3 ms·

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

by escapedmoose 3y ago

robertlagrant 3y ago
That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Not that I have a horse in this race, but… Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base or not playing fairly, so that you’ll walk away with more accurate understanding than you started. I suppose if you don’t want to be challenged by a proxy dialogue then a better medium for you would be statistical analysis or a scientific, structured study, but unfortunately most topics just don’t get the dedicated resources to do that properly. I’ve seen the aggregators and summary bots as well, but that seems even worse: Cherry-picking “facts” from an essay without seeing the context around them? A recipe for misunderstanding and/or getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Maybe the best solution is for every article to have a comments section where folks can point out inaccuracies and inconsistencies to help each other out? Citizen fact-checkers? Then you wind up with… this same article, as-is, posted on Hacker News alongside intelligent debate ;)
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? Yes. My point is those shows are presented as though they are telling you well-contextualised facts, and then they are making jokes about those facts. I think that presentation is deceptive.

3 ms·

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

by escapedmoose 3y ago

There’s more than one reason to read an article. Often the story is the point.

robertlagrant 3y ago
That's true, but not great. "I'm here for you to subtly impute how I should feel about something by bypass my critical faculties" is a poor substitute for people who want to be informed.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Not that I have a horse in this race, but… Your information is always going to be sourced and/or presented by humans with bias. Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? A solo author draws their reader into a proxy conversation with them (which naturally lends itself to some level of persuasion most of the time). As a reader (I believe) your job is to pay enough attention to catch the author if they’re off-base or not playing fairly, so that you’ll walk away with more accurate understanding than you started. I suppose if you don’t want to be challenged by a proxy dialogue then a better medium for you would be statistical analysis or a scientific, structured study, but unfortunately most topics just don’t get the dedicated resources to do that properly. I’ve seen the aggregators and summary bots as well, but that seems even worse: Cherry-picking “facts” from an essay without seeing the context around them? A recipe for misunderstanding and/or getting the wool pulled over your eyes. Maybe the best solution is for every article to have a comments section where folks can point out inaccuracies and inconsistencies to help each other out? Citizen fact-checkers? Then you wind up with… this same article, as-is, posted on Hacker News alongside intelligent debate ;)
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Isn’t it better when that bias is transparent? Yes. My point is those shows are presented as though they are telling you well-contextualised facts, and then they are making jokes about those facts. I think that presentation is deceptive.