No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media • Hacker News Board

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#81

Post by zby » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC

The problem is that people don't want surprises - they want confirmations of what they already believe.

"The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/

Somehow we what we value is not information. Maybe it is the political use of it - we want to know so that we can pass it to others from our group?

It is perhaps the number one criteria for evaluating an internet source now - does the author(s) welcome surprises? Is there any curiosity in his writing? Hacker News is still quite good on that. Some others: https://marginalrevolution.com/, https://www.gwern.net/index, https://www.overcomingbias.com/

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#82

Post by ithkuil » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #77

glitcher wrote: post #2

> our opinions should be formed from a careful examination of arguments and evidence on each side of the issue, reading from only one perspective is akin to not reading at all The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith a…

As it turns out, almost nobody actually wants a good faith argument. Public people that routinely engage in good faith arguments, with carefully considering opposing viewpoints, scrupulously and honestly analyzing evidence and making conclusion based on the strength of the argument presented - are routinely attacked for being harmful to whatever cause the activists prefer, not seeing the larger point, enabling the $B…

This. The "other side"'s bad faith arguments are often times so outrageous and patently wrong that even "your side" participates in spreading them and amplifying them by pointing fingers at them. It's like one side has the moral obligation to "keep watch" on the other side and keep finding arguments to remind people that the other side is dangerous and cannot be left unchecked in spreading these lies.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#83

Post by skinkestek » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 10:08 AM UTC

glitcher wrote: post #11

mfer wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings This highlights both a problem an opportunity. How many people know how to make a good argument or how to spot one? How many know what good evidence looks like or how to spot beliefs and assumptions making their way into something? I would…

I absolutely agree. I have been tempted to buy the logical fallacies and critical thinking posters from The Thinking Shop[1] as gifts for certain family members, but I know too much of my motivation comes from the self-centered position of wanting to prove I'm right, which I didn't want to perpetuate. Instead I just read through the posters and ended up recognizing several items I probably need to work on myself. The…

> Instead I just read through the posters and ended up recognizing several items I probably need to work on myself.

Hi unknown friend!

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#84

Post by smt88 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 12:07 PM UTC

vaccinator wrote: post #72

smt88 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be explicit with the types of stories you're referencing? What are "covered" stories that the media still writes about but should stop?

They do it with most subjects because they don't have enough original content to fill in the time.

That's true of 24-hour news, sure. Theu have to fill air time. But most people don't consider that format to be real journalism.

Is there an example of a story on mainstream news sites that was covered without new info? I'm curious to see an example or two, which should be easy to find if it's really happening with most subjects.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#85

Post by sleepysysadmin » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 12:59 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #26

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #17

>My assertion, paradoxically, is that polarization has greatly diminished the quantity of information being produced and consumed via today's press despite the sea of content they produce. Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. Noam Chomsky I agree with Chomsky here. >In today's polarized media, each side of the media discourse has established its perspective, and the content they p…

This level of uniformity cannot come about naturally. Thomas Schelling says otherwise. See http://nifty.stanford.edu/2014/mccown-schelling-model-segreg... and consider the idea of voluntarty ideological segregation in a virtual space.

I haven't seen that before thanks. I believe what it's showing is why echo chambers form or for that matter why people of similar nationality tend to live in the same neighbourhoods.

Not necessarily that all the major news agencies all push the same story and never question or challenge anything. Or for that matter only challenge the reverse.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#86

Post by sleepysysadmin » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #22

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #17

>My assertion, paradoxically, is that polarization has greatly diminished the quantity of information being produced and consumed via today's press despite the sea of content they produce. Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. Noam Chomsky I agree with Chomsky here. >In today's polarized media, each side of the media discourse has established its perspective, and the content they p…

That sounds like a prognosis for a bygone era. There is nothing "uniform" about the news provided by MSNBC and OANN. Though I imagine that what we have now is not the kind of diversity of thought that Chomsky was hoping for.

>That sounds like a prognosis for a bygone era. There is nothing "uniform" about the news provided by MSNBC and OANN. Though I imagine that what we have now is not the kind of diversity of thought that Chomsky was hoping for.

I've never heard of OANN until like yesterday. So I'm very curious where it's coming from. Wiki suggests it has been around for 7 years but I'm guessing it gets no views. Chomsky is not referring to some tiny venue.

He's talking about PBS, NPR, Fox, msnbc, News corp, ATT, time, CBS, and Disney.

They are virtually all the same. The beauty of capitalism is when something like this happens, if you can provide a new product that isn't what everyone else is providing. You can crush the competition. Hence why suddenly OANN is a thing? Though I'm looking at their wikipedia and apparently all they do is report on 'conspiracy theories'.

Which makes sense to me. Anyone outside the unification will be attacked as such.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#87

Post by pm90 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

CyberDildonics wrote: post #54

pm90 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are twenty four logical fallacies listed there... twenty four Genuine question: how does one keep 24 logical fallacies in mind when evaluating arguments? Do you mentally iterate through all these fallacies? Don't get me wrong: they are very valid and I think they will make me better and my arguments better. I just want to understand how people without photographic memories do this.

You don't need to know them all for them to be useful (this falls into what the poster calls the "black and white" fallacy.

Note that I took care to point out that I didn’t believe it was not useful but had trouble with applying them personally. I am not asserting that they’re not useful.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#88

Post by agsqwe » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #77

glitcher wrote: post #2

> our opinions should be formed from a careful examination of arguments and evidence on each side of the issue, reading from only one perspective is akin to not reading at all The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith a…

As it turns out, almost nobody actually wants a good faith argument. Public people that routinely engage in good faith arguments, with carefully considering opposing viewpoints, scrupulously and honestly analyzing evidence and making conclusion based on the strength of the argument presented - are routinely attacked for being harmful to whatever cause the activists prefer, not seeing the larger point, enabling the $B…

That's an interesting point. What can we do as a society to fix this?

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#89

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

mafuyu wrote: post #29

This post doesn't quite do it for me. There is indeed a huge amount of low quality and low information news content going around. However, to me, the issue is not the lack of novel or high quality articles around a single topic or set of topics, as the bell curve bit seems to imply. For one, frequency bias is real, and people aren't able to dig deep into every single issue they read about online. There's just too muc…

>There's just too much of it.

Welcome to the Brave New World.

Re: No surprises here – On the absence of information in today’s media

#90

Post by brokenkebab » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

>When one outlet consistently publishes pieces that align with their perspective, the information content [...] starts to diminish.

Two problems with this statement. It's unlikely to be correct, and it's built on a "the grass used to be greener" assumption.

First, unless skewed data are still data. As a rather extreme example: Soviet dissident Bukovsky recalled that he made his opinion on what life looks like behind the iron curtain from Soviet propaganda by making adjustments, and extrapolations. And when he was allowed (actually forced) to emigrate he found it was not the whole pucture, but his guesses were mostly correct. As a former Soviet citizen myself I can say one can learn to read between the lines, even when available sources don't shy away from producing 100% fakes. Certainly, people who do not filter, and re-adjust consumed information will be misinformed. But then we are coming to the next point: was it any different before? Before (we are talking about USA, I suppose), there were less controversies, because there was just one mainstream (now various outlets need not to be mutually coherent), and media was more protected from outside criticism, but it doesn't mean it was all correctness, no bias, and no corruption. Political polarization probably makes people more sensitive for an opposite side's bias (but not to one's own side), and modern communications give more possibilities to challenge it. Maybe that's why it feels like it appeared recently.