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What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

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Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#191

Post by Daho0n »

tacitusarc wrote: post #161
tsimionescu wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their coverage leans left like Fox News leans right, particularly MSNBC. I don't think it detracts from your points, but the coverage of all these outlets leans Democrat, but not left. They are centrist papers. Left voices (think Chomsky) are almost completely absent from mainstream media.

This is changing the meaning of the word left, and then redefining Democrat as centrist, which is just incorrect.

Do you see a situation where the word left means something different if you are talking about national politics versus international politics as a good idea? Because that is the situation you are in if you won't acknowledge that the Democrats are centrist. What then do you call left leaning politics outside the US? Left left? Foreign Left? Communists? This misuse and redefining of words is one of the reasons we have people crying Socialist or Communist of left leaning politicians.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#192

Post by Daho0n »

soared wrote: post #116
tehwebguy wrote: post #29

Headline, abstract and URL edits to NYT are tracked by @nyt_diff on Twitter, it can be very interesting to see: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff Not sure if they only catch front page article changes or what. Newspaper article content is a big game that’s worth tracking, but what’s more difficult (probably nearly impossible right now) is local television news. Tons of news is pushed through to a wide audience and then it…

Seems weird that every post is in image. Yes changelogs with text would be challenging, but you can't search/etc images.

Because Twitter sucks and let you post lots of text in images but not in text. It's awful.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#193

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

ardy42 wrote: post #135
jkhdigital wrote: post #84

If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.

> If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary. For the record, that is completely impractical for reasons so obvious that it's surprising people suggest it with the frequency they do. Take science reporting, for instance. You think science reporting makes too many mistakes, so you're going to just go to the source and read the raw papers instead (a suggestion I've seen doze…

Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed.

I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar.

With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts.

I'd recommend reading Epistemic Learned Helplessness [0].

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#194

Post by DanBC »

mr_toad wrote: post #62
denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

If your company bases security decisions on articles in the NYT then they’re beyond helping. Frankly that’s both laughable and incompetent. No professional (in any field) should base a decision solely on something written in any secondary source. Even if it was a specialist publication, a competent professional should do their own research, and look at the primary sources. Imagine if a doctor or civil engineer based…

> No professional (in any field) should base a decision solely on something written in any secondary source. Even if it was a specialist publication, a competent professional should do their own research, and look at the primary sources.

> Imagine if a doctor or civil engineer based professional decisions on what they read in magazines and newspapers. The thought is horrifying.

No, I really really don't want doctors looking at primary sources. They don't have time to find and read all the sources, and they tend not to have expertise to understand specialist papers.

I would much rather we have organisations like NICE or Cochrane who employ experts in evidence based medicine to gather and précis the science and come up with recommendations for assessment and treatment.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#195

Post by Smaug123 »

> Why does random newsletter guy have a better system than two “we care a lot about the truth” news corporations each worth billions?

Because the news corporations are solving a very different (and much harder) problem. It's the same reason the rationalist community was ready for the pandemic weeks or months ahead of the general populus. A small entity (such as a newsletter) has the slack to actually optimise for truth. A large entity must instead optimise for power. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-... and https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-char... .

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#197

Post by spiralx »

hef19898 wrote: post #166
tacitusarc wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is changing the meaning of the word left, and then redefining Democrat as centrist, which is just incorrect.

Depends on where you are from. In most, if not all, western democracies the Democrats pass as centrist. People like Bernie pass as slightly left of center in Germany for example. And passes as left parties over here would considered full-blown communist in the US.

That's just not true of the Democratic Party by any useful metric and likewise there is nothing about Bernie's platform that would be centre-left anywhere in Europe, the majority of his proposals being to the left of anything implemented anywhere.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunda...

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#198

Post by spiralx »

colordrops wrote: post #185
robin21 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart people are actually more susceptible to biases. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-... Funny that I link to a New Yorker article. Fitting that it is from 2012.

I guess being aware of bias is not part of the "smart" equation?

Being aware of bias is in no way the same as being unaffected by it. In fact you can imagine the possibility where being aware of a bias allows one to believe that they are unable to be affected by it and thus pay less attention to whether their thinking is flawed.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#199

Post by snakeboy »

concordDance wrote: post #175
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump happened in the last 8 years. He did two major things. First, he relentlessly attacked the media ("fake news") and regularly called them out on false or misleading stories. (Then the media regularly complained about him eroding their credibility, without admitting that his criticisms were often valid.) Second, he was incredibly good at manipulation. His signature move was to tell a big fat lie about an i…

I really wish Trump hadn't made attacking fake news become associated with Trumpism. Makes it much harder for people to fight back against fake news without losing all credibility due to the association.

Unfortunately this was Trump's impact on a few issues. Immigration immediately comes to mind.

Re: What happens when the NYT and New Yorker make mistakes

#200

Post by mike_hearn »

cyberlurker wrote: post #65
denimnerd42 wrote: post #4

I wish the NYT would clarify or retract this piece/headline https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/russia-cyber-... > Widely Used Software Company May Be Entry Point for Huge U.S. Hacking > Russian hackers may have piggybacked on a tool developed by JetBrains, which is based in the Czech Republic, to gain access to federal government and private sector systems in the United States. My company has banned Jetbr…

I have a similar experience, where Jetbrains is effectively banned. Do you have any updated source that I could circulate to clear their name?

They wrote about it on their blog.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/07/an-update-on-sola...

https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/01/08/january-8th-updat...

Summary: they have no idea what anyone is talking about, nobody has told them anything and there are no known issues with TeamCity. Later they did a blog post with security tips for locking it down but they're all pretty generic things that'd apply to any CI system.

These companies that are banning JetBrains and thus locking themselves out of some of the best software tools out there are now suffering the consequences of years of mass hysteria over Russia, largely promoted by the New York Times. Every time someone read or quoted the New York Times as an authority on something and did not receive major pushback, it was another brick in the wall that has now led to this.

It was all entirely predictable. In 2017 I wrote about an even more deceptive and malicious article in the New York Times on the topic of "Russian Twitter bots" and Brexit. The story was based on an academic paper that superficially made it seems like credible expertise, but was intellectual fraud from beginning to end.

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

After that I started compiling a list of stories I read about Russia that fell apart when fact checked. I gave up after doing sixteen of them because it was just endless.

https://blog.plan99.net/%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B4%D0%B0...

The thread article starts by saying, "Most educated people believe that premier news outlets are inherently trustworthy". This is probably true but just makes it clear that education doesn't make people smart. The total unreliability of anything Russia-related in the "educated" press has been obvious for years. The only way for things to get better are for people to repeatedly attack the credibility of these outlets, in public, on any topic where they engage in deceptive practices, in front of the sort of decision makers who are now making snap anti-Russian decisions on the basis of prior articles.

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