3 ms·

> I'm seeing a lot of these poorly written articles lately. Journalists have a preconceived point they want to make, make it in the headline, and then pretend t

> I'm seeing a lot of these poorly written articles lately. Journalists have a preconceived point they want to make, make it in the headline, and then pretend they're writing something that supports it but not really supporting their thesis at all, counting on the fact that most people are only going to skim the article and not critically evaluate it so they can put their idea into people's heads 'Hey, young billionaires are all totes boring, right?", inception style. Honestly, though, isn't that what information is? You can try to make it perfect, but I bet you'd wind up inventing just as much new stuff as you would uncovering 'the truth'. It's a philosophical argument, what is perspective, what is understanding, what 'should' be conveyed versus what is simply being repeated, what has been discovered, what is the true representation of reality versus what is a selectively biased data set. There's probably a balance of how much criticism a journalist can expect to obtain when they are looking to uncover something mundane and tailored to a crowd, versus something truly groundbreaking. Honestly I think a lot of people are just exhausted from the internet. Everywhere you look, it's either extreme criticism on 'group think' or being uncertain whether to engage in agreement because agreement can be criticized as 'group think'. Then you get divergence of opinion, need to distinguish oneself, but you can be different in a billion ways and that still doesn't make every variation of different better than whatever base you opted out of, especially if that change is done in a lazy, circular, thoughtless fashion. It's very circular. That doesn't necessarily make it bad. I don't think trying to speak out necessarily means one is trying to shove ideas into people's heads inception style. I honestly think if that's something you are afraid of, that's probably because you've entertained the thought at least once or twice yourself. And that sort of stuff just happens, being a fish of indeterminate size in a pond of indeterminate size.

cableshaft 8y ago
My main point is if she wanted to make this point, she could spend a little more time digging for examples in favor of that point, of which I'm sure she would be able to find if she wanted to, and less time making the exact opposite point because these are the five CEOs she can name off the top of her head (that's an exaggeration, but that's how it came across). I'm not saying her argument can be objectively proven or disproven. At best she can only show a correlation based on her definition of what constitutes a 'boring' life. But she should at least have tried to make the case she had chosen as best as she could (given a limited timeframe and a modicum of research). If this is the best she could come up with, I am not impressed. Granted I made a generalization to journalists in general out of it, but that's just based on a handful of articles that have made dubious claims that I've bothered to take the time to read fully, and being disappointed in how weak the arguments seem to be (because I'd like to see a good argument for why I should consider those claims to be true, and accept those arguments, or at least think critically and thoughtfully about it, rather than being able to quickly dismiss what they say because they said almost nothing at all). There was another one recently that claimed that Online Dating leads to Depression, and the text supports the assertion because A) Match.com did a user survey and found people thought online dating was addicting, and B) 'studies show' that addictive behavior can lead to depression. Therefore 'studies show' Online Dating leads to Depression, for the headline. Such a weak defense of their point, and they might as well have also said just about everything that can be addicting leads to depression at that point.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Just about everything that is an opinion can be deconstructed into a correlation. If you don't want to agree with it, don't.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Yeah. I see it as part of the decline of journalism in general. This article is appropriate for some random person's blog, basically. There a few people might read it but they probably wouldn't reshare it, and the giant link filtering machine of the internet would ensure it dropped to the bottom of the barrel pretty quickly. Because, as you say, she spends a lot of words to argue nothing at all (some nouveau riche had ordinary backgrounds and others didn't, tech nerds are boring men except they're interesting enough to write a whole article about them, this is sorta bad but actually sorta good, the non-boring histories I'm referring to are mostly imagined anyway, etc). The only reason we're discussing such a nothing-burger of an article is that Bloomberg published it (the only article on Bloomberg by this person). This leads to the question of why? Apparently it's triggered by Zuckerberg overtaking Buffet's wealth - an news event worthy of maybe a paragraph of text. Should Bloomberg really be investing their resources here? Surely there are topics that deserve this level of effort more?

cableshaft 8y ago

My main point is if she wanted to make this point, she could spend a little more time digging for examples in favor of that point, of which I'm sure she would be able to find if she wanted to, and less time making the exact opposite point because these are the five CEOs she can name off the top of her head (that's an exaggeration, but that's how it came across). I'm not saying her argument can be objectively proven or disproven. At best she can only show a correlation based on her definition of what constitutes a 'boring' life. But she should at least have tried to make the case she had chosen as best as she could (given a limited timeframe and a modicum of research). If this is the best she could come up with, I am not impressed. Granted I made a generalization to journalists in general out of it, but that's just based on a handful of articles that have made dubious claims that I've bothered to take the time to read fully, and being disappointed in how weak the arguments seem to be (because I'd like to see a good argument for why I should consider those claims to be true, and accept those arguments, or at least think critically and thoughtfully about it, rather than being able to quickly dismiss what they say because they said almost nothing at all). There was another one recently that claimed that Online Dating leads to Depression, and the text supports the assertion because A) Match.com did a user survey and found people thought online dating was addicting, and B) 'studies show' that addictive behavior can lead to depression. Therefore 'studies show' Online Dating leads to Depression, for the headline. Such a weak defense of their point, and they might as well have also said just about everything that can be addicting leads to depression at that point.

s-shellfish 8y ago
Just about everything that is an opinion can be deconstructed into a correlation. If you don't want to agree with it, don't.
repolfx 8y ago
Yeah. I see it as part of the decline of journalism in general. This article is appropriate for some random person's blog, basically. There a few people might read it but they probably wouldn't reshare it, and the giant link filtering machine of the internet would ensure it dropped to the bottom of the barrel pretty quickly. Because, as you say, she spends a lot of words to argue nothing at all (some nouveau riche had ordinary backgrounds and others didn't, tech nerds are boring men except they're interesting enough to write a whole article about them, this is sorta bad but actually sorta good, the non-boring histories I'm referring to are mostly imagined anyway, etc). The only reason we're discussing such a nothing-burger of an article is that Bloomberg published it (the only article on Bloomberg by this person). This leads to the question of why? Apparently it's triggered by Zuckerberg overtaking Buffet's wealth - an news event worthy of maybe a paragraph of text. Should Bloomberg really be investing their resources here? Surely there are topics that deserve this level of effort more?