Is there a reason why official government reports never catch traction?
Just a theory but titles of threads do matter. I'm not claiming it's the reason in your case but it might be.
- Your previous title with no activity: "BLS Reports 14.7% Unemployment Rate"
- This title that attracted upvotes: "April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7%"
Your title's matter-of-fact tone is clinical and missing the impact of the 14.7%? Hmmm... the 14.7%... so... is that a lot or a little?
The phrase "rose to a record" is immediate spoonfeeding of the impact to potential readers.
Good newspapers like WSJ, NYT, Buzzfeed, etc know how to craft titles to get readers to click on them. This is often abused and thus disparaged as SEO/clickbait. In this case, providing a little bit of a statistic's impact could be helpful.
So do we want to be correct, or do we want to win?
It's nice if you can do both. Unfortunately, most systems in the world are actively being gamed which means adding additional constraints to systems (like being correct, clear, forthcoming, honest, etc.) often put you at a disadvantage.
Obviously this applies more to comments than to submissions but the comments are a large part of the user experience here so whether HN is "based on this premise of winning" boils down to a question of the importance of the comment section.
I want to win, but I want to make sure that the thesis has some modeling diligence =)
I know I've often fallen prey to this effect. You feel like your team has a disadvantage and then think the other team crazy when they claim the same. Almost like our brains are trying desperately to let us feel justified in relaxing our moral code.
Of course, confirmation biases and other related phenomena help us construct and reinforce these perspectives.
judge Claude Frollo longed to purge the world of vice and sin / and he saw corruption everywhere, except within.
I’d much rather be correct, and let people make their own decisions. Otherwise this thing you call “freedom” is just empty words on a bit of paper.
No, not control - principal reduction of problems associated with climate crisis.
The last tweet reads:
For what it’s worth, nytimes senior editor mark bulik said, “we’ve learned a number of lessons from months of testing... clear, powerful words and a conversational tone make a big difference.”
Haha, 'clear, powerful words...'. That's an understatement.
This Bill Maher clip seems somewhat relevant:
"Guess what government figure just hit 14.7% today?"
"These 3 sectors hate the latest unemployment figures!"
But I think that people want more of a story so they tend to favor news articles over official sources. If you look at the BLS report, it's hard to even read because of the font. I believe both are of value, but that's why I figure people favor the other formats.
The paywall I hit on this article could be one reason.
Regular reporting still appears to happen.
My understanding is that pre-Murdoch, the news and opinion sides were thoroughly separate. Hopefully that isn't getting lost.
"It's okay that mega-million corporation X misleads and manipulates people in order to take money from them, because sometimes it uses that money in a meagerly beneficial way"
I feel like HN has an original source fetish. I remember there was an IPO and the HN submission was some weirdly formatted document submitted to the SEC, it took me a while to understand what it is about. It would be better to simply link to some article which would contain a link to the document for the 1% of people who are interested in reading it.
It’s the search for veritas. We are a bunch of scientists, engineers, and thinking people. We want to go straight to the source and understand from first principles.
Here is the BBC article. You will find the link to the scholarly article at the end. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52560812
edit: grammar
Newspapers provide context and interpretation. And they are designed to be read. A big block of monospace text is not inviting for most people.
I am not saying that this is true, but it certainly is an interesting idea to consider and think about.
Eric´s take on this is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu_-qV-9hMo
Wiki link to the phenomenon in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
Having to construct your own narrative all the time is most certainly too much for any single person. If I had to come up with my own interpretation of everything, I'd be sitting here crunching data all day long until I go crazy. One always has to choose their fights, and for everything else you have to find someone else to trust.
I keep the news on all day on a monitor as I work and unless it's a day like yesterday you'll hear the same headline repeated over and over all day with the same facts.
Now if you want to be an expert XYZ in any of the fields that touch those subjects that's another story, but not being an expert in something never stopped people from posting as one before.
The media (not sure what work the word "mainstream" is doing in this context) cherry picks what will give them clicks and views then runs it until it stops getting clicks and views.
Take scientific reporting. How often is the long many paragraph article written by e.g. bbc ridiculously wrong compared to the few sentence abstract of the paper itself? Sure, I'm not going to understand it all, but the misleading mainstream article that does the work of doing interpretation and narrative for me is more likely to make it worse than better.
For example: there's a new academic paper describing some discovery. I want an easy to understand and accurate summary from the media. What I don't want is them telling me how should I fee.