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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

Scientist: "difficult to interpret... I assume... This is a big leap... ideally I would have preferred... this calculation is at best considered illustrative... caveats aside..."

Reporter: "Opioid Use Explains 20% of Drop in American Men From Labor Force"

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While genuine 'Fake News' is a real problem, hyperbolic reporting that disregards nuance to attract clicks from the lowest common denominator is much more widespread and insidiously damaging. I'd argue that it plays a large role in the polarization of society.

> is much more widespread and insidiously damaging.

Is that "is much more widespread and is also insidiously damaging" or "is much more widespread and is much more insidiously damaging"?

The former. I'm not sure how to determine the amount of damage so I won't rank them.

It definitely helps blur the lines so that full-on fake news can more easily exist and be accepted.

I think that the whole fake-news is just a cry from news outlets clearly supporting democrats. Not that fake-news don't exist, it's the exact opposite: they're the norm and fake-news are the norm because is what mainstream media outlets actually do.

So now that someone is beating them at their own game, they came out for blood and you see facebook effectively filtering out whatever is considered fake news, which is ridiculous on so many levels.

> hyperbolic reporting that disregards nuance to attract clicks from the lowest common denominator is much more widespread and insidiously damaging. I'd argue that it plays a large role in the polarization of society.

So, which is better? That? Or accurate, nuanced reporting that the everyman does not even attempt to read because his eyes glaze over before he's done parsing the first sentence?

The problem is not with the news, the problem is that this is what human nature is. The vast majority of people are amazingly bad at absorbing information regarding things beyond their immediate interests and horizon.

By the time the everyman finishes reading the malarkey he doesn't know anything useful and now believes he has a handle on a complex and multifaceted issue. Ergo he actually knows less than when he started.

You assume that everyman doesn't attempt to read it. Everyman read it for years. The news dumbed everything down when they chased the tabloid dollars.

Again. Remember an early symbol countering the yellow journals was the Old Gray Lady.

And thorough, well researched, objective journalism has atrophied or gone underground in the wake of the digital readership monetization crisis.

And AFK, how many reporters are there now versus news readers? When you can buy your rhetoric and blurbs right from the think tanks in partnership with SocialCo(TM) and have anyone who looks the part read off the script, it makes sense not to spend the money on originality and depth.

It takes some mental acrobatics not to want to call that an ersatz representation or a fools interpretation of what journalism is.

Things are not completely bad, however.

I tend to not go on Facebook too often. But when I do, there are two categories of news (or news and news-like, I should say) items on my feed:

- posts by Nautilus Magazine, Aeon Magazine, along with articles from more specialized journals like Sky & Telescope, etc

- reposts by Facebook friends from fringe blogs

The contrast is so huge, it's hilarious. I read one category for actual information; the other could be entertainment, except it tends to push me towards cynicism, so I end up just ignoring it.

Maybe I should restructure my Google News feed and just use that instead.

The NYT just seems so one sided since Trump (and probably before). I mean there are two sides to DACA and both have merit. There was an article the other day that tried to explain away whites being killed by cops as suicide by cop. That's not good reporting, that borders on propaganda. I mean I know opinion pages are garbage, but damn.

EDIT: Suicide by cop article was Wapo, not NYT. I need to stop reading Wapo.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/1...

I don't even mind that much that they pick a side if they do it at the end, I just want them to present both arguments, and their merits so I can decide.

When the best out there does what the NYT is doing now, we're in trouble.

In the US at least, as the richest country in the world, there's really not very much pressure against anti-intellectualism. It'll work fine for people for a while.

There's too much money to be made to worry about long-term effects.

Totally agree. State of information is moving in a worrying direction. Example: verrit.com - "verifying" subjective political statements.

Fake news is an even bigger problem than opioid use?

No, he said hyperbolic reporting might be a bigger problem than fake news.

Now there's a headline idea!

I'll take it a step further. I see no difference between this and fake news. One has somewhat less repugnant ends, but the means are equally repugnant.

Absolutely, yet we hesitate to call it "fake news," which it obviously is.

Fortune has "1 in 5 Men Drop Out of the Labor Market Because of Drugs".

Wow. I thought you were kidding. That's disgusting. I don't dare link it here for fear of encouraging such behavior.

Buzzfeed: 1 out of 5 men fired for smoking a joint!

Has anyone seen one to the tune of "4/5 men not fired for doing drugs"?

Is that really what the headline said? Because now it is: "Opioid Use May Explain 20% of Drop in American Men’s Labor-Force Participation"

yes it originally said "Opioid Explains 20% of Drop in American Men’s Labor-Force Participation". It was stealth updated.

What is still hyperbolic, since that link is still too tenuous to even call attention to it. The study does not really deserve a mainstream paper headline, but if it must have one, it should be about researchers looking for a link, not a link (maybe) existing.

Also the fact that it "perhaps" covers 0.6% of the total which is 20% of people dropping out, so the headline should be " 1 in 5 of people leaving work might be doing it because of opioids".

That's jabber to evade political nuance. Opoid and drug abuse is obviously heavily prevalent in American society, and is part of their mainstream culture and media. The Americans spent hundreds billions of dollars just in their media push to make drug abuse a part of everyday American life.

Opoid abuse has been _observed_ in other civilizations as leading to a collapse in labor throughput. The Middle Eastern empires, the Chinese Empires, etc... have all recorded _correlated_ evidence of opoid abuse to a collapse in economic throughput, but never "_proven_" it under the "rigor of Western Science".

The real question isn't so much as to _what_ caused the drop in labor force. It is obviously not only drug abuse, where drug abuse is understood to be a symptom of the problem(s). The question that the scientist cannot or will not answer is why the Americans did this to themselves.

In other words, this:

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

I prefer this:

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1623#comic

"Opioid Use May Explain 20% of Drop in American Men’s Labor-Force Participation"

Could. Opioid use Could explain. How would you re-phrase it?

As I understand it from the other comments, the title of the article has changed since originally submitted. It looks like it's changed a couple of times. The original slug:

> opioid-use-explains-20-of-drop-in-american-men-from-labor-force

The current title on the article:

> Opioid Use May Explain 20% of Drop in American Men’s Labor-Force Participation

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