3 ms·
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and
by treetalker 11mo ago
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
- TrevorFSmith 11mo agoA similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
- mh- 11mo agoReading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting. Back when tech was this niche thing 20+ years ago, media's illiteracy on the matter was forgivable. Now that it's omnipresent and represents a huge portion of the economy, not so much. Yet the accuracy of the reporting on events that I have familiarity with has barely improved.* * Acknowledging that this is subjective and I don't have any way to quantify it.
- graemep 11mo agoIts the same in many areas. You have just escaped Gell-Mann amnesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect Inaccuracy is a common complaint about science reporting. If you look at how a country is reported in another country, it is often highly inaccurate. In my case its mostly been how Sri Lanka is reported in the UK, but I have also seen lots of inaccurate reporting of the UK in American media (and not restricted to any type of media or political side.) I have seen quite a bit of inaccurate reporting of business and finance. Lots of bad reports of survey data, especially related to things like religious and political attitudes. Often the result of badly (or dishonestly) crafted questions.
- mh- 11mo ago> just escaped [..] About 20 years ago, haha, but yes. Am familiar with that term from Crichton. > [..] UK in American media If it's any consolation, much of the reporting I see on America in American media is also inaccurate. > survey data To me this is perhaps the most egregious bad faith reporting I see. The survey questions themselves are often designed in a way that will likely produce a given result, whether through malice or incompetence. Then the reporting on those results buries the actual questions asked. I saw one recently, from the early 2000s, that said "majority of Americans cannot locate the Middle East on a map". But the actual survey's findings were "the majority of Americans can not identify the Middle East on a map". And what did it mean by that? It was a multiple choice question and if you failed to include the correct extent of North Africa that is regarded as the Middle East, you were considered unable to identify the Middle East. Something like 85% correctly included Saudi Arabia.
- busymom0 11mo agoThe Verge's infamous "how to build a gaming PC" tutorial video made me stop visiting their site and mostly stop trusting most tech news.
- inglor_cz 11mo agoReading almost any mass media article on encryption makes me want to scream.
- Balgair 11mo agoThe classic Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect
- yen223 11mo agoReminder that you can see last week's (or any day's) HN front page using the `past` link https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-11-16 https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-11-16
- ycombinete 11mo agoA great way to do this is to subscribe to a weekend edition of a good newspaper.