Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Am Deleting the Blog

slatestarcodex.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#461

Post by war1025 »

dilandau wrote: post #410
gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

Both of those are right on point, and match my observations within my own circles. For me stallmans cancellation was a big turning point. I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now. I can't risk someone pulling up a comment or post years from now and using it to ruin my reputation or career, simply because i may have voiced an unpopular or controversial opinion that did not age well. It seems, too, that making jokes is ver…

> I'm using a pseudonym everywhere now.

I've wondered a couple times recently how dangerous it is that I'm easily discoverable. I tell myself that since I live in the Midwest, the worst of it hasn't reached here yet. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#462

Post by zimablue »

plake wrote: post #437
simonh wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality. I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different t…

For UK sources, I'd suggest adding The Spectator. They're not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I've found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source. For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?

This is not true, the spectator is a very right wing newspaper which our current pm used to edit (who was undeniably on the right wing of our the Tory party, which if you run the numbers on voting must put him in the rightmost 20% of the country).

It’s probably well written though, the irony is that the right wing press is often externally funded, not intrinsically profitable, and so has more cash in the bank to maintain high production quality, if completely destroying any pretense of neutrality.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#463

Post by raxxorrax »

gringoDan wrote: post #394

Reading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – those…

This self censorship is most often meant when someone criticizes political correctness. It doesn't mean that you should unnecessarily put people off with inflammatory language. But I think it could still get you fired if posted on Twitter, at least a few years ago. Some people with especially large incomes seem to be immune though.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#464

Post by macspoofing »

>He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation. (emphasis mine)

That sounds like the reporter was buttering him up before dropping the hit-piece.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#466

Post by TomSwirly »

Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

The Times wrote a story about a play written about my life (long story) and there was a mistake in every line - most trivial and inexplicable, like guessing an age for people and getting it wrong, and some mistakes actively annoying.

Also, I once appeared in the Post and the Times in the same day when my friend and I got blown up in a steam pipe explosion (we were covered in mud but undamaged). The Times made us seem suave and hip (they mentioned my natty tie covered by mud) and the Post made us seem like victims of a tragedy. Such different pictures!

All very educational.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#467

Post by sk0g »

aj3 wrote: post #355
npstr wrote: post #111

Similar effect when reading the news on a topic that one is an expert in - they usually get it incredibly wrong. And then you turn the page and read the next article completely forgetting how bad the reporting actually is - there is no reason to assume they do a better job on topics that one is not an expert in! I think this bias had a name but I can't remember it.

Would it be worthwhile to create an index where people that are experts in something could vouch for the journalists that seem to know what they're talking about? E.g. I can verify that on the information security topic Joseph Cox from Motherboard is constantly on topic, but that information is useless to me personally, because by the time Vice publishes something it's already old news for people in the industry (or…

Do you mean something like MetaCritic for journalists? It could work, but then who reviews (and vets) the reviewers?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#468

Post by bttrfl »

Uhrheber wrote: post #75

I stopped trusting reporters about 35 years ago, when I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter was at the scene, and later read what he had written about it in the newspaper. It had practically nothing to do with what really happened, but was written in a way that most of their readers would most likely expect and endorse. I was still very young then, but it opened my eyes, and from then on, I mostly st…

Well, I personally witnessed an occurrence, where a reporter WASN'T at the scene, and yet I later read what she had written about it in the newspaper as if she had been present.

It was a really nice review of a show that... was cancelled.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#469

Post by mattkrause »

the-dude wrote: post #120
npstr wrote: post #111

Similar effect when reading the news on a topic that one is an expert in - they usually get it incredibly wrong. And then you turn the page and read the next article completely forgetting how bad the reporting actually is - there is no reason to assume they do a better job on topics that one is not an expert in! I think this bias had a name but I can't remember it.

Gell-mann Amnesia : https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

This always bugs me, because “science” is a giant spectrum of fields from astronomy to zoology. Nobody knows even a small portion of it, and yet we expect a few journalists to cover all of it, often on tight deadlines[0]. Politics is probably closer to many journalists’ backgrounds, and it changes slower—-last week’s background helps with this week’s scandal too.

[0] The impetus for most articles is usually the publication of a new paper, but this always seems weird because it’s really more of a hook: papers are almost always incremental progress on a problem and most of the article ends up being background and context anyway.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#470

Post by donohoe »

thinkingemote wrote: post #170

It doesn't take too much imagination to see how easy it would be to write a hit piece. Scott writes eloquently and in depth, but the news is not about either of those things. Scott has written a few times about problematic issues which have surfaced in recent months and it would be very easy to write "some people say that Scott is ${label}" with just a bit of superficial quotes. Today's climate of online mob justice…

Sure, but thats not the issue here. It is about naming sources.
Post reply on HN