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I appreciate you bringing up this issue on this highly-provocative claim, but I'm a little confused. Isn't that a pretty solid source...? Obviously it's not as

by bbor 1y ago

I appreciate you bringing up this issue on this highly-provocative claim, but I'm a little confused. Isn't that a pretty solid source...? Obviously it's not as good as a scientific paper, but it's also more than a random blogger or something. Given that most enterprises operate on a closed source model, isn't it reasonable that there wouldn't be methodology provided directly? In general I agree that this sounds hard to believe, I'm more looking for words from some security experts on why that's such a damning quote to you/y'all.

roughly 1y ago
Nobody trusts anyone or anything anymore. It used to be the fact that this was printed in the Washington Post was sufficient to indicate enough fact checking and background sourcing had been done that the paper was comfortable putting its name on the claims, which was a high enough bar that they were basically trustworthy, but for assorted reasons that’s not true for basically any institution in the country (world?) anymore.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient, but this is a tech related article being discussed on a site full of people who have a much better than average understanding of tech. Just like how a physicist isn't just going to trust a claim in his expertise, like "Dark Matter found" from just seeing a headline in WaPo/NYT, it's reasonable that people working in tech will be suspicious of this claim without seeing technical details.
  - roughly 1y ago
    > For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient I genuinely do not know if this is the case anymore - I really do think we’ve reached a level of epistemological breakdown societally where “God is dead” again for us.
    - dotnet00 1y ago
      I think it really depends on how 'poisoned' the person is. I can totally believe that my politically-disconnected parents would consider being published in WaPo or NYT to be a strong sign of reliability. It helps that headlines that amount to "China is doing comically evil things again" tend to be taken at face value by many people, just for confirming their own biases, regardless of actual evidence.
      - roughly 1y ago
        Yeah, and that’s my concern right now - I think going back ~10 years or so, the percentage of “poisoned” (and we’ll use that term as in a dataset or something - the percentage of values in this set that have been affected by the contaminant) people was a minority, in the 10-20% range (just throwing out numbers). That meant if the NYT or WaPo published something, as a nation, we could generally debate our values and opinions based on a common set of facts - the credibility of those institutions was high enough that if they asserted, for instance, that Paul Ryan wore a toupee, we’d be arguing whether or not the wearing of a toupee was worth caring about and what the proper response to the toupee was, not whether or not he actually wore a toupee. My fear right now is the percentage of the population that’s “poisoned” is well over 50% - that more people than not distrust those types of institutions, which is sufficient to mean that we’re no longer arguing as a nation whether toupee-wearing fits into our national ideals or who we want to be as a people, and indeed we cannot have those debates, because for us to discuss our values or positions, they need to be in reference to some shared common set of facts, and there’s not a source of facts shared in common by enough of the population for us to be able to generate any kind of consensus worldview to even debate.
        godelski 1y ago
        Isn't the goal of disinformation campaigns to create a post truth era? It's very hard to combat. I hope since HN has an at least above average intelligence userbase and familiarity with the internet that we'd be better at fighting this. I hope we don't give up the fight. I think some advice I got from another academic about how to serve as a reviewer applies more broadly. It's easy to find flaws or critiques in a work. Your job as a reviewer isn't to help authors identify flaws, they are likely already aware. Your job is to determine if their flaws undermine their claims, even if their claims are accurate it's insufficient if not properly evidenced. The point is that nothing is perfect. So the real question is if we're making progress to finding truth or if we're just being lazy or overly perfectionist. Or Feynman said something similar. (Not a precise quote) "the first rule is not to be fooled and you're the easiest person for you to fool"
  - ngcc_hk 1y ago
    But every hole has its expertise. If IT has, other areas would have.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient, but this is a tech related article being discussed on a site full of people who have a much better than average understanding of tech. I agree but also look at the responses to my comment above and the version in the main thread. People here aren't responding as techies, regardless of them being techies or not. I'm asking for help demonstrating or countering the claim but most responses are not responding in a way where we're trying to do this. Most responses are still knee jerk reactions. I understand how people misinterpret my comment as a stronger claim, and that is my bad, but it's also hard to avoid. So I want to agree with you but I also want to make sure *our* actions align with *our* words I would like to keep HN a techie culture but it's a battle we're losing
- ryandrake 1y ago
  For the last decade or so, there's been a huge, sustained war on expertise, and an effort to undermine the public's trust of experts. Quoting an expert isn't enough for people, anymore. Everyone's skeptical unless you point them to actual research papers, and even then, some people would rather stick to their pre-existing world views and dO tHeIr OwN rEsEaRcH. Not defending this particular expert or even commenting on whether he is an expert, but as it stands, we have a quote from some company official vs. randos on the internet saying "nah-uh".
  - foolswisdom 1y ago
    You make it sound like the newspapers/companies are un-culpable for that effect. I believe it to be the case because I've seen cases were a newspaper presents a narrative as fact when those involved know very well it's just someone's spin for their own benefit. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect>.
  - iinnPP 1y ago
    The problem with expertise is anyone can be an expert. I would challenge the integrity of anyone claiming any field has precisely zero idiots.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    > there's been a huge, sustained war on expertise, and an effort to undermine the public's trust of experts. I find your verbiage particularly hilarious considering the amount of media and expert complicity that went into manufacturing the public support for the war on terror. The media has always been various shades of questionable. It just wasn't possible for the naysayers to get much traction before due to the information and media landscape and how content was disseminated. Now, for better or worse, they laymen can read the bible for themselves, metaphorically speaking.
    - mapontosevenths 1y ago
      Fifty four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level. They shouldn't be reading anything for themselves and should be trusting the experts, even if those experts are sometimes wrong they will be more accurate than the average American. Teaching someone to think for themselves, without first teaching them how to think is an invitation to disaster.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  The Washington Post was always bad. Movement liberals just fell in love with it because they hated Trump. Always a awful, militaristic, working-class hating neocon propaganda rag that gleefully mixed editorial and news, the only thing that got worse with the Bezos acquisition were the headlines (and, of course, the coverage of Amazon.) The Wall Street Journal was more truthful, and actually cared about not dipping their opinions in their reporting. I could swear there's a Chomsky quote about that. People put their names on it because it got them better jobs as propagandists elsewhere and they could sell their stupid books. It's a lot easier to tell the truth than to lie well; that's where the money and talent is at.
- username332211 1y ago
  And yet, I suspect if you look at the publications of "reliable" institutions in the 1980s, you'd find far more ridiculous things than you'd ever see in the modern era. For one, half the things I see from that era had so much to gain from exaggerating the might and power of the Soviet Union. It's easy to dig up quotes and reports denying any sort of stagnation (and far worse - claiming economic growth higher than the west) as late as Andropov and Chernenko's premierships.
- sinxccc 1y ago
  I don't feel they can be trusted on tech reports since 7 years ago, Bloomberg "The Big Hack".
- godelski 1y ago
  > Nobody trusts anyone or anything anymore. Which, btw, is the goal of most disinformation campaigns. To create a post truth era. I'll say it's ironic that the strategy comes out of Russia because there's an old Russian saying (often misattributed to Reagan) that's a good defense: trust but verify
incone123 1y ago
The person you replied to says there was no methodology. This is standard for mainstream media, along with no links to papers. If it gets reported in a specialist journal with detail I'll take it more seriously.
BoorishBears 1y ago
I'm way more confused why you think a company that makes its living on selling protection from threats, making such a bold claim with so little evidence is a good source. Compare this to the current NPM situation where a security provider is providing detailed breakdowns of events that do benefit them, but are so detailed that it's easy to separate their own interests from the attack. This reminds me of Databrick's CTO co-authoring a flimsy paper on how GPT-4 was degrading ... right as they were making a push for finetuning.
lxe 1y ago
Not sure why downvoted. Good journalism here would have been to show the methodology behind the findings or produce a link to a paper. Any article that says "Coffee is bad for you", as an example, that doesn't link to an actual paper or describes the methodology cannot be critically taken at face value. Same thing with this one. Appeal to authority isn't a good way to make a conclusion.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I'm not even gonna ask them to explain the methodology but it's 20-goddamn-25, link your source so that those who want to dig through that stuff can.
balamatom 1y ago
>Isn't that a pretty solid source...? What, CrowdStrike?

by bbor 1y ago

roughly 1y ago

Nobody trusts anyone or anything anymore. It used to be the fact that this was printed in the Washington Post was sufficient to indicate enough fact checking and background sourcing had been done that the paper was comfortable putting its name on the claims, which was a high enough bar that they were basically trustworthy, but for assorted reasons that’s not true for basically any institution in the country (world?) anymore.

dotnet00 1y ago
For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient, but this is a tech related article being discussed on a site full of people who have a much better than average understanding of tech. Just like how a physicist isn't just going to trust a claim in his expertise, like "Dark Matter found" from just seeing a headline in WaPo/NYT, it's reasonable that people working in tech will be suspicious of this claim without seeing technical details.
- roughly 1y ago
  > For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient I genuinely do not know if this is the case anymore - I really do think we’ve reached a level of epistemological breakdown societally where “God is dead” again for us.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    I think it really depends on how 'poisoned' the person is. I can totally believe that my politically-disconnected parents would consider being published in WaPo or NYT to be a strong sign of reliability. It helps that headlines that amount to "China is doing comically evil things again" tend to be taken at face value by many people, just for confirming their own biases, regardless of actual evidence.
    - roughly 1y ago
      Yeah, and that’s my concern right now - I think going back ~10 years or so, the percentage of “poisoned” (and we’ll use that term as in a dataset or something - the percentage of values in this set that have been affected by the contaminant) people was a minority, in the 10-20% range (just throwing out numbers). That meant if the NYT or WaPo published something, as a nation, we could generally debate our values and opinions based on a common set of facts - the credibility of those institutions was high enough that if they asserted, for instance, that Paul Ryan wore a toupee, we’d be arguing whether or not the wearing of a toupee was worth caring about and what the proper response to the toupee was, not whether or not he actually wore a toupee. My fear right now is the percentage of the population that’s “poisoned” is well over 50% - that more people than not distrust those types of institutions, which is sufficient to mean that we’re no longer arguing as a nation whether toupee-wearing fits into our national ideals or who we want to be as a people, and indeed we cannot have those debates, because for us to discuss our values or positions, they need to be in reference to some shared common set of facts, and there’s not a source of facts shared in common by enough of the population for us to be able to generate any kind of consensus worldview to even debate.
      - godelski 1y ago
        Isn't the goal of disinformation campaigns to create a post truth era? It's very hard to combat. I hope since HN has an at least above average intelligence userbase and familiarity with the internet that we'd be better at fighting this. I hope we don't give up the fight. I think some advice I got from another academic about how to serve as a reviewer applies more broadly. It's easy to find flaws or critiques in a work. Your job as a reviewer isn't to help authors identify flaws, they are likely already aware. Your job is to determine if their flaws undermine their claims, even if their claims are accurate it's insufficient if not properly evidenced. The point is that nothing is perfect. So the real question is if we're making progress to finding truth or if we're just being lazy or overly perfectionist. Or Feynman said something similar. (Not a precise quote) "the first rule is not to be fooled and you're the easiest person for you to fool"
- ngcc_hk 1y ago
  But every hole has its expertise. If IT has, other areas would have.
- godelski 1y ago
  > For the average person, being published in WaPo may still be sufficient, but this is a tech related article being discussed on a site full of people who have a much better than average understanding of tech. I agree but also look at the responses to my comment above and the version in the main thread. People here aren't responding as techies, regardless of them being techies or not. I'm asking for help demonstrating or countering the claim but most responses are not responding in a way where we're trying to do this. Most responses are still knee jerk reactions. I understand how people misinterpret my comment as a stronger claim, and that is my bad, but it's also hard to avoid. So I want to agree with you but I also want to make sure *our* actions align with *our* words I would like to keep HN a techie culture but it's a battle we're losing
ryandrake 1y ago
For the last decade or so, there's been a huge, sustained war on expertise, and an effort to undermine the public's trust of experts. Quoting an expert isn't enough for people, anymore. Everyone's skeptical unless you point them to actual research papers, and even then, some people would rather stick to their pre-existing world views and dO tHeIr OwN rEsEaRcH. Not defending this particular expert or even commenting on whether he is an expert, but as it stands, we have a quote from some company official vs. randos on the internet saying "nah-uh".
- foolswisdom 1y ago
  You make it sound like the newspapers/companies are un-culpable for that effect. I believe it to be the case because I've seen cases were a newspaper presents a narrative as fact when those involved know very well it's just someone's spin for their own benefit. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect>.
- iinnPP 1y ago
  The problem with expertise is anyone can be an expert. I would challenge the integrity of anyone claiming any field has precisely zero idiots.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  > there's been a huge, sustained war on expertise, and an effort to undermine the public's trust of experts. I find your verbiage particularly hilarious considering the amount of media and expert complicity that went into manufacturing the public support for the war on terror. The media has always been various shades of questionable. It just wasn't possible for the naysayers to get much traction before due to the information and media landscape and how content was disseminated. Now, for better or worse, they laymen can read the bible for themselves, metaphorically speaking.
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    Fifty four percent of Americans read below the sixth grade level. They shouldn't be reading anything for themselves and should be trusting the experts, even if those experts are sometimes wrong they will be more accurate than the average American. Teaching someone to think for themselves, without first teaching them how to think is an invitation to disaster.
pessimizer 1y ago
The Washington Post was always bad. Movement liberals just fell in love with it because they hated Trump. Always a awful, militaristic, working-class hating neocon propaganda rag that gleefully mixed editorial and news, the only thing that got worse with the Bezos acquisition were the headlines (and, of course, the coverage of Amazon.) The Wall Street Journal was more truthful, and actually cared about not dipping their opinions in their reporting. I could swear there's a Chomsky quote about that. People put their names on it because it got them better jobs as propagandists elsewhere and they could sell their stupid books. It's a lot easier to tell the truth than to lie well; that's where the money and talent is at.
username332211 1y ago
And yet, I suspect if you look at the publications of "reliable" institutions in the 1980s, you'd find far more ridiculous things than you'd ever see in the modern era. For one, half the things I see from that era had so much to gain from exaggerating the might and power of the Soviet Union. It's easy to dig up quotes and reports denying any sort of stagnation (and far worse - claiming economic growth higher than the west) as late as Andropov and Chernenko's premierships.
sinxccc 1y ago
I don't feel they can be trusted on tech reports since 7 years ago, Bloomberg "The Big Hack".
godelski 1y ago
> Nobody trusts anyone or anything anymore. Which, btw, is the goal of most disinformation campaigns. To create a post truth era. I'll say it's ironic that the strategy comes out of Russia because there's an old Russian saying (often misattributed to Reagan) that's a good defense: trust but verify

incone123 1y ago

The person you replied to says there was no methodology. This is standard for mainstream media, along with no links to papers. If it gets reported in a specialist journal with detail I'll take it more seriously.

BoorishBears 1y ago

I'm way more confused why you think a company that makes its living on selling protection from threats, making such a bold claim with so little evidence is a good source. Compare this to the current NPM situation where a security provider is providing detailed breakdowns of events that do benefit them, but are so detailed that it's easy to separate their own interests from the attack. This reminds me of Databrick's CTO co-authoring a flimsy paper on how GPT-4 was degrading ... right as they were making a push for finetuning.

lxe 1y ago

Not sure why downvoted. Good journalism here would have been to show the methodology behind the findings or produce a link to a paper. Any article that says "Coffee is bad for you", as an example, that doesn't link to an actual paper or describes the methodology cannot be critically taken at face value. Same thing with this one. Appeal to authority isn't a good way to make a conclusion.

potato3732842 1y ago
I'm not even gonna ask them to explain the methodology but it's 20-goddamn-25, link your source so that those who want to dig through that stuff can.

balamatom 1y ago

>Isn't that a pretty solid source...? What, CrowdStrike?