Don't Outsource Your Thinking (2015)

Yeah, be prepared to be treated like a paranoid schizophrenic when you do that.

You're going to stop having conversations, or will you be recording them all?

Not to say you shouldn't, but it isn't easy and requires a lot of consideration, energy and discipline.

The digital tools are definitely NOT ready, there's a few gigabytes of raw mathematical data to be processed by humans into algorithms before we get there.

Michael Crichton observed this and called it the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. I think he said publicly that the name was to ride on the coat tails of Gell-Mann's public success:

>>> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

I don't believe there is anyone I've ever met whose thoughts were original to them in all particulars. I think it has been very seldom where I have met anyone that has had one original thought in their head, I'm pretty sure most thoughts, including mine were thought somewhere else and transmitted via some media. Probably in most cases the only originality lies in the assemblage of the thoughts and how they interact.

These days newsrooms do have a bunch of technical people on staff (plus access to an amazing network of experts outside), to do the kind of digging the article talks about. Resource, time constraints, pressure to publish before someone else scoops you I think complicate the process.

It's similar to software companies pushing out workarounds and hacks to deal with bugs that there is no time/resource available to fully investigate.

If journalism, as a profession, is to add more societal value than random blog posts, I think there needs to be a fundamental reworking of the medium. As it currently stands, the medium itself encourages sloppiness. A modest proposal:

1) Articles should, like legal briefs, support each non-trivial point with a footnote or citation. Primary sources, such as presses releases, documents, and transcripts, should be hyperlinked from the footnotes.

2) Long form articles—unless they appear in a literary magazine—should contain section headings ordered in a logical manner.

3) An adversarial aspect should be introduced into the medium. When a judge receives a legal brief, she doesn’t review the brief in isolation. Typically, there is an opening brief, a response, and a reply. It should be a matter of journalist practice to write response articles to other articles. Aggregators like Google News could then make it easy to see, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s response to a New York Times article.