High energy physics and cosmology have been kind of stuck for years, generating untestable theories. But low energy physics, down near absolute zero, has had a steady stream of new experimental results. Real progress down there. Optical tweezers, attosecond lasers, quantum condensates...
Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
61–70 of 145 posts
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link doesn’t work for me, but based off your comment: I can accept that mainstream journalism is generally in decline in various ways. But it is curious they chose to single out WSJ, which is considered more balanced and less biased than NYT or whoever else ( https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart ). Or is it just to point out that even WSJ is subject to this issue?
Framing it as a spectrum between Left and Right is absolutely daft. In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right. That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
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Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#63WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything
Journalism is kind of a weird thing... it's often been about truth to power and reporting even what the govt/establishment doesn't always want to see. Of course this also attracts a lot of activism. I think they've, for a long while, crossed over to more propaganda over truth in general. This combined with infotainment news business trends in general is a bad mix.
I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#64> I was planning on writing something explaining what exactly the WSJ story gets wrong, but now realize this is hopeless Okay, then this blog post was essentially useless. The WSJ is wrong about something, but the author can't be bothered to tell us what. Pity.
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Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.
Might be worth asking: Why would “the media” do this? Over thousands of outlets?
Because it’s a moral obligation. The fourth estate is critical to the sustainable operation of our system of government and society. The electorate need to make informed decisions at the polls. In the same way lobbyists inform representatives the media inform the electorate.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#66The bias in favor of "dark matter" is a strong example of why academic physics is corrupt. There is absolutely no astrophysical evidence for dark matter, only gravitational anomalies of regular matter, yet significant money has been funded into it for decades, at the expense of ignoring other simpler satisfactory theories. The alternate theories have been prematurely rejected on false grounds without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#67[flagged]
Maybe your society. Finland is doing great with media literacy and resilience to misinformation in Europe.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-f...
As a general rule, you can sit there and moan about problems or you can spend 5min to find proven solutions. It's hard to do both.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#68[flagged]
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#69[flagged]
When the media stops holding people in power accountable, they are no different than idiots with megaphones. The press has special rights because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job.
Do they have special rights ? Perhaps an expectation or a duty.
From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.
Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Framing it as a spectrum between Left and Right is absolutely daft. In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right. That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
How is it daft when we’re discussing a critique of an American institution by another American institution? “Other places are further left” seems irrelevant to this discussion.
When framed in terms of bias, the implication is that things in the centre are unbiased, or that the bias somehow equals out — that you get the best picture by reading those news sources.