plan hatched by two-bit amateurs doesn't matter as much as the premise that many, many people are susceptible to preferring a channel that happily conforms to the ideas that seem to please them, without questioning why it always provides them with everything they've always agreed with. Is the problem that someone out there is creating junk food popcorn stories that people smoke crack and read avidly? Or is the problem that people are smoking crack before they read the news? Seems like it's an easier solution to hunt down those rotten unethical publishers. But after you get rid of the publishers, you still have this sprawling kingdom of crack addicts, so did anything really get fixed? Like, certain people prefer to hear that we have this amazing trillion dollar oil field now, whether it's worth that much or not. So that's what gets published. Meanwhile, the valuation of the huge, bigly oil field is a digression from the more pressing conversation about whether we should ever burn all that oil to begin with. Like, yeah, wow. Lots of oil. Great. But uh, what about all the smog and that business with the greenhouse gases? Weren't we supposed to start using less oil? But never mind all that! What gets clicks is the price tag! Run it!

smsm42 10y ago

Frankly, I resent the trend to call anything one disagrees with or find some problem with "fake news". Fake news is specific phenomenon and this has nothing to do with it. True that the 900B estimate is nothing to do with actual monetary value of the deposit - it's just a size estimate expressed in terms most understandable by common person. Maybe it is misleading - though quantifying "a real lot of oil" to make it comprehensible is not an easy task, and writing "well, there's lots of oil but we have no idea if we can get to it and how much would that cost" is a bad headline. But the correction that 900B figure is just a sort of "car analogy" to estimate the size and not the actual worth is true. It does not mean original article is "fake news" - it's true news, just using one somewhat misleading illustration.

gozur88 10y ago
I didn't find the headline misleading. It's no different than when people say there's $10 trillion in platinum out in some asteroid. People understand there are extraction costs.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

rdtsc 10y ago

I thought "Fake News" was lizard people or ancient aliens. Are we using "Fake News" for oil price estimates now? Heck, by this metric CNN, ABC, FOX, CBS, NYT, WP all are fake news outlets. What are the real news then?

enraged_camel 10y ago

Just because something is wrong doesn't mean it is fake.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

I'm pretty sure you have the best intentions but I think you're making a critical mistake here. There is a distinct difference between insufficiently researched news or biased news (likely what we have here) and propaganda (aka "fake news"). The legitimization of propaganda sources is an enormously serious problem which shouldn't be watered down by confusing it with other journalistic problems.