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Re: No More Stories

#41

Post by Spivak »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #34

> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus. This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and the meek-but-correct get crushed. Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare opinions for reasonableness.

Supreme court opinions are collections of consensus despite containing dissenting opinions. The point is to organize all the information, data, analyses and opinions worth listening to instead of it being an ad-hoc stream of unconnected narratives.

And if you say that somehow journalists can't sanity check and vet sources for quality then, for you, the battle is already lost and the solution is to just delete news.

Re: No More Stories

#42

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cgh wrote: post #4
alexfromapex wrote: post #2

I would really appreciate a "news" site that just cited verifiable facts and maybe showed data trends but didn't try to make any conclusions for me

Here’s a good media bias chart: https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St... Try choosing sources near the top middle, eg the Associated Press, Reuters, etc.

This version of "least bias" appears to translate into a wierd combination of:

   * pro status quo
   * more fact-based reporting
The first one is deeply suspect (though an entirely legitimate position to take). The second one is valuable, but far from the only kind of valuable journalism.

Re: No More Stories

#43

Post by gpm »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #3

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term reporting that OP is talking about would do that.

Surely inducing people to read the same story multiple times, get's more eyeballs. Being reliable enough that people check your news every day, wins eyeballs. Being frequently uninformative, makes people less likely to come back (loses eyeballs). Etc.

You say that "subtle nuance doesn't drive engagement", but don't we also see that people like "knowing more" than everyone else, or even just thinking they do (the latter of which seems to be a large driving force behind conspiracy theories)?

So I don't think that this really explains the entirety of the media's behavior. I think a lot of it is based on things like institutional inertia from when news was delivered via physical news papers, and optimizing for just the metrics that are easy to measure.

Re: No More Stories

#44

Post by carapace »

The news sources Glyph wants already exist but the mass market is uninterested, unwilling to pay for them. There are niche markets, people who are interested and willing and able to pay, and they do get serviced by tiny obscure outfits.

(e.g. SemiAccurate:

> Professional membership allows instant access to the entire site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news, analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year’s worth of access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.

https://semiaccurate.com/subscribe/ )

So the problem is not that we can't do this, it's that nobody wants it at scale, there's no mass market for this sort of in-depth information.

FWIW I agree that a system of timelines (what Glyph calls "trackers") would likely be a very useful motif for interacting with news.

Bucky Fuller thought that we would just program all the data into (effectively) giant spreadsheets, do analysis and scenario planning, and the computer could work out the logistics for us. Automatic utopia.

Which brings me to my point: In order to get more people to ingest and make decisions based on all this data, we need to foster more free time. Automation should free people up to spend more time learning and communicating to improve governance (among other things.)

Re: No More Stories

#45

Post by carapace »

darawk wrote: post #38
nerdponx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have come to believe that people don't want it as much as they are just generally susceptible to it. The "news" has figured out how to become a supernormal stimulus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

I think this point is sort of the fundamental contradiction of modernity, and it underlies many of our disagreements and problems. Succinctly, it's the non-unitary nature of preference. I want to eat the cookie and I want to be thin. The fact that I eat the cookie does not actually mean that I want the cookie "more" than I want to be thin. It just means that preference functions are not consistent over time. My prefe…

You make a good point. But isn't the ability to comprehend and work towards long(er)-term goals over more immediate gratification kind of the essence of being human (as distinguished from animal?)

If we "allow people to architect their environment to conform to their longer term executive preferences, rather than imposing an environment tailored to their shorter term instinctual ones.", isn't that kind of the definition of civilization?

Re: No More Stories

#46

Post by [deleted] »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #3

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

[deleted]

Re: No More Stories

#47

Post by pjscott »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #3

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, n…

What you're talking about is a real problem, but I don't think it's the same problem that the article is talking about. There's a lot of journalism that isn't trying to stir up strong emotion, that actually does look like it's trying to be calmly informative -- and when I see it, it's usually what the OP calls a story: "[...] a temporal snapshot of one journalist's interpretation of an issue. Just a tidy little pile of motivated reasoning with a few cherry-picked citations, and then we move on to the next story."

I suspect that news sources that are trying to brand themselves as impartial and trustworthy could get more trust without sacrificing many eyeballs if they'd switch from a story format to a regularly-updated "Here's what we think we know, how we think we know it, and how confident we are about it" format.

Re: No More Stories

#48

Post by pjscott »

pcmaffey wrote: post #26

There are no facts in journalism, only observations. The media is not a courtroom, it’s not science, it’s just humans observing each other.

A couple of days ago there were very strong winds in my area that caused a lot of falling tree limbs and property damage. The next day the newspaper reported, correctly, the fact that the weather had indeed been like that. I'm not sure how this fits with your claim unless you're using the words "fact" and "observation" in an epistemically radical way.

Re: No More Stories

#49

Post by pjscott »

nsxwolf wrote: post #8

At this point literally everything has been wrong. Facts are confidently stated and they turn out to be opposite, then reverse again. Followed by more totally confident assertions. Maybe there is a story here, and it is our hubris. This is beyond us.

I've been appreciating some people's practice of giving subjective probability estimates for various things depending on the strength of the evidence; see e.g. the "Probability Updates" section of this article:

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/omicron-post-7/#prob...

Probably a well-functioning prediction market would do it better, though I'm not sure our prediction markets today are there yet.

Re: No More Stories

#50

Post by glyph »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #34

> What we need from journalism for the 21st century is a curated set of ongoing collections of consensus. This is a horrifying idea. Tension between various facets on a topic is good. Consensus breeds complacency, avoids change, and the meek-but-correct get crushed. Let's teach our children how to identify opinion and compare opinions for reasonableness.

This is why consensus is a collection. Sometimes dialectical analysis is good; thesis, antithesis, synthesis is a tried and true formula that often works. But not always! Sometimes one side is just horseshit that gets mindlessly repeated in the interest of “balance”. In either case I’m not suggesting that the consensus ruthlessly censor dissenting views, rather that in order to make sense out of dissenting views, the strongest forms of each argument need to be presented together alongside accountability: editorial moderation and fact-checking.

Even in the cases where the truth really is somewhere in the middle between two opposing camps, reading a sequence of side A #1, side B #1, side A #2, side B #2, in disconnected stories gives you a very skewed view subject to recency bias. For example you can’t easily check the history to see if a claim B is making in their second story was already debunked by A in their first one, and it’s a huge waste of time and energy for A to have to spend all their media budget just refuting that claim over and over because B keeps bringing it up every time there’s no fact checker right in front of them to call them on it (and even sometimes if there is).

In other words the current media environment rewards being loud, wrong, simple and repetitive far over and above even the normal human bias for such things. It reinforces our worst cognitive habits.

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