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The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

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Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#461

Post by andrewtbham »

vosper wrote: post #456
ALittleLight wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a mistake to judge on one incident? If I worked with someone who seemed like a professional, and then one day he spat on me and never apologized and denied he did so, I'd probably judge that guy even though it was just one incident. There is a difference between making a mistake or being wrong while trying to be right, and intentionally doing something bad or refusing to acknowledge error. Everyone is in th…

The NYT has 4,320 employees. If one of them spat on you, never apologized, and denied he did so, would you then judge every employee of NYT the same as you judge that one person? Edit for clarity, since I'm getting downvoted: My point is that the analogy is not great. You can judge one person for their actions directly towards you. It isn't necessarily reasonable to judge a large number of people by the actions of a…

it's really more than one person... there is the journalist but it's the editor that wrote the response and the editor manages several journalists. it's really the nyt's culture and their incentives... it's a system that would promote someone that is incentivized to defend their integrity when they're clearly wrong.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#462

Post by vosper »

andrewtbham wrote: post #461
vosper wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT has 4,320 employees. If one of them spat on you, never apologized, and denied he did so, would you then judge every employee of NYT the same as you judge that one person? Edit for clarity, since I'm getting downvoted: My point is that the analogy is not great. You can judge one person for their actions directly towards you. It isn't necessarily reasonable to judge a large number of people by the actions of a…

it's really more than one person... there is the journalist but it's the editor that wrote the response and the editor manages several journalists. it's really the nyt's culture and their incentives... it's a system that would promote someone that is incentivized to defend their integrity when they're clearly wrong.

Sure, and you'll notice that I didn't say there's no problem at the NYT, or that the organisation as a whole should be exempt from the actions of some set of it's staff.

I'm just saying that the analogy to an (offensive) action by a specific person, toward a specific person, is a poor analogy for the actions of some subset of a large organisation, which almost certainly isn't directed at a specific person.

And I doubt many people would equate the actions of the NYT with literally being spat on.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#463

Post by blueyes »

zoul wrote: post #357
notadonut wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please propose a system whereby facts can be collected, interpreted, verified and distributed for free. If it is not free, who funds it? How do we prevent the organization funding it from perverting the facts to serve its own interest? If we cannot prevent perversion by the financing organs, then we have propaganda. These blue-sky pronouncements about truth being a public good do not move the discussion forward. "Tru…

In Europe we often have public service media, paid for by the public. Here in the Czech Republic the public service media is not perfect (what is?), but they do a very good job. (Which is also why they are under constant attacks by politicians.) Of course, this is not “free”, but it’s high-quality journalism that’s not behind a paywall.

The New York Times is not perfect, but they do a very good job as well, despite what some commenters in this thread may think. And the paper is not run by a political appointee, as are most of the public service media organizations in Europe (Radio France comes to mind).

I have to wonder: how does your public service media cover events that reflect poorly on the Czech Republic's elite and its government? How did it cover the decision to split from your poorer sister state of Slovakia? How does it cover the vulnerability of the Czech elite to blackmail by the Russian intelligence services? How does it cover the historical issues related to the expulsion of Sudetenland Germans from their homes?

Separately, for what it's worth, the US has national public radio, which is a public service radio largely funded by local listener/donors. It is much better than most media here.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#464

Post by ALittleLight »

vosper wrote: post #456
ALittleLight wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a mistake to judge on one incident? If I worked with someone who seemed like a professional, and then one day he spat on me and never apologized and denied he did so, I'd probably judge that guy even though it was just one incident. There is a difference between making a mistake or being wrong while trying to be right, and intentionally doing something bad or refusing to acknowledge error. Everyone is in th…

The NYT has 4,320 employees. If one of them spat on you, never apologized, and denied he did so, would you then judge every employee of NYT the same as you judge that one person? Edit for clarity, since I'm getting downvoted: My point is that the analogy is not great. You can judge one person for their actions directly towards you. It isn't necessarily reasonable to judge a large number of people by the actions of a…

The Tesla story referenced above is a perfect example. NYT reviewer tells a story about how inadequate the Tesla is and how he ran out of charge and had to be towed. Tesla logs show that he essentially rigged the test drive to get the results he wanted. Tesla calls this out and the NYT basically stands by the story.

You're right that the NYT has a lot of employees. If this were one guy writing a bad review, and the NYT took some disciplinary action against him, wrote a retraction and wrote a new article, then I wouldn't hold it against the NYT and I would probably increase my respect for them. They had a problem, employee did bad work, and they corrected it - that's good.

Instead, they just stood by the bad work and kept on without doing fixing the core issue. "It's just one person" doesn't really make sense because it's actually the whole organization not correcting problems originally caused by one person.

Put another way, if they're willing to lie and district to get a more sensational car review, what else are they willing to lie about? Who knows, perhaps they'll lie about some country having weapons of mass destruction to help trick the country into a pointless war. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme - obviously they'd have to be extremely far gone to do anything like that.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#465

Post by Nasrudith »

SkyBelow wrote: post #227
blueyes wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the author of this piece want? The "truth", or even a plausible interpretation of the facts, is expensive to produce. It is even more expensive when you do it every day covering a wide array of topics. If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. It's that simple. Sure, the New York Times gets a lot of things wrong. So does everyone else, including many commenters on HN. * But a lot of what the New Y…

>If you value facts and good analysis, pay for them. If you have a society where people must pay for truths but are given lies freely, then should we be surprised when people believe lies? Given those people have equal say in how things are ran as the people willing to pay for truth, doesn't this cause a social level problem?

The thesis itself is false and the implications fail because of it. Paying is no guarantee of the truth and it being free is no guarantee of falsity. If free was always false then they could be filtered more or less to subconscious effects in a "Don't trust the tabloids about batboy being the love child of the pope." sort of way.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#466

Post by Nasrudith »

lootsauce wrote: post #201
sandoooo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in wholehearted agreement on a tax on lies so long as I get to decide which articles are lies.

Again why is THIS downvoted? Am I taking crazy pills or are downvotes completely meaningless?

Poe's law I suspect despite the dripping sarcasm pointing out how stupidly exploitable and violent to the truth said "solution" would be.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#467

Post by Nasrudith »

The central thesis, that the truth must be paid for is fundamentally wrong. Even if many experts may require payment it is no guarantee that what is paid for is true.

Furthermore payment isn't always needed to publish the truth. There are agendas which aren't neccessarily a bad thing or untrue. An honest victim of a crime or travesty would have an agenda!

Anyone claiming to be a victim may or may not be telling the truth but they would not need any payment to want to have their story told!

That isn't to say that unpaid could be a complete replacement but every issue cited for free could also occur in paywalled ones including nobody wanting to pay for an expert.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#468

Post by kaicianflone »

schemy wrote: post #427
PakG1 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sure, but this all unfortunately feeds into the motivations of conspiracy theorists. Maybe it is what it is, but what can we do to stop the wave of noncritical thinking washing over the Internet, where people insist that they are the only wise ones? Are we just doomed? I realize that media has lost its credibility in the eyes of many, I just wish that there was a good amount of high-quality critical thinking to…

Your conspiracy theory is a conspiracy fact when you think about peoples motivations. Take the current virus. We realize that the republican version of 'it's a hoax and everything is fine' is a lie. But so is the democrat version of 'you need to never leave your house or you're a murderer'. The simple fact is that without having solid numbers for: 1). The true infection rate. 2). The true age-adjusted mortality rate.…

I don't think it's a democratic perspective to be on the safer than sorry "version of the virus".

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#469

Post by gonehome »

jimkleiber wrote: post #459
jimkleiber wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This answer you've written is one of the reasons why I keep coming back to HN. I think I expect most online conversations to devolve into ad hominem attacks, whether towards me or the third party to whom we refer, and yet this didn't. I worried it may become antagonistic, but on the contrary, I feel grateful for what you've said and how you've given me more to think about. I often prefer dialogue to debate—a conversa…

Oh, and the LessWrong article confused me lol. I'll take another look when I'm in a more calm, less rushed, state of being :-D

Yeah it's a little unnecessarily complicated with the many worlds bit.

The main idea is a clever arguer can start with any conclusion and then retroactively select the points that support their conclusion while ignoring any evidence or points that contradict it. If you do this then the points you bring up don't inform much because you've already decided the conclusion based on something else (in the example it's whoever paid the most for their arguments).

It's better to start with trying to understand things and then using what you learn to inform a conclusion.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#470

Post by schemy »

kaicianflone wrote: post #468
schemy wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your conspiracy theory is a conspiracy fact when you think about peoples motivations. Take the current virus. We realize that the republican version of 'it's a hoax and everything is fine' is a lie. But so is the democrat version of 'you need to never leave your house or you're a murderer'. The simple fact is that without having solid numbers for: 1). The true infection rate. 2). The true age-adjusted mortality rate.…

I don't think it's a democratic perspective to be on the safer than sorry "version of the virus".

Sorry you're homeless over something that is no more dangerous than a bad flu.

Without answering the three simple questions I put there, there is no way you can prove that the above is wrong.

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