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How accurate are these costs? This was commissioned by an anti-fossil fuel policy organization and despite taking some feedback from industry, they have a huge
by kortilla 3y ago
How accurate are these costs? This was commissioned by an anti-fossil fuel policy organization and despite taking some feedback from industry, they have a huge bias that perfectly aligns the incentives for them to grossly exaggerate the figures.
- bcrosby95 3y agoIf you want to do it right, you probably want to take their figure and double it. The gov will likely let them skate by though so yeah it'll cost them a buck fifty or something.
- hedora 3y agoAs journalists go, Propublica (and their data science team) is the gold standard for verifying such things before going to press.
- readams 3y agoProPublica definitely has a viewpoint though and I would not recommend treating them as neutral.
- kieselguhr_kid 3y agoThere's no such thing as neutral and you shouldn't treat any journalists as such. I don't know if their viewpoint is relevant here though; the question is about their ability to verify a factual assertion.
- mc32 3y agoOne may count and add things correctly, but one may count things that are not connected or double count items. That's the kind of thing people fudge when trying to convince people one way or another. They usually don't outright make things up.
- darthoctopus 3y agoit is for precisely not resorting to these dirty tactics that ProPublica is considered the gold standard.
- mc32 3y agoThey have their issues from time to time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5158216/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5158216/ And they also tend to go with investigations that go their way and those that don’t line up get dropped.
- readams 3y agoThe secret here is they only investigate the things that support their narrative. In this article they actually explicitly stated they're looking to cover a specific list of negative things associated with the industry. They would not, for example, publish an article about how much lower our standard of living would be without the industry. Or to attempt to weigh the positives adjust the negatives of the industry. So you can always publish "gold standard" journalism and yet still present a distorted version of the truth.
- operatingthetan 3y agoYour criticism seems to suggest a standard for journalism that no outlets would possibly reach.
- Spooky23 3y agoIt’s a variant of the “both sides” fallacy.
- operatingthetan 3y agoGood call, my minor in philosophy fails me once the fallacy falls outside of the usual suspects.
- viraptor 3y agoSo you can get information from multiple well researched sources. This is one of them. Don't expect anyone to do all the work. "You're not publishing full investigative journalism articles on absolutely everything." is not a valid criticism of your article, or a reasonable criticism of the publisher.
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- emodendroket 3y ago
- EGreg 3y agoThat's why you should be reading outlets for opposing sides, to get the best arguments for each side. But if one side doesn't bother to mount a defense or do their own individual research, and resorts only to dismissing the other side based on the fact that it's "the other side", they aren't doing themselves any favors.
- arealaccount 3y agoTwo wrongs dont make a right. Or at least what my mother said growing up
- EGreg 3y agoThat’s different. It is when two wrongs compound, not balance each other out.
- RetroHippyNimby 3y agoReading both sides is itself a bit of a fallacy. Most problems don't fit neatly into two 'sides'. For example, take gun control -- typically associated with the liberal wing of the democratic party, and opposed by most of the republican party. The leftist wing of American politics, however, is often opposed to gun control. Organizations like the Socialist Rifle Association and John Brown Gun Club and Pink Pistols. In the case of environmental review, there's also a multitude of different perspectives with different objectives. From indigenous groups whose land was (typically) stolen, to anti-oil activists, to pro-business democrats (like Biden/Clinton) who want to keep profits rolling at the expense of pristine wildlands, to the various concerns of the right. I know plenty of republican folks who are religiously compelled to take care of the earth and oppose oil drilling. I know plenty of republicans who believe that anthropogenic climate change is "impossible". Quite frankly, it's not wrong to read a few viewpoints, or read only the viewpoints you agree with and just acknowledge there are other viewpoints. Just don't get lost in believing your viewpoint is the only reasoned one.
- unmole 3y ago> the question is about their ability to verify a factual assertion. No, the question is about their inclination to critically examine a claim made by their side.
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- smcin 3y agoWhich ProPublica articles would you claim are most inaccurate? [EDIT: if you're only referring to the 2021 "CEOs living off loans against unrealized CG", see my comments below. Any other set of articles? I've seeen some quality work from ProPublica on e.g. the US justice system. You'll never see that from Forbes, or Cato, or Heritage Foundation, or AEI.]
- mxkopy 3y agoSome viewpoints are correct.
- unmole 3y agoThe same Propublica that decided to treat unrealized gains as income and then ran a plainly ludicrous story about how the rich were paying a true tax rate of 0.1%?
- missedthecue 3y agoYes, that's the same one. Here is the article for anyone unaware. Charitably, it was naked misrepresentation of the truth. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov... In an article titled "How the wealthiest avoid income tax" they sneakily changed the definition of income to include paper gains on assets not yet sold, and then represented the fact that taxes aren't paid on non-taxable events as a method the rich use to not pay income tax. It was a complete miscarriage of journalistic ethics. They lied to their readers to advance a political narrative.
- smcin 3y agoYou're referring to the tactic where billionaires can live off loans against their unrealized capital gains (e.g. stock with appreciation/dividends). Which goes back to the US case Eisner v. Macomber (Stock Dividends are Not Taxable) (1920). But it also goes back to CEO compensation in general, and in stock in particular, being abnormally high. It is not tax-effective for the proverbial Google chefs to do this, only a tiny group. A dictionary definition of "Income" is "money received, especially on a regular basis, for work or through investments". It's not just the narrowest definition, e.g. "only the thing that appears in the Income box on your [US] tax form, under the latest revision of the US tax code". (Like when Mitt Romney in 2012 accidentally shone a spotlight on "carried interest" which allows private equity managers to pay only 15% tax.) If your unrealized CG is so high that you can live off the loan until you die or retire, then it semantically isn't really a loan, is it. When US CEO compensation becomes so excessive that it means that something that originally meant temporarily deferring tax in the 1920s now means deferring essentially all income taxes for most of their working life, it does suggest things have gotten distorted. Sure ProPublica should have been more accurate and said "Here's stuff that is functionally equivalent to income, yet isn't taxed". But if you want to argue that ProPublica isn't entitled to is own semantics, then neither are other people in that debate. For example, we'll probaly see more scrutiny that Clarence Thomas (and his mother) were clearly receiving multiple streams of undeclared "income" or benefits from Harlan Crow. Also allegedly a complete miscarriage of ethics. (Yes that's currently primarily an ethics scandal not a tax evasion one, although it might become that too). By the way, Warren Buffett essentially made the same point as ProPublica with his famous 2011(?) wager about CEO's secretaries' tax rates being higher. Noone accused him of a complete miscarriage of ethics.
- civilized 3y agoI used to think so, but they badly embarrassed themselves on a COVID origin story a few months ago. They relied on a single source who claimed to have unique expertise in translating ambiguous Chinese Communist Party language. Most commentators with knowledge of Chinese language and politics criticized his interpretations heavily. A decent review of the events is here: https://www.semafor.com/article/10/31/2022/pro-publica-scrambles-to-check-translation-in-covid-origin-story https://www.semafor.com/article/10/31/2022/pro-publica-scram... This review is also very helpful for understanding the specific mistakes, and perhaps even bad faith misrepresentations, that their source made: https://fallows.substack.com/p/on-that-propublica-chinese-lab-leak https://fallows.substack.com/p/on-that-propublica-chinese-la... In one particularly disturbing case, their translator stopped midway through a sentence, omitting the remaining half of the sentence which completely changes the interpretation. ProPublica's editor note on the criticism said they asked for independent translations, but contains no support for their article except that the translators found their translation "plausible". The lack of detail is to me pretty telling. https://www.propublica.org/article/editors-note-a-review-of-criticisms-of-a-propublica-vanity-fair-story-on-a-covid-origins-report https://www.propublica.org/article/editors-note-a-review-of-...
- repeekad 3y agoThe Semafor article just reports that the Propublica story is being reviewed, with the review being later published in the editor’s note which you linked. Do you have any reputable sources that criticize Propublica’s response as being inaccurate?
- civilized 3y agoThat's an inaccurate summary of the Semafor article, and also omits the Fallows Substack, which is authored by a veteran reporter who interviewed a veteran translator and published his comments in full. Both the Semafor article and the Fallows Substack report on many Chinese translators who found the translations in the ProPublica article incorrect and misleading. The ProPublica editor note engages with none of their criticisms directly, and only states that they found some translators who all declared their translation "plausible", and that some of the translators agreed with or considered acceptable some particular points of their translation. They make some corrections and acknowledgments of ambiguity and missing context, but without any meaningful discussion of the impact of these changes on the article. Regarding that, I think it is revealing that the biggest revisions in the story, including a full new paragraph pointing out translation ambiguity with a link to the editor's note, are concentrated in the first few paragraphs of the story, where the "bombshell revelations" are typically broken. Fallows followed up with questions reflecting the inadequacies of ProPublica's response here: https://fallows.substack.com/p/more-questions-for-propublica https://fallows.substack.com/p/more-questions-for-propublica Fallows notes that some of the most problematic aspects of the story went entirely unanswered: > Why did you dismiss the issue of virtually identical language found in a Communist Party document many months before the alleged “lab leak”? Did this issue come up in the editing process? How was it resolved? All this said, I agree with Fallows that ProPublica is still very much worth reading, and that it's just unfortunate they won't frankly acknowledge some shortcomings in reporting on a topic that Western sources are inevitably going to mess up. Even in this story, ProPublica deserves credit for transparency, disclosing its original sources in a way that allowed outside critics to quickly and easily reassess them.
- kortilla 3y agoHow would propublica verify this though without reproducing the research themselves? All propublica would do (which is sadly “the gold standard”) is check that the research is sound based on what the researchers chose to publish. Journalists very rarely catch lies by omission, especially when it’s a report that aligns with their preexisting biases.
- hedora 3y agoThey have a large data science team, and they often work directly with data sets in collaboration with other researchers.
- hristov 3y agoOf course they have an anti-fossil fuel industry bias because they write an article against the fossil fuel industry. One should listen to an unbiased source, i.e., a source that never writes anything against the fuel industry. It would be great if we could hire an unbiased source to study the issue and determine what the cleanup costs of California oil production will be. But there is a danger that that unbiased source will determine that the cleanup costs will indeed be high and then they will immediately become a biased source, not to be believed ever again. And we will have wasted our money. 'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed. 'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.
- hef19898 3y agoOh, even better. Find a source with a strong pro-fossil fuel bias. And see what happens if their results show the same thing. Case in point, global warming and those oil industry internal reports showing global warming to be true, and man made, since the 70s.