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It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

natesilver.net

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Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evidence from reputable OSINT orgs like Bellingcat Do you have a link to their findings?

Not OSINT, but the BBC and the guardian going over some of the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67144061

Useful links. Noteworthy that the Guardian reports 'The hospital had also been targeted last week' where I suspect 'The hospital had also been hit last week'. Or do they have evidence it was targeted?

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The video had the wrong timestamps There was live stream from Al-Jazeera showing the failed rocket at the correct timestamp. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-h... > and the voice recordings were alleged to be faked By who? The article just leads to a tweet with no citations from any experts.

Channel 4 and plenty of other people. Y'all are inside a propaganda bubble. https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...

"Two independent Arab journalists" isn't exactly a reputable source - It most likely means they found 2 random people on Twitter.

And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems remarkably similar to when they print a "debate" on taxes that consists of "We need to cut food stamps to balance the budget" on one side and "We need to raise taxes on the upper-middle class, actually" on the other. One of these has clear factual arguments behind it, but the other one is the interest of the company hosting the debate, so who's to say?

Im just a simple country boy but it seems to me that you can balance a budget by reducing spending or raising revenue.

Yes, but note both suggestions omit doing anything to ultra-wealthy and continue to drive the wedge between the lower and middle classes, each being told the other is why they can't have nice things.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#154
post #9

A long time ago, I worked for a brand that bought expensive advertisements in the nytimes. The sales team invited me to be a silent attendee of the 'page one meeting', a meeting during which the editors decide which stories will be on the front page of the paper and how they will be presented. By that time, they were also discussing if certain stories warranted a push notification, and how tweets would be presented.…

> Anyway, I mostly get my news from twitter nowadays. At least there, I find it a bit easier to make sense of who is misleading me and why. How does that make it easier to make sense of who is misleading you? Don't people on twitter have a source whose bias is unknown to you? It would be difficult to only read first person accounts of events by sources you discovered yourself. Not to mention knowing enough about thos…

X doesn't apply its own filter to those potentially biased reports. You can find pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel tweets. These are all suspect. What gives credence to certain points of view are the details provided. Fabrications are often shallow and when repeated offer no new insight (it's often the same tweet with little change in wording). The truth can be supported in many ways and becomes more clear as more data becomes available.

It's not that any one tweet is more accurate, it's that the collection of tweets that provide info and insight eventually steers us closer to the truth.

We don't need fact-checkers or disinformation checks. It's more useful to remove duplicate posts, low-quality posts (e.g. "Israel should bomb Gaza!!") to give us more signal to noise.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#155

NYT had a near-identical fact pattern a few weeks ago. The military of Ukraine accidentally bombed its own city, killing 17 people. NYT falsely and without evidence attributed it to the Russian military—just like in Silver's example with the Gaza hospital. This is a recurring issue, and IMHO suggests a systemic problem with their reporting, not limited to one topic or bureau. Original, conclusory title captured by a…

When journalists hear hoof beats, you want them to think ‘horses’ not ‘zebras’, though, right? When party A is causing a lot of explosions in general in land controlled by party B, and party B is broadly not trying to cause explosions in its own land, when an explosion happens in land controlled by party B you should have a strong prior that the most likely culprit is party A. Journalists should be allowed to assume…

Professional journalists have the responsibility to be epistemologically correct—to accurately say "X told us Y", "our reporter observed Z", etc. You can't jump the gun and launder speculation into truth.

That's what Silver's complaining about in the OP: not that the NYT got it wrong, but how in particular they got it wrong, making claims of confidence and certainty that weren't supported by what they had.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#156
post #137

The reason everyone believed it was Israel is because they do it all the time. Today they bombed a church. I find it funny (as long as you ignore that these events involve dead people) that Silver here is up in arms for an alleged misattribution when it happens otherwise every day and nobody is bothered. A novel thought: maybe stop bombing civilians and the chance of you unjustly being accused of bombing civilians go…

Both groups do it all the time. The difference is that, Isreal doesn't lie about it when they do it while Hamas lies about pretty much everything.

That's complete nonsense. They do it all the time, and they lie or distort at will. Just like every other government, military, or secret service.

Example:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-killed-a...

https://legionmagazine.com/one-martyr-down-the-untold-story-...

https://www.cjpme.org/fs_033

IDF fired on a UN post and killed neutral UN observers, including a Canadian citizen. They've never admitted it was deliberate... but they did it because of the specific neutrality interventions of that UN post... as a signal to STFU ... and everybody knows it. And because of alliances with Israel even the Canadian gov't wouldn't raise protest.

"The question of how and why it [UN base] was on their targeting list has never been legally resolved. The Israelis claim it was a data-entry error—put on their target list by mistake. But they have prevented any organization or government from verifying that claim; including both the UN and the Canadian government."

It's not like anybody is forcing you to think in terms where there's only Hamas or IDF to choose from. That's a mental framework you're choosing for yourself. It's not a football game.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still not sure what to believe on that story Do this. A lesson from air crash investigations: wait a week. Until then, discount everything. > story would look the same no matter who did it This is not true. Too many countries with disparate motivations had eyes on the area. We haven’t had time for intelligence to be scrubbed for public release. Again, give it a week. In the meantime, observe the meta story; who con…

Sure, ignore everything for a week. Unless you want to make money in prediction markets - then help out humanity by reading as much information as possible and moving the price so that people who don't have time to do that can have better information. A week is a long time in a fast moving conflict, and the ambiguity favours the defenders if it slows down any attack. An explosion at a hospital doesn't need a golden r…

It's good advice if you don't know what to believe.

Presumably people in your proposed situation have an idea on what's believable haha.

I think it's pretty clear where the smart money is on who is lying at every stage here lol.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#158

I just find this all so pointless. News organisations can't be expected to verify every claim. And so all they can do is report the claims of what should be trusted sources i.e. governments, NGOs etc. And to be fair every country spins the truth so it's not like this incident is without precedent. So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verif…

> So you get to choose. Either you have breaking news or you don't. But you can't ask for breaking news and have them verify each claim. It's just not possible. This is a false dichotomy. You can have breaking news that covers the verifiable facts (an explosion happened in Gaza near a hospital) without uncritically reporting salacious claims by extremely biased parties. Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes…

> Imagine if on 9/11 the press had within minutes come out and said, "Twin tower attacks ordered by Saddam Hussein kill 20,000, intelligence sources say." That didn't happen because the press at the time exercised some caution, yet they still covered the event.

That didn't happen because no intelligence sources said that.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as the story broke, it was clear to me that whoever did it, it was an accident. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter. It's an unfortunate casualty of war, in which innocent people suffer even when it's not intended. One thing that I respect about the initial Israeli response was that they weren't quick to assign blame. In a press conference soon after the event, the military spokesperson said that they…

> As soon as the story broke, it was clear to me that whoever did it, it was an accident. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter. It's an unfortunate casualty of war, in which innocent people suffer even when it's not intended. What’s this based on? Vibes? People are upset about this because it, in fact, does matter. Intentionally destroying a hospital is an atrocity; in the context of a war, it’s a war crime. Th…

Lofty even-handedness was not my intention, I have a definite side in this conflict because it personally affects me. I'm not unbiased and make no claim to be. I live in Israel and I'm scared of how this will end because I have skin in the game.

It doesn't matter to me who hit the hospital because I don't believe it was intentional. That's not to say the deaths don't matter, they do, and we should mourn them. And that's not to say that blame for the overall war doesn't matter, it does, I don't mean to say that we can't know anything and I'm not offering some bland hope for a ceasefire and end of suffering for all sides.

I'm saying that I don't believe figuring out whose errant projectile is responsible for this particular tragedy materially changes how I feel about the war[0].

Can I prove that it wasn't intentional? No, I can't. But I consider it much more likely than the claim that it was intentional. The Israeli claim is that it was an Islamic Jihad mistake, they're not arguing it was intentional. I don't know if Hamas claims Israeli did it intentionally or by accident, but it is entirely against Israel's interest to hit it intentionally and I see no reason they'd kick the ball into their own goal so spectacularly. Mistakes happen. War is terrible. And yes, this war includes a lot of war crimes.

[0] If eventually we find actual evidence that this was an intentional strike by the Israeli military, I will retract my position and express shock and horror at my government. I already express my anger at my more extreme, fundamentalist countrymen for their actions and statements that I consider to be immoral. The fact that they're on my team does not spare them from my wrath, on the contrary, I get more angry at them for the damage they do than I do at the extremists on the other side.

Re: It's easy to screw up on breaking news but you have to admit when you do

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Channel 4 and plenty of other people. Y'all are inside a propaganda bubble. https://twitter.com/jacksonhinklle/status/171499970410093403...

"Two independent Arab journalists" isn't exactly a reputable source - It most likely means they found 2 random people on Twitter. And initially I thought it was probably Israel, but the evidence is fairly overwhelming to support that it is a failed Jihad rocket.

The IDF released the recordings in the first place. Are you claiming that they're a reputable source?
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