5 ms·

If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are

by blhack 6y ago

If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are similarly full of lies.

sokoloff 6y ago
Exactly. See also: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
- konjin 6y ago
  That is not incompetence. This is a hatchet job. Stop giving malicious actors the benefit of the doubt.
karaterobot 6y ago
In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.
- np- 6y ago
  My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
  - arduanika 6y ago
    Personally I think I've arrived at a place where I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia both with the established sources, and with the conspiracy rabbit holes. I've seen both NYT and "alt" news say things that are straight-up incorrect about facts that I know from my own experience, in my own domains of knowledge, so I'm not going to trust either blindly. I'm left trying to piece together from various sources of different slants, at different points on the established/fringe spectrum. This is harder than taking a side, but I want to believe it's worth it. Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Isn’t that exactly what Gell-Mann would lead you to conclude you should do? Realize that many (most?) sources are riddled with errors? (I agree with your overall stance; I don’t get you wariness of Gell-Mann.) HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
      - arduanika 6y ago
        Ah. I think I was being so pedantic it was confusing. If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity". Is that where we're getting mixed up?
    - AngrySkillzz 6y ago
      And then you read HN, and you realize no one here knows anything about economics or finance, despite how confident they are! Gell-Mann amnesia is everywhere, and not just in authoritative sources. The people on the internet who you chat with and know a lot about computers... might not know that much about other topics.
      - arduanika 6y ago
        Yes, exactly.
  - hedora 6y ago
    The solution is to reinstate the media ownership laws that Regan and W Bush eliminated: no foreign ownership of the press, strict limits on the percentage of the audience any one outlet can control nationally and locally. That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
    - krapp 6y ago
      How would any of that lead to an increase in accuracy or decrease in bias in reporting? There are already plenty of local news stations no one trusts, and social media has plenty of voices in local communities no one should trust. >some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT. Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        There are already plenty of local news stations no one trusts Some of that mistrust comes from the centralized ownership and control of a lot of "local" stations.
        krapp 6y ago
        But most of it is just blanket mistrust of "the media." That's not going to change with more local ownership, they'll just assume local politics controls the media rather than national.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pas 6y ago
    The solution is History, as in the data/evidence-driven profession. It's perfectly well applicable to contemporary events too. Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic"). There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
    - robin21 6y ago
      NYT is addictive as hell though. You can't look away, whether you are liberal or moderate. Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias. Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases. Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives. I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers". I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
      - pas 6y ago
        Maybe I spent too much time lurking on economics/policy related online places, but nowadays fewer and fewer articles can lull me into the usual Gell-Mann amnesia. (Arrogance lvl 99.) > Outrage sells Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually. > I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper. Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
  - ardy42 6y ago
    >> In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary. > My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is. What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think. Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
- mherdeg 6y ago
  Do you agree with Crichton that it was wrong for newspapers to report on expert predictions the 2002 steel tariffs would affect US GDP or employment? Do you think in retrospect this was a reasonable things for experts to predict? That was the central tenet of the 2002 speech laying out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (some prior discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )
anm89 6y ago
I think they know how deeply engrained their position is but I hope they underestimate how much deeper the connections people have to truly inspriring sources like SSC are. I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.

by blhack 6y ago

If you read this article and know the types of things that Scott writes, remember this experience and try to imagine how many other nytimes outrage articles are similarly full of lies.

sokoloff 6y ago

Exactly. See also: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

konjin 6y ago
That is not incompetence. This is a hatchet job. Stop giving malicious actors the benefit of the doubt.

karaterobot 6y ago

In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary.

np- 6y ago
My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
- arduanika 6y ago
  Personally I think I've arrived at a place where I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia both with the established sources, and with the conspiracy rabbit holes. I've seen both NYT and "alt" news say things that are straight-up incorrect about facts that I know from my own experience, in my own domains of knowledge, so I'm not going to trust either blindly. I'm left trying to piece together from various sources of different slants, at different points on the established/fringe spectrum. This is harder than taking a side, but I want to believe it's worth it. Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Isn’t that exactly what Gell-Mann would lead you to conclude you should do? Realize that many (most?) sources are riddled with errors? (I agree with your overall stance; I don’t get you wariness of Gell-Mann.) HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
    - arduanika 6y ago
      Ah. I think I was being so pedantic it was confusing. If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity". Is that where we're getting mixed up?
  - AngrySkillzz 6y ago
    And then you read HN, and you realize no one here knows anything about economics or finance, despite how confident they are! Gell-Mann amnesia is everywhere, and not just in authoritative sources. The people on the internet who you chat with and know a lot about computers... might not know that much about other topics.
    - arduanika 6y ago
      Yes, exactly.
- hedora 6y ago
  The solution is to reinstate the media ownership laws that Regan and W Bush eliminated: no foreign ownership of the press, strict limits on the percentage of the audience any one outlet can control nationally and locally. That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
  - krapp 6y ago
    How would any of that lead to an increase in accuracy or decrease in bias in reporting? There are already plenty of local news stations no one trusts, and social media has plenty of voices in local communities no one should trust. >some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT. Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      There are already plenty of local news stations no one trusts Some of that mistrust comes from the centralized ownership and control of a lot of "local" stations.
      - krapp 6y ago
        But most of it is just blanket mistrust of "the media." That's not going to change with more local ownership, they'll just assume local politics controls the media rather than national.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pas 6y ago
  The solution is History, as in the data/evidence-driven profession. It's perfectly well applicable to contemporary events too. Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic"). There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
  - robin21 6y ago
    NYT is addictive as hell though. You can't look away, whether you are liberal or moderate. Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias. Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases. Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives. I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers". I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
    - pas 6y ago
      Maybe I spent too much time lurking on economics/policy related online places, but nowadays fewer and fewer articles can lull me into the usual Gell-Mann amnesia. (Arrogance lvl 99.) > Outrage sells Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually. > I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper. Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
- ardy42 6y ago
  >> In some real way, Gell-Mann amnesia sustains the entire news industry. We have to believe there is a central, reliable source of news somewhere out there, despite so much evidence to the contrary. > My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is. What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think. Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
mherdeg 6y ago
Do you agree with Crichton that it was wrong for newspapers to report on expert predictions the 2002 steel tariffs would affect US GDP or employment? Do you think in retrospect this was a reasonable things for experts to predict? That was the central tenet of the 2002 speech laying out the Gell-Mann amnesia effect (some prior discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18005236 )

anm89 6y ago

I think they know how deeply engrained their position is but I hope they underestimate how much deeper the connections people have to truly inspriring sources like SSC are. I would say I had mixed feelings about the nyt before the SSC incident. Now it is irrevocably tarnished in my mind.