[HN Gopher] No More Stories
___________________________________________________________________
No More Stories
Author : ingve
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-12-17 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| allemagne wrote:
| The ideal situation our brains want is a close friend with high
| social status who entertains us with compelling and digestible
| narratives about what's _really_ going on. A news outlet that
| only deals in cold hard facts, consensus, and objective numbers
| will simply never be able to out-compete a retweetable headline
| from a famous journalist with a sensationalized and entertaining
| version of the facts.
|
| For one thing, I am not convinced we have cracked a way in
| general of translating cold hard data and situations with scant
| evidence into a decent lay understanding. So in some ways news-
| as-entertainment media may even succeed in communicating actual
| reality better than a list of facts ever could, even if
| everyone's understanding is pretty shit on average. By using
| clickbait and sensation to turn a profit they can even do it more
| sustainably while Objective News Corp goes out of business (or
| more likely starts to slowly become more like everyone else).
|
| Maybe we'll find effective scientific ways to measure how news
| outlets and specific authors tend to do at predicting future
| developments through implication or otherwise, but I think the
| more realistic boring reality is that the broad ecosystem will
| just trudge ahead on a bumpy road and converge on a few
| marginally better ways of reporting and interpreting news.
| masswerk wrote:
| Actually, no. The article misses one important step, namely
| experts or interpretation of data. Meaning, there's data, data
| reporting, aggregation and selection, and finally,
| interpretation. Journalism is then another step, namely a
| transmission system from the realm of data and specific domain to
| common understanding. The form of this is the story, which
| integrates the findings with public matters (by this constructing
| meaning) and allows the public to form an opinion. Accepted
| opinion eventually becomes the narration that leads our accorded
| actions. - What "data journalism" means here, is omitting expert
| opinion and directly applying common understanding to
| unstructured data, by this neglecting any need for expert domain
| or domain experts, in other words, skipping informed opinion,
| since the expertise is already "in the stack" - and even more so,
| requiring the members of the public to come up with the story on
| their own (and fight it out). I'm not convinced.
| skybrian wrote:
| I'm a fan of data journalism too, but not everything can be done
| that way, and social sciences have lots of problems.
|
| In particular, surveys are a cursed instrument. You aren't
| allowed to know what people were thinking when they filled out
| the survey a certain way.
|
| I think there might be interesting ways to combine these. As part
| of doing a survey, maybe pick a few people at random and
| interview them to find out where they're coming from and why they
| answered the survey a certain way?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I would really appreciate a "news" site that just cited
| verifiable facts and maybe showed data trends but didn't try to
| make any conclusions for me
| Mezzie wrote:
| I work in political communications, so I'll throw a few US
| resources here. Unfortunately, because the media IS unreliable,
| doing this requires going to primary sources and a lot of time
| as well as a very defined idea of what you care about. There's
| nowhere that will bundle up the 'most important' things for
| you, but if you're willing to drink from the firehose:
|
| - https://www.govtrack.us/
|
| - Your local and state websites (if they don't suck, this is
| highly variable). Some allow for things like RSS feeds of bill
| updates if you'd like to track certain things
|
| - https://ballotpedia.org/ is an encyclopedia that, while slow
| on the news side, had a lot of structural supporting
| information so you can look up things like how ballot measures
| work. So good for fact checking basic government facts.
|
| - https://www.congress.gov/ - The LoC also collects and
| archives data on Congressional actions
|
| - https://www.senate.gov/legislative/HowTo/how_to_votes.htm and
| the Congressional Register
|
| - Wire services and things like AP + Reuters are good
| triggers/trip wires to go check on your own. So they tell you
| about a story, and you don't read their version, you just go
| look up whatever it is on one of the sources above.
|
| That's what I end up doing, and it's time-consuming and janky.
| I hate it, but I've also been a professional fact-checker and
| do so occasionally on news articles and I am not pleased with
| what I find, so.
| cgh wrote:
| Here's a good media bias chart:
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St...
|
| Try choosing sources near the top middle, eg the Associated
| Press, Reuters, etc.
| allemagne wrote:
| Honestly that chart looks great to me, but there's just no
| way to tell or to prove to others whether that's because
| we're both objective truth-seekers or because our awful
| obvious heinous biases happen to match up.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This version of "least bias" appears to translate into a
| wierd combination of: * pro status quo
| * more fact-based reporting
|
| The first one is deeply suspect (though an entirely
| legitimate position to take). The second one is valuable, but
| far from the only kind of valuable journalism.
| olah_1 wrote:
| The ones in the middle are the most nefarious in my
| experience. Precisely because they purport to be "the
| objective standard" and quite simply are entertainment just
| like everyone else.
|
| Even the reliability of AP has completely evaporated for me.
| Not just influence from money, but also from intelligence
| agencies that make journalists feel important.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Even the reliability of AP has completely evaporated for
| me. Not just influence from money, but also from
| intelligence agencies that make journalists feel important.
|
| +1, it's grotesque how certain outlets have become CIA
| mouthpieces since 2016.
| stevenicr wrote:
| this chart is helpful and glad it's been made to keep the
| conversation going in a better direction.
|
| Sadly due to what I consider terrible editorial controls, I
| feel we need to move to a chart that shows more details, and
| even goes to actual reporter/writer level and editor level.
|
| Also in the age of Trump and Bernie - we likely need to chart
| 'those for / those against' these two specifically - as there
| are plenty on the 'right' and 'left' side of the news that
| are against them.
|
| I'd like a browser extension that can highlight a crowd
| sourced plusses and minusses of each individual writer.
|
| In some ways I have found the trust placed in the middle,
| like chart shows abc/cbs/bbc/npr near middle.. this is when
| the most damage is done..
|
| like when I watched a nora odonel about 2 years ago - a fair
| and balanced reporting for about 55 minutes - lots of facts,
| not much fluff.. then the last 5 minutes one fact and a hard
| slant to be anti-trump story.. what makes this so bad is that
| she/they really try to say they are proper reporting, so it
| makes the propaganda pieces they add in 100x worse imho..
|
| at least if you watch enough of the reidOut or newsmax (going
| by the chart) - you get a sense that they are totally
| skewering the stories with no balance at all attempted - and
| I think it becomes obvious that are working more like the
| enquirer - it's more tribal circle jerking entertainment than
| real facts..
|
| When a place stands as an arbiter of truth and fairness and
| balance and they sprinkle just little bits of slant it's
| worse I believe.
| Shish2k wrote:
| That seems like a nice idea, but still very exploitable - it's
| easy to control people's conclusions by limiting _which_
| verifiable facts you publish.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I went looking for that, and I found that Wall Street Journal
| does that better than any other US source I found, though of
| course nothing is perfect.
|
| Their regular quoted subscription rate is big, but with some
| effort you can find much better deals.
| [deleted]
| nsxwolf wrote:
| At this point literally everything has been wrong. Facts are
| confidently stated and they turn out to be opposite, then reverse
| again. Followed by more totally confident assertions. Maybe there
| is a story here, and it is our hubris. This is beyond us.
| viro wrote:
| Scientific consensus changes when it receives new data.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| And that's happening so quickly and so often. People say
| they're following the science, but they're really being
| whipsawed by it.
| pjscott wrote:
| I've been appreciating some people's practice of giving
| subjective probability estimates for various things depending
| on the strength of the evidence; see e.g. the "Probability
| Updates" section of this article:
|
| https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#prob...
|
| Probably a well-functioning prediction market would do it
| better, though I'm not sure our prediction markets today are
| there yet.
| bostik wrote:
| Prediction markets, or at least the decent and regulated
| ones, won't touch the plague. It's gambling, and taking bets
| on human misery is generally frowned upon as a business
| practice.
|
| You need insurance provider's license for that.
| azangru wrote:
| I'd love some data journalism on the facts that are being
| reversed this way and that :-)
| TuringTest wrote:
| We need automatic compilation, to fight that trend.
|
| When all you get from the news is the current political spin of
| the latest scandal to make your party look good, you need to
| record who is saying what to start to see trends in what may be
| the truth, piecing together the bits of verifiable information
| they offer.
|
| Now this is too much to do manually. A fact-counterfact format
| on "public discourse" sites like Kialo[1] is useful to collect
| the evolution of known facts over news, but it's too slow to do
| by hand. A news aggregator that collected partisan claims from
| both sides in breaking news would allow journalists to analyse
| the big picture, being able to report the story based on
| _published facts_ and not just hearsay.
|
| An additional advantage is that it would allow readers to
| contrast the bias of individual journalists, seeing which facts
| they emphasise and which they ignore. It would also serve as an
| ever-growing database of public discourse like we used to have
| in the days of printing press and newspaper libraries, when
| what was published remained unchanged and could be checked out.
|
| [1] https://www.kialo.com/
| tptacek wrote:
| With respect to COVID-19, this makes sense.
|
| More broadly, though, for journalism in general, not so much. For
| instance: Carryrou's Theranos work much more strongly fits the
| "story" notion of journalism than it does "data journalism".
| Veen wrote:
| Even if the media adopted a "just the facts" approach, there's
| still the question of which facts. Most misleading news stories
| aren't outright lies, but a careful selection of truths and
| ommissions that creates a narrative the journalist (and their
| reader) finds desirable. I don't think it's possible to overcome
| that and still create a product most people will watch or read: I
| strongly doubt the average reader will wade through "collections
| of consensus" in place of partial news stories. People read the
| New York Times or the Daily Mail because they like them, not
| because they lack an alternative that tells them the real truth.
|
| Another problem, one tech people tend to ignore, is that
| journalism is as much about values as facts. And so long as we
| disagree on values, collections of consensus will quickly turn
| into competing consensuses, each motivated by values that aren't
| recognized by the others, which is exactly what we have now.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm working on something similar to the "tracker for every issue
| of public concern" idea that OP suggests at the end. A news site
| that doesn't write articles. Instead just organizes links to
| other peoples articles, and links to original sources, into sagas
| that unfolded over time.
|
| It's not released yet, and I just talked about it publicly for
| the first time in another HN comment a few days ago [1]. There I
| asked people to email me if they were interested in being
| notified when I had an MVP ready, and I had a great response (33
| emails, for context the comment itself only got 46 upvotes), so I
| guess I'll do the same here. Email is in my profile, sorry for
| the blatant self promotion.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=29552009
| pcmaffey wrote:
| There are no facts in journalism, only observations. The media is
| not a courtroom, it's not science, it's just humans observing
| each other.
| pjscott wrote:
| A couple of days ago there were very strong winds in my area
| that caused a lot of falling tree limbs and property damage.
| The next day the newspaper reported, correctly, the fact that
| the weather had indeed been like that. I'm not sure how this
| fits with your claim unless you're using the words "fact" and
| "observation" in an epistemically radical way.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| All facts begin as observations. Not all observations are
| facts.
|
| All I'm saying is that the media operates on the level of
| "observations." That doesn't mean that some of those
| observations are not facts, just that the verification
| process that makes an observation a fact is outside the
| domain of media.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Problems that people have with journalism are always misplaced
| IMO. It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar
| as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of
| what individuals in society want to see and hear. Quite to the
| contrary, most journalists I've met and talked to (largely in
| print media) have journalistic standards and generally want to do
| the right thing by their readers. But in a sense, media companies
| are held captive by their readers.
|
| It seems like many people believe that if somehow big corporate
| media (let's say Fox, CNN, NBC), swapped into a mode of "more
| facts, less editorialization" then it would have positive
| downstream effects on society. (Let's set aside that facts and
| data are completely meaningless without context, and context is
| political.) I'm not sure that's actually the case. I think it
| would have largely no effect. People in our society want the
| Rachel Maddow's and the Tucker Carlson's, the Joe Rogan's and the
| Russell Brand's. Until society shifts out of that mode, our media
| will continue to look this way.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar
| as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of
| what individuals in society want to see and hear.
|
| This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for the
| public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to
| advertising. Not to mention, everyone in power knows how much
| the public is influenced by media, and takes care to cultivate
| their relationship with media through all means possible -
| donations, access journalism (you publish something bad about
| me? See if anyone in your whole paper gets one more "leak" from
| us), friendships with the editors and managers and so on.
|
| Not to mention, you're making an assumption that the media has
| a responsibility of extracting the maximum possible engagement,
| which is definitely not a given. Even if Rachel Maddow or
| Tucker Carlson get the maximum possible engagement, that
| doesn't make it ethical to put such partisan and deceptive
| voices front and center. This is essentially a way of
| manipulating emotion, just like advertising, it's not a
| democratic style of "listening to your consumer".
|
| Finally, there is a difference between the style that media
| chooses to employ, which the public has some influence on; and
| the content they actually publish, which is much more
| controlled by management and special interests groups. Just
| look at stories that don't get published - for example, when
| Ruth Badger Ginsburg was interviewed, she noted that she didn't
| agree with athletes kneeling; but, the interviewers decided
| that this will hurt her image among the left, so they just cut
| out this part of her interview.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| I think what you've said here, while well reasoned, is pretty
| much the kind of magical thinking about the power of the
| media and its influences that I think is a part of the
| paralysis around the subject.
|
| Media, in your words, is simultaneously purely driven by
| capital and Machiavellian self-interest, "not working for the
| public" and _also_ is an entity that should be concerned
| about the ethics of putting "such partisan and deceptive
| voices front and center". In this world, there exists a cabal
| of people, all moving in concert to suppress the truth (which
| truths? don't know) and release propaganda, all of which, of
| course, everyone in society cleanly falls for.
|
| The problem, of course, is that you're taking the actions of
| a loosely defined group of hundreds or thousands (or more) of
| publications, and importantly, _individuals_ working at those
| publications in the U.S. and around the world and pushing
| them together into a grand narrative.
|
| I don't really think I'm being naive. We've all gotten to see
| the rise of independent media and the new gigantic wave of
| disinformation networks that came along with it. The
| democratization of content creation was a shift of power from
| "elites" to the common people. And yet, independent media
| tends to reproduce the same kinds of narratives of
| traditional media (and often even more nefarious ones), just
| with a different face. It's precisely because of the
| relationship between people and the media that there are no
| easy answers.
| craftinator wrote:
| > This seems very naive. Media companies are not working for
| the public, which pays pennies to the dollar compared to
| advertising.
|
| I agree that the advertising is where the money comes from
| for most media... But that supports the parent comment, in
| that it incentivises the media companies to tell their
| audiences exactly what they want to hear (or, more correctly,
| exactly what will keep them coming back and watching more
| advertisements).
| nerdponx wrote:
| I have come to believe that people don't _want_ it as much as
| they are just generally susceptible to it. The "news" has
| figured out how to become a supernormal stimulus:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
| darawk wrote:
| I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction
| of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and
| problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unitary nature of
| preference.
|
| I want to eat the cookie and I want to be thin. The fact that
| I eat the cookie does not actually mean that I want the
| cookie "more" than I want to be thin. It just means that
| preference functions are not consistent over time. My
| preference over the next 5 minutes is not the same as my
| preference for what to do with the collection of all of my 5
| minutes over the course of my life.
|
| You can prove this with a simple thought experiment. Almost
| everyone on earth has some vice or bad habit that they'd like
| to break if they could, or some better behavior they'd like
| to do if they could. What that means is that for those
| people, if they could take a side-effect free pill to change
| their brain to behave in that way, they would. If that's
| true, it's clear that the consistency of preferences is
| falsified.
|
| Once you accept this, I think it recasts how we ought to
| think about technology, and social architecture. The
| implications of this are that, probably in general, we want
| to allow people to architect their environment to conform to
| their longer term executive preferences, rather than imposing
| an environment tailored to their shorter term instinctual
| ones.
|
| Notably this does not mean _imposing_ this environment on
| them. If people want to read clickbait they should be allowed
| to. But I think most people, if they had a "filter clickbait
| bullshit journalism from my life" button, they would press
| that button. Those same people (myself included), will also
| happily click on a perfectly tailored to my hot buttons
| headline. This is not a contradiction, and people shouldn't
| be shamed for it.
|
| The promise of technology in this domain is to engage
| executive preferences by providing intentional, tailored
| environments for people. If you can give me the option not to
| be exposed to click bait, i'll take it. If you can give me
| the option not to be exposed to sugary snacks, i'll take that
| too. I'm hopeful that technology and media will start to move
| in this direction, because I think it'd be a really
| significant improvement.
| carapace wrote:
| You make a good point. But isn't the ability to comprehend
| and work towards long(er)-term goals over more immediate
| gratification kind of the essence of being human (as
| distinguished from animal?)
|
| If we "allow people to architect their environment to
| conform to their longer term executive preferences, rather
| than imposing an environment tailored to their shorter term
| instinctual ones.", isn't that kind of the definition of
| civilization?
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| You should take this, expand on it if you want, and publish
| it as a blog.
| shannifin wrote:
| > the media and what it publishes is downstream of what
| individuals in society want to see and hear.
|
| I think it's more likely a feedback loop and they're both
| downstream from each other. And, in that sense, there's "blame"
| on both sides, and certain patterns continually reinforce
| themselves through such loops.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > It's easy to scapegoat "the media" as an entity, but insofar
| as it exists, the media and what it publishes is downstream of
| what individuals in society want to see and hear.
|
| Hard to believe that someone could be this naive. Even 50 [
| EDIT: more like 40 ] years ago, Paul Weller of the Jam sang, in
| relation to this precise issue: Does the
| public want what the public gets? Or does the public
| get what the public wants?
|
| It's not easy to answer this question definitively, and seems
| unwise to pretend that this is a settled matter.
| debacle wrote:
| I advocate on grassroots political issues locally. There is a
| special interest group that has much more sway than the general
| public is aware over local policy decisions (to the extent that
| they head two local, theoretically competing political
| parties). In the last 12 months, I have brought this up at
| least a dozen times in media interviews, letters to the editor,
| etc.
|
| It has gotten nearly no media attention. Eventually I just
| asked one of the interviewers why this aspect of our advocacy
| was getting no coverage, and she plainly stated that her
| editors would not publish this information, because they are
| part of this special interest group.
|
| Take this and scale it nationally. Our news media does not
| serve its stated purpose. It is simply another mechanism for
| control.
|
| There has never been a time in history where the news media has
| been a bastion of unbiased, informed reporting.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I disagree that journalism that uses stories, quotes, human
| interest is bad or causing our misinformation problems. There is
| a LOT of great, factual, reporting that use real stories.
|
| A great example is this recent Wayfair child trafficking article
| from WaPo (worth a read if you haven't). [1]
|
| Adding in the real life experience of the supposed victims, those
| who spread the information, and then the final story of a
| believer. How this was the start of her radicalization, directly
| leads to QAnon, and finally she went to Jan 6 and died. Powerful
| story from start to finish which is 100% based in fact. This
| brings what a lot of us view as fringe & quirky online craziness
| into the real world with real consequences.
|
| IMHO the big problem is opinion masked as news.
|
| I constantly report on Apple News examples of this. Fox News does
| it all the time. They put out pieces on there that are opinion
| and not reporting that are not labeled. They put headlines and
| push notifications that are opinion but not labeled. A lot of
| people only see these and don't actually read. They are not
| reporting facts, or the piece uses just a few facts to support
| their opinion.
|
| When WaPo, NyTimes, even more 'conservative' outlets like WSJ
| publish they put 'opinion: ' in the headline or minimally the
| byline and a graph at the bottom about the writer.
|
| I'm picking on Fox but they aren't the only bad actors this
| happens on the left too lots of online outlets like Vox, Mother
| Jones. But Fox is the modern pioneer of opinion 'news' and
| probably have the widest audience of a mainstream outlet and IMHO
| take it farther than what are more like obviously political
| blogs.
|
| Their top shows are all opinion but parade as news. A lot of
| these personalities have segments that are not based in reality
| and especially not factual (Tucker Carlson's jan 6 show is
| probably the most egregious recent example).
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2021/way...
| carapace wrote:
| The news sources Glyph wants already exist but the mass market is
| uninterested, unwilling to pay for them. There are niche markets,
| people who are interested and willing and able to pay, and they
| do get serviced by tiny obscure outfits.
|
| (e.g. SemiAccurate:
|
| > Professional membership allows instant access to the entire
| site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news,
| analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to
| all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and
| related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year's worth of
| access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.
|
| https://semiaccurate.com/subscribe/ )
|
| So the problem is not that we can't do this, it's that nobody
| wants it at scale, there's no mass market for this sort of in-
| depth information.
|
| FWIW I agree that a system of _timelines_ (what Glyph calls
| "trackers") would likely be a very useful motif for interacting
| with news.
|
| Bucky Fuller thought that we would just program all the data into
| (effectively) giant spreadsheets, do analysis and scenario
| planning, and the computer could work out the logistics for us.
| Automatic utopia.
|
| Which brings me to my point: In order to get more people to
| ingest and make decisions based on all this data, we need to
| foster more free time. Automation should free people up to spend
| more time learning and communicating to improve governance (among
| other things.)
| fredley wrote:
| The best example of what modern journalism can (should?) be is
| Ros Atkins's work on BBC Outside Source.
| https://twitter.com/BBCRosAtkins/status/1471755622651682816
|
| Brutally factual and to the point.
| coding123 wrote:
| I think this is a good idea. Trackers that have things in green,
| yellow, orange, red - kind of like how we track covid rates in
| areas. The story IS the current data. There's no reason to go to
| CNN for the latest covid numbers I can get it in many places that
| share this data now.
|
| This idea can be applied to home pricing, homelessness, food and
| gas prices, crime stats. We can set up breaking points and
| literally watch the numbers break through something.
|
| I mean what if we applied names to the red color like: Crime is
| now red in this part of SF which means this area is basically
| Venezuela right now.
|
| Live stats (trackers) coupled with zones of terribleness so we
| can literally watch the world fall apart in the form of a
| tracker.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Until the crime stats show inconvenient facts and they take
| them down.
| thomascgalvin wrote:
| > _One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept
| of a "story" in the news media is a relic that needs to be
| completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of
| media communication today._
|
| > _Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy
| questions which require robust engagement from an informed
| electorate._
|
| The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the
| electorate, nor to communicate truth. The sole job of the media
| is to win eyeballs, so that those eyeballs can be shown ads.
|
| The profit motive is what these entities exist, and the profit
| motive pushes them toward actions that are harmful to society as
| a whole. Fear and anger drives engagement, and engagement drives
| profit. Clam reason and subtle nuance do not drive engagement,
| and therefore have no place in today's media.
| [deleted]
| pjscott wrote:
| What you're talking about is a real problem, but I don't think
| it's the same problem that the article is talking about.
| There's a lot of journalism that _isn 't_ trying to stir up
| strong emotion, that actually does look like it's trying to be
| calmly informative -- and when I see it, it's usually what the
| OP calls a story: "[...] a temporal snapshot of one
| journalist's interpretation of an issue. Just a tidy little
| pile of motivated reasoning with a few cherry-picked citations,
| and then we move on to the next story."
|
| I suspect that news sources that are trying to brand themselves
| as impartial and trustworthy could get more trust without
| sacrificing many eyeballs if they'd switch from a story format
| to a regularly-updated "Here's what we think we know, how we
| think we know it, and how confident we are about it" format.
| gpm wrote:
| Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win
| eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term
| reporting that OP is talking about would do that.
|
| Surely inducing people to read the same story multiple times,
| get's more eyeballs. Being reliable enough that people check
| your news every day, wins eyeballs. Being frequently
| uninformative, makes people less likely to come back (loses
| eyeballs). Etc.
|
| You say that "subtle nuance doesn't drive engagement", but
| don't we also see that people like "knowing more" than everyone
| else, or even just thinking they do (the latter of which seems
| to be a large driving force behind conspiracy theories)?
|
| So I don't think that this really explains the entirety of the
| media's behavior. I think a lot of it is based on things like
| institutional inertia from when news was delivered via physical
| news papers, and optimizing for just the metrics that are easy
| to measure.
| kiba wrote:
| Is an informed electorate by definition a group of people who
| sat through a series of free college level lecture taught by an
| expert virologist? Even then, I found an error or two because I
| did exhaustive surface level fact checking.
|
| Or is it about the public being informed of accurate surface
| level facts and big picture views?
| Mezzie wrote:
| This also ignores that there are multiple perspectives to
| being 'informed'.
|
| For example, as someone who's studied online communication
| and social computing at the graduate level, my main
| disagreement with a lot of policy decisions isn't due to my
| disagreement with scientists, but rather because I think that
| the policy decisions made are pouring gasoline on our
| infosphere problems. So am I not informed because I don't
| have a biology related degree, or are THEY not informed
| because none of them seem to have a clue how people or the
| Internet work?
|
| Somebody that only understands virology doesn't understand
| the PANDEMIC, as a social construct/an impact on human
| societies. (And vice versa.) And that's without getting into
| history and geopolitics: Since variants are a global concern,
| the optimal choices are also impacted by what other countries
| are doing. And understanding those in context means different
| legal systems, different ideas of human rights, different
| patent and pharma laws, blah blah blah.
|
| I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on
| some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time
| investment to be informed is too much to put on the average
| citizen.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible
| on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time
| investment to be informed is too much to put on the average
| citizen.
|
| Entirely reasonable, and also universally accepted in many
| domains. When it comes to figuring out how we next put
| someone on the moon, nobody thinks that an informed
| electorate is an important part of the process. We just
| generally keep quiet and let "them" get on with it.
|
| The difficulties start when there is an issue (such as a
| pandemic) about which huge numbers of people are neither
| informed nor will they shut up.
| taneq wrote:
| > The sole job of the media is to win eyeballs, so that those
| eyeballs can be shown ads.
|
| Don't you miss the good ol' days, when the media was just there
| to manipulate public opinion in favour of whichever oligarch
| paid the piper?
| coldpie wrote:
| The ad-based business model is probably the single largest
| contributor to bad outcomes in our time.
| carabiner wrote:
| Go for news sources that are less reliant on ads for revenue,
| and more on subscriptions. That would be the Financial Times.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| > What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated
| set of ongoing collections of consensus.
|
| This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a
| topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and
| the meek-but-correct get crushed.
|
| Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare
| opinions for reasonableness.
| Spivak wrote:
| Supreme court opinions are collections of consensus despite
| containing dissenting opinions. The point is to organize all
| the information, data, analyses and opinions worth listening to
| instead of it being an ad-hoc stream of unconnected narratives.
|
| And if you say that somehow journalists can't sanity check and
| vet sources for quality then, for you, the battle is already
| lost and the solution is to just delete news.
| glyph wrote:
| This is why consensus is a _collection_. Sometimes dialectical
| analysis is good; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a tried and
| true formula that often works. But not always! Sometimes one
| side is just horseshit that gets mindlessly repeated in the
| interest of "balance". In either case I'm not suggesting that
| the consensus ruthlessly censor dissenting views, rather that
| in order to make _sense_ out of dissenting views, the strongest
| forms of each argument need to be presented together alongside
| accountability: editorial moderation and fact-checking.
|
| Even in the cases where the truth really is somewhere in the
| middle between two opposing camps, reading a sequence of side A
| #1, side B #1, side A #2, side B #2, in disconnected stories
| gives you a very skewed view subject to recency bias. For
| example you can't easily check the history to see if a claim B
| is making in their second story was already debunked by A in
| their first one, and it's a huge waste of time and energy for A
| to have to spend all their media budget just refuting that
| claim over and over because B keeps bringing it up every time
| there's no fact checker _right_ in front of them to call them
| on it (and even sometimes if there is).
|
| In other words the current media environment rewards being
| loud, wrong, simple and repetitive far over and above even the
| normal human bias for such things. It reinforces our worst
| cognitive habits.
| Msw242 wrote:
| Reminder that The New York Times eliminated their public editor,
| a role meant to enforce journalistic standards. An ombudsman of
| sorts. https://www.vox.com/2017/5/31/15719278/public-editor-liz-
| spa...
| [deleted]
| hereforphone wrote:
| Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in war zones. I
| made friends with journalists. They were all (even the "good"
| ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if they
| wanted to tell the truth they couldn't, because they didn't
| understand the subject matter well enough.
|
| Edit to refine my point due to presumed misunderstanding: At the
| end of the day it's about dollars. News is there to sell, not to
| explain truths.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Nothing new here. I spent a few years working in enterprise. I
| made friends with software developers. They were all (even the
| "good" ones that I became friends with) full of crap. Even if
| they wanted to create good software they couldn't, because they
| didn't understand the problems to be solved well enough.
|
| (This is how unhelpful and condescending it sounds when one
| paints everyone in a profession with the same broad brush.)
| throwawayboise wrote:
| What you say reinforces the GP's point. In my experience,
| most devs _don 't_ understand the problems well enough. They
| think they do, they may even earnestly try to understand, but
| because they lack first hand experience they do not.
|
| How many devs actually spend a year or more working in the
| role of the person who will be using their software? Then
| they _might_ have an understanding.
| allemagne wrote:
| These criticisms probably ring true for any field,
| profession, or institution. At the end of the day all of
| these are inevitably made up of flawed human beings with a
| vested interest in appearing more high-minded and
| impressive than they really are.
| dudeman13 wrote:
| I think you've unintentionally made an argument in favour of
| GP.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Explains the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
|
| https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
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