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The Bullshit

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: The Bullshit

#81

Post by rexreed »

paulpauper wrote: post #80
rexreed wrote: post #76

Yes, of course there's bullshit everywhere. But what can you do with that knowledge exactly? Knowing that something is fallacious and full of BS doesn't give you some advantage. It makes it worse. Knowing that the system is full of lies and corrupt doesn't provide a means to get some good from that knowledge or take advantage of knowing the "truth". It's just depressing to know that the takers will always be taking,…

tune out. it's not like being up to date about everything going on the world is necessary. follow only the news you care about, read only the people whose work you enjoy

That's certainly the easy way. But that only applies to news and internet chatter and social media blather -- stuff that's fairly easy to tune out. I've already tuned those out. But the lies and BS are much more than just what the nattering neighbobs say on the Internets and the glowing chatter box. The lies exist everywhere if you look deeply to find the truth when what you expect doesn't match reality. It's much more difficult to tune that out.

Re: The Bullshit

#82

Post by rootusrootus »

peytn wrote: post #17
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #10

These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose. They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap t…

Wow, this guy must have something to say with haters like these.

It's probably just because he spends most of his essay complaining only about left-wing media sins. Nobody said he had to be neutral, of course, but if you want to know who the haters are...

Re: The Bullshit

#83

Post by mongol »

>The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public.

I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?

https://youtu.be/EFyFOQTs9DI

Re: The Bullshit

#84

Post by danielmarkbruce »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #21
brundolf wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive. I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks…

My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.

I've seen this too. It seems like it would be better to do "strategy driven decision making" and use data to help inform.

Re: The Bullshit

#86

Post by barrkel »

tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

Yes. But it, and other mass media like it, generated unifying narratives, narratives that weren't hermetically sealed from conflicting narratives.

That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.

Re: The Bullshit

#87

Post by teflodollar »

roenxi wrote: post #54
tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse! And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companie…

I always thought PBS and NPR were pretty good. What am I missing?

Re: The Bullshit

#88

Post by bsanr2 »

colordrops wrote: post #75
tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

Absolutely. Time was just as guilty of misinformation, exclusion, blackouts, appeal to vague authorities, and maintaining the Overton window for the establishment. Yeah, sure, it had a much more professional sheen and you had to pay attention to notice, but it was still shit.

My father refused to read Time for decades - decades - because they'd manipulated their cover photo of OJ Simpson to make him look darker-skinned than he actually is. It was, I'm told, A Thing, along with All-American restaurant Denny's having to pay out millions in damages over racial discrimination (Wells Fargo having to do the same 20 years later does much for my suspicion that the 2010s are something of an echo of the 90s). This is what is on my personal radar; I'm sure someone with other priorities can name similar, fact-based grievances with other institutions that ostensibly design their products for general American consumption.

For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.

Re: The Bullshit

#89

Post by zug_zug »

In my opinion this is entirely unreadable. Not for what it has to say, but how it says it.

The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.

The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.

But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.

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