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Statement on New York Times Article

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Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#201

Post by ALittleLight »

MrMan wrote: post #188
ALittleLight wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the difference between a blog and reddit I would say that the comment section harbors people with many different views. Some of the comments may be objectionable (again: I didn't see examples) but so what? That's got to be true of everywhere with a comments section. Why make that a focus? You write "if the claim is indeed true that racists/sexists think the blog is great" - but this isn't even the kind of t…

Some of our applied social scientists are being allowed to work with very large datasets at places like Facebook and I believe they are increasingly in a position to make quantifiable statements on what racists or any other cluster-able groups of humans like. If by spectrum you mean “distance from a centroid” it might be more precise. Marketing is essentially the working, reproducible arm of the social sciences, and…

That still relies on the scientists defining and labeling racists which will be an arbitrary process. Regardless - do you think anything of the kind was done by the NYT?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#202

Post by plake »

sanxiyn wrote: post #173
nanna wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"] I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.

Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example, Q. What if I take too much? A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away. This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is inco…

Or perhaps that the pressures against legible expertise are worse in the US?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#203

Post by optimalsolver »

dohnuts1919 wrote: post #181
etc-hosts wrote: post #113

I can't read the sapinker tweet since he blocks anyone who sends him that photo of him with Jeffrey Epstein.

It's worth noting that this Pinker-Epstein connection is about as meaningful as the anti-Scott NYT article's own guilt-by-assocation attempts. Here's Pinker's statement on the matter: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/07/12/tarring-steve-pink...

So if I'm understanding correctly, Dershowitz asked Pinker for a linguistic opinion vis a vis laws against sex with underage girls, and Pinker wasn't the least bit curious over what this was all about?

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#204

Post by optimalsolver »

dohnuts1919 wrote: post #162

> I don’t want to accuse the New York Times of lying about me, exactly, but if they were truthful, it was in the same way as that famous movie review which describes the Wizard of Oz as: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” I laughed out loud at this paragraph, and it's such a perfect example of why I love Scott's wri…

Scott didn't come up with that joke.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#205

Post by jpxw »

speedgoose wrote: post #100

I thought the New York Times was a decent newspaper until their "French police shoot and kill man after a fatal knife attack on the street" title, that replaced later by a not so much better "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police". Even Macron felt the need to tell them they fucked up.

It wasn’t just the NYT calling it a “knife attack” as a euphemism. I remember seeing many media outlets doing that

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#206

Post by curun1r »

sanxiyn wrote: post #173
nanna wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WebMD is the Internet's most important source of medical information. [WebMD, And The Tragedy Of Legible Expertise"] I had no idea WebMD was taken this seriously. Can I recommend to HNers especially across the pond to use the excellent NHS.UK instead, for level-headed and concise medical info.

Wow, I just looked up aspirin and warfarin (comparison used in the article) at NHS.UK, and it really is better. For example, Q. What if I take too much? A. (for aspirin) Taking 1 or 2 extra tablets is unlikely to be harmful. (for warfarin) If you take an extra dose of warfarin, call your anticoagulant clinic straight away. This convinces me it's not that WebMD is a tragedy of legible expertise, but that WebMD is inco…

Even as large as WebMD is, it would surprise me if they weren't using a third-party drug database to drive their public database. When I worked at a similar site, we used First DataBank [0], but there may be others too. The world of pharmaceuticals changes so rapidly that you need a small army of pharmacists and doctors scouring medical journals and materials from big pharma companies to keep your information up-to-date and it's just a lot easier to pay one of the dedicated companies that focus on that to do that work for you.

However it wouldn't surprise me if the NHS took on that task itself. Unlike WebMD, the NHS is also responsible for prescribing medications and would need to give their doctors and pharmacists up-to-date information, software and guidance for prescribing. Their scale and scope would allow them to take on this task in a way that makes less sense in the US system, where insurance providers, doctors, pharmacies and online health information are all separate entities with separate budgets/funding.

[0] https://www.fdbhealth.com/

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#207

Post by makomk »

Retric wrote: post #124
forgingahead wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another. Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of…

Not all partisan mouthpieces are equivalent. You can be factually accurate while leading people to the wrong conclusion. However, it’s much less work to find someone willing to lie, and much harder to detect lies than misleading statements. Journalistic integrity is therefore critical when selecting which biased sources to pay attention to.

Leading people to believe things that are wildly untrue using statements that are technically not lies does as much damage to society as doing it any other way, in my opinion. Sure, in theory smart people might be able to spot that what the article is trying to convince them of isn't backed up by the facts it uses - but in practice they almost never seem to, not even other journalists. (Here in the UK, the BBC seems to be a bit of a repeat offender - some other partisan rag publishes something designed to lead people to an untrue conclusion without technically lying, and then the BBC just outright repeats the untrue claim.)

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#208

Post by JohnStrangeII »

forgingahead wrote: post #96
vinay_ys wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A publication can be politically titled to one side and still be factually accurate and stay true to journalistic integrity principles (or at least that's what I want). With social media and modern communication/publication mechanisms, it is much easier for individuals who know the ground truth to bring their perspective to the fore and poke holes into a major publication's journalistic flaws. This wasn't possible ju…

This seems to be contradictory. It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias? The NYT and others like it go out of their way to pretend they have no political bias, using the passive voice to give authority to slanted reporting which favours one "team" over another. Being a partisan mouthpiece isn't itself a problem, the issue is when it pretends (and many of…

> It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?

Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."

What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#209

Post by LeanderK »

I don't understand why the NYT would do something like this. I will continue to read the NYT but with a different feeling, it eroded my trust. More missteps and I will loose my trust. This is just unacceptable, especially in the times of fake news.

I think the piece just does not have any arguments, it's just based on held beliefs that some things are wrong. It's just connects dots and quotes sentences that offend a certain readership.

EDIT: And I just don't get why on earth they have to reveal his name if he does not want the NYT to reveal it? What does it add to the story? It's a persons life they are playing with.

EDIT 2: I don't share the beliefs of the blog, but this piece is just written to please a certain readership. This is not journalism!

EDIT 3: the newyorkers article is so much better: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...

Re: Statement on New York Times Article

#210

Post by jasonvorhe »

raspasov wrote: post #174

Very often when I read a NYT article, I get a paranoid Neo-marxist feeling that NYT doesn’t really care for equality of opportunity, minority rights, women’s rights or any particular oppressed group. They just hate the successful and the rich.

Mark Thompson, CEO of NYT has an estimated net worth of about 10-30 million USD according to a few sites on the Internet. That's not "did a unicorn IPO"-rich but it certainly doesn't align with "NYT hates the rich".
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