"Think tanks are natural lobbies w/a facade of "research" Their cover allows them to censor dissent from monoculture"
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/902859415375798274
OT: I'm curious how many hours will this post survive on the front page
It is ridiculous that either is taken serious.
I couldn't put out press release on my amateur research and expect to get articles printed in several national papers, simply because they wouldn't take me seriously.
Furthermore they get less and less time because they do more and more lobbying.
http://www.altinget.dk/civilsamfund/artikel/taenketanke-faar...
"Expect?" No.
But:
- Write a press release with a sufficiently "useful" headline. Ideally add some research with a conclusion that supports the headline, too, but that's really optional. Write well, and offer lots of both clever "sound bytes" and entire copy-pasteable paragraphs. Journalists are busy and/or lazy.
- "Useful" means that it fits a narrative being advanced by the part of the press you're interested in. However important your story is, without that hook it goes nowhere. With the right hook, a story about goats in Siberia can end up on the front page. These days, a novel edge on the ways that tax cuts shockingly benefits people who pay a lot of tax ("the rich") more than people who pay less or no tax ("the poor") is a shoe-in.
- You'll need some sort of credential, but not much. By the time anyone figures out your PhD is in marine biology and not economics or tax policy or Siberian goats, or the think tank or NGO you're chief researcher of operates out of your kitchen, the world will have moved on.
- Finally, you need a bit of luck, ingenuity and cheekiness getting the release in front of a journalist. Most of them are on Twitter and Facebook, and that seems to be where they do most of their research anyway, so that's a good start. You're going to want to offer them an exclusive.
Incidentally, this is basically how all of these "think tanks" operate, except with a few established press contacts and a sort of short-circuited credentials loop.
The real "fight" is upvotes and substantive comments vs. people blindly flagging articles they disagree with.
Not long. HN heavily censors any criticism of Google and yet any blog post from one of the official Google sites stays on the front page for a whole day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136918
It was censored by HN admins as a dupe.Even thought it's different from the other Google story about firing of a critic.
The WaPo article adds nothing materially new to a conversation about Open Markets and Barry Lynn's firing.
Dozens of stories daily are marked as dupes to keep related conversations under one roof. I completely support marking the WaPo story as dupe and directing folks to the NYT discussion.
For sure, Googlers downvote a lot of critical comments and surely flag posts they feel are inaccurate. There are a LOT of Googlers and quite a few of them are very active here. Some are even vocally opposed to disclosing their employer.
The other thing is that many posts critical of companies are extremely controversial here. HN is a weird mixing pot of startup folks from the Valley and hackers and code enthusiasts, so there are some very pro-business and very anti-business voices.
Where this plays in is that HN tends to push threads with a lot of argument and debate off the front page much faster. Announcements of new products aren't nearly as controversial as a post about say... James Damore's memo.