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Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)

by dhosek 7y ago

adolph 7y ago
Fact checking sounds great in theory but maybe in practice maybe it is an exercise in confirmation bias. For example, in a case cited by the article an author did employ at least one fact checker[0] who was an ostensible expert and who describes a reasonable effort but who still got it wrong (maybe). In another example, the article alludes to "mistakes" which was actually plagiarism.[1] If the question really is a matter of trusting books or not, then maybe a reasonable heuristic is to identify the agenda of the author and weight more heavily the writings of authors with divergent priors, similar to Slate Star Codex' idea of adversarial collaboration.[2] An example is Kahneman and Klein's Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree.[3] 0. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay-rights-book-error-a8979646.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay... 1. https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202 https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202 2. https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/ https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/ 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19739881 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19739881
Chris2048 7y ago
Do "fact checks" include oversights and misleading premises? Would a fact check have caught the bias in a recent NYT article, for instance?
- dhosek 7y ago
  Nope, it's generally a case of looking up things asserted as fact or otherwise independently verifying them. Quotations may also be verified with the interviewee. If I had known that such a job existed when I was in college, my career path would have been very different.
hguant 7y ago
>The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!) After the debacle with Lehrer, I'd be amazed if the New Yorker wasn't fact checking everything the print, down to their ad copy.

Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)

by dhosek 7y ago

Most (if not all) large magazines fact check their published material. The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!)

adolph 7y ago

Fact checking sounds great in theory but maybe in practice maybe it is an exercise in confirmation bias. For example, in a case cited by the article an author did employ at least one fact checker[0] who was an ostensible expert and who describes a reasonable effort but who still got it wrong (maybe). In another example, the article alludes to "mistakes" which was actually plagiarism.[1] If the question really is a matter of trusting books or not, then maybe a reasonable heuristic is to identify the agenda of the author and weight more heavily the writings of authors with divergent priors, similar to Slate Star Codex' idea of adversarial collaboration.[2] An example is Kahneman and Klein's Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree.[3] 0. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay-rights-book-error-a8979646.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay... 1. https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202 https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202 2. https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/ https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/ 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19739881 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19739881

Chris2048 7y ago

Do "fact checks" include oversights and misleading premises? Would a fact check have caught the bias in a recent NYT article, for instance?

dhosek 7y ago
Nope, it's generally a case of looking up things asserted as fact or otherwise independently verifying them. Quotations may also be verified with the interviewee. If I had known that such a job existed when I was in college, my career path would have been very different.

hguant 7y ago

>The New Yorker even fact checks the poetry (seriously!) After the debacle with Lehrer, I'd be amazed if the New Yorker wasn't fact checking everything the print, down to their ad copy.