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Some do a great job, like Matt Levine at Bloomberg or Felix Salmon. Just because of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect doesn't mean incompetent journalists should get

by fmajid 4y ago

Some do a great job, like Matt Levine at Bloomberg or Felix Salmon. Just because of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect doesn't mean incompetent journalists should get a free pass, or manifestly corrupt pseudo-journalists like Paul Krugman as shown in the article when he was simultaneously taking money from Enron and lauding them.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
I think your comment is fantastic, and it made me think of a curiosity: Matt Levine is an excellent journalist because he's not a journalist historically, writes about a topic he knows in depth, but Krugman supposedly also writes about what he knows, but is just plain (as you cited) corrupt to a disgusting extent.
- rpgbr 4y ago
  You see the huge problem we from journalism have when even in a place like HN people can't discern between reporting and opinion on the news. Levine is terrific, but he isn't a reporter. His job as columnist is to give context and his opinion on subjects he's an expert on, not to report events. Most people can't tell the differences between a reporter and an editor or a columnist. They are, like the parent commenter, ignorants on this matter. And yet they complain vigorously about something they don't even comprehend. It's fascinating if not terrifying.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    i could not have said better what you just wrote.
ALittleLight 4y ago
On the one hand, Matt Levine writes interesting and insightful articles and I feel I learn from reading them. On the other hand, Levine also had multiple contacts with FTX and SBF including lengthy interviews and he seems to not have detected the FTX fraud early. It also seems like the fraud was, in retrospect, pretty obvious, SBF acknowledged to Levine that he ran a Ponzi scheme in an interview - and that was kind of it. Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. In some sense it seems like nobody was actually doing investigative journalism.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  > Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. FTX and Alameda didnt realise either. What makes you think that a journalist would have figured it out?
  - ALittleLight 4y ago
    Well, I think FTX and Alameda (specifically SBF) certainly realized where the money was coming from. How could anyone, much less a trading firm, be unaware of an extra 8 billion dollars in their accounts? As for journalists - I'm not sure how exactly they would have known to discover this point. It seems obvious after the fact, but who would think to check "Let me make sure deposits actually go to the business I think they do"? Instead, what I mean here is that there were incredibly obvious signs of wrongdoing and I would expect that a critical and competent investigator would discover at least one such sign, write about it and be motivated to find more. That seems not to have happened which makes me think nobody was actually investigating a new startup with billions of dollars in an area rife with fraud - which seems like a pretty big condemnation for the class of people whose job is to investigate and analyze companies in that industry.
_Tev 4y ago
> manifestly corrupt pseudo-journalists like Paul Krugman as shown in the article when he was simultaneously taking money from Enron and lauding them. That's just wrong, article did a bit insinuating but never directly claimed that, and linked source (http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html) actually disproves it: > 1. What did I do? In early 1999 I was asked to serve on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. As far as I knew at the time, they genuinely wanted to learn something. I resigned from that board in the fall of 1999, when I accepted an offer to write for the New York Times. It's funny to post such a clear falsehood when talking about Gell-Mann amnesia.

by fmajid 4y ago

jjtheblunt 4y ago

I think your comment is fantastic, and it made me think of a curiosity: Matt Levine is an excellent journalist because he's not a journalist historically, writes about a topic he knows in depth, but Krugman supposedly also writes about what he knows, but is just plain (as you cited) corrupt to a disgusting extent.

rpgbr 4y ago
You see the huge problem we from journalism have when even in a place like HN people can't discern between reporting and opinion on the news. Levine is terrific, but he isn't a reporter. His job as columnist is to give context and his opinion on subjects he's an expert on, not to report events. Most people can't tell the differences between a reporter and an editor or a columnist. They are, like the parent commenter, ignorants on this matter. And yet they complain vigorously about something they don't even comprehend. It's fascinating if not terrifying.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  i could not have said better what you just wrote.

ALittleLight 4y ago

On the one hand, Matt Levine writes interesting and insightful articles and I feel I learn from reading them. On the other hand, Levine also had multiple contacts with FTX and SBF including lengthy interviews and he seems to not have detected the FTX fraud early. It also seems like the fraud was, in retrospect, pretty obvious, SBF acknowledged to Levine that he ran a Ponzi scheme in an interview - and that was kind of it. Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. In some sense it seems like nobody was actually doing investigative journalism.

shapefrog 4y ago
> Depositors were depositing their FTX money directly to Alameda's bank account and nobody noticed. FTX and Alameda didnt realise either. What makes you think that a journalist would have figured it out?
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Well, I think FTX and Alameda (specifically SBF) certainly realized where the money was coming from. How could anyone, much less a trading firm, be unaware of an extra 8 billion dollars in their accounts? As for journalists - I'm not sure how exactly they would have known to discover this point. It seems obvious after the fact, but who would think to check "Let me make sure deposits actually go to the business I think they do"? Instead, what I mean here is that there were incredibly obvious signs of wrongdoing and I would expect that a critical and competent investigator would discover at least one such sign, write about it and be motivated to find more. That seems not to have happened which makes me think nobody was actually investigating a new startup with billions of dollars in an area rife with fraud - which seems like a pretty big condemnation for the class of people whose job is to investigate and analyze companies in that industry.

_Tev 4y ago

> manifestly corrupt pseudo-journalists like Paul Krugman as shown in the article when he was simultaneously taking money from Enron and lauding them. That's just wrong, article did a bit insinuating but never directly claimed that, and linked source (http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html) actually disproves it: > 1. What did I do? In early 1999 I was asked to serve on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues. As far as I knew at the time, they genuinely wanted to learn something. I resigned from that board in the fall of 1999, when I accepted an offer to write for the New York Times. It's funny to post such a clear falsehood when talking about Gell-Mann amnesia.