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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

I know we're being trained to hate journalists these days, but that quoted sentence is just stating a fact: the biggest drop since dotcom bubble... and the article reads very reasonable. I don't see anything controversial in there - seems to balance the negatives with things like "the rate of decline abated" and "the decline in industry sales didn’t stop investors betting on a future rebound." - how is that sensationalist? Maybe they could have reported it as "19th best year since dot com bubble"?

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As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics, where they say something like, "this batter on sunny days in April has an advantage against left-handed pitchers."

While it may be true, it feels more like p-hacking than some kind of useful fact.

I felt like the financial industry was really doing this early in 2019, after the huge drop in stocks, everyone was like the S&P is up 20% this year already (forgetting to mention it was down a huge amount in December and ready for a comeback).

Of course how you frame these numbers and which numbers you pick is part of the reporting. When taking numbers of out of context, I think it can get a little sensationalist.

> As someone who watches the financial news, it almost feels more like baseball statistics...

If you hear a loud banging noise, don’t buy?

GP's point is that someone predicting a bang based on increasingly obscure and cherry-picked data does not in fact reliably predict a real bang in the future.

According to EMH, all information is subsumed into the price. As such, how could the huge 2018 Christmas drop affect future returns?

How could there be a huge temporary drop, with your view of the EMH? The fundamentals can't have changed that much. If they did change that much, and the market absorbed new information, then the price wouldn't have come back. The only way you can retain a belief that the price is "correct" is by imagining there are invisible error bars somewhat bigger than the size of the fluctuation.

Maybe EMH isn't correct?

Statistically it's not incorrect.

While you should be skeptical of strong forms of the EMH, all evidence points to weak forms of the EMH being true.

A corrolary that is good to keep in mind is "markets are more efficient than you're smart" -- prevents you from starting doomed financial enterprises

Weak forms of EMH are almost certainty correct. If they were not, you could beat passive investing with relatively little work, and that is impossible.

The article cannot be distilled to that single sentence. Framing the financial facts as a precursor to a recession by explicitly referencing the last tech bubble that burst carries with it implications that a skimmer may take away from the article if they weren't reading very critically. This is what FUD looks like in the wild. It's much more subtle and devious than the millions of Twitter bots spamming "sell $TSLA".

You don’t like Mike?

By "being trained" do you really mean that we are thinking more critically about the information fed to us?

We've always been trained to think critically about media (I even had classes on it in high school - one called "critical thinking"!). Seems like now it's just "hate journalists" not "think critically". If something doesn't fit your world view, just ad hominem it.

I'm hoping I'm just imagining it though (confirmation bias!), and it's really always been like this.

It might have something to do with social media making it more obvious that journalists and news agencies are usually partisan and agenda-focused rather than neutral and content-focused.

Political journalism (domestic US and international) has completely gone to shit. Tech journalism has slowly fizzled away into just clickbait and financial news has slowly drifted towards interpreting Ouija boards and magic 8-balls.

I think it's nostalgia for an age that never existed, multiplied by a US-based demagogue's campaign against facts.

Journalism has always been deeply flawed and massively biased, yet still useful. The people of the past knew that. You're not smarter than your great grandparents on that front. Tech wasn't some cure-all that opened your eyes but not theirs.

People knew these things.

In my opinion journalism has been destroyed by tech - the tech that drives journalists to optimize for selling online ads. The problem with what's written is not fundamentally political, nor is it the same old same old; it's the fallout of paperclip maximization.

Writing things that leave a false impression, use any and all techniques to inflame, and so on, are becoming the norm due to a runaway optimization process which is massively reshaping society in my lifetime.

Go read some old newspapers. It's clear you haven't.

What do you consider "old"?

100 years or more would be a reasonable start if we're going to have perspective.

No it’s not just nostalgia. The journalism business has totally changed. They once were funded by selling ads and now that business model is failing so they have been pivoting. They have to compete with the free content of blogs, Twitteratti, etc. Totally different now. We used to have serious journalists, they have vanished along with the demand.

So what are suggesting be done?

The “payload “ of this article might be the line that attributes the so called crash to a trade war that damaged free trade. Some partisans consider free trade to be sacred, others, evil.

Disclosure: I lean more towards “free trade is evil”, at least if you are labor, rather than capital. Michael Bloomberg might see it differently.

Edit: and I didn’t go into the article looking for a fight - I wanted to see news affecting an industry I work in, and the trade line jumped out. It’s probably even true, but it’s not hard to to imagine ulterior motives for mentioning it.

> We've always been trained to think critically about media

If that was true, media wouldn't exist because nobody would consume it.

> Seems like now it's just "hate journalists" not "think critically".

The criticism was about a bloomberg article, not a journalist.

> (I even had classes on it in high school - one called "critical thinking"!).

Do you really believe you learned to think critically in a government funded indoctrination center called high school? It's not what high school were designed for. It's certainly not what high schools are equipped for.

> I'm hoping I'm just imagining it though (confirmation bias!), and it's really always been like this.

It's always been like this. The media has always lied. People have always criticized it. Nothing has changed.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day."

                                                                              -- Thomas Jefferson ( one of the people who gave us free press )

Well just reading the headline, I immediately thought that in terms of absolute sales numbers, they were as bad as since the dot com bubble burst...

Only to learn after that it's talking about a percentage drop?

The headline I'm seeing says "worst sales year", and I would expect that to be measured by the top-line revenue number, not in the y/y drop in revenue.

It was the third best year since the dot com bubble (also the third best year in the entire history of the industry), only worse than 2017 and 2018.

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