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Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

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Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#241

Post by Bartweiss »

rlucas wrote: post #222
Bartweiss wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question. I'm not sure what the other poster had in mind, and I suspect it's not the same, but RT has a bunch of rating problems that would probably become far more egregious for news than they are for movies. (Leaving aside the tricky question of how to translate the formats: is a movie like a news story, or a news source? Does news really have an existing aggregation-worthy source like movie reviews?)…

> BeerAdvocate, of all things, takes on this problem with interesting meta-info like "reviewer's average distance from consensus". There's a lot to be said for intelligently dealing with ratings and their metadata in ways like this. For example, the Kappa statistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability Presenting crowdsourced ratings as mere averages -- or really any collapse onto a single scalar --…

Yep, I really wish sites would either give me a histogram of raw scores, provide more thoughtful interpretations, or both.

Histograms are a screamingly obvious way of distinguishing "mediocre" from "some good some bad", which is one of the most common needs with things like Amazon products. But beyond that, there's so much more to be done. You can weight or shift scores by reviewer's average, reviewer's average distance from consensus, or a dozen other things. A one-star review from someone who uses Yelp exclusively to call out bad experiences is relevant, but a one-star review from someone who often gives 4-5 is far more interesting.

Maybe the weirdest thing is that a lot of this is done to catch fake/paid reviewers, but it's not extended to providing clearer info overall. Even the fight against fake reviews would be much achievable if it was shifted from a binary "take down or don't" to a more flexible approach to maximizing review value.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#242

Post by devy »

mncharity wrote: post #221
devy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Rating news is a terrible idea. The news should ideally be as objective as possible (or otherwise it's called "Fake News"), they don't always come out as a popular / most highly rated one. Movies, on the other hand, are highly subjective. Elon Must has a similar idea where he wanted to rate journalists but later he gave up.[1] https://www.inc.com/brian-hart/elon-musk-wants-to-let-public... Ultimately, you as an…

I'm a life-long (but intermittent) NYT reader. Coverage of SpaceX (in NYT, WSJ, and WaPo) changed how I think of journalism. Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth, of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misin…

Feel free to write your own content - publish your own knowledge by contributing to the media outlets - NYT has tons of contributing writers who's full time job is not in journalism!

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#244

Post by amanaplanacanal »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #240
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, if you just read the news stories, and not the opinion articles from all three of those, you are probably doing pretty well. They can get something wrong once in a while, sure, but it's mostly good. Television news is going to probably be not quite as good, just because they can't cover as much as a newspaper in only 30-60 minutes. Again, just the news, not the opinion stuff. If you just take all of it in u…

Have you already forgotten the "weapons of mass destruction" fiasco? The one that NYT apologized for: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-th...

No, as I said:

> They can get something wrong once in a while, sure, but it's mostly good.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#245

Post by wutbrodo »

mindslight wrote: post #181
wutbrodo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation). People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy…

IMHO what it comes down to is that "Democracy" has become our national religion. Not in the general sense of rule by the people, but the specific implementation wherein everybody picks and votes their yes/no option. Poor results can never be attributed to the abstract ideal itself, but rather can only be due to a lack of adherence to the process. So it is paramount that everybody adopts an opinion, no matter how ill-…

I agree. Another thing that I failed to understand from a pretty young age was this frenzy to turn out every single vote, and the treating of turnout as a per se good thing. As far as I can tell, an uninformed vote, determined entirely by fashion and social pressure, is _worse_ than a missing vote.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#246

Post by wutbrodo »

chocolatebunny wrote: post #192
wutbrodo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I find so disgusting about this tendency of many people. If I don't care enough about an issue to be rigorous about it, then by definition I don't care enough about it to 1) vote based off of it or 2) spread my uninformed opinion about it (when I do talk about it, I'm clear that I have only a tentative, uninformed model of the situation). People have often defended the average voter with "people have busy…

An individual may not be that well informed when voting but the collective of all votes is supposed to average out to something more reasonable. There was a story about a bunch of people who were guessing the weight of an ox in a state fair ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton#Variance_and_st... ) where people were generally not very well informed but the average weight guessed was pretty accurate. There ar…

Sure, and that's the core value proposition of democracy, but it doesn't address my complaint. This over-simplified model isn't quite relevant in the face of the huge incentives to screw with voters' epistemology that voting creates. There was no small-ox constituency trying to push voters towards estimating lower, because it didn't matter, while modern culture is suffused with politics, and not symmetrically with respect to every issue. There's a reason that my original comment was disgusted by the tendency I'm describing, instead of modeling it as stupidity: a voter would have to be unbelievably dumb to think that their gut feeling is even remotely useful when it comes to 1) complex topics 2) that they haven't bothered to inform themselves about, 3) for which there are a huge amount of resources dedicated to skewing their views on the issue.

> There are a lot of reasons why democracy as it stands today doesn't work as well but I don't think ill informed voters is one of them.

I agree with you in that I don't think it's a "voters these days" problems as much as a "most people's moral reasoning is horrifically stunted, in any population and time period". This is a baseline flaw of democracy, and one of the things that made Churchill call it "the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried". But the inevitability of it across a population doesn't mean it can't be criticized at the individual level.

Re: Credder Wants to Create an Equivalent to “Rotten Tomatoes” for News

#247

Post by mncharity »

devy wrote: post #242
mncharity wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a life-long (but intermittent) NYT reader. Coverage of SpaceX (in NYT, WSJ, and WaPo) changed how I think of journalism. Faced with the usual issue of good newspapers getting every topic you know about not-quite right, variously wrong, I used to explain it by an analogy. It was like when newspapers closed their foreign offices. Loss of ground truth, of sanity checking, of insight and nuance. An abundance of misin…

Feel free to write your own content - publish your own knowledge by contributing to the media outlets - NYT has tons of contributing writers who's full time job is not in journalism!

Nifty. This suggestion seems to nicely illustrate what journalism seems to be missing. I see it as analogous to...

Think you can operate our press without losing fingers? Great - we're often looking for replacement operators. Does the machine have guards? Well, we have both a day and a night watchman, why?

Think you can operate without ever leaving sponges and instruments behind in patients? Great, set yourself up as a barber surgeon and go for it. Do we count sponges? You'll have to talk to accounting, but they're not that expensive, why?

And so on.

Responding to operator errors with "well, just stop doing that". Responding to pervasive systemic failures with "well, maybe we need better operators". That's being oblivious to a half century of progress, to minimum standards and best practices, across multiple industries.

Some years back, someone said their first-tier newspaper didn't even have a process for tracking errors. Despite an institutional self-image of caring about quality. ISO 9000 has not hit journalism yet?

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