8 ms·

I’ll disagree with your statement because there’s a hidden variable/assumption that has now changed. There is a great amount of information available today com

I’ll disagree with your statement because there’s a hidden variable/assumption that has now changed. There is a great amount of information available today compared to before - all else held constant. All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task than before. Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational awareness as a member of HN. They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of various turf wars, or the credibility of a page. This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or distracted from information. In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is now swamped with more noise than ever before. So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific and intractable sense. (The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational, non-impulsive minds.)

csydas 9y ago
Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get into an argument banter back and forth? We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information, regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as viral. We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - even when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable source is darn near impossible. Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily enough, but the rest is pretty dire.

csydas 9y ago

Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get into an argument banter back and forth? We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information, regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as viral. We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - even when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable source is darn near impossible. Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily enough, but the rest is pretty dire.