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At this point literally everything has been wrong. Facts are confidently stated and they turn out to be opposite, then reverse again. Followed by more totally c

At this point literally everything has been wrong. Facts are confidently stated and they turn out to be opposite, then reverse again. Followed by more totally confident assertions. Maybe there is a story here, and it is our hubris. This is beyond us.

azangru 5y ago
I'd love some data journalism on the facts that are being reversed this way and that :-)
viro 5y ago
Scientific consensus changes when it receives new data.
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  And that's happening so quickly and so often. People say they're following the science, but they're really being whipsawed by it.
TuringTest 5y ago
We need automatic compilation, to fight that trend. When all you get from the news is the current political spin of the latest scandal to make your party look good, you need to record who is saying what to start to see trends in what may be the truth, piecing together the bits of verifiable information they offer. Now this is too much to do manually. A fact-counterfact format on "public discourse" sites like Kialo[1] is useful to collect the evolution of known facts over news, but it's too slow to do by hand. A news aggregator that collected partisan claims from both sides in breaking news would allow journalists to analyse the big picture, being able to report the story based on published facts and not just hearsay. An additional advantage is that it would allow readers to contrast the bias of individual journalists, seeing which facts they emphasise and which they ignore. It would also serve as an ever-growing database of public discourse like we used to have in the days of printing press and newspaper libraries, when what was published remained unchanged and could be checked out. [1] https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/
pjscott 5y ago
I've been appreciating some people's practice of giving subjective probability estimates for various things depending on the strength of the evidence; see e.g. the "Probability Updates" section of this article: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#probability-updates https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#prob... Probably a well-functioning prediction market would do it better, though I'm not sure our prediction markets today are there yet.
- bostik 5y ago
  Prediction markets, or at least the decent and regulated ones, won't touch the plague. It's gambling, and taking bets on human misery is generally frowned upon as a business practice. You need insurance provider's license for that.

azangru 5y ago

I'd love some data journalism on the facts that are being reversed this way and that :-)

viro 5y ago

Scientific consensus changes when it receives new data.

nsxwolf 5y ago
And that's happening so quickly and so often. People say they're following the science, but they're really being whipsawed by it.

TuringTest 5y ago

We need automatic compilation, to fight that trend. When all you get from the news is the current political spin of the latest scandal to make your party look good, you need to record who is saying what to start to see trends in what may be the truth, piecing together the bits of verifiable information they offer. Now this is too much to do manually. A fact-counterfact format on "public discourse" sites like Kialo[1] is useful to collect the evolution of known facts over news, but it's too slow to do by hand. A news aggregator that collected partisan claims from both sides in breaking news would allow journalists to analyse the big picture, being able to report the story based on published facts and not just hearsay. An additional advantage is that it would allow readers to contrast the bias of individual journalists, seeing which facts they emphasise and which they ignore. It would also serve as an ever-growing database of public discourse like we used to have in the days of printing press and newspaper libraries, when what was published remained unchanged and could be checked out. [1] https://www.kialo.com/ https://www.kialo.com/

pjscott 5y ago

I've been appreciating some people's practice of giving subjective probability estimates for various things depending on the strength of the evidence; see e.g. the "Probability Updates" section of this article: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#probability-updates https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#prob... Probably a well-functioning prediction market would do it better, though I'm not sure our prediction markets today are there yet.

bostik 5y ago
Prediction markets, or at least the decent and regulated ones, won't touch the plague. It's gambling, and taking bets on human misery is generally frowned upon as a business practice. You need insurance provider's license for that.