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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that most journalists are innumerate. As Matt Yglesias notes, "many reporters and editors don't really understand what they're doing. Reputable colleges hand out degrees to people who have almost no understanding of quantitative methods." [1] These journalists see the numbers as garnishes on a narrative point. They're not trying to put the numbers in some sort of mathematical context to draw sound conclusions. They may not even realize that there is a difference between using numbers for garnish and deriving meaning from numbers.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/12/innumer....

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I've noticed a trend on BBC news.

'[X market/stock] slumps as [thing related to X] [does something]'

Yet when you go and look at the long-term graph, it's well within normal variance. There's no evidence they're connected at all. I'm sure it happens with other media providers too.

Why? Because they didn't have the numbers right, or just didn't check at all. Well, if I'd written a statement like that in an essay during my schooling, I'd be marked down for unsubstantiated claims at best or admonished for plagiarism at worst.

I find it irresponsible that the news rarely cites its sources beyond admitting they bought it from AP/Reuters. I believe it should be enough to prevent them being cited as a trustworthy secondary source until they at least have their justifications to a level that would be considered adequate by a high school history class. It's the only reason citogenesis happens on Wikipedia.

That’s how financial news has always been reported. They need to sell papers, and technically they’re just mentioning two things that happened to happen at the same time.

The problem is that "Sellers outnumber buyers as equity markets fall" and "Buyers outnumber sellers as equity markets post gains" are not compelling headlines.

As you've noted, financial news is post-hoc analysis. It is narrative-based, and not fact-based. Sometimes the narratives and facts coincide, though.

> "Sellers outnumber buyers as equity markets fall"

> "Buyers outnumber sellers as equity markets post gains"

And those statements aren't even necessarily true.

Those statements seem odd, as well. You can't really tell how many of either there are.

> Yet when you go and look at the long-term graph, it's well within normal variance. There's no evidence they're connected at all.

What a completely mathematically and financially illiterate thing to say. Whether or not a market move is within “normal” variance has nothing to do with whether or not it is clearly attributable to a particular economic event. If Jerome Powell says something about rates or Trump tweets something about tariffs and the market moves 1% in the exact minute that happens you can pinpoint the cause of the move with pretty high confidence even if 1% is not significant relative to the long term variance.

I’ve seen this bizarre sentiment propagated on HN before. A lot of people seem to think it’s never possible to identify the causes of market movements (even when obvious market moving news is released).

>long term variance

That's not a phrase I used. I'm sorry the sentiment upsets you; please don't conflate it with mine.

I think you're conflating whether or not there's correlation/causation with whether or not the result is significant. If a stock appreciates or depreciates at the same time that something related to that stock happens, a relationship between the two is not an unreasonable hypothesis.

Of course, there's still the matter of actually validating that hypothesis, and examining whether said hypothesis actually holds true or the coincident timing really is just coincidence and nothing more (or, indeed, if the timing really was coincident between the two events, e.g. whether or not the stock move happened before the event that allegedly "caused" it).

And of course, even if the event did cause the stock move, that's still a separate concern from the long term impact of that stock move. It could very well just be a temporary blip, or it could be a harbinger of some more significant change.

A nitpick: Markets are driven by beliefs and expectations not real-world events themselves. It may not be simple to follow the causation and timing.

Matt Yglesias himself fits that mold perfectly -- studying philosophy at a prestigious university -- and going on to write about economics, politics, and foreign policy, not philosophy. Best I can tell he's never had any kind of role other than blogger/journalist.

He's probably been a full-time journalist much longer than he was a college student.

My spouse works in e-commerce as an expert in international payments systems. Her undergrad degree was an Art/Asian Civilizations double major (with honors work in historic Chinese painting), and her master's degree is in Chinese pedagogy.

By your standards, she's not qualified for the field she has worked in for the past 15 years. Then again, you can't exactly get a college degree in international payments.

I think that explains only part of the problem.

The other problem is that for-profit media would never have an incentive to hire journalist with quantitative skills. There's very little demand for it outside of trade and professional presses and I would bet media companies would have to pay quant journalist at least twice as much as regular ones.

So why should media companies hire and publish quant journalists? There's no good reason.

And that's also why journalism programs don't teach serious quantitative methods - there's not going to be demand for journalists with those skill sets.

The obvious exception to this is trade and professional publications, but those are often subscribed to by businesses with a vested economic interest in the information.

>So why should media companies hire and publish quant journalists? There's no good reason.

So that you can take them seriously. Then again, modern journalism is such a joke I don't know if this is a worthy endeavor

Do they need you to take them seriously in order to support their revenue stream?

Advertisers used to have to take them seriously. But thanks to the new revolution of commoditized ads, they don't anymore.

How about The Economist? I feel like they are doing a good job at a middle path.

There is genuine critique about the inexperienced writers of The Economist (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot...) —however, still much better than any other print media, it seems.

That's from almost 30 years ago. And it's not like there's any hard data, mostly just gossip from a single source.

Now that many of the writers aren't anonymous anymore, is there anybody still saying that it's all young 20-somethings?

I’ve seen more than a few data science-like jobs at the New York Times, and I don’t think all of them were on the business side.

I think it's a bit more complex than that though. Experts within these fields should be a resource for journalists to access, perhaps in some fields - like economics or legal matters - it's prudent for the news organization to have internal specialists that can evaluate the raw data and draw independent conclusions - but that's not scalable. I think the issue is more that experts with vested interests who lie repeatedly to news organizations don't end up being ostrasized and instead thrive, leading more experts to follow suit and putting news organizations in the position where they either need to accept the interpretation at face value[1] or else try and make an inexpert evaluation of those facts. I think this is associated with the fact that the world is growing in complexity. A hundred years ago most people had built or helped to build a house and could call B.S. if a poorly constructed building collapsed and the constructor tried to claim unexpected ground instability - now a-days if the wiring in a building causes a fire that results in fatalities most members of society aren't able to go and look at the sight and reason whether that wiring was faultily installed or whether there really was a crazy factor out of the electrician's control.

The specific example I used above is actually perfectly terrible because I think we do still have accountability in a lot of the "trades" since so many people work independent of large firms and feel empowered to call out bullshit, but that's sort of what I wanted to highlight - it's when we're talking about an industry that is largely consolidated or centralized (like say banking) where everyone who knows what's going on is employed either by the primary party or a friend of the primary party that we get a breakdown of the truth.

1. I.e. Those iraqis have weapons of mass destruction because intel and this mustard coloured powder.

I think the problem is they're not entirely innumerate but they have precious little time or resources to really do their articles justice, and they aren't as facile with numbers as engineers are so they botch them a little bit.

Exactly this, and then there are people who exploit this in order to skew perceptions as described in "Proofiness: How you're being fooled by the numbers."[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Proofiness-Youre-Being-Fooled-Numbers...

I think the problem is more that most economists are innumerate. Economics meets virtually all of the definitions of a pseudo-science. Just because there are differential equations in a paper doesn't mean it's real science with proven predictive power.

(Anecdata, but why not?) In the run-up to 2008 I was having regular random conversations with non-technical people about the fact that the bubble was about to pop. It was obvious to them that valuations were divorced from all common sense.

But most expert economists and/or bankers were insisting the valuations were correct, and there was no cause for concern.

In this kind of context - and there's a very long history of it in finance and banking, so it's hardly a one-off - it seems a little strange to be picking on journalists for alleged innumeracy.

Put crudely, it isn't journalists who do the damage.

imo part of the problem is our liberal arts influenced college education system.

because college has moved away from being a luxury of broadly educating landed gentry to being a signaling of "i can be employed and responsible" the train a generalist approach doesn't really work.

To be specific, there are two types of journalists/writers

1. domain experts that are good writers/communicators 2. good writers/communicators with an ability to pick up domains quickly

at some point the 2nd type of person will be out of their depth. but the 1st type of person is expensive.

Why are Matt Levine and Adam Minter (even Krugman sometimes) such great journalists? All were domain experts first.

Great journalists that were not domain experts still exist, but they are more of the investigative variety. the ones that win Pulitzers.

What about the third and fourth types - paid shills/hacks without a clue and activists with an axe to grind.

i think those reduce to the first two types. paid shills is subjective and can be a domain expert. some even think krugman is a neoliberalist shill.

many hacks are also the first type. see degrasse tyson, jared diamond, malcolm gladwell, arguably pinker. very little substantive base, but great storytellers

activists reduces to the second type imo. if you have domain expertise, you usually hold a more nuanced view and don't come off as an activist even if you are very active. those with a preconceived notion are typically not a domain expert and just use their superior communication ability to prove their axe

I think this is due to how writing is taught throughout school. It’s all about a thesis and supporting evidence. There are a lot of parallels between a good essay and a math proof. And yet, there will always be a gap between them because prose does not have space for the rigor required by math. That gap gets filled with bullshit because the path of least resistance is to pick a thesis first, and then cherrypick evidence to support it.

The best journalists are aware of this and also remember the other lesson from English class, which is to consider counterarguments. But even then, there is never enough space for all the counterarguments, so those are cherrypicked too.

Journalists, or people, some of whom are journalists?

The latter, obviously.

Journalists specifically, among college graduates generally: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37.

In 2015-16, there were 1.9 million bachelors degrees awarded, of which about 1.1 million were in business, engineering, science, math, psychology, or health fields, all of which would involve significant math/statistics. A further 160,000 were in social sciences, which typically involve a significant statistics component these days. So only a minority, 35-45% graduate in fields like communications and journalism, where math would not necessarily be part of the curriculum.

A start would be that the rest of us stop considering these type journalists. Call them reporters. Call them writers. But journalism is a verb. And if you're not going to act appropriately then you're not worthy of being labeled with the title.

Words matter. They shape worlds. Ironic, huh.

Great idea, maybe you could write a report on it.

Seriously, what is it going to matter what a few semi-anonymous comments on the internet are going to say? The news media has all the exposure and presumption of telling the truth, whereas people writing blogs and posting comments do not.

Having a stethoscope doesn't make you a doctor. Having an index finger doesn't make you a photographer. If you want better and more complete news we'd be wise to stop calling sloppy lazy hacks journalists.

Words matter. If we're going to misuse words then we deserve the (intellectual) abuse we get from those we are allowing to run wild.

The Orwellian use of the word journalist / journalists is one of the most ironic quirks of the 21st century.

Journalism is a noun.

Metaphorically it's a verb. It is the things you do or not. For example, fact check. The problem is, the belief that it's a noun and a noun one can assign to themselves; that has no formal definition.

If we want to user the word journalism / journalist properly and fairly then the easy way to do is to think of it as being a verb - like leadership. Leader isn't a title. It's actions you take. Just like journalism.

Words matter. They shape worlds. Ironic, huh.

‘Leadership’ and ‘leader’ are also both nouns.

And metaphorical and abstract are what? Words you don't understand? Geez.

Calling the absolute numbers re subprime loans a "garnish" is subjective at best and wrong at worst. Even if the subprime-to-prime ratio hasn't changed much, a large increase in the ballooning subprime total may still be newsworthy in its own right.

>Even if the subprime-to-prime ratio hasn't changed much, a large increase in the ballooning subprime total may still be newsworthy in its own right.

Wouldn't the news there be that the total number of mortgages have grown dramatically? Unless you have a narrative to push that is.

The question is how large the dollar risk of default is.

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