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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much!

I don't think these are very good rules.

I thought it was especially amusing that this person doesn't trust journalists to write about anything but journalism. If you believe that, why are you interested in reading about journalism in the first place?

HN has an unfortunate fixation on Michael Crichton's supposed Gell-Mann amnesia effect (wherein you read something in the news that pertains to your field, spot errors, get angry, and then forget that happened when you go on to read the next story). I propose the countervailing Djikstra amnesia effect, wherein a technical professional produces workmanlike output with all the attendant errors and omissions that attach to any work produced by humans (Christ knows our field is intimately acquainted with errors and omissions), then forgets they did that, and expects every other professional to measure up to the standard they themselves failed to meet.

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I don't know any of the authors you've mentioned, but in my own experience, not reading books written by journalists is a good rule of thumb. That doesn't mean, obviously, that it's impossible for a journalist to write a good book. By profession, journalism is both shallow and narrow: it focuses on the surface of events in the given moment. That tends not to equip someone with the knowledge or expertise to write a truly insightful book.

As a funny counter-point, Marx was a journalist and Capital is one of the most insightful books I'm reading at the moment.

Is it a total coincidence that you bring this up responding to a user with the name Emma_Goldman?

Anyway, I definitely second your point. I wonder if “Capital in the 21st Century” will be relevant for the entire century (although doubtlessly won’t be as consequential as Marx’s series).

Hah, no, seeing the username is a factor in pushing me to make the comment. I feel as though many books tend to be far less wide ranging, because they take up a smaller view; Piketty's book (going from what I'm seeing on the descriptions, I haven't read it yet) seems to be limited in scope, and less polemical. But those aren't matters of its relevance. So I might venture to say that if we will see a book as consequential as Marx's, its author will see with revolutionary (forgive the pun) clarity right to the most abstract core of their object. In the modern era, there are only three widely regarded as having done so with force: Marx, Nietzche and Freud. I'm still waiting to see what the post-modern era brings out. Who will do to economics today what Marx did to political economy and sociology in the 19th century?

That's a good point, but it's worth noting that Marx wrote Capital with the help of Engel's patronage. Journalism was not his livelihood, ultimately. And it was before the wide-ranging, academic professionalisation of the twentieth century. Had Karl Marx been born today, he would almost certainly have become an academic.

Journalism was literally his only livelihood. He was a journalist/editor years before he even conceived of the theories that spawned Capital, and he did it for the rest of his life. His first newspaper was actually shut down precisely because of his journalism on the question of the rights of poor to gather wood in forests owned by the crown and nobles. He went on to write for at least 3 other papers/journals that I know of, one of which was american and his work was directly on the American Civil war

If you read Gareth Stedman Jones' biography of Marx, it's very clear that there was a persisting shortfall between whatever income Marx acquired via journalism - which was, in any case, fluctuating - and the outgoings of his family. He depended upon regular support from Engels, among others.

oh for sure. I've read a couple of collections of his correspondence, specifically with Engels and its replete with pleas for money. That being said, his only real job, his only job, from university til his death was journalism, and he did quite a bit of it and absolutely relied on it for income along with Engels (and others) donations. Like, journalism makes up close to 3(?) volumes of his collected works.

Insightful maybe but drastically wrong about the whole LTV thing.

I think that's a point if we argued about we'd agree to disagree.

I’m honestly not sure what there is to disagree with. There has been no quantitative evidence supporting it. “Things should cost based on labor” is a nice thought for laborers, but it’s completely unrealistic. Nobody is going to pay twice as much for something because one manufacturer used a really shitty process that took twice as many man hours.

There’s a reason the “criticisms” section of the wiki is one of the largest and links to a full article on it. It’s a religion, not an evidence-driven theory. Prescriptive, not descriptive.

I suppose we would agree to disagree if you believe in ideas not grounded in reality (a.k.a. backed by empirical evidence).

It seems like a rule of thumb that’s served you poorly, given it’s left you unfamiliar with some of the most widely acclaimed recent (and less recent) non-fiction work.

I presume you're referring to the authors the OP listed. It's certainly true that I don't tend to read a huge amount of popular nonfiction, and that I'm young enough to have a generationally limited knowledge of what's out there. But, at the same time, what the best nonfiction books of recent decades have been is an open, and very subjective question. I have my own peculiar interests and proclivities. I think, from a quick Google, that all the books the OP listed fall outside of that space.

It is fine to not be interested in things; there's lots I'm not interested in either. It's less great to have strong, sweeping opinions about things you're basically incurious about.

See where I wrote 'in my own experience'. The reasoning I gave, in any case, holds entirely independently of how encompassing my reading is. And to be quite honest, with the caveats above, I would hazard that I read far more nonfiction than most, i.e. I am not speaking from a position of unusual ignorance, as you seem to be implying.

I have no idea who you are or what expertise you have; I'm responding to your own statement that you're unaware of these journalist-authors because you don't read much nonfiction.

You said, if you are incurious about something, you ought not to make sweeping statements about it. I was challenging the premise, i.e. that I'm incurious about non-fiction books. I don't, by that way, think the claim holds up. It's perfectly possible to be incurious about something and to make a sensible general statements about it (e.g. 'all ducks have wings'). Hence why I told you to engage with my reasoning.

I never said I don't read much non-fiction. I spend nearly all my time reading non-fiction. I said I don't spend 'huge' amounts of time reading popular non-fiction.

You can't really logic-puzzle your way out of 'if you are unfamiliar with books written by journalists, you're not in a good position to make worthwhile pronouncements on books written by journalists'. It's not even an interesting thing to try and dispute.

Easy:

1. The reasoning holds independent of how much I have read. 2. I'm not unfamiliar with books written by journalists.

Whether recently acclaimed works will remain relevant or are just trendy remains to be clarified.

_When Genius Failed_ was written 18 years ago, by a journalist, and predicted many technical details of the 2008 crisis. It's also an excellent book, so if this is news to you, let me also recommend it unreservedly as a good read.

A counterpoint to your point on shallowness and narrowness is Andrew Solomon's "Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity". Journalists, ostensibly, are good at writing, interviewing, and exploring wide-ranging societal struggles. The archetype of journalist has unfortunately fallen into disrepute if they're no longer trusted as relayers of information. On reflection it may be worth distinguishing the 'columnist' archetype from the 'reporter' and 'investigator'. The latter two I value greatly. Although I also value reflection and summation. No mainstream audience wants to read a white-paper on recent Syrian conflicts. For this we need good relayers of information.

Agreed. That said, to give some credit, here are a few I’ve read during the last few years that I can offer as counter examples:

* All the shah’s men, by Stephen Kinzer, about how the 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh was orchestrated.

* The Idea Factory, by John Gertnee, about the history of Bell Labs

* A mind at play, by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, about Claude Shannon

* Ike’s bluff, by Evan Thomas, about Dwight Eisenhower

* The Wise Men, by Walter Isacsson and Evan Thomas, about diplomats during the Truman administration

I tend to be more skeptical about books written by journalists that relate to some specific topic rather than historical narrative. Additionally, I tend to read the historical narratives with more skepticism than I do when I read history books written by professional historians.

> That tends not to equip someone with the knowledge or expertise to write a truly insightful book.

Or perhaps their fallibility in the field and readiness to acknowledge their shortcomings in it promotes lots of cooperation with and review by experts. You note narrowness, but what's more narrow than expecting a single expert in one or more fields to have a comprehensive view about anything, even their own subject much of the time? I can't think of a single person in computer science that I would trust to know everything about that topic, so why would I trust that person to cover it well over someone that has spent a career coordinating information from different people and attempting to distill it to an audience that may not be familiar with it?

And to be clear, I don't see computer science as special in this regard. I think most things interesting enough to cover are probably complex enough that multiple people are likely required to get a full picture of it.

John Carreyrou (ok, I haven't read his recent book, only heard a lot about it) didn't write about phlebotomy or biochemistry; he writes about corporate scandals, something he has been involved with since he first shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Likewise, Woodward and Bernstein are the experts on Watergate. Roger Lowenstein also writes about corporate scandals in When Genius Failed---that may be all you need to know about hedge funds, but it is kind of one-sided.

How about another example: Bill Bryson. He's a brilliant writer and I really like all of his books. Except for A Short History of Nearly Everything. That's mostly a regurgitation of other popular science writers; it is a good read, but if you are fond of the genre, you'll spot his sources and it kind of ruins the effect.

Compare those with J.E. Gordon on structures and materials, John Clark's Ignition (which is a collection of amusing anecdotes and settling scores, I admit; the closest in my field is M.A. Padlipsky), Peter Ward (Gorgon), or Mark McMenamin (The Garden of Ediacara, some thumbs up).

If you want to know the story behind some event, journalists are admirably well suited to tell it. If you want to know about some field, they really aren't. In a world full of books, reading a journalist writing about phlebotomy or biochemistry is probably not all that useful.

I'm definitely in agreement about your Dijkstra amnesia effect.

I think you might be selling Carreyrou short. The "corporate scandals" you're saying he wrote about are, in many cases, scandals because he broke the story about them. There might still be a Theranos as a going concern if it weren't for him. He's not like Andrew Ross Sorkin writing about the collapse of investment banks in 2008 --- his reporting had a causal impact on the collapse he wrote about.

Read the book! It is a excellent read. There are technical details in it a-plenty.

_When Genius Failed_ isn't simply a description of a scandal, but also a pop-grade exploration of the technical factors that led to the scandal. The book is impossible to write without conversance with its technical subject matter. Which is my point: Lowenstein wasn't a quant, but he was able to accurately and effectively write on them.

Ask quants if they feel that it’s a balanced view of quants though. It might seem accurate to you, but you’re not a quant now, nor were you one during the era of LTCM.

You are in no position to judge how accurately or effectively it was written (unless you judge effectiveness as entertaining you).

I cannot speak on Carreyrou, but parts of _When Genius Failed_ make me think that Lowenstein did not have a good grasp of the subject he was writing about.

For example, when discussing LTCM volatility strategies: >The stock market, for instance, typically varies by about 15 percent to 20 percent a year. Now and then, the market might be more volatile, but it will always revert to form—or so the mathematicians in Greenwich believed. It was guided by the unseen law of large numbers, which assured the world of a normal distribution of brown cows and spotted cows and quiet trading days and market crashes. For Long-Term’s professors, with their supreme faith in markets, this was written in stone. It flowed from their Mertonian view of markets as efficient machines that spit out new prices with all the random logic of heat molecules dispersing through a cloud. From this quote it looks like Lowenstein believed that 1. Volatility is not mean reverting 2. The reason people at LTCM believed volatility was mean reverting was due to complex mathematical models rooted in market efficiency. Now, volatility mean reversion is something that can be easily seen by looking at a graph of volatility over time [1].

Also, Lowenstein does not do a good job at describing the way LTCM modeled risk, and the way it failed. In fact, he barely even tries. He just hints here and there about "correlations going to one", but nothing more. For example, which assumptions failed? Did they assume that different kind of bets (relative value between bonds, merger arbitrage, arbitrage between double-listed equities, etc) were uncorrelated? Did they get hurt more by different kind of bets being correlated, or by some bets going particularly wrong? Did they stress test their risk measures in any way?

[1] E.g. https://a.c-dn.net/b/4tKv1V/Forex-Trading-Video-SPX-and-VIX-...

We are in a period of transition. Moving from info scarcity to info overload didn't come with a migration booklet.

It doesn't help that everyone's attention is being hacked simultaneously. Nor does it help that the internet allows you to reach everyone on the planet, whether you are worthy of that reach or whether they are worthy of your words.

All I know is in such an environment in flux pointing out hypocrisy is a waste of time. Let it play out. Give it another 10 years.

> John Carreyrou wasn't an expert on phlebotomy or biochemistry. Roger Lowenstein wasn't an expert on hedge funds or technical finance. Eric Schlosser on nuclear command and control? Nope. Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much!

So, your argument against a rule of thumb - a broad, sweeping heuristic never meant to account for all possibilities, and by definition not to account for outliers - is that outliers exist?

Well, I readily grant you: every rule of thumb, ever, has failed miserably at accounting for outliers.

Seeing as how the post you're addressing was written how to triage the endless flux of books given finite time, I rather think their point was, you know, how best to handle the general case - not the outliers.

Rather like, "I will never read fiction whose cover is a sexy lady in all leather holding a knife and leaning on a motorcycle." It's not only likely, but certain, that that will end up excluding really good fiction. But, playing odds on where to devote my time, it's a better bet to avoid such books than not, given my reading preferences.

And I'm very comfortable with the rule that "non-experts attempting to digest and relate complex topics will tend to (a) not be experts, and thus (b) misunderstand, and (c) relate that misunderstanding to their readers, on average, and certainly are far more likely to than relevant experts." E.g., Malcolm Gladwell, who has an excellent reputation for his writing, just so long as you're not familiar with any of the things he writes about. Or 99% of pop-sci books ever written on the topic of quantum physics.

There are good rules of thumb (don't check malloc return values for NULL, just blow up when malloc fails) and bad rules of thumb (no function should be longer than 60 lines).

"Don't read books by journalists that aren't about journalism" is a bad rule of thumb.

I like the idea of the Dijkstra amnesia effect. I feel like it’s due time to birth a system like what Ted Nelson had in mind using RDF or something more novel.

Ever since YC had an RFS about replacing Wikipedia I’ve thought about how it needs to change. There are many shortcomings including the fact that it is hard to edit for a number of reasons, but most importantly going to a Wikipedia page at one point in time only captures that information which may be right at the time or wildly off or as you point out full of omissions. Information shouldn’t be deleted but instead we should see meta information like how other experts weigh in. If someone points to the Wait But Why article on AI it will be backed by the author and Elon Musk (who are both dilettantes), and maybe we can see some experts gave it a low rating.

Part of the problem I see is that often so called experts are just those who are rabidly vocal while the actual experts are heads down becoming better experts. So while we might see hand waving about killer AI from several “experts” we only have a few people who occasionally interject like Rodney Brooks. (This is a bit why I’m not very optimistic about several of these startups trying to show consumers “the truth;” indeed, the Dijkstra amnesia effect.)

> Ever since YC had an RFS about replacing Wikipedia

Wow. Lord knows Wikipedia has problems, but replacing it with a VC-backed startup would be a disaster.

So, imagine if even professionals/experts in their fields are prone to mistakes, then what can we expect from people who know little about a foreign subject?

Then there are things like economics where even the experts in their field can’t agree on either theory or in data interpretation. If they can’t reach consensus being informed and all, imagine someone in a different field like journalism trying to write expertly.

What book reporting on economics that wasn't written or co-written by an economist are you concerned is too influential or widely read?

As we can obviously see, even professionals in medical sciences were wrong about Theranos. How did John Carreyrou, a WSJ reporter, do such a good job reporting on them?

To do journalism well, I think you need insider help: a whistleblower without ulterior motive, corroborating evidence and subject matter experts who can confirm suspicions. So, I think there are ways for journalists to marshall resources and then do their part which is to write a coherent story based on credible evidence and opinion, but much of what comes from journalism is hurried and often put together after having formed a conclusion and finding data supporting the conclusion and omitting data which would weaken the conclusion.

This is an answer to some question, but to neither of the questions I actually asked. Did my questions not make sense?

I’m implying this journalist had the luck of right resources at the right time for the right subject and proceeded in a manner to seek the truth rather than to simply want to bring Theranos down.

W/re economics. We have the likes of Fukuyama and Krugman who have influence on Americans with regards to economics but who are often taken as oracles, rather than accepting they are economics thinkers who can be wrong.

Krugman won a Nobel prize in economics. Like him or not, you can't use him as an example of a "journalist" writing about a technical subject with which they have no expertise.

My argument isn't "all books are good". That would be a stupid argument. My argument is that these rules suck.

In that, I agree with you.

Flash boys was pretty much one sided incorrect views about how HFTs work designed as an advertisement for a new exchange.

It was highly read and picked up by armchair experts everywhere leading to lots of outrage against... not much in particular other than evil Wall Street people stealing muh money.

The Big Short is in a similar category although it wasn’t really an ad so much as an excuse for everyone who overleveraged on their mortgage to pat themselves on the back and shirk the responsibility of financial ignorance onto “evil Wall Street people”. The movie (while entertaining) was even worse.

>As we can obviously see, even professionals in medical sciences were wrong about Theranos. How did John Carreyrou, a WSJ reporter, do such a good job reporting on them?

Simple, medical professionals aren’t equipped to sniff out business fraud signals like investigators of businesses. Given that Theranos didn’t have technology, it didn’t take any more medical expertise to explain that then it took medical expertise to explain Bernie Madoff.

I don't like Flash Boys at all either. But it's not my argument that all books by journalists are good. Ninety percent of everything is crap.

These are heuristics. They will of course produce false negatives. Given the huge volume of available books relative to available reading time in a human life, the most important thing is to minimize false positives.

Whether the particular books you refer to are false negatives on these heuristics is of course a matter of opinion. I don't know Woodward and Bernstein's book on constitutional law; their most famous book, All the President's Men, would surely fall under a similar exception to biography/memoir, since it is an account of their own investigation.

This is the same funny circular argument the author of these "rules" made. If you don't believe in the value of the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did, why would you believe there's value in their account of how they did it?

I think you're kind of cherry-picking examples here. My gloss of the OP's point was "be skeptical of books by journalists on technically complex subjects in which they have no direct expertise". e.g. it's common for journalists who have never worked in a scientific field to write popular science books.

A book about investigative journalism by investigative journalists is rather different.

How is blood lab technology not a technically complex subject? Are you saying Carreyrou had direct expertise with it, or that _Bad Blood_ is an untrustworthy account?

Does Bad Blood cover the tech aspects of Theranos? My impression was that it was more about the psychological and legal stuff.

Edit: ... which obviously doesn't make the book any less interesting.

It does indeed. The question you are asking leads me to believe you haven't read it. As a favor to the thread I will make this plain: drop everything else you're reading long-form and buy a copy of _Bad Blood_; it is fantastic. I didn't give a shit about Theranos. Until I got a couple pages into Carreyrou's book, that is.

There is at least one "holy shit" moment in every single chapter in that book.

Haven't read it. It's been sitting on a pile somewhere. Time to reprioritize!

This method does seem limited. I have read some of the best nonfiction books from Journalists over the last few years: Vance's biography of Musk, Stone's biography of Bezos and the books from Issacson including Job's biography. Author's missing all these NF books due to his disdain for the journalists.

Did you read the post? He specifically calls out biographies as the exception to the 'no journalists' rule and describes why journalists are well suited to write bios.

In other words there's no reason to believe the author would miss any of the books you mentioned by his "journalist disdain".

Speaking of things specifically called out, the HN guidelines ask you not to write the words "did you read the post".

Hmm so better to just overtly state "you didn't read the post."

No. How about, just read the guidelines and find out.

So what you're telling me is that I didn't read the guidelines. Kind of my point exactly. But anyway.

Fair enough! thanks for keeping me honest. Unfortunately edit window has passed so can't fix as suggested in the guidelines:future readers please ignore the question and start at sentence 2.

I'm a big fan of Isaacson's biographies, but Vance's Musk biography highlights the dangers of an author that isn't an expert on the source material: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/895834554245709824?lang=...

This thread, I think, was Musk complaining about a report that he let go an assistant who asked for a raise. He did that, he says so in the thread. He just doesn't like the way it is sometimes portrayed.

Everything in the news is true, except the rare story one has firsthand knowledge of.

Given someone always has rare first hand experience and this is true for all stories that would actually mean no news stories are actually true.

Probably an accurate statement really.

> Woodward and Bernstein and constitutional law? Not so much!

Neither of their books were really about constitutional law. "All the President's Men" is in the "Books about journalism" section of Wikipedia.

Yeah, I agree; I wrote that comment very quickly and needed something better than "whatever you want to call the expertise required to understand the issues involved in Watergate and in reporting Watergate". I brought it up because I think it's pretty funny to have a "no journalists, except when they're writing about journalism" rule. Nobody was interested in _All The President's Men_ because they wanted a Jack-Shafer-esque inquiry into the media and the practice of reporting; what made the book influential is the reporting Woodward and Bernstein performed.

If you want a replacement example that isn't make that point, substitute in Lawrence Wright and either scientology or terrorism.

Making an error in my field doesn’t fundamentally misrepresent another field to the general public though.

So yes, mistakes are expected initially. But the job of the author is to get enough outside eyes to fix it. Historians go to great lengths to ensure they aren’t just repeating a single view of an event. Most authors do not seem to make any similar effort.

There's a reason journalism is called "the first draft of history", and not the final draft.

Also, the idea that the errors software developers make don't have a broad impact on society is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me, but that might be a function of the subfield of software that I happen to work in.

>Also, the idea that the errors software developers make don't have a broad impact on society is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me

It’s also an eyebrow raiser to me, given that’s not even close to what I said. “Having an impact != misrepresent”.

I suspect I’ll be a long time waiting for you to make any correction to your comment that misrepresented what I said though, which is funny given the conversation.

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