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I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just g

I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just go onto one of the many economic blogs, quite a few run by professors of economics. Ditto political news. Ditto tech news on reddit, HN or slashdot where there are multiple commentators who often have graduate degrees in the subject matter and certainly many links posted to peer reviewed articles or at least Wikipedia. So often tech journalism is just the recycling of press releases, or science journalism pops up with, yet again, a correlation/causation fallacy with all of the interesting details cropped out for a mass audience. I am glad journalism is dying... The thing is, journalism as you paint it isn't dying. The medium is changing, but the landscape is still dominated by journalists, meaning people who write stories on subjects they don't deeply understand, for a mass audience who doesn't know any better. And I'm really not sure that the quality is improving at all. Look at the top 10 tech blogs, or political news sites, or whatever, and tell me I'm wrong. The fact of human nature is that we're predisposed to believe people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and who can write in a persuasive manner. And our info economy has driven us to a shallower understanding of the world, I think, so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics. The places like Aol and Demand Media who build content farms get this, and that's why they're going for volume and scale instead of deep quality. HN and places like it will never be mainstream, because people don't like to spend this much time thinking about stuff.

pyre 17y ago
> so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics. At least for local news, I'm happy about twitter-sized updates. This way I can get a gist of what's going on without the unnecessary details. For example: Gunman shoots 3 people in X town I now know that a gunman shot three people in X town, but I don't have a name, face, etc. If I end up on a jury I'm less biased towards saying that the defendant is guilty. Normally local press would try to pack as many details as possible into this report, when a gist is really good enough (at least until there's a trial).
mistermann 17y ago
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com I'm interested if you can name one mainstream economist or economic commentator, especially a famous one, who comes even close to being as factual and prescient as Mish. This is just one site...the blogosphere was all over the impending economic collapse for years, while the mainstream economic journalists, many with economics degrees, had it exactly backwards. And if your retort is that it wasn't a big deal, all is well now, I recommend you do more reading and decide for yourself if that is true.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Nope, my retort is that people do not care. On HN, we (usually) seek out the best information and data by using rationality and logic and having a high standard for what constitutes intellectual discussion. We hold subject matter experts in high regard and we seek to sidestep fallacies and gratuitous displays of emotion. Most people are not this way. Witness the rise of 24/7 cable news that blathers endlessly about whatever is the big story of the minute, or conservative talk radio, designed to whip people into an emotional frenzy. Or Twitter! I'm pretty sure that if Mish was restricted to 140 characters, he'd be a lot less insightful. The medium is changing, but human nature hasn't changed. And the result of making everyone a content producer is that there are many orders of magnitude of content out there, which means you have to get attention by being intensely targeted (HN), or by pure volume (Demand Media). My point is that human nature seems to be driving more people to the latter.
  - mistermann 17y ago
    Ahhh....agreed.

pyre 17y ago

> so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics. At least for local news, I'm happy about twitter-sized updates. This way I can get a gist of what's going on without the unnecessary details. For example: Gunman shoots 3 people in X town I now know that a gunman shot three people in X town, but I don't have a name, face, etc. If I end up on a jury I'm less biased towards saying that the defendant is guilty. Normally local press would try to pack as many details as possible into this report, when a gist is really good enough (at least until there's a trial).

mistermann 17y ago

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com I'm interested if you can name one mainstream economist or economic commentator, especially a famous one, who comes even close to being as factual and prescient as Mish. This is just one site...the blogosphere was all over the impending economic collapse for years, while the mainstream economic journalists, many with economics degrees, had it exactly backwards. And if your retort is that it wasn't a big deal, all is well now, I recommend you do more reading and decide for yourself if that is true.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Nope, my retort is that people do not care. On HN, we (usually) seek out the best information and data by using rationality and logic and having a high standard for what constitutes intellectual discussion. We hold subject matter experts in high regard and we seek to sidestep fallacies and gratuitous displays of emotion. Most people are not this way. Witness the rise of 24/7 cable news that blathers endlessly about whatever is the big story of the minute, or conservative talk radio, designed to whip people into an emotional frenzy. Or Twitter! I'm pretty sure that if Mish was restricted to 140 characters, he'd be a lot less insightful. The medium is changing, but human nature hasn't changed. And the result of making everyone a content producer is that there are many orders of magnitude of content out there, which means you have to get attention by being intensely targeted (HN), or by pure volume (Demand Media). My point is that human nature seems to be driving more people to the latter.
- mistermann 17y ago
  Ahhh....agreed.