7 ms·

This makes a critical point, one that needs to be taken to heart societally at large, but I feels like it undercuts itself by burying its main arguments. The pr

This makes a critical point, one that needs to be taken to heart societally at large, but I feels like it undercuts itself by burying its main arguments. The problem isn't just crypto, or business, but rather something about modern society at large -- academics, politics, the workplace, and so forth and so on, celebrity or not. There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, without enough critical caution or skepticism. SBF/FTX is a good example but by framing the article so strongly around it the broader message is diminished somewhat.

jl6 4y ago
Same vibe in medicine. Doctors and medical researchers carry a great weight of authority. Some medical treatments can be mainstream for years, before research finally self-corrects. Lobotomy, opioids, and more. “It’s a perfectly safe and normal procedure”.
- itronitron 4y ago
  Regarding opioids, I recall that in the mid `90's when I listened to about 4 hours of NPR during work every day the host (Dianne Ream?) had reps from Purdue Pharma (or one of the other opioid purveyors) in which the pharma reps were basically saying that doctors weren't prescribing enough pain medication for their patients. I recall the host really challenging them on each of the points they were trying to make, which was out of character for her and stuck in my mind. Point being, I expect that at least some of the guests are arranged without much input from the hosts. There must be heavy politicking involved to get bandwidth in mass media, and the people actually doing the work (running interviews or writing articles) can only push back to the degree that they have some degree of control over the network or channel.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    If you want a striking example of this, look at the interview Ben Shapiro gave to the BBC a few years back. Whatever you think of Shapiro, he has a masterful understanding of how American media works (I believe his Daily Wire is among the top shared sites on Facebook for instance), but he is clearly off-balance in a British interview. The interviewer repeatedly asks questions and doesn't allow Shapiro to dodge them which eventually results in Shapiro becoming too agitated to finish. It was really illuminating on a few levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E
    - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      And it was a famous British conservative doing the interview, no less.
    - brobinson 4y ago
      Shapiro was recently interviewed by Lex Fridman, and Fridman asked him about this interview specifically. He said he hadn't prepared properly as he was not aware of how "combative" the interview style would be vs. the kind of interviews he was used to thus his showing was poorer than usual.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I remember the interviewer as being firm but polite about it. But I think it's a bit ironic considering that Shapiro posted videos to his own youtube channel with titles like "Ben Shapiro destroys liberal college student" or something to that effect. I believe it was one of the questions in the interview. I thought combative was his forte.
  - refurb 4y ago
    I’ve worked with the folks in public affairs at a Forbes 500 company before. Plenty of what you read as “reporting”, which to the reader appears as actual news, is carefully planned corporate stories that are shopped around to various contacts in the media until someone bites. This is described as “organic media” (only because it’s not paid for), but it’s mostly directed by the companies themselves.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Ignorance of aerosol transmission of respiratory viruses was a good one. Even contact transmission of respiratory viruses is hanging on a thread. Not sure what these people were thinking I was doing with whatever I touched day-to-day. Going through similar things with avian flu. "Experts" think I inhale raw chicken and that birds don't really care about borders. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-cfia-poultry-bird-flu-michigan-1.6520550 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-cfia-poultry-... Or the assurances that the new food guide is no longer tainted by food/farming industries.
  - erk__ 4y ago
    In most cases with avian flu the thing they are scared about is not you getting sick but birds around you catching it. So while birds don't care about borders potential sick bird carcass does. Avian flu is not great for farms, if there is a breakout you pretty much cannot have your birds outside. And if your flock is infected they will be gassed and destroyed which no one wants to happen. Hence why they are careful.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      They think I’m going to feed this chicken breast to… birds in my backyard?
      - erk__ 4y ago
        Maybe you don't compost food in your backyard, but some may and that is harder to police than banning import from certain locations.
- rosnd 4y ago
  Opioids are a perfectly good treatment and should be mainstream. Extremely effective with minor side effects.
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
Exactly. It also doesn't help that >90% of "journalists" have no clue what they're talking about. But it doesn't matter for revenue because 99% of their readers know even less.
- rpgbr 4y ago
  Journalist's job isn't to master a field they cover (although this can help a lot), but to know what questions to ask to whom. Lack of skepticism and fact checking is, indeed, sins of the profession, but that's it.
  - Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
    >but to know what questions to ask to whom This requires knowing what you're talking about because, as OP alluded to, everyone is hyping everything, including acedemics and CEOs. In that enviroment, how does a jouranlist know who to talk to and what questions to ask? The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject, something which returns lower (perhaps negative) ROI vs posting clickbait hype content. "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation.
    - jasonlotito 4y ago
      > The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject, Somewhat, sure, but they aren't going to become an expert. They are reporters. Journalists. They report what people do and say. They present their findings. Hopefully they find people that are willing to cast doubt on a subject, which in the case of crypto, they did. You had many articles from journalists reporting back on problems with crypto. We pretend like FTX was something that was well known and well established, yet I didn't hear much about it here prior to everything collapsing. And suddenly, all these armchair experts come out the woodwork, apparently well aware of all the problems with FTX but apparently never spoke up once and didn't think it was news worthy. The experts are out there, but apparently none how how to talk to reporters. > "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation. Let's ignore all the "real investigations" that happen.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I mean, you need some reason to get out of bed in the morning, and naive optimism sounds a lot better than my dread of the consequences if I don't.
- itronitron 4y ago
  Depends, I don't use them myself (yet) so I usually get out of bed in the morning to use the toilet.
pessimizer 4y ago
> There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, I don't think this is true. I think that people who are selling things generate hype for those things that they're selling, and our media not only depends on those sellers to pay for ads, but additionally is owned by people who are also invested in those things that are being sold. I think this can easily be misinterpreted as everything being hyped up, rather than everything being designed to trick you into supporting things that benefit people who sell, whether they're politicians or toilet-brush sellers. This is happening because our politicians, toilet-brush sellers, and media are owned by the same people. They rely on you buying in, or at least not being able to organize or sustain an opposition. We've allowed the world to consolidate so much that separating sales and news is impossible. They're operating from the same address. Main point: not everything is being hyped. Scams that benefit the people who own the media that hype spreads through are being hyped.
- mc32 4y ago
  Journalists are human and as such also fall to the same pitfalls of most people. So they fawn over Apple, or Google or a new Show on Netflix --reflexively. There are some who do do in-depth analysis and some of those who do do analysis go overboard and go full-on post-modernist/intersectional on their subjects when all we want is a skeptical and more or less objective approach to reporting. We don't want "narrative" and storytelling --that's for longform writing.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > > There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, Speak for yourself, I was saying this guy was going to end up in black site prison in the Summer of '22 as CONbase was looking like it was going to be insolvent, SBF's meddling in the US political system just underscores the MO of the well-heeled of SV, VC and political circles. In many ways this represents what that class does in any ecosystem: it does it in the stock market, the energy market, pharmaceutical drugs, Ag seed IP etc... it's all just a means to an end. Why weren't we having this conversation with memestocks and it's blatant collusion between the hedge fund World and regulators and even the Stock Market itself when it pulled the plug as it suffered too many one day loses? It almost makes me think this was intentional, a sort of deliberate narrative to push to ignore the blatant level of grift that is wide-spread in this economic system. The only question is cui bono? > Main point: not everything is being hyped. Scams that benefit the people who own the media that hype spreads through are being hyped. Yield farming was hyped in every conceivable manner, and it was HEAVILY resisted in the Bitcoin community because we had seen some variation of this before; Celcius and 3 arrows were also pushing this scam and were equally vilified at that time for the scam that they were, in fact when someone explained to me what Caradano was I felt it was just another MLM playing out in token form. I initially tried to talk people out, but I've been around long enough to know that getting burned is what it often takes for people to learn why this tech was invented in the first place. People won't listen when everyone is getting paid as it feeds off of some basic Human urges: greed. It isn't until it all comes crashing down that people who once hailed as genius by the media or VC World in SV, likely paid to do so, are seen for the scammers that they are. > This is happening because our politicians, toilet-brush sellers, and media are owned by the same people. They rely on you buying in, or at least not being able to organize or sustain an opposition. We've allowed the world to consolidate so much that separating sales and news is impossible. They're operating from the same address. Well said, I highly recommend this series on the Murdoch's [0], I wasn't aware of how far Rupert's reach was in some key events in History (Berlin Wall, early 2000s Hong Kong) in order to sell a specific narrative, and I only vaguely recall how sensationalist his programming like 'A Current Affair' was at creating Fake News for sensationalism that drove sales. Hell, it even seems like what Elon is doing at Twitter is exactly a page out of Murdoch's book with a paper he bought in the UK. 0: https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-murdochs-empire-of-influence https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-murdochs-empire-of-influence
enkid 4y ago
Hype wasn't called that, but there was plenty of "hysterias" and "manias" previously in history. Look at the Dutch Tulip Bubble or the reporting that led to the Spanish American War. Not saying it's not a problem, but it is not about modern society, it's about human nature.
- Haga 4y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
I think social media is directly responsible for that. I was just listening to some Christopher Hitchens videos yesterday and was reminded of just how articulate and elegant his arguments were. Compare that to modern "intellectuals" like Jordan Peterson. Complete rabble rousers. Social media has allowed cowardly arguments to be made mainstream and that has weakened our total global human B.S. detector by a ton. Imagine crypto had to be popular without social media. It would have been ripped apart just like Marc Andreessen was ripped apart on that podcast for his intellectually vapid ideas. It is really a shame how much harm social media has done to our species.
- refurb 4y ago
  The same Christopher Hitchens that went pro-Iraq War and got water boarded himself? Do you have a better example?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    He got waterboarded to truly understand what it entailed and changed his mind and understood it to be torture. What a great example of a journalist.
pixl97 4y ago
Um, modern society? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Our country sucks up to elites, because their vast wealth makes them gods. The fourth estate is totally owned by the elites, and there is no real dissent with the views of the wealthy. That's why global warming is only now recognized at all (three decades late), because it is actually on some of their radars now.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
partiallypro 4y ago
This core issue is one that surrounds a lot of investments/companies: A lot of "smart people" like (or hate) this, so if I question it, they will think I'm dumb or not with the "in crowd." Basically, every financial scandal you can think of in the past 30 years had the press absolutely excited about it and pumping it. Enron, Maddoff, FTX, Theranos, WorldCom, Tyco, etc. One problem I've encountered is that a lot of people in the press are not trained in the field they are reporting on. So, they actually have no idea if you're blowing smoke. I worked with a newspaper and major publisher earlier in life and was shocked at how ignorant people that we read every day are on the very topics they are reporting on. Not to mention the abuse of alcohol and drugs that happens in the newsroom, which was baffling. The media does a lot better when it is looking at events and reporting on that rather than trying to derive some narrative or to get a scoop, especially when it involves business or government fluff. It doesn't help that a lot of journalists have what feels like a need for validation, but at the same time have big egos. All of these big scam artists know that and feed them.

jl6 4y ago

Same vibe in medicine. Doctors and medical researchers carry a great weight of authority. Some medical treatments can be mainstream for years, before research finally self-corrects. Lobotomy, opioids, and more. “It’s a perfectly safe and normal procedure”.

itronitron 4y ago
Regarding opioids, I recall that in the mid `90's when I listened to about 4 hours of NPR during work every day the host (Dianne Ream?) had reps from Purdue Pharma (or one of the other opioid purveyors) in which the pharma reps were basically saying that doctors weren't prescribing enough pain medication for their patients. I recall the host really challenging them on each of the points they were trying to make, which was out of character for her and stuck in my mind. Point being, I expect that at least some of the guests are arranged without much input from the hosts. There must be heavy politicking involved to get bandwidth in mass media, and the people actually doing the work (running interviews or writing articles) can only push back to the degree that they have some degree of control over the network or channel.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  If you want a striking example of this, look at the interview Ben Shapiro gave to the BBC a few years back. Whatever you think of Shapiro, he has a masterful understanding of how American media works (I believe his Daily Wire is among the top shared sites on Facebook for instance), but he is clearly off-balance in a British interview. The interviewer repeatedly asks questions and doesn't allow Shapiro to dodge them which eventually results in Shapiro becoming too agitated to finish. It was really illuminating on a few levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    And it was a famous British conservative doing the interview, no less.
  - brobinson 4y ago
    Shapiro was recently interviewed by Lex Fridman, and Fridman asked him about this interview specifically. He said he hadn't prepared properly as he was not aware of how "combative" the interview style would be vs. the kind of interviews he was used to thus his showing was poorer than usual.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I remember the interviewer as being firm but polite about it. But I think it's a bit ironic considering that Shapiro posted videos to his own youtube channel with titles like "Ben Shapiro destroys liberal college student" or something to that effect. I believe it was one of the questions in the interview. I thought combative was his forte.
- refurb 4y ago
  I’ve worked with the folks in public affairs at a Forbes 500 company before. Plenty of what you read as “reporting”, which to the reader appears as actual news, is carefully planned corporate stories that are shopped around to various contacts in the media until someone bites. This is described as “organic media” (only because it’s not paid for), but it’s mostly directed by the companies themselves.
Scoundreller 4y ago
Ignorance of aerosol transmission of respiratory viruses was a good one. Even contact transmission of respiratory viruses is hanging on a thread. Not sure what these people were thinking I was doing with whatever I touched day-to-day. Going through similar things with avian flu. "Experts" think I inhale raw chicken and that birds don't really care about borders. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-cfia-poultry-bird-flu-michigan-1.6520550 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-cfia-poultry-... Or the assurances that the new food guide is no longer tainted by food/farming industries.
- erk__ 4y ago
  In most cases with avian flu the thing they are scared about is not you getting sick but birds around you catching it. So while birds don't care about borders potential sick bird carcass does. Avian flu is not great for farms, if there is a breakout you pretty much cannot have your birds outside. And if your flock is infected they will be gassed and destroyed which no one wants to happen. Hence why they are careful.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    They think I’m going to feed this chicken breast to… birds in my backyard?
    - erk__ 4y ago
      Maybe you don't compost food in your backyard, but some may and that is harder to police than banning import from certain locations.
rosnd 4y ago
Opioids are a perfectly good treatment and should be mainstream. Extremely effective with minor side effects.

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago

Exactly. It also doesn't help that >90% of "journalists" have no clue what they're talking about. But it doesn't matter for revenue because 99% of their readers know even less.

rpgbr 4y ago
Journalist's job isn't to master a field they cover (although this can help a lot), but to know what questions to ask to whom. Lack of skepticism and fact checking is, indeed, sins of the profession, but that's it.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
  >but to know what questions to ask to whom This requires knowing what you're talking about because, as OP alluded to, everyone is hyping everything, including acedemics and CEOs. In that enviroment, how does a jouranlist know who to talk to and what questions to ask? The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject, something which returns lower (perhaps negative) ROI vs posting clickbait hype content. "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation.
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    > The only way in today's climate is to learn the subject, Somewhat, sure, but they aren't going to become an expert. They are reporters. Journalists. They report what people do and say. They present their findings. Hopefully they find people that are willing to cast doubt on a subject, which in the case of crypto, they did. You had many articles from journalists reporting back on problems with crypto. We pretend like FTX was something that was well known and well established, yet I didn't hear much about it here prior to everything collapsing. And suddenly, all these armchair experts come out the woodwork, apparently well aware of all the problems with FTX but apparently never spoke up once and didn't think it was news worthy. The experts are out there, but apparently none how how to talk to reporters. > "New startup claims quantom tech could crack your bank account password in just 3 seconds" will do better and requires less knowlege and effort than an a real investigation. Let's ignore all the "real investigations" that happen.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I mean, you need some reason to get out of bed in the morning, and naive optimism sounds a lot better than my dread of the consequences if I don't.

itronitron 4y ago
Depends, I don't use them myself (yet) so I usually get out of bed in the morning to use the toilet.

pessimizer 4y ago

> There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, I don't think this is true. I think that people who are selling things generate hype for those things that they're selling, and our media not only depends on those sellers to pay for ads, but additionally is owned by people who are also invested in those things that are being sold. I think this can easily be misinterpreted as everything being hyped up, rather than everything being designed to trick you into supporting things that benefit people who sell, whether they're politicians or toilet-brush sellers. This is happening because our politicians, toilet-brush sellers, and media are owned by the same people. They rely on you buying in, or at least not being able to organize or sustain an opposition. We've allowed the world to consolidate so much that separating sales and news is impossible. They're operating from the same address. Main point: not everything is being hyped. Scams that benefit the people who own the media that hype spreads through are being hyped.

mc32 4y ago
Journalists are human and as such also fall to the same pitfalls of most people. So they fawn over Apple, or Google or a new Show on Netflix --reflexively. There are some who do do in-depth analysis and some of those who do do analysis go overboard and go full-on post-modernist/intersectional on their subjects when all we want is a skeptical and more or less objective approach to reporting. We don't want "narrative" and storytelling --that's for longform writing.
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> > There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, Speak for yourself, I was saying this guy was going to end up in black site prison in the Summer of '22 as CONbase was looking like it was going to be insolvent, SBF's meddling in the US political system just underscores the MO of the well-heeled of SV, VC and political circles. In many ways this represents what that class does in any ecosystem: it does it in the stock market, the energy market, pharmaceutical drugs, Ag seed IP etc... it's all just a means to an end. Why weren't we having this conversation with memestocks and it's blatant collusion between the hedge fund World and regulators and even the Stock Market itself when it pulled the plug as it suffered too many one day loses? It almost makes me think this was intentional, a sort of deliberate narrative to push to ignore the blatant level of grift that is wide-spread in this economic system. The only question is cui bono? > Main point: not everything is being hyped. Scams that benefit the people who own the media that hype spreads through are being hyped. Yield farming was hyped in every conceivable manner, and it was HEAVILY resisted in the Bitcoin community because we had seen some variation of this before; Celcius and 3 arrows were also pushing this scam and were equally vilified at that time for the scam that they were, in fact when someone explained to me what Caradano was I felt it was just another MLM playing out in token form. I initially tried to talk people out, but I've been around long enough to know that getting burned is what it often takes for people to learn why this tech was invented in the first place. People won't listen when everyone is getting paid as it feeds off of some basic Human urges: greed. It isn't until it all comes crashing down that people who once hailed as genius by the media or VC World in SV, likely paid to do so, are seen for the scammers that they are. > This is happening because our politicians, toilet-brush sellers, and media are owned by the same people. They rely on you buying in, or at least not being able to organize or sustain an opposition. We've allowed the world to consolidate so much that separating sales and news is impossible. They're operating from the same address. Well said, I highly recommend this series on the Murdoch's [0], I wasn't aware of how far Rupert's reach was in some key events in History (Berlin Wall, early 2000s Hong Kong) in order to sell a specific narrative, and I only vaguely recall how sensationalist his programming like 'A Current Affair' was at creating Fake News for sensationalism that drove sales. Hell, it even seems like what Elon is doing at Twitter is exactly a page out of Murdoch's book with a paper he bought in the UK. 0: https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-murdochs-empire-of-influence https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-murdochs-empire-of-influence

enkid 4y ago

Hype wasn't called that, but there was plenty of "hysterias" and "manias" previously in history. Look at the Dutch Tulip Bubble or the reporting that led to the Spanish American War. Not saying it's not a problem, but it is not about modern society, it's about human nature.

Haga 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

I think social media is directly responsible for that. I was just listening to some Christopher Hitchens videos yesterday and was reminded of just how articulate and elegant his arguments were. Compare that to modern "intellectuals" like Jordan Peterson. Complete rabble rousers. Social media has allowed cowardly arguments to be made mainstream and that has weakened our total global human B.S. detector by a ton. Imagine crypto had to be popular without social media. It would have been ripped apart just like Marc Andreessen was ripped apart on that podcast for his intellectually vapid ideas. It is really a shame how much harm social media has done to our species.

refurb 4y ago
The same Christopher Hitchens that went pro-Iraq War and got water boarded himself? Do you have a better example?
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  He got waterboarded to truly understand what it entailed and changed his mind and understood it to be torture. What a great example of a journalist.

pixl97 4y ago

Um, modern society? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Our country sucks up to elites, because their vast wealth makes them gods. The fourth estate is totally owned by the elites, and there is no real dissent with the views of the wealthy. That's why global warming is only now recognized at all (three decades late), because it is actually on some of their radars now.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

partiallypro 4y ago

This core issue is one that surrounds a lot of investments/companies: A lot of "smart people" like (or hate) this, so if I question it, they will think I'm dumb or not with the "in crowd." Basically, every financial scandal you can think of in the past 30 years had the press absolutely excited about it and pumping it. Enron, Maddoff, FTX, Theranos, WorldCom, Tyco, etc. One problem I've encountered is that a lot of people in the press are not trained in the field they are reporting on. So, they actually have no idea if you're blowing smoke. I worked with a newspaper and major publisher earlier in life and was shocked at how ignorant people that we read every day are on the very topics they are reporting on. Not to mention the abuse of alcohol and drugs that happens in the newsroom, which was baffling. The media does a lot better when it is looking at events and reporting on that rather than trying to derive some narrative or to get a scoop, especially when it involves business or government fluff. It doesn't help that a lot of journalists have what feels like a need for validation, but at the same time have big egos. All of these big scam artists know that and feed them.