7 ms·
WRT the how could they get it so wrong question, I guess it's time for the obligatory link to Michael Crichton's essay "Why Speculate?" and his discussion of th
by scarhill 8y ago
WRT the how could they get it so wrong question, I guess it's time for the obligatory link to Michael Crichton's essay "Why Speculate?" and his discussion of the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" [1]
Money quote: "You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
1 - http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/ http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/
- suls 8y agoBrilliant. Thanks for sharing this.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoI would expect newspapers to be more knowledgable about politics and international relations than scientific topics like physics. The latter is too broad a category, the former is usually the paper's primary focus.
- hopler 8y agoPolitics and International relations are opinion fields, not fact fields. It's impossible to be wrong about things that are impossible to falsify.
- ufmace 8y agoI wouldn't quite say that. Some aspects are opinions, but there's plenty of facts. Such as "House Reps A and B are cooperating on a bill regarding X" - that's a fact. What your position on X is, whether the bill is a good or bad idea, and why A and B are cooperating on it are opinions.
- Symmetry 8y agoThere really are some publications where you can read an article on a topic you're familiar with and they get it right. For instance I have a subscription to The Economist and sometimes their coverage is a bit shallow. And sometimes it repeats an expert consensus I disagree with. But most of the time the coverage is as good as it can be in the number of paragraphs allotted and sometimes it's downright excellent[1]. You probably have to actually pay money for high quality reporting. [1]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the-semiconductor-industry-and-the-power-of-globalisation https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the-semiconduc...
- ghaff 8y agoAnd I’m guessing a lot of people here conflate simplifying for a mainstream audience as getting it wrong because they’ve omitted a lot of details. Mind you, simplifying with a degree of accuracy is difficult and top writers like those with the Economist do it better than most. With tech stuff, I find more poor and incomplete explanations than I do outright errors. Mind you, back when I provided commentary for a lot of news stories, there were some reporters I always dreaded calls from because I knew steering them in the right direction was going to take an hour out of my life.
- kingofpandora 8y agoJust don't try to cancel your subscription ... Suddenly they become impossible to communicate with.
- garmaine 8y agoFunny I’ve had the opposite experience with the economist. Whenever they touch my area of expertise they demonstrate their substantial ignorance and inability to fact check even the simplest things.
- gdy 8y agoExcept for almost any article about Russia.
- Spooky23 8y agoThe Economist is good, but tiring. They are sort of like an old school “chamber of commerce” republican version of NPR. The writing is good and interesting, until to read for a year and realize that formula is pretty much the same, and you can predict the arc of the article after reading a paragraph.
- hannasanarion 8y agoNot that Michael Crichton should be treated as an authority on truth in reporting. He believed there was a vast worldwide conspiracy to defraud poor innocent oil companies by manufacturing evidence of global warming.
- briandear 8y agoFor reference here is a Michael Crichton speech on the topic: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publications/16365.pdf https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publica...
- exolymph 8y agoMichael Crichton himself doesn't need to be any type of authority for the reasoning in that specific quote to make sense.
- hannasanarion 8y agoThe point is that "the baloney you just read" is not necessarily baloney if your "expertise" derives from conspiracy theory blogs and propaganda.
- dkonofalski 8y agoAKA the Reddit Effect. Everyone on Reddit posts as if they know what they're talking about when, in reality, they only have a cursory knowledge of it and yet the entire site is somehow treated as a curated collection of high-quality, factual information.
- malshe 8y agoThis is right! I think there is another, perhaps unrelated Reddit effect. Blogs and some news sites pick up on Reddit and then feed them what they know will be popular on Reddit. The cycle continues. That's why Reddit is so good for astroturfing.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- garmaine 8y agoDon’t think HN is any different.
- dkonofalski 8y agoFor whatever reason, HN is different to me because, when discussions center around the things that I actually have expertise in, the information tends to be mostly correct. Every now and then some nonsense slips in but, for the most part, keeping people from being able to downvote and upvote everything eventually leads to a pretty informed view of whatever the topic is. Even in instances where I disagree with something, there's usually a well-reasoned response that includes some support whereas, with Reddit, it's just a bunch of unfounded statements with no backup whatsoever.
- garmaine 8y agoHN is generally correct about established computer science and tech stuff. Anything frontier or controversial (e.g. bitcoin) or outside the narrow domain of typical Silicon Valley startups gets the exact same ignorant herd response. The point is that when the topic aligns with the expertise of the community you get quality, whereas when the topic varies you get ignorance and BS spoken just as authoritatively. Always be aware of the latter outcome!
- ghostly_s 8y agoTo be clear, this is not an actual 'effect' that anyone has done any research on to demonstrate it exists or has real implications. It's just something that some pop-science writer idly speculated about once, so I question why you would introduce it into this discussion.