251–260 of 503 posts
Lies are not free, they are paid by ads and a complete industry is built on keeping this going. The price of the ads are built into the price of the product/service you buy, so we are basically paying for the lies too, it’s just not as obvious as paying to get through the paywall.
> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…
That's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.
Also this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-...
Also: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
I think there are some great New York Times writers (Li Yuan’s articles I always like), but there’s a lot of seriously bad writing and writers.
It’s not exclusive to NYT either, Vox makes some great stuff - but they also published that “no handshakes” article mocking Silicon Valley for taking COVID seriously.
Vox repeatedly pushed the “COVID isn’t a pandemic” story. Vox doubled down on the “no handshakes” thing with Kara Swisher arguing in support of it. They still haven’t admitted being wrong.
Link: https://medium.com/@balajis/citations-for-the-recode-handsha...
If you know anyone who has a NYT piece written about them usually they’re surprised by how many things are wrong.
Of course these are just the publications that even pretend to be honest, I’m not unfairly targeting them - others unnamed are often worse.
I think their ad driven model is a corrupting influence. I also think their anti-tech company bias is related to tech companies destroying their historical business model (I think they're holding a grudge: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...).
I think it’s better to support good writers directly, I hope substack and independent blogs win.
Some suggestions:
Persuasion: https://www.persuasion.community/
Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/
Stay Tuned with Preet: https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/
Andrew Sullivan: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe
Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/
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>They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant. Not really: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/aug/20/bernie-san... >The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longe…
If the facts are not accurate, that's relevant. On average, are the facts accurate? Also, 1.65 isn't double. I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.
Regardless, even if the average WERE 1.65, that's still a damning enough number that the meter shouldn't be all the way to the "False" side.
The linked article concludes: "Creators must be compensated well. But at the same time we have to try to keep things that are important and profound from getting locked away where few people will see them. The truth needs to be free and universal." Let's also consider whether lies should be made more expensive. Free costs more than it's worth.
Coal plants offer cheap power, mostly because they ignore the externalities of pollution.
If you could identify the externalities of lies and tax or fine them in some way, maybe they would be minimized.
(tax what you want less of)
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Oh nobody’s even bothered to think about epistemology before.
I know right? Wittgenstein solved the whole thing in 1922 and yet here we are 100 years later, still acting like "knowing the truth" is a hard problem. (Here's hoping I can avoid the wrath of Poe's law)
> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…
It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source. This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough t…
Excuse me for not wanting to pay or support other people's misery.
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This is the fallacy that led to the current broken model. Suppose that instead of paying $17 a month to get the NYT, I pay $20 a month to get that and five other similarly high quality news sources. Does this make it harder to fund journalism? Not at all. The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. So do the five other organizations. And, since…
> The NYT now has (for argument's sake) six times as many subscribers, all paying slightly more than six times as much. Not really, there must be an intersection between them and we don't know how large it is. And I don't believe there's many other magazine/news sites as successful as NYT so the revenue number is more likely 3x~4x even assuming no intersection and 100% conversion rate. The real issue is that traditio…
There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".
For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.
So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.
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> so that article OP cites is outrage bait, it's not an informed source. How does this follow? One faction burns a bible and another faction puts it out. How do you choose which narrative to privilege?
The book being burned doesn't look like a bible to me - the breitbart article tries to spin that one book being burned into a NSDAP-like mass book burning event, with bible s being burned - we don't know which faction burned that single book, but breitbart wants the reader very hard to believe that it was BLM people/leftwing people.
You can play this game for the rest of your life. It won't make you more informed. It won't make you happier.
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False. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check-ratings/
I was thinking more along the lines of a true spectrum, like a percentage system. What you have here is a bunch of qualitative truthiness symbols decided arbitrarily, it's not much different from just saying true or false. For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In real…
The NEXT 2 PARAGRAPHS say, in simple language, what part is true and which is not.