Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year.

Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.

But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.

they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas

As someone with repeated direct experience with the elite corps that staffs their bureaus in Japan, I cannot provide evidence in favor of your hypothesis that they keep a special breed of Pulitzerschreck around for that purpose. They still call me for Japanese domestic political analysis on the basis of a) in Japan b) speaks English c) was in the NYT in 2011.

I believe that you got contacted by a dumb reporter about a Japanese political story by an NYT reporter, but I also know that there are people like Tom Wright getting paid by major news outlets to cover Asia; the evidence I have suggests that those outlets do a great deal of important investigative journalism.

I agree there's good journalism being done but Chricton's observation is not completely off either. The nature of _most_ reporting requires that journalists talk about stuff without being adequately informed. They have to produce stuff on demand and there's little penalty to getting stuff wrong.

In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brush but I think journalism sometimes attracts people who have a different relationship with facts and ideas than I do.

I read a piece by a moderately famous journalist a while ago (and I've been trying to figure out who even since with no luck) who when talking about his practice said that sometimes there _are_ no experts in a particular subject and the journalist has to do a 'deep dive' and become the expert. Now he didn't say exactly what constitutes a 'deep dive' but it struck me as profoundly arrogant and symptomatic of this problem.

Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real.

But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.

What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".

† though I'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values".

I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken-Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).

He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.

I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.

> But of course, that's a silly thing to argue.

I don't see how that's a silly thing to argue. Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different. You don't just call "Gell-Mann Amnesia" upon spotting a simple jargon mistake and call all news bullshit. But people have different expertise. You, me and others here know our CS; many of us also know our maths & physics, and derived specializations ranging from batteries to rocketry. We can routinely spot nonsense in news stories within those domains. Then, we all have friends who are knowledgeable in other areas. Myself, I have a historian in my circle, whose pastime is debunking nonsense written within his field of expertise. If you ask around, between yourself and your friends, you can spot the same reporting problems emerging across many domains. A pattern emerges.

That's not to say that good journalism doesn't exist. I maintain that good stories, and good journalists, are few and far between. You may read a solid, trustworthy[0] report on an important topic every year. Or every month, if you're good at curating your news experience. But these good stories are not what majority of people read most of the time; using them as defense of modern journalism is just plain motte-and-bailey. Regular people read regular news, with clickbait headlines, bad reporting, lowest-effort articles and no attempt at being accurate.

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[0] - But then, if it's not in your field, is it trustworthy or just good sounding? How can you tell?

Or maybe, what's actually argued is something slightly different.

Hah, you can't try to sneak out of this using the tangential Gell-Mann lifeline. You said something along the lines of 'Hard to call it idle cynicism and incuriosity because [overt expression of idle cynicism and incuriosity]'. That's plainly silly.

As to this 'effect' itself, I've always found it strange it's given the weight and consideration that it sometimes is. I'm no Crichtonoscopist and I've never seen the full text of his remarks but given it was a bit in a speech delivered at the "International Leadership Forum" and arrives at the conclusion media is useless, I'm guessing it wasn't meant entirely seriously. It's a little amusing anecdote and morsel for thought in a talk - not some expression of deep insight and hard-hitting media criticism. If someone had come up with it on HN, there'd be legions of black-belt logicians leaping in to check off the fallacies (appeal to authority? confirmation bias? the dreaded 'anecdata'? plain old vanity? it's got it all).

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