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Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

math.columbia.edu

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Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#91

Post by sriram_malhar »

cm2187 wrote: post #59
electric_muse wrote: post #13

[flagged]

From the WSJ article: > The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory. I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance,…

Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration.

That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#92

Post by jacobgkau »

JackYoustra wrote: post #81
OutOfHere wrote: post #66

The 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 suff…

> corrupt What do you mean when you say this? > prematurely rejected What does this mean?

>> prematurely rejected

> What does this mean?

I'm assuming it means rejected "without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development," as stated in the rest of the sentence. What do you think "prematurely" means?

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#93

Post by tracker1 »

ejstronge wrote: post #79
tracker1 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 betw…

My understanding is that the workers are actually contractors and not direct employees of Samsung and were left to make their own Visa arrangements and instead of getting the correct Visas to be able to actually work in the US, they used business travel (B-1) Visas which are supposed to be for temporary travel in order to enter the US for a maximum of 6 months.

This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#94

Post by ch4s3 »

davidw wrote: post #38
SilverElfin wrote: post #25

Earlier 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?

The NYT has some pretty serious problems of its own, although they're subtler in nature. This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening: https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in... The press has a lot of problems right now: * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance. * Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The pa…

> * Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs

This has more or less always been the case.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#95

Post by intalentive »

jeffbee wrote: post #84
intalentive wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the evidence for this claim? Seems at odds with the details reported here: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

You don't think writing Helldivers memes on shell casings means anything?

"Hey, fascist! Catch!", "Bella ciao" and three arrows are all antifascist. I would assume that the shooter is motivated by antifascist political ideology at odds with Kirk's political ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows

The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#96

Post by mikert89 »

ejstronge wrote: post #77
mikert89 wrote: post #31

WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything

> WSJ and the like just hire for pedigree. You end up with careerists writing generic articles, and injecting political opinion into everything I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.' When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make muc…

I’m saying that modern journalists are in many cases careerists, in a way that was not true 50 years ago

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#97

Post by etblg »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #82
Terr_ wrote: post #14

The linked WSJ article has an interview-quote from Scott Aaronson: > Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding. I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive…

> finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed. It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate. Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in an…

Error: Compiler warning: Appeal to Authority fallacy detected on line 8, your argument is hereby invalid

or whatever fallacy nerds like bringing up in debates, just pick your favourite one and insert it here.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#98

Post by mattmcknight »

seydor wrote: post #18

In the past it was the postmodernists attacking physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism) It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science

"the postmodernists attacking physics"

The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.

The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).

It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#99

Post by Eisenstein »

nilkn wrote: post #44

A couple thoughts: - The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't kn…

The author is a member of the academic community and are known for their grounded and informed takes on topics which are extremely complex and only well understood by high level physics theoreticians and researchers.

They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.

Re: Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ

#100

Post by danaris »

muglug wrote: post #70
tiltowait wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...when the truth is that no news source is unbiased. Period.

Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!

In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".

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