Hacker News Reader

Comment by JRKrause | Hacker News Reader

"it made the newspapers because of Bell’s allegations of “extreme cruelty” by Feynman, including the notion that he spent all of his waking hours either doing calculus and playing the bongos." I find it hard to imagine a world where the eccentric behaviors and personal lives of practicing scientists would receive newspaper coverage.

View on HN

I find it hard to imagine a world where the eccentric behaviors and personal lives of practicing scientists would receive newspaper coverage.

Really? Such tactics are all over the media nowadays. Read Manufacturing Consent then look for all of the tactics in the western "propaganda model" of operation updated for 2020. The news has never been subtle about this sort of manipulation since at least the 80's. By comparison, what I see nowadays, it seems like journalists think everyone's a mental toddler.

Look for emotional language in articles. Then count up the hard facts. There's an inverse relationship. It's not supposed to be like this!

The most significant separator for me is that, from my understanding, Feynman was an actual practicing scientist. I am struggling to think of anyone in an analogous position today who has received this kind of attention.

Nowadays, we focus primarily on wealthy (loosely) Internet-related businessmen. Do you think anyone really cares about Travis Kalanick's antics or what Elon Musk names his kids?

Not so long ago I think Stephen Hawking was in that position.

But his disease probably got him more publicity than his brilliant mind.

How about Neil Ferguson? He is/was the head of the Imperial College infectious disease modelling team and part of the UK government scientific advisory team.

He had to resign from the latter post after getting caught in a breach of lockdown rules by the media.

His personal life has been an endless source of fascination to the right-wing tabloids (e.g. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8294315/Naked-hypoc... ).

Yeah and it's easy to see why it happened.

In the 80s the fairness doctrine was killed. In short words it required certain forms of opinion pieces to give an opposing viewpoint. [0]

Bringing this back would probably have a bigger impact on politics in this country than anything else we could do right now.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

> Look for emotional language in articles. Then count up the hard facts. There's an inverse relationship.

This would actually be an interesting empirical study, if anyone is sitting on a news DB stretching back a few decades.

Even more interesting would be the news coverage it received.

Oh yes, and in which country. Tone, coverage, country, related situation in that country/media-outlet...oh man that would make press a bit more transparent.

> Look for emotional language in articles. Then count up the hard facts. There's an inverse relationship. It's not supposed to be like this!

Seems like it would be great to train a model on the historical corpus of news articles to visualize this trend and inform readers of this kind of deliberate manipulation. It might also be interesting to have a browser plugin that could use the model to "rewrite" articles to remove the manipulation as well.

Yes, absolutely! The Swiss-Media (once a highly trusted News-source NZZ etc) became a shadow of it's own, its nowadays so easy to spot their 'propaganda' of what they thinks its right. Medias should inform NOT do some 'opinion formation'

> Look for emotional language in articles. Then count up the hard facts. There's an inverse relationship.

Exactly!

For an easy demonstration, watch NHK news (Japan), then compare to any of {CNN,FOX,MSNBC,CBS,ABC,...}.

It's nice that one can be informed without being inflamed.

My copy of Manufacturing Consent has yet to be opened. I need to get into it, as people keep referencing it regularly.

Thank you for the recommendation! I have been thinking about this _exact_ topic a lot recently (for obvious reasons).

This was during the early Cold War, not long after the American Castle Bravo and Soviet RDS-37 tests. Feynman was, I believe, known as one of the more important figures in the Manhattan Project and theoretical physicists in general were vital to national security. Given the background, eccentric behavior and ugly personal events were probably pretty newsworthy.

If I had to listen to bongos every day, I might have agreed with her about the "cruelty" of it :)

To play devils advocate here, this was at a time before to no-fault divorce. For a woman to divorce her husband she was forced to show just cause, such as abandonment, insanity, adultery or cruelty. Cruelty is the easiest to claim. he obviously was not insane, he had not abandoned her for a extended period or to the best of my knowledge been in a affair to she would have to claim cruelty true or not to leave.

Yes, this was quite routine.

Playing Bongos!

At all hours!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com