Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by revelation | Hacker News Reader

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In Germany, if you ask your employer for a job reference, he has to write it in the most positive words or invite a lawsuit. This leads to the bizarre situation where in such a job reference, everything is a testament to the capabilities of the employee. You can only detect the intended statement by comparing various levels of exaltation and looking for key phrases.

How does this relate to Sullivans statement? It's the same situation: you can not openly condemn the work of a colleague or the NYT as a whole. So you write everything in the most conflict-averse way as possible. That is why its such a "coached" response and 1/2 of it is even the quote from a Tesla supporter.

But frankly, everything you need to know about Broder is in the headline:

Problems With Precision and Judgment

In Germany, if you ask your employer for a job reference, he has to write it in the most positive words...

The US, in my experience, is no different, whether it be job references or letters of rec. Good writers will be able to use nuance to make their meaning clear, and good readers must be able to interpret the nuances appropriately.

The job of a public editor is wholly to fact check and criticize their own newspaper, which itself lends credibility to both themselves and the paper (because a paper that is its own worse critic seems above reproach). They have no boundary on tearing into their own paper.

However the primary complaint of the editor is effectively that the author used poor judgement in not getting every single detail absolutely right with pinpoint accuracy, particularly in dealing with anything to do with Tesla. They said that they turned the temperature down at a certain point, for instance, giving Musk the ammunition to cry outrage when his own data showed that not much further in the journey the temperature went to the minimum for over 50 miles of the journey (which, at the slow speeds recorded, would have been over an hour). It's things like that which have been the topic of most outage about the NYT article, despite not changing the actual substance of the article whatsoever.

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