4 ms·
Exactly what I wanted to say. Maybe living in Israel teaches a lot about how good, and all too often bad, reporting is. Even the reporting considered the most "
by edanm 16y ago
Exactly what I wanted to say. Maybe living in Israel teaches a lot about how good, and all too often bad, reporting is. Even the reporting considered the most "unbiased" in certain countries sounds, to me, like it's incredibly biased. Never mind which more accurate: it just goes to show that bias depends more on what you believe going into the new piece than what it contains.
After reading Seth Godin's "All Marketers are Liars", I've come to the realization that there is not truth, not in the sense people mean when they say "unbiased". Everything worth saying has a marketing spin. Everything people say to you goes through layers of previous beliefs. There is not such thing as "just the facts".
It's not even hard to "prove": take any reasonably controversial story that happened recently. The initial story already shows you what most people believe based on their first reactions. Any new piece of evidence that comes out doesn't have any effect on which side of the issue people are on: the "fact" is always somehow a proof that they are right. I've seen this happen very often, and yet people still seem to think that it's all facts.
- pg 16y agoThe square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is the sum of the squares of the other sides.
- edanm 16y agoMathematics (and certain sciences) are one of the few fields where actual facts exist. Most news, though, deals with with humans, humans' interactions, and so on. You can never know what other people are thinking or feeling when they do something, and oftentimes they themselves don't even know. If you want to see how bad most reporting is, just see how bad it is in fields you understand. Most reporting about the computer industry is terrible. Just as one funny example of a "fact" by an expert (and ironic who I'm writing this to), pg's article on PR has a footnote about how the damages figure for the Morris worm was calculated. Great read in any case, which sorta makes some of the same points: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.
- nitrogen 16y agopg's article on I think it's awesome that usernames are so de-emphasized in HN that one can respond directly to a comment by the site's creator without realizing it (or perhaps you did realize, but deliberately chose to use the third person[1]). Though HN obviously has reputation built in with karma and well-known members with well-deserved notoriety, it's very easy to ignore names and evaluate posts solely on their merits. I believe this can be a useful tool when implementing the suggestion of others to consider aggregated information from multiple sources. [1] Will grammarians one day create formal rules for forum posts?
- thisrod 16y ago... in Pythagoras's dreams. It ain't so in our universe. http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980327b.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980327b....
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- grinich 16y agoEuclid fanboy!