4 ms·

The most impressive application I've seen of this lately is the "all journalists are bad" idea. Having hidden under a rock for the last few years (deleted twitt

The most impressive application I've seen of this lately is the "all journalists are bad" idea. Having hidden under a rock for the last few years (deleted twitter, no social media except here), I was surprised when I started seeing that sentiment appear on HN: "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts", "They only print what generates clicks - so they're all terrible". The third time I saw that sentiment repeated here I googled around a bit, and it seems like that originated a couple of years ago - and was repeated enough that it worked really really well. No one believes any journalism now and every publication is equally wrong! I'm jaded enough that I don't care about too much - but damn that has a scary "history repeating" feeling about it.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Why exactly is this sentiment wrong? I've been holding it for many years now - I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience. Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. And deleting social feeds perhaps made this more difficult for you to notice - one nice feature of some social networks (like HN or niche subreddits) is that for almost any news story, either the subject of the article, someone with first-hand knowledge, or an expert on the topic will chime in to thoroughly debunk the article. It's hard to not draw conclusions from this pattern. EDIT: The conclusion also hold under reasoning from first principles. The basic idea behind critical reading is considering who's writing and why. The reason news media publishes anything is to make money, they don't really keep any pretense of a civil duty anymore. How do they make money? Predominantly by advertising. Which creates a strong selection pressure that favors outrage-inducing stories, and disincentivises truthful and accurate reporting. EDIT2: I just remembered I actually made a diagram of this before: BULLSHIT SCALE |[------]----------[---------------]--> | | | | | the range people think | fake news | news publications | | operate in the range | they actually | operate in as close to truth as one could get See [0] for more explanation. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258
- wavefunction 7y ago
  You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? How accurate are they after you've researched their claims? What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I don't expect my holding the belief to be an evidence for its validity; I only said I hold it, and listed what I consider evidence in its favor - evidence you can verify independently, and draw your own conclusion. > I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? Not really, unless I have a particular interest in the topic. The times I did spend hours on my own research (usually because someone sent me an article in order to convince me of something), it usually turned out the article cherry-picked facts to draw an opposite conclusion from what's reasonable. I don't track this explicitly beyond knowing that, in those cases, bad articles vastly outnumber good articles. > What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" It's not the question I'm trying to answer. I don't care much about "non-mainstream news" as some opposite category to "mainstream news". I only care about how much bullshit there is in any particular article I'm reading. And when generalizing over the samples I've observed, I came to the conclusion that most journalism isn't much different from blogging, except most bloggers don't have as much time pressure. > I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief. I'm open to changing my belief on this one, but I'm not going to go out of my way on this. For one, because there are many other beliefs I'm working to verify, where verification has a bigger payoff. There's only so much time in the day. Secondly, this belief pays a very strong rent. I don't find myself confused about reality often by following it. If I did, it would be on the top of my verification list.
twoflower9 7y ago
When I was a kid my family used to say "you can't trust anything the media says". Now as an adult they all seem to have forgotten this and think I'm odd for my skepticism.
deogeo 7y ago
> "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts" I trust mainstream publications to mostly report accurately, but they also choose what to report. E.g. the NY Times decided to reframe US history around slavery [1]. Suppose, at the height of the refugee crisis, the Guardian decided to launch a project to reframe Europe's history around Islamic invasions and slavery [2,3,4,5]? Suddenly, it would become very clear there's more to journalism than only accuracy. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade
- weare138 7y ago
  You might want to reread the title of that NY Times page you linked to as the basis for your argument. It's not reframing US history around slavery. The series is specifically about slavery in the US. Here's the full title: 1619 An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    You're right, sorry. I was going by the summary in the search results. I should have linked one of the following instead: "It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619... "The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619... "The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times to correct the record, reframing the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the national narrative.": https://store.nytimes.com/products/the-1619-project https://store.nytimes.com/products/the-1619-project

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Why exactly is this sentiment wrong? I've been holding it for many years now - I consider every mainstream news article individually to be bullshit until proven otherwise. I base this on my personal experience. Gell-Mann amnesia is a thing. And deleting social feeds perhaps made this more difficult for you to notice - one nice feature of some social networks (like HN or niche subreddits) is that for almost any news story, either the subject of the article, someone with first-hand knowledge, or an expert on the topic will chime in to thoroughly debunk the article. It's hard to not draw conclusions from this pattern. EDIT: The conclusion also hold under reasoning from first principles. The basic idea behind critical reading is considering who's writing and why. The reason news media publishes anything is to make money, they don't really keep any pretense of a civil duty anymore. How do they make money? Predominantly by advertising. Which creates a strong selection pressure that favors outrage-inducing stories, and disincentivises truthful and accurate reporting. EDIT2: I just remembered I actually made a diagram of this before: BULLSHIT SCALE |[------]----------[---------------]--> | | | | | the range people think | fake news | news publications | | operate in the range | they actually | operate in as close to truth as one could get See [0] for more explanation. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21627258

wavefunction 7y ago
You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? How accurate are they after you've researched their claims? What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > You may certainly hold the sentiment yourself but that offers no insight into whether it is valid. I don't expect my holding the belief to be an evidence for its validity; I only said I hold it, and listed what I consider evidence in its favor - evidence you can verify independently, and draw your own conclusion. > I have to wonder for example, do you research the claims of every mainstream news article and if so what have you found? Not really, unless I have a particular interest in the topic. The times I did spend hours on my own research (usually because someone sent me an article in order to convince me of something), it usually turned out the article cherry-picked facts to draw an opposite conclusion from what's reasonable. I don't track this explicitly beyond knowing that, in those cases, bad articles vastly outnumber good articles. > What's the accuracy rate on mainstream news articles? How does that compare to the accuracy rate of "non-mainstream news articles?" It's not the question I'm trying to answer. I don't care much about "non-mainstream news" as some opposite category to "mainstream news". I only care about how much bullshit there is in any particular article I'm reading. And when generalizing over the samples I've observed, I came to the conclusion that most journalism isn't much different from blogging, except most bloggers don't have as much time pressure. > I know if I had such a strongly held belief as this that I would want to investigate if my belief was correct or not and if not, change my belief. I'm open to changing my belief on this one, but I'm not going to go out of my way on this. For one, because there are many other beliefs I'm working to verify, where verification has a bigger payoff. There's only so much time in the day. Secondly, this belief pays a very strong rent. I don't find myself confused about reality often by following it. If I did, it would be on the top of my verification list.

twoflower9 7y ago

When I was a kid my family used to say "you can't trust anything the media says". Now as an adult they all seem to have forgotten this and think I'm odd for my skepticism.

deogeo 7y ago

> "Sure tabloid X is all lies, but NY Times/WaPo/etc don't check facts" I trust mainstream publications to mostly report accurately, but they also choose what to report. E.g. the NY Times decided to reframe US history around slavery [1]. Suppose, at the height of the refugee crisis, the Guardian decided to launch a project to reframe Europe's history around Islamic invasions and slavery [2,3,4,5]? Suddenly, it would become very clear there's more to journalism than only accuracy. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project https://www.nytimes.com/column/1619-project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

weare138 7y ago
You might want to reread the title of that NY Times page you linked to as the basis for your argument. It's not reframing US history around slavery. The series is specifically about slavery in the US. Here's the full title: 1619 An audio series from The Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.
- deogeo 7y ago
  You're right, sorry. I was going by the summary in the search results. I should have linked one of the following instead: "It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619... "The goal of The 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.": https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619... "The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times to correct the record, reframing the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the national narrative.": https://store.nytimes.com/products/the-1619-project https://store.nytimes.com/products/the-1619-project