It is so strange - when I write exactly the same assertions I am getting downvoted into oblivion lol.
All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
151–160 of 216 posts
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#152So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
Incentives matter
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#153So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
Let me start with the following caveat: I’m not convinced journalism’s quality now is worse than any time in the past.
That being said, I think content aggregators are partly to blame. I mean if you’re just reading the daily paper, maybe the front page has exaggerated headlines, but once you’re in the issue it can mellow out. But content aggregators are always trying to find the latest splash.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#154I think making medical claims is quite punishable if one doesn't have a license. This could easily be extended to include journalists and politicians as well as other areas of science (if the stakes are high enough)
It would work like this:
For each field there has to be a committee similar to the ones medical practitioners already have. If the behavior is not up to standards they do an inquiry and if need be the credentials are stripped.
Someone with credentials may sign-off on articles written by journalists and must do so for laws made by law makers.
Such articles and laws stay active for as long as the credentials are valid. If the person dies a new one has to sign off on it. If that doesn't happen the law is abolished automatically and the archived news article will have to clearly state at the top that such validation is missing as-of [say] march 2043. It may also solicit such review.
We can make a convenient api that allows people with credentials to stick our their neck to approve a publication. The list of professionals endorsing the perspective must be made available from the article or law.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#155I think making medical claims is quite punishable if one doesn't have a license. This could easily be extended to include journalists and politicians as well as other areas of science (if the stakes are high enough) It would work like this: For each field there has to be a committee similar to the ones medical practitioners already have. If the behavior is not up to standards they do an inquiry and if need be the cre…
> I think making medical claims is quite punishable if one doesn't have a license.
Well, it's tricky. If you say "I don't believe covid-19 is a serious problem", that can't be punishable as there is a large spectrum of legitimate thinking as to its severity and what trade-offs we should want to make. Such a statement is not remotely like practicing medicine without a license, but some will argue that it is if it could help them shut up the speaker. While saying that "chloroquine phosphate is a good prophylactic for covid-19" to someone who would believe it certainly should be punishable (as attempted murder perhaps! and regardless of whether the speaker is a licensed physician!).
> This could easily be extended to include journalists and politicians as well as other areas of science (if the stakes are high enough)
Journalists? Eh, maybe, but government officers generally have privileges and immunities -- good luck getting them to let those go.
Anyways, the rest of your comment reads like 1984. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that. Regulatory capture and all that. There's no Objectivity. There's no way to set up a mechanism that yields objectively-correct results. All systems will be susceptible to collective delusions and other failures. There's no silver bullet here, and free speech should be part of the mix. Reactionary thinking is fun for the angry, but not good for society.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#156Absolutely true. The amount of bogus science being shared is astonishing. Yet, almost no one seems to notice, care or demand better. All that’s said in the article should be, but personally I’ve lost all hope. We might be living through a generation that values TikTok And click bait more than truth, and it won’t end well, but that’s where we are heading.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#157So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
I get why corrupt politicans hate the media, which is because it holds them accountable. Why do you choose to help them tear it down? Are we better off with no media and just the raw tweets of our leaders?
The article here is about how the media can often help spread misinformation, which can be really bad in a pandemic, so going to guess that's what they're concerned about.
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nestle poisons entire cities and has killed thousands of babies. Name anyone who died from a single thing 90s Microsoft did. The modern tech giants take actions every day that are far more anti competitive than anything Microsoft ever did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Red_herring_... Fallacy of relative privation (also known as "appeal to worse problems" or "not as bad as") – dismissing an argument or complaint due to what are perceived to be more important problems. First World problems are a subset of this fallacy. Nestle is evil. Microsoft is evil. Nestle kills more than Microsoft. Microsoft is still evil.
My bar for evil is a lot higher than "signed exclusive distribution agreements with some OEMs in the 90s."
Illegal? Sure. Evil? So some other millionaires didn't get to become billionaires. Meanwhile the world got a single API to write software against for almost two decades, how many ISVs existed because Microsoft provided an insanely stable (in regards to API churn) platform to develop against?
Hell right now with 2 major mobile OS players there is a huge tax on developers, imagine if the 90s had been a wild west and there had been 4 or 5 major players.
One can also note that given how mobile played out, there is a good chance that the desktop market would have coalesced around a single dominant OS and a secondary minor OS anyway.
And yeah I know everyone is pissed about BeOS, but they also had their chance to be a player until they tried to hard bargain with Apple and Apple walked away!
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#159So, I basically agree with everything this article says, but it seems to miss a basic point. If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. Journalists, and the newsmedia corporations and organizations that employ them, don't run with the most inflammatory headline possible as an accidental fluke of a mistake that they were too careless to catch. Even public sector newsmedia organizations use measu…
> If journalists do what this paper suggests, they make less money. This is clearly true, but I wonder if must always be so. In academia, lying in a publication can be career-ending, which acts to broadly 'scare them straight'. For academics, it's desirable to be highly read and cited, but to be seen to be dishonest is the end of the road. Could it be possible to create similar incentives for journalists?
At least these days, it's not so easy for a journalist to have a career ending mistake. My example for this is Daniel Lyons, for whom I have practically no respect at all as a journalist. His participation in the SCO debacle should legitimately have been career ending (and IMHO was not at all mitigated by his subsequent apology). His "Fake Steve Jobs" work breathtakingly poor judgement, again IMHO. I mean there is trash journalism and then there is making stuff up and hinting that maybe you know more than others do (all the while saying, "It's just a parody"). Let's not even talk about bit that's mentioned at the end of his Wikipedia article (I really hope that's not true!). But let's face it, he's a talented writer. He writes engagingly on topics that are interesting for a lot a people. The fact that he exercises absolutely no judgement whatsoever in his research is unfortunate, but even this is appealing to a lot of people who want to believe what he writes. I suspect that there are more people on HN who love him than hate him. How would you filter this kind of writing without some draconian censor forbidding him from publishing?
Re: All models are wrong, but some are completely wrong
#160The headline really cuts off the points nose.
Yeah - I was trying to play off the George Box quote but maybe it's too obscure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
It’s less the obscurity, and more that to a layman, you are saying in the title that modelling doesn't work, or it really doesn’t work. Understanding your audience and all that. Someone should write an article about it so we aren’t misrepresenting our point by trying to be clever and assume the layman understands that which has not been explained to them...