Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like to criticize the NYT, I think this is unfair. The original article makes it clear that it's BS. The article says clearly, "scientists and groundwater experts make clear that the dowsers’ methods are unscientific and amount to a kind of hocus-pocus".

What I think people don't understand here is that the NYT doesn't just come out and call people assholes. A traditional journalist is not supposed to insert themselves into the frame to that extent. The highfalutin' journalist approach to the problem is to paint a sympathetic picture of the asshole in ways that make it clear that they are an asshole.

View on HN

I don't think that does make it clear that it's BS, unless you come from a very particular pro-science mindset that's common in our circles but far from universal. You'll note that quote is immediately followed by two wineyard managers explaining how their professional experience suggests the scientists are wrong. I'm confident a substantial number of people would read this article and see it as an example of scientists ignoring the value of practical experience and traditional wisdom.

Compare something like their Aduhelm article from today (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...). The NYT isn't quite insulting Biogen, true, but they're being much more confrontational and not giving Biogen any space to frame the story how they might prefer.

I think this depends a lot on whom you think things aren't being made clear to. Given who the NYT audience is (72% have a university degree, 91% identify as Democrats), I think most of the readership is going to be in the pro-science mindset.

More that that, regular readers of anything learn to interpret in context. E.g., I've long read The Economist. People reading one article there might see them as dull. But as a regular reader, I know they can be brutal; you just have know which particular dry turns of phrase indicate the brutality. I think most NYT subscribers will know how to parse NYT articles and pick up the condescension and undermining in the article.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't really see it as a complete defense. I would expect the point of a paper of record to be that you can take its reporting at face value. If you have to be familiar with its cultural conventions to understand what the reporters are really trying to say, doesn't that still boil down to, I'd better be careful when reading the paper or I might end up misinformed?

If nothing else this should be clear already from these past years. Very few journalist has the kind of absolutely maniacal approach to understanding the world, placing a particular story in it and then effectively communicating it that would be required for blindly trusting a paper of record.

I don't think that the typical view of Gell-Mann amnesia is correct. I think there are issues, topics that are pretty much reliably communicated. Probably local issues, politics, and maybe that's it. Everything else that requires deeper context just gets at least one thing wrong. How wrong is of course an important question, and is usually paper and journalist dependent. (But for example anything involving economics, psychology, AI, the sciences... are suspect.)

I think you're packing a lot into "face value". Off the top of my head, I can't think of a source that I don't understand better once I've read a bunch of it. Words get meaning through context, through expected shared understanding.

Exercises in "true" simplicity end up having their own problems. For example, Up Goer Five [1] and Thing Explainer [2]. Or less cartoonishly, Simple English Wikipedia [3]. There are reasons that more advanced topic are covered in more advanced ways.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1133/

[2] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/

[3] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

I agree the story seems to be about the desperation of these people.

I kinda wonder if ANY portrayal of these people would be ok with the author if it didn't constantly have notes about how foolish they were ...

What's better?

Making a strong case for the desperation of the drought and advocating for practical solutions? Or helping con artists steal huge sums of money from desperate people?

I don't understand where you're coming from / what you think a given journalist's role might be.

Sometimes it's just documenting what people are up to / what their lives are like, what they do... even if foolish.

Are you saying that NYT is supposed to be advocating for solutions you like and not writing about these people?

The truth matters!

I have a bunch of lies I'd like the Times to publish to promote my business. How do I get an article?

Almost uniquely, you cannot get the Times to write about your business--what publicists call a "placement". The Times tells stories that fit the narrative its editors have chosen, and only those stories. If they wrote about dowsers, it was because it fit into (e.g.) the California drought story line.

They could be documenting how people are being scammed in desperate times. That would document what people are truly up to.

They absolutely were. There's at least half a dozen mentions that the technique doesn't work and multiple quotes from geologists. There's no reason to believe that the witches themselves are intentional scammers as opposed to true believers in what they're doing, but it's made abundantly clear that they're providing a worthless service.

That approach just helps con artists rip off desperate ignorant people, promoting a worldview that magic is a viable alternative to scientific reality, a view held by a dangerously large and easily exploited percentage of the population.

I don't think so. The NYT's customers know how to read an NYT article like this. I expect very few will come away with the notion that they should hire a dowser, and that the bulk would read it as intended.

If you have evidence otherwise, I'd be interested to see it.

You lack major introspective skills and self awareness if you think your beliefs are the "correct" ones and the rest of the world is full of fools. This kind of attitude has been on the rise and is a large part why public trust of our institutions is falling. No one needs to be protected from bad ideas they are fully capable of reaching that conclusion on their own.

"Scientific reality" is in the eyes of the beholder, unfortunately. Plenty of people will happily accept 'the science says' type statements if it's something they already believe in.

Show them something that goes against those beliefs, and suddenly you'll be fielding skepticisms of sample sizes, P-values, the ideological leanings of the principal investigators, etc.

People do not live their lives governed by scientific knowledge, and ignoring that isn't going to change the status quo.

They shouldn't have ran the story at all. At best, it's juvenile.

Why not though? It's happening. They report things that are happening. The story says about half a dozen times that the technique doesn't work and quotes as many geologists as it does witches. Popular belief in superstition is still newsworthy. As is reporting on religious movements or QAnon.

Why's that? As a California resident, I'm very interested in local pseudoscience. As the article suggests, there's an important contrast between the Bay Area's high-tech reputation and what's happening in the region.

Imagine the article was about a right wing anti-trans activist. The criticism would be that the NYT was providing a platform to someone that doesn’t deserve it.

But this water witch is clearly a fraud. They are giving a platform to someone who does not deserve it because that are ripping off people. They are humanizing a fraudster.

I would think that TERFs etc cause and contribute to a significantly larger amount of human suffering than water dousers, though.

>They are humanizing a fraudster.

So? Fraudsters are human, though, as obvious a statement as that is.

For sure. And I want to caution against seeing all dowsers as fraudsters. Fraud for me is in the "knows or should have known it's a lie" bucket. But I'm sure a lot of dowsers believe in what they're doing.

As one of the sciencey experts explains, it's perfectly plausible that some dowsers do a decent job because they have a subconscious knowledge of landforms and how they relate to water. So this may not be fraud so much as ignorance of how they actually work.

Given the extent to which the tech industry is coughing up "AI" solutions that are also driven by neural networks, only some of which actually work and the rest work for mysterious reasons, I think we can treat dowsers as human.

That used to be the case but in the last ten to fifteen years the prestige press has been moving away from these norms (under the influence of a generation of journalism professors that became dominant ten to fifteen years before that.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com