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I Am Deleting the Blog

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#191

Post by geofft »

stevenjohns wrote: post #138
zoul wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was bad journalism. Would you also stop trusting all doctors after meeting a bad one?

* What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics? * What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health? * What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics? Unfortunately all US media, and most international media, is equally bad and built on bad in…

> What if every hospital had an overt political stance and forced doctors to make diagnoses based on those politics?

At least in the US, this is standard. Try getting your local Catholic hospital to deal with complications with your IUD and this isn't a "what if." There are plenty of stories of people who discover that their primary care network has an avowed ideological stance on certain procedures and they need to switch doctors and perhaps go out of network for full care.

> What if the hospitals had a financial incentive to sensationalise public health?

Don't they? There is no shortage of for-profit hospitals, and thanks to insurance, Medicaid, etc., they can often increase profit at no cost to the patient by just seeing the patient more and treating them kn more ways that might be strictly speaking unnecessary.

> What if independent doctors only got into medicine in the first place to make decisions based on their own partisan politics?

Isn't this approximately the backstory of Planned Parenthood?

Basically, everyone has an ideology, a reason to do what they do. Sometimes it's based on their view of the world and a desire to make it better in some way. Sometimes it's profit. Neither of these is necessary nefarious.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#192

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

Findeton wrote: post #35
sxp wrote: post #5

> He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me. ... When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he just said that…

He could also name the NYT reporter.

That's been done, unsurprisingly, on Twitter already.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#193

Post by virgilp »

Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

I think unfortunately journalists are trained to take phrases out of context so that they sound "sensational" / trigger emotional responses in the readers. You quickly find that out if give out interviews - you need to be very mindful how things may sound if taken out of context.

E.g. a while ago a newspaper here took me an interview/ they were building a story about people that had somewhat remarkable results in school & ample opportunities to leave (e.g. I participated in IOI and had 2 medals), and still chose to stay in the country - what were their motives, how it turned out for them. During the interview, I mentioned something along the lines that "I earn well enough to afford everything that I want, and my friends/family is here, I'm used to the local culture, etc". As a result, "I can afford everything" became basically the headline.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#194

Post by CM30 »

chillacy wrote: post #14

This is a tragedy, Scott Alexander is such a thoughtful writer. I wish journalists would come up with some professional standards and make the title licensed, like doctor or lawyer. Right now we all recognize how important journalism is but journalists themselves run the gamut from ethical investigative journalists to clickbait manufacturers. Imagine if journalists also had to adhere to the equivalent of attorney cli…

Personally, I'd rather journalism wasn't licensed in this way. I get the intention behind it, but it'd basically outlaw freelance journalists, independent journalism sites, blogging, etc, and make it easier to justify arresting people at protests because you don't like what they're recording.

Also an easy target to politicise, and dangerous to society if the far left/right end up running such a board and dictating that their opponents are wrong.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#195

Post by andrewksl »

rorykoehler wrote: post #185
throwaway713 wrote: post #146

I have become increasingly frustrated with the NYT's reporting practices. They are very hypocritical about criticizing tech while continuing to advertise heavily on the same services they criticize to promote their journalism. A lot of what they publish nowadays is often "technically correct" but misleading to the point of being dangerous. That, combined with the philosophy of the younger journalists working there to…

It's Fox News for psuedo-intellectuals. My mother is a subscriber so I read a bit and it is absolutely atrociously biased and blatantly misleading in a similar way to how Fox News operate. The main difference is NYT add a minor sheen of intellectual language over the top to try obfuscate it.

Do you have any links to articles you find particularly egregious?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#196

Post by lazyasciiart »

jamesrcole wrote: post #88
Findeton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could also name the NYT reporter.

I would like to know who the journalist is. Not so they can be threatened or put in danger. But so their reputation can take a hit. Part of the reason people do these things is because they can get away with it without any consequences.

People want to know who SSC is for the same reason.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#197

Post by radomysisky »

jamesrcole wrote: post #88
Findeton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He could also name the NYT reporter.

I would like to know who the journalist is. Not so they can be threatened or put in danger. But so their reputation can take a hit. Part of the reason people do these things is because they can get away with it without any consequences.

https://twitter.com/CadeMetz

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#198

Post by normalnorm »

brnt wrote: post #126
Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society. Our society is built on individual (and collective) attempts to improve, and you putting your money towards journalists you found to be doing a good job is the way we leave the world better than we found it. I hope you'll consider this, because our society cannot function without quality investigative reporting. I of course ag…

> Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.

Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).

We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.

And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#199

Post by Lio »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #163
himinlomax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalists obviously never tell their subject their piece is going to be negative. In fact, as far as I can tell from the few people I know who have been in that situation, they appear to routinely say the opposite.

No doubt, it would be just as interesting of an article without his real name.

...and who would know if they'd just used his pseudonym?

It's not like a large % of the NYT readers are going to know straight away that no one exists with the name used in the article deviate from it at all?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#200

Post by noodlenotes »

saltedonion wrote: post #134

Can someone tell this person that this site is probably still on way back machine? And he or she should request it to be removed.

Scott didn't delete his blog to remove all traces of it from the internet. He deleted it so that if the NYT publishes the article, they'll be forced to include the story of how they threatened to doxx him. Can't publish an article about a blog that doesn't exist without talking about why it's gone.
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