3 ms·

I would love this to be the case. My problem with this approach is that every single news report that I have actually had personal knowledge of has been ridicul

I would love this to be the case. My problem with this approach is that every single news report that I have actually had personal knowledge of has been ridiculously flawed. I just can't bring myself to believe that there is some protected elite cadre of journalists I should trust when 100% of my actual experience has been the opposite. Their direct incentives are getting sales (and now clicks), which doesn't appear to be highly correlated with accuracy. Additionally, my experience in college was that it wasn't the best and the brightest going into that field, though I deeply hope that it was a skewed sample, and believe that there are many deeply intelligent people working there. However, I think it likely that many people are not drawn to the field for the pursuit of pure objective truth, but because they have a particular agenda and want to enlighten the world with it. There is a quote about a logical fallacy that I can't quite remember, it goes along the lines of the following: You read an article about something with which you are deeply familiar. You laugh to yourself at the childish misconceptions of the journalist. You then turn the page to something you know little about, and assume that everything that is written is true. That doesn't make sense.

forapurpose 8y ago
IME, in most things I have personal knowledge of the better news sources do a pretty good job; they rarely have significant errors, for example. The lesser, non-partisan sources also rarely have significant errors, but they cover issues with less sophistication. My most common objections are that they don't go deep enough (but if it's something I already know about then I'm not the intended audience - the NY Times isn't going to cover tech issues as deeply as I'd like) and that what I see as important questions are left unanswered and sometimes unasked. On the other hand, I should't presume my own superior intelligence - if the journalist and I disagree, perhaps I'm not the one in the right; the smartest people I know often disagree with me about things like which questions are important. Beyond that, I'm not sure stereotypes of any large group of human beings are worth addressing, other than to point them out for what they are.
krastanov 8y ago
You are talking about this anecdote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.

forapurpose 8y ago

IME, in most things I have personal knowledge of the better news sources do a pretty good job; they rarely have significant errors, for example. The lesser, non-partisan sources also rarely have significant errors, but they cover issues with less sophistication. My most common objections are that they don't go deep enough (but if it's something I already know about then I'm not the intended audience - the NY Times isn't going to cover tech issues as deeply as I'd like) and that what I see as important questions are left unanswered and sometimes unasked. On the other hand, I should't presume my own superior intelligence - if the journalist and I disagree, perhaps I'm not the one in the right; the smartest people I know often disagree with me about things like which questions are important. Beyond that, I'm not sure stereotypes of any large group of human beings are worth addressing, other than to point them out for what they are.

krastanov 8y ago

You are talking about this anecdote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect And I partially agree! But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater! I am a physicist myself and have seen how the Gell-Mann effect has become less problematic over time, especially in respected journals that want to be taken seriously by scientists: Just make a decisive effort to 1) go out of your bubble and 2) learn about logical fallacies.