Mistakes Are Embarrassing the Publishing Industry
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I realize this isn't as widely held a view as it was 10-20 years ago, but bloggers used to be looked at with disdain, untrustworthy because of the lack of reputability that came with published materials.
This makes me further question whether there was much gatekeeping at all even before this fake news, post truth era.
It was much harder to comment on things and have an international audience for your outrage. Basically to criticize a piece of work was reserved to a few professional critics writing in newspapers. Now everyone who spots a mistake can write about it on Twitter, Amazon review or plenty of other channels.
It was common to write replies in long form and mail then into newspapers, which would then publish them.
Only if the newspapers themselves allowed it. Newspapers could suppress public criticism that came their way through this channel if they so chose.
These weren't just yellow-journalism tabloids, but two or even three genuine competing reporting organizations. They fought to be the first to publish, but couldn't afford to simply publish falsehoods, or fail to admit mistakes.
Not that they were paragons of honor all the time. They're humans. But it did set up a pattern of keeping each other honest, which they maintained to a large degree after they could no longer sustain multiple papers. That has diminished substantially as they're competing against Internet-style "move fast, break things, nobody cares what you wrote yesterday" publishing (and before that, 24 hour TV that wants to present a constant crisis so that you must never turn it off).
So there was less "suppressing public criticism" than you seem to be implying. It happened, to be sure, but it was very different from the current self-swallowing echo chambers you get today -- at least among the major newspapers. Modern journalism, even the comparatively mainstream stuff, has a lot more in common with those yellow journalism tabloids.
Also I don't think I ever wrote a response to any newspaper in pre internet times, that's a lot of work just to be heard.
It was fun, and I certainly _felt_ like I was being heard - first when I saw my words in print, and again when selected replies would get published a week later or so.
Ultimately, I suppose not so different than posting to $platform_of_choice and waiting for replies/retweets/etc. Just slower.
For example, in a case cited by the article an author did employ at least one fact checker[0] who was an ostensible expert and who describes a reasonable effort but who still got it wrong (maybe).
In another example, the article alludes to "mistakes" which was actually plagiarism.[1]
If the question really is a matter of trusting books or not, then maybe a reasonable heuristic is to identify the agenda of the author and weight more heavily the writings of authors with divergent priors, similar to Slate Star Codex' idea of adversarial collaboration.[2] An example is Kahneman and Klein's Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree.[3]
0. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/naomi-wolf-outrages-gay...
1. https://twitter.com/mcmoynihan/status/1093290016632115202
2. https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/adversarial-collaboration/
After the debacle with Lehrer, I'd be amazed if the New Yorker wasn't fact checking everything the print, down to their ad copy.
- Too much hypothesis-driven science that results in statistically significant, but untrustworthy results. It's easy to find statistically significant data to backup whatever crazy thing your brain comes up with.
- Too much pseudo-scientifically backed popular press. Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers.
Wow, never seen this worded so clearly before. Thanks for the great summation buboard!
The NY publishing system is set up so that editors spend most of their day doing tasks unrelated to actually editing their books, of which they have too many. It gets worse as you go up the food chain.
However your previous remark about Richard Dawkins opening up a Bible is a bit worrying.
It is obvious that the missing historical information is not in the Bible, and that remark can be interpreted a bit like the point of view of Jehovah witnesses, that all you need to read is the Bible.
Having read Dawkins, my primary critique of him overall is that he regularly demonstrates a willful ignorance as to what religious people actually believe. He’s content to attack straw men and not the propositional truth claims at the heart of religious belief.
They omitted some critical information last week in the Kavanaugh story and blamed it on editorial process.
Reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly said in an interview on MSNBC that they wrote in the draft of their Sunday Review piece that a woman who Kavanaugh was said to have exposed himself to while a student at Yale had told others she had no recollection of the alleged incident. Their editors, they say, removed the reference. “It was just sort of. . . in the haste of the editing process,” said Pogrebin.
Couple more of these and they will be in Buzzfeed level of trustworthiness.
The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.
This is unnecessarily harsh. The New York Times is a massive company with hundreds of journalists and editors.
If every once in a while a journalistic organization makes a mistake, I think it's reasonable to point it out, have them publicly correct the record, and then let it go.
Harping on every honest (if sloppy) mistake as if it is evidence that an organization is totally incompetent or dishonest is something autocrats do to de-legitimize journalism itself. So long as 99% of the time, they don't make mistakes, and so long as they promptly acknowledge and correct the mistakes when they are called out, I think journalism done in good faith (like the work done at The Times) deserves our benefit of the doubt in an era when it is under unprecedented attack by leaders worldwide.
The difference now is the agenda is obvious because more viewpoints are available online, and in the past the agenda would - sometimes - be supported with hard journalism from real sources, including field reporters.
Now there's a lot more newswire and PR copy pasta and Google searching.
I'm fine with this, so long as they don't insist on their objectivity. Otherwise everything they say must be filtered through an undefined lens that readers either a) don't have time for and are thus victimized by the 'untruth' or b) believe and desire the confirmation bias and are thus victimized by misinformation.
It seems bias is becoming encouraged, quite disappointing.
However, this mistake was a piece of information that even the Washington Post said was the reason they did not report on it [1]. To confound it, this was a piece seemingly to drum up interest for the books that the writers of the story also wrote.
Those facts don't make this seem to be an honest mistake. Those facts makes it look to be two authors promoting a book and hoping a bombshell article will drum up sales for their books. It's awfully convenient that the editors took out a couple of details that make it a non-story.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-book-on-kav...
My take on all of that was the Saddam Hussein was running a con. He wanted his regional adversaries to have the thought that he had WMD but wanted the UN inspectors to never find a "smoking gun". The analogy would be someone making a gun gesture in their coat pocket and then finding themselves confronting someone who really does have a gun...
On top of that he clearly didn't adhere to the restrictions imposed on him after the first Gulf War leading to the second Gulf War to eliminate any possibility of him having WMD and to enforce the restrictions.
Other explanations for our motivation to go to war never made sense to me such as "it was for the oil". Much cheaper (in blood and $$) to just purchase the oil if that was our goal, but the oil economy is basically private so it doesn't even make sense as a government goal. But I digress...
https://mobile.twitter.com/thymetikon/status/113170257787850...
Re: just reporting the facts. Look in a journal or in data tables for facts. News is propaganda to sell newspapers. Everything else is secondary to that for them.
Are there examples of this happening? Michael Wolff's book was a bestseller, for example, despite many of the factual disputes coming up prior to its release.
In theory, lack of fact-checking would seriously hurt a traditional media outlet, as it could reduce traffic or subscriptions. For authors, however, it's not exactly the same calculus. Once the book is sold, it's sold (I realize it's a bit more complex than this with advances and returns, my point is that convincing someone to keep paying them monthly isn't a concern). Once they become a best-seller, they'll be able to put "best-seller" in their "About the Author" section. While there's a future credibility argument (which can be partially mitigated by the value of being a "best-selling author"), I'd argue that from a pure "maximize returns from this publication" perspective, there's really only an incentive to fact check things that are so egregious that it could lead to a recall or stop the book from being published in the first place.
This is not a good situation to be in, but the job a publisher is hired to do is to take a manuscript and turn it into something that can be sold in bookstores. I'm not really sure that it should be their role to police this, unless it's published by a media outlet explicitly as journalism.
I'm nearly done a PhD in mechanical engineering. Recently I was writing the review section of my dissertation and I decided to check one of the most used results in my field, the most common empirical equation for the boundary of the "atomization" regime in the breakup of liquid jets into droplets. This dates back to the late 1970s. Turns out that it's off by a factor of about 4 due to a math error. Out of the hundreds of people to examine this result, I think I'm the only one to notice the error. I spent a fair amount of time checking the literature to make sure I'm not crazy but seems no one noticed the problem.
A result being highly cited is no guarantee that it's correct.
The result was a factor of 4 too high (edit: 3.3, to be more precise), which is conservative for certain applications. But for those applications I'd argue that you are typically confident that your device is in the atomization regime a priori and don't need to check.
But it's extremely inaccurate for my application, where you don't want your device to be in the atomization regime. In fact, I only started examining this in more detail because my own experiments clearly contradicted the textbooks, review articles, etc. If someone blindly applied this result then they'd potentially make a bad device.
In the past it wasn't even the author's fault necessarily. The worst case of this was an anthology of Ursula Leguin, "Five Complete Novels" where I quit recording the typos as there would be multiple per page
If the typos are in the printed book, that's bad.
At the very least, end it on a high note that you can be proud of -- don't let it degrade slowly until people are openly mocking it.