31–40 of 105 posts
This can’t be true, even theoretically. There’s a certain amount of information the world creates, and some fraction of that gets written up in the news. The first would seem to be vastly larger today, just because the human population has grown significantly and the reduction of poverty has brought far more people to a level where they work on “information-producing” endeavors. What fraction of that will be covered…
> Context and factual data are often considered too cumbersome for the audience. There may be some truth to that (our education system really should improve the critical thinking skills of Americans) – but another hard truth is that it is the job of journalists to teach and inform, which means they might need to figure out a better way to do that. [...] Therefore, it’s particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
[1] https://www.arianapekary.net/post/personal-news-why-i-m-now-...
Consider a headline like, "Trump says illegal immigration is a big problem." He's said that many times, it's very unsurprising that he would say it again, and hence it contains very little information. However, each time he says it, it affords the press that agree with him a fresh opportunity to talk about why he's right, and the press that disagrees a new chance to talk about why he's wrong.
That is the point here - that what we call "news" has shifted from spending most of its energy informing us of things we don't know towards reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know. If that trend is true, then certainly it represents a reduction in information (in the Claude Shannon sense as well as the everyday sense).
Love the approach of looking at media through the lens of information theory. A main point seems to be that free media is important. It’s interesting to consider that the existence of google/craigslist/facebook destroyed the means by which the media used to fund their own existence and hire competent people with a high salary (now these people work in other areas of the economy and are compensated for their communica…
An article produced by a totalitarian state could contain a lot of "surprising information", in an information theoretic sense - if it described surprising wardrobe choices and surprising choices of meals by the fearless leader. Vacuous tabloids describe the surprising antics of the more mentally unbalanced celebrities but also don't challenge our world view. And made-up stuff like QAnon is partly surprise driven.
Also, the biggest hit to conventional media has been craigslist - print media never was primarily funded by subscriptions but always made most of it's money with advertising.
I think many people don't really accept that there can be evidence on both sides of an issue. Once there's a critical mass of evidence on one side, each subsequent piece of evidence on the other side is kinda suspect and can be defeated by simple majority. It's a wrong way to think, but I'm sure my thinking on many issues is also like that.
The worst thing about having roughly two very polarized ideologies constantly visible in society is that the slightly more clever people wind-up expecting that "the truth is somewhere in the middle". In a given case, there's no reason to think that.
I think many people don't really accept that there can be evidence on both sides of an issue. Once there's a critical mass of evidence on one side, each subsequent piece of evidence on the other side is kinda suspect and can be defeated by simple majority. It's a wrong way to think, but I'm sure my thinking on many issues is also like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings This highlights both a problem an opportunity. How many people know how to make a good argument or how to spot one? How many know what good evidence looks like or how to spot beliefs and assumptions making their way into something? I would…
I absolutely agree. I have been tempted to buy the logical fallacies and critical thinking posters from The Thinking Shop[1] as gifts for certain family members, but I know too much of my motivation comes from the self-centered position of wanting to prove I'm right, which I didn't want to perpetuate. Instead I just read through the posters and ended up recognizing several items I probably need to work on myself. The…
twenty four
Genuine question: how does one keep 24 logical fallacies in mind when evaluating arguments? Do you mentally iterate through all these fallacies?
Don't get me wrong: they are very valid and I think they will make me better and my arguments better. I just want to understand how people without photographic memories do this.
As I read this, I think what the author is saying is that today's media is more about creating "Narratives" rather than communicating "Information." My Grandfather, who was an attorney, shared with me that attorneys cut apart narratives with evidence to get to the truth. If all of the evidence is available, the only surviving narrative is most likely the truest representation of an event. At the time, I didn't apprec…
Long form media (like the New Yorker) are generally better at being somewhat exhaustive with their sources. Newspapers...are almost entirely narrative driven but do include the factual description of at least one event around which the stories are based. "Instant" media (e.g. Twitter, TikTok) is even more extreme in being narrative driven.
Because of the time commitment involved in consumption, I suspect that long form journalism won't ever get the audience that other types of media gets.
Use a proper definition of news, and much of what gets passed off as news is in fact fake. News is not noise.