The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#281

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

jimkleiber wrote: post #261

andrewtbham wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least on the topic of tesla, nyt has been wrong and unfair against tesla for about 10 years. i really don't know about other topics... but... pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812

In the first link you provided, PG put two photos: one of the NYT article and one of his HN post. The NYT article yes, condensed his lengthy post into one sentence, which will almost always be incomplete, but they also linked that quote to what I assume was the HN post. I guess it seems to me that PG is upset they didn't fully encapsulate his ideas, and I'd probably be frustrated as well. But is that the role of a jo…

PG: "It must have felt like walking through a minefield of truth to get hold of a quote she could misrepresent."

Well, yeah. Sounds like some serious Gell-mann amnesia.

I'm surprised Paul Graham would act surprised by this.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#282

Post by gonehome » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #280

When I first saw google books and google scholar I thought 'Oh my god, this is amazing, this will change everything!'. I imagined that a decade or two in the future, being able to read pretty much any book or paper I wanted for a reasonable monthly fee. The search functionality was an absolute godsend! Now? Google books has been pretty much sidelined and abandoned. I feel like I've watched the second library of Alexa…

I think this is one case where the end of the product is not Google's fault.

Books got enormous push back from legacy publishers. They also had trouble with copyright law around orphaned works, but copyright protection increasing over time from 14yrs to 90yrs after the death of the author (and moving from requiring registration to being default) really made it hard for them to do what they wanted.

It's a shame that something initially intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" is now used to inhibit it.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#283

Post by skrtskrt » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

andrewtbham wrote: post #173

> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…

NYT has beat the drums of war for Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the recent Bolivian coup and pretty much every other imperialist, fascist action backed by the US the world over.

Its "liberalism" is a thin sheen over another mass media corporation continually enabling the military-industrial complex at the cost of tens of millions of lives.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-false...

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#284

Post by linjus » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

After reading this I feel like humanity might be better off if we have a full libertarian approach to information online, the Ross Ulbricht school of thought. Access everything that is digital at your desire. The internet seems to be driving humanity the wrong way in its current form, seeing what happens to democracies worldwide.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#285

Post by labcomputer » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #245

busterarm wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.

Right; but it's one thing to say "they no longer have industry-leading editorial standards" and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect. I don't read the NYT front page – just articles linked here and elsewhere – so my view of it is far from complete and biased; I don't see "ZOMG ALIES!"-type articles for example, but there certainly still seems plenty of content of value on the NY…

> and quite another to dismiss the entire publication for being less-than-perfect

The newspaper's ombudsman declined to punish the reporter in any way, or admit anything other than "oops, mistakes were made". That's what makes it a failure of the newspaper and not just "less-than-perfect" reporting. It's one example from a pattern of behavior, and the reason people are saying the NYT no longer have industry-leading editorial standards.

Let me remind you that the reporter was caught red-handed driving a car in circles in a parking lot so that he could have a more salacious story about "running out of gas". The original article stated that he coasted off the freeway into the parking lot with no energy remaining. There's no two ways about it: That's a lie.

How low do you need the p-value to be before you reject the null hypothesis? 0.0005? 5e-9?

Nobody is disputing that news is a hard business, but you can't have it both ways: If you're going to run a serious newspaper, then you need to run a serious newspaper. That means upholding editorial standards. Most importantly, that mean having real repercussions for reporters who break the trust of your readership.

> "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue.

The owners are completely within their rights to pivot and turn the NYT into the next buzzfeed. But you're just reinforcing the point that it is no longer a serious newspaper.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#286

Post by mundo » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:11 PM UTC

irontinkerer wrote: post #127

The first link in the article is not a "lie". "Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets" has a RT video that shows exactly that, and links to several other confirmed Twitter accounts all stating the same thing. How is that a lie?

Through selective omission, by presenting the non-central as central. Did the events in that article happen? Yes, probably. Would someone who gets their information from Breitbart have a roughly accurate idea of what happened at the Portland protests? No.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#287

Post by gonehome » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

auggierose wrote: post #278

jimkleiber wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first link you provided, PG put two photos: one of the NYT article and one of his HN post. The NYT article yes, condensed his lengthy post into one sentence, which will almost always be incomplete, but they also linked that quote to what I assume was the HN post. I guess it seems to me that PG is upset they didn't fully encapsulate his ideas, and I'd probably be frustrated as well. But is that the role of a jo…

Well the point of the NYT article totally evaporates if you read the HN post. PG is explicitly saying that no-one knows the effect that this will have, but better to prepare for the worst. And that's the thing: if you cannot trust that someone makes their point as neutrally as possible, they become worthless for me as a source of condensed information. Rather look up the original source then for myself.

It's even worse than that, their sentence after the quote implies PG said something about FB stock.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236980342667575296?s=20

The NYT writer isn't mistakenly summarizing, they're actively misleading. They had to read through PG's post and selectively pick a line that they could stuff into the position they already had, to say the thing they already wanted to say. It's just motivated reasoning and the primary sources aren't being used as sources beyond something they can vaguely mention to pretend it supports what they wanted to say anyway.

That isn't journalism - or at least it shouldn't be.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#288

Post by Supermancho » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

lootsauce wrote: post #194

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "f…

what is the reason to down-vote this comment?

Lumping into an "us vs them" or "republican vs liberal" via

> here is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making

Which is both mixing the some undefined set of concepts of the Enlightenment with some undefined characteristics of "All Republicans", in an awkward ad-hominem against "non-republicans"? It's nonsensical.

> At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself,

All truth is subjective, so there is no truth tautology.

Etc etc. There isn't a point being made or a topic to discuss. It's a "too many ideas" post mixed with too many wild tangents that are intentionally designed to incite.

ie Vapid flamebait.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#289

Post by googthrowaway42 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

Supermancho wrote: post #288

lootsauce wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the reason to down-vote this comment?

Lumping into an "us vs them" or "republican vs liberal" via > here is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making Which is both mixing the some undefined set of concepts of the Enlightenment with some undefined characteristics of "All Republicans", in an awkward ad-hominem against "non-republicans"? It's nonsensical. > At the end of the day unless you were personally the…

Whether or not there is truth is dependent on if you believe in an objective set of values. Conservatives believe there is (the Bible, natural law, God, etc) and people like Postermodernists believe there isn't.

And yes all discussions of this type require some generalization and lumping. "Republican" doesn't even mean one thing since the party consists of libertarians and evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives among many others.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#290

Post by throwaway8582 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

jhardy54 wrote: post #191

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "f…

You're in for a surprise when you discover Fox News.

I always laugh when I see someone bring up Fox News in this context. You realize your just proving his point, right? I can name dozens or hundreds of major media outlets that that lean left (MSNBC, CNN, NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, BuzzFeed, etc.), but you can only name one or two that lean right.