4 ms·

Elon Musk's latest company: Pravda

22 points by azhenley 8y ago

azhenley 8y ago
Someone dug up the filing of the corporation in California by one of Musk's associates: https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704 https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704
dragonwriter 8y ago
That's a stunningly bad idea; it amounts to rating how well articles feed into public (or, rather, the sites users) preestablished biases, which is the only basis most users will have to rate the “core truth” of most news stories. At best, it's useless, at worst it contributes to further suppressing any news story that challenges widely accepted narratives.
- azhenley 8y ago
  I had a similar first thought: it is going to drive us even deeper into an echo chamber.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    The pretty clear motivation for this is recent negative (but factually true) news about Tesla, and Musk's desire to either end negative news about his company, or else get people not to trust such news. An echo chamber may be exactly what he wants. And, well, there's precedent for this strategy working to an extent.
- kankroc 8y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic. I'd see this as a useful tool for smaller local newspapers.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic. That's true of most topics; having the lay public vote on credibility ratingd does nothing to address this, though (and probably makes it worse on issues where the truth clashes with the popular misconception.)
- Udik 8y ago
  I think that, as always, the important is the implementation. People are mentioning Facebook's attempts to check fake news as an example of how this is a bad idea, but Facebook is a system that has trained hundreds of millions to just thing in terms of "thumbs up/ thumbs down". Wikipedia would be a better example of a collaborative system meant to distill some shared truth out of the work of faceless crowds, and while it has serious issues, it's also been a remarkable success. And Wikipedia basically lacks tools for structured discussion, and the bureaucratic processes in place seem all built on on the most basic hypertext technology. Let's not underestimate Musk's logical thinking and ability in executing.
matte_black 8y ago
Getting sick and tired of Elon Musk, and his petty Donald Trump style rants. Focus.
mncharity 8y ago
A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. And there doesn't seem a good existing mechanism to deal with that. Individual journalists with an axe to grind, which if you don't follow their work, you'll not know to take with a grain of salt. Large misinformation campaigns, which the press happily falls for, and afterwards doesn't report on or learn from. When the Zuma defense satellite deployment failed, it was very quickly clear that Northrop Grumman was at fault. But they ran a congress and press campaign, pointing at SpaceX, generating a press "frenzy" (WSJ's word). It was bizarre to watch the press, from NYTimes front page on down, simply getting the story wrong. For days. Oh, the NYTimes got "facts" right - as in "people are blaming SpaceX" - but with little hint that that was bogus. The campaign was successful in avoiding a public story of "Northrop just burned up a billion dollars!" And afterward? No negative feedback for any of the participants. Some quiet little corrections, some of which required reading between the lines to even recognize as such. No articles about the reporting. No backlash. No postmortems. No sign that next week any of them will do any better. And Tesla is apparently the largest short on the US stock market. With the press coverage you'd expect from that. So perhaps Musk encountered a societal failure mode, didn't see anyone else successfully addressing it, and is doing a trial balloon on one possible approach. Hopefully this will at least raise the visibility of the issue.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. Tesla, at least, has been "encountering" problems of its own making. Financial troubles, production troubles, safety troubles with its "autopilot" feature and workplace safety issues for manufacturing employees have all been reported, and I'm unaware of any evidence that such stories were lies fabricated from whole cloth. Rather, those stories seem to be fact-based. If Musk doesn't like the facts, he has the power to change them (by remedying the problems at Tesla). But instead he seems to be in favor of forming his own propaganda outlet to attack those who report the facts.
mkempe 8y ago
How many Americans know what "pravda" means in Russian, as well as what "Pravda" was in the Soviet Union?
- djkz 8y ago
  To elaborate, Pravda means "truth" in Russian, and that was the name of the state propoganda newspaper in the soviet union.
- desdiv 8y ago
  Americans read/watch the news and every news article about this I've read so far ₁₂₃₄ correctly pointed out the Soviet connection. ₁ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-media/638253002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-s... ₂ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-filed-for-pravda-business-months-before-scorning-the-media https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-file... ₃ https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-exists-1826271755 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-... ₄ http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-pravda-mean-2018-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-pr...
- greglindahl 8y ago
  "There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda" -- Pravda being truth and Izvestiya being news.
Jeff_Brown 8y ago
This good idea does not go far enough. There's a clear need to crowdsource judgment. The judgment could be much more expressive than "this is true". A hypergraph database would allow collection of arbitrary metadata -- "this helped me understand plate tectonics", "this contradicts that", etc. And it would enable more targeted search: not just "show me true things", but, say, "show me articles about voting that are highly discussed among the economic faculty at Michigan State". I've written about this here: https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-why/blob/master/noise-vs-sunlight.md https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-why/blob/master/noise-vs-s... I also wrote a language -- very, very close to natural language, but machine-readable -- designed to facilitate such higher-order queries: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...

22 points by azhenley 8y ago

Someone dug up the filing of the corporation in California by one of Musk's associates: https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704 https://twitter.com/meharris/status/999372255237832704

dragonwriter 8y ago

That's a stunningly bad idea; it amounts to rating how well articles feed into public (or, rather, the sites users) preestablished biases, which is the only basis most users will have to rate the “core truth” of most news stories. At best, it's useless, at worst it contributes to further suppressing any news story that challenges widely accepted narratives.

azhenley 8y ago
I had a similar first thought: it is going to drive us even deeper into an echo chamber.
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  The pretty clear motivation for this is recent negative (but factually true) news about Tesla, and Musk's desire to either end negative news about his company, or else get people not to trust such news. An echo chamber may be exactly what he wants. And, well, there's precedent for this strategy working to an extent.
kankroc 8y ago
While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic. I'd see this as a useful tool for smaller local newspapers.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > While I agree with the sentiment, I also have to point out that some journalists covering tech seem to have little knowledge of the topic. That's true of most topics; having the lay public vote on credibility ratingd does nothing to address this, though (and probably makes it worse on issues where the truth clashes with the popular misconception.)
Udik 8y ago
I think that, as always, the important is the implementation. People are mentioning Facebook's attempts to check fake news as an example of how this is a bad idea, but Facebook is a system that has trained hundreds of millions to just thing in terms of "thumbs up/ thumbs down". Wikipedia would be a better example of a collaborative system meant to distill some shared truth out of the work of faceless crowds, and while it has serious issues, it's also been a remarkable success. And Wikipedia basically lacks tools for structured discussion, and the bureaucratic processes in place seem all built on on the most basic hypertext technology. Let's not underestimate Musk's logical thinking and ability in executing.

matte_black 8y ago

Getting sick and tired of Elon Musk, and his petty Donald Trump style rants. Focus.

mncharity 8y ago

A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. And there doesn't seem a good existing mechanism to deal with that. Individual journalists with an axe to grind, which if you don't follow their work, you'll not know to take with a grain of salt. Large misinformation campaigns, which the press happily falls for, and afterwards doesn't report on or learn from. When the Zuma defense satellite deployment failed, it was very quickly clear that Northrop Grumman was at fault. But they ran a congress and press campaign, pointing at SpaceX, generating a press "frenzy" (WSJ's word). It was bizarre to watch the press, from NYTimes front page on down, simply getting the story wrong. For days. Oh, the NYTimes got "facts" right - as in "people are blaming SpaceX" - but with little hint that that was bogus. The campaign was successful in avoiding a public story of "Northrop just burned up a billion dollars!" And afterward? No negative feedback for any of the participants. Some quiet little corrections, some of which required reading between the lines to even recognize as such. No articles about the reporting. No backlash. No postmortems. No sign that next week any of them will do any better. And Tesla is apparently the largest short on the US stock market. With the press coverage you'd expect from that. So perhaps Musk encountered a societal failure mode, didn't see anyone else successfully addressing it, and is doing a trial balloon on one possible approach. Hopefully this will at least raise the visibility of the issue.

ubernostrum 8y ago
A possible context is that SpaceX and Tesla have been encountering journalism whose quality has been less than wonderful. Tesla, at least, has been "encountering" problems of its own making. Financial troubles, production troubles, safety troubles with its "autopilot" feature and workplace safety issues for manufacturing employees have all been reported, and I'm unaware of any evidence that such stories were lies fabricated from whole cloth. Rather, those stories seem to be fact-based. If Musk doesn't like the facts, he has the power to change them (by remedying the problems at Tesla). But instead he seems to be in favor of forming his own propaganda outlet to attack those who report the facts.

mkempe 8y ago

How many Americans know what "pravda" means in Russian, as well as what "Pravda" was in the Soviet Union?

djkz 8y ago
To elaborate, Pravda means "truth" in Russian, and that was the name of the state propoganda newspaper in the soviet union.
desdiv 8y ago
Americans read/watch the news and every news article about this I've read so far ₁₂₃₄ correctly pointed out the Soviet connection. ₁ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-spacex-ceo-elon-musk-media/638253002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/23/tesla-s... ₂ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-filed-for-pravda-business-months-before-scorning-the-media https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/musk-file... ₃ https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-exists-1826271755 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-... ₄ http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-pravda-mean-2018-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tweets-what-does-pr...
greglindahl 8y ago
"There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda" -- Pravda being truth and Izvestiya being news.

Jeff_Brown 8y ago

This good idea does not go far enough. There's a clear need to crowdsource judgment. The judgment could be much more expressive than "this is true". A hypergraph database would allow collection of arbitrary metadata -- "this helped me understand plate tectonics", "this contradicts that", etc. And it would enable more targeted search: not just "show me true things", but, say, "show me articles about voting that are highly discussed among the economic faculty at Michigan State". I've written about this here: https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-why/blob/master/noise-vs-sunlight.md https://github.com/synchrony/smsn-why/blob/master/noise-vs-s... I also wrote a language -- very, very close to natural language, but machine-readable -- designed to facilitate such higher-order queries: https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/blob/master/Hash/why-use-hash.md https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/b...