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NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

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Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#61

Post by _dczq »

nailer wrote: post #51
moorhosj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the basis for this claim? Where do Ross Douthat and David Brooks fit in your model?

This article: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 Read the follow up tweets for some more context. I'm a liberal, and happen to watch Ben Shapiro (an Othodox Jewish lawyer who records a conservative podcast) and follow Lauren Southern (the filmmaker who looks at people smuggling and illegal immigration, who directed the film 'Borderless') - both are mentioned in the 'online radicalisation' piece ab…

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Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#62

Post by gundmc »

ralph84 wrote: post #56

Any time I see an article in a "mainstream" news outlet on a topic I'm familiar with, the inaccuracies make me cringe. The more familiar I am with the topic, the more inaccuracies I spot. The charitable interpretation is that news outlets have been so decimated by changes in their business model that they can't afford good editors. There are plenty of less charitable interpretations.

Sounds like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect[1]. We notice the innacuracies in the fields we are familiar with and then readily believe stories outside of our expertise.

Disclaimer - reporting is critically important and by and large journalists are doing their best to understand and describe incredibly complex and esoteric subjects. It's always good to remember there is a lot more nuance behind just about every story than surface level would indicate.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#63

Post by mehrdadn »

solveit wrote: post #58
scotchio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Just don't see it as malicious

Malice is completely unnecessary for the world to go to shit. Very few people are actually malicious in any meaningful sense of the term. Most bad things happen when generally good people cut corners.

I think you can assume "acting maliciously" was intended to be a catch-all for something more general, like maybe "acting in a grossly disrespectable manner", regardless of whether the intentions were actually malice or not.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#64

Post by fwip »

fyoving wrote: post #2

The NYT is yet to publish a correction to an article publicizing a comically erroneous study suggesting a relationship between Facebook use and attacks on refugees in Germany: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/fa... They have been running smear campaigns against tech companies for years and then act dumb and ask about the change in sentiment towards them.

The NYT summary sounds accurate to me.

> > Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

> That sounds horrible, but it is actually a claim about variation across municipalities, not a claim about the absolute importance of the internet.

That's why they used the word "wherever," to emphasis that it was based on locality.

That seems to form the bulk of Mr Cowen's objection. The remainder appears to be recitation of the stock phrase "correlation is not causation," mock horror and snark about the methods the study used (Nutella! heaven forbid!), and expressing his general confusion about parts of the study he doesn't understand.

To my eyes, this doesn't appear to be a "comically erroneous study," unless, as Mr. Cowen does, you find great intrinsic humor in the concept of Nutella. Nor does the NYT reporting on it seem to misrepresent the study any more than articles for the layperson usually do.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#65

Post by remarkEon »

noetic_techy wrote: post #37
ergothus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The New York Times is no longer the steady unbias pillar it once was Okay, I'm open to hearing this - I've certainly noticed a decrease in quality (vs quantity - NYT still leads there) vs, say, the Washington Post. > They hire fresh out SJW types I'm not even sure what this means. I'm used to seeing "SJW" as an attack label that is absent actual meaning, similar to "snowflake" or "libtard", stemming from groups sta…

I understand your concern about the SJW label and the charged political context its often used, but it is to me accurate, since this it what they would call themselves. Take a look at this Joe Rogan + Johnathon Haidt podcast clip that talks about SJW cultural origins in northeastern and western elite liberal arts colleges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9VYf9FKHo NOTE: Jonathan David Haidt is an American social ps…

It's fascinating to watch comments like this get downvoted.

Everything you noted is accurate, and is reflected in recent high-profile hires at NYT (Sarah Jeong the most recent). All organizations can go through preference cascades like this, where hiring for certain views becomes self reinforcing to the point where the organization doesn't even realize it has a bias toward them. It can be especially acute when the views are activist in nature, and signaling alignment with them is how to achieve in-group status. Frankly this is kind of a boring observation - it's basic organizational psychology, which Professor Haidt notes on several occasions.

Fox News in the run-up to the Iraq War is another great example of this. Every single talking-head they had on aligned with their internal bias toward invasion.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#66

Post by ummonk »

nailer wrote: post #51
moorhosj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the basis for this claim? Where do Ross Douthat and David Brooks fit in your model?

This article: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 Read the follow up tweets for some more context. I'm a liberal, and happen to watch Ben Shapiro (an Othodox Jewish lawyer who records a conservative podcast) and follow Lauren Southern (the filmmaker who looks at people smuggling and illegal immigration, who directed the film 'Borderless') - both are mentioned in the 'online radicalisation' piece ab…

Milton Friedman and Jordan Peterson are not, but Lauren Southern and Ben Shapiro are both alt-right.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#67

Post by jlawson »

ummonk wrote: post #66
nailer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1137539862293372928 Read the follow up tweets for some more context. I'm a liberal, and happen to watch Ben Shapiro (an Othodox Jewish lawyer who records a conservative podcast) and follow Lauren Southern (the filmmaker who looks at people smuggling and illegal immigration, who directed the film 'Borderless') - both are mentioned in the 'online radicalisation' piece ab…

Milton Friedman and Jordan Peterson are not, but Lauren Southern and Ben Shapiro are both alt-right.

[flagged]

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#68

Post by Consultant32452 »

scotchio wrote: post #27
darawk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they published something that confirmed their priors, and didn't due their due diligence on it because it confirmed their priors and was the kind of story they wanted to write. They have to be held to account for that.

Agree. Just don't see it as malicious

It's also important to remember that social media and tech firms like Google are a direct threat to their long term survival. YouTubers offering low budget news is eating them alive.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#69

Post by harry8 »

scotchio wrote: post #21

To be fair... The front page of Hacker News is pretty much a Google hate hangoutfest -- so maybe cut some slack on this one... I'm sure the NYT reporter was not acting malicious. Maybe they will even issue correction or update in time. No one would argue that speed of social media and corrections is not ideal, but I would bet they are trying to be accurate and transparent with their readers. I just seriously doubt th…

>The front page of Hacker News is pretty much a Google hate hangoutfest -- so maybe cut some slack on this one...

HN is not a newspaper. HN is an opinion-fest. NYT purports to be the "Newspaper of Record." Requiring NYT to publish corrections to factual error is utterly reasonable and has nothing to do with HN or Google in any way.

Oh, and Google are evil. There are more tech-literate people around on HN to have noticed and understood this. Google have become utterly hideous.

The NYT should publish corrections for factually incorrect reporting because it is what separates them from fraudulent pretend news sources such as Fox and CNBC which are simply garbage to be treated as lies until proven otherwise by anyone sane of any political persuasion. The NYT wants to be better than that.

Re: NYT promotes questionable study on Google and the media

#70

Post by dang »

nailer wrote: post #14

The NYT also deliberately blurs the lines between any kind of non-leftist thinking (traditional conservative views, non-left liberal thinking, criticism of Islam or illegal immigration) and 'alt right' - a term created by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who wants to create a white ethnostate which (at least according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right ) describes far right hate groups. I know p…

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's boring, nasty, and just what we don't need here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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