The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

The newspaper's ombudsman declined to punish the reporter in any way, or admit anything other than "oops, mistakes were made". That's what makes it a failure of the newspaper and not just "less-than-perfect" reporting. It's one example from a pattern of behavior, and the reason people are saying the NYT no longer have industry-leading editorial standards.

Let me remind you that the reporter was caught red-handed driving a car in circles in a parking lot so that he could have a more salacious story about "running out of gas". The original article stated that he coasted off the freeway into the parking lot with no energy remaining. There's no two ways about it: That's a lie.

How low do you need the p-value to be before you reject the null hypothesis? 0.0005? 5e-9?

Nobody is disputing that news is a hard business, but you can't have it both ways: If you're going to run a serious newspaper, then you need to run a serious newspaper. That means upholding editorial standards. Most importantly, that mean having real repercussions for reporters who break the trust of your readership.

> "ZOMG ALIENS!" is complete nonsense, but ... it probably also drives traffic, and thus revenue.

The owners are completely within their rights to pivot and turn the NYT into the next buzzfeed. But you're just reinforcing the point that it is no longer a serious newspaper.

Unfortunately both my memory and Google are failing me on this one. Maybe someone in the comments will contribute.

NYT is no more in the business of credible news than the Wall Street Journal or Fox News. That’s simply not their business model. They all take unbiased Reuters coverage and add spin to appeal to their audience and distort the truth in the process.

Which is not to say they don’t happen to report things that actually happened, but the weather channel is a prime example where keeping people entertained is vastly more important than keeping them informed.

Of course, this is not “free”, but it’s high-quality journalism that’s not behind a paywall.

And that's the thing: if you cannot trust that someone makes their point as neutrally as possible, they become worthless for me as a source of condensed information. Rather look up the original source then for myself.

Well, yeah. Sounds like some serious Gell-mann amnesia.

I'm surprised Paul Graham would act surprised by this.

The current affairs article was extremely tedious, whatever good point they might have made was hurt by its self-assured hostile tone and personal attacks (basically an example of the kind of thing PG's essay was talking about).

There are a few essays that get into the weeds and give more explicit examples of problems (something PG probably avoided because of the issues he talks about, but it seems he was also attacked for avoiding them anyway).

Some that give more direct examples/arguments:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres...

https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt...

Also: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

Some others recently: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-...

Take the current virus. We realize that the republican version of 'it's a hoax and everything is fine' is a lie. But so is the democrat version of 'you need to never leave your house or you're a murderer'.

The simple fact is that without having solid numbers for:

1). The true infection rate.

2). The true age-adjusted mortality rate.

3). The asymptomatic r0 rate.

Any policy anyone suggests tells you more about the person suggesting it than about how effective it will be. It could be that reality is closer to the republican version, or the democrat one. But without a lot more science that no one is doing we will not know until decades down the line when people start digging up corpses and testing for the virus and finally doing some basic statistics.

And that's before we even look at what the economic impact is of the virus.

If you can't understand, and also form a series of arguments for yourself, as to why the tin foil hat conspiracy theorist is wrong, why the earth almost certainly isn’t flat, or run by a cabal of shapeshifting alien lizard people, 5G, etc. how are you going to respond to the more insidiously cogent arguments about other more important things that are just as wrong but harder to spot?

I personally credit my upbringing by my religious parents into creationism (the concept that the earth is only 6 thousand years old and evolutionary science is a conspiracy against God.) as what ultimately led to my development of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, as I dug myself out of that belief system and deconverted in my late teens.

I remember feeling so deeply and irradeemably stupid, for being so completely convinced without any reason or evidence. And then, as a result, feeling so desperate for a specific formula or system of thought that could let me avoid this kind of personal failing in the future.

Which led me to listening to debates, learning about things like burden of proof, and the preponderance of evidence. And the very simple and straightforward concept of spot checking whether a stated “truth” used by someone in an argument is actually valid, or if they are lying to bolster their points, expecting (correctly, unfortunately) that the vast majority of their audience will never even check to see if they are telling the truth or a lie.

How else are you going to teach someone to think critically without showing them the examples of what a bad argument is, and how to respond to it rationally? Tell them to just trust the “good” sources? That’s arguably worse than telling them nothing at all.

It certainly is largely the fault of our garbage public schooling system, but the existing penchant to call for the banning and censcoring of stupid conspiracies online as if it were some sort of panacea for stupidity itself is certainly not helping the problem.

I personally don’t consider it the journalists’ fault at all, otherwise we would just end up with an academic journal. It is important, however, to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism when reading the news.

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

> - Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)

From Wikiquote Murray Gell-Mann https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

Edit: Remove markdown formatting.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper somehow has exactly the same quantity and quality of errors about Palestine as the baloney you just read. You turn the page and vastly overestimate what you think you can critique based on your vast knowledge of show business.”

― Crichael Michton

[1] based on evidence ascertained through the Mell-Gann Memory effect

Edit: clarification

Highly-technical subject + lots of nuance + financial journalism = absolute disaster for the truth.

You can try reading e.g. The Intercept, local papers, Democracy Now for a different spin on things, but there's only one thing that actually works is reading several sources, including the papers from "the other side" and trying to figure out which story line makes logical sense. Usually lies are poorly constructed and contain a combination of paradoxes, deference to authority, and appeal to various fears without a firm logical basis. Pay close attention to verifiable information and evidence. Those are the only pieces of information that can be trusted from either the state or journalists.

You're right that the NYT has a lot of employees. If this were one guy writing a bad review, and the NYT took some disciplinary action against him, wrote a retraction and wrote a new article, then I wouldn't hold it against the NYT and I would probably increase my respect for them. They had a problem, employee did bad work, and they corrected it - that's good.

Instead, they just stood by the bad work and kept on without doing fixing the core issue. "It's just one person" doesn't really make sense because it's actually the whole organization not correcting problems originally caused by one person.

Put another way, if they're willing to lie and district to get a more sensational car review, what else are they willing to lie about? Who knows, perhaps they'll lie about some country having weapons of mass destruction to help trick the country into a pointless war. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme - obviously they'd have to be extremely far gone to do anything like that.

But regardless of that, the decision to not apologize and admit they lied was an editorial one. It was their choice to die on this hill.

Separately, moderators purge controversial content as a check/balance to the voting system. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they choose a different site to frequent, as is the case in market systems.

Through the process. You never have to trust the data if you have a good process. Process will verify data. Process will verify sources. Process is impartial. Trust the process, not the results.

Also, I take issue with the attempt to conflate people who are incorrect with people who are dishonest.

There is nothing wrong with being wrong. Being wrong is the first step to being right. You can't be corrected if you're never willing to be wrong. And we can't learn if everyone has to wait to be completely correct before making a claim. Often, we don't even know we should be looking into something until someone makes a claim that turns out to be incorrect on further study.

Knowledge isn't furthered in "eureka" moments where we have all the answers at once, it's in observing something and thinking, "Huh, that's weird", then seeking the answers.

If a scientist is emotionally attached to a result and ignores a result that they don't like, they are no longer engaged in science.

Peer review and replication is the correcting factor for the unfortunate reality that science must be, for the moment carried out by humans.

At the very least, when operating properly science becomes less wrong. That cannot be said for politicians who are interested in nothing but confirmation of their preconceptions.

There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.

Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.

This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.

Not really:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/aug/20/bernie-san...

>The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. The highest is the Netherlands at $4,417. The other four were Austria, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.

So he was rated as wrong for saying 'double' because it was actually 1.65 times for one country out of thirty. Oh and they used the dollar exchange rate for their numbers, not the PPP which is what actually matters.

Multiple perspectives can accurately describe the same event - e.g. the fable about the blind me all describing an elephant.

Each of their individual descriptions is true. There is also a larger truth that none of them are aware of. That doesn’t make them liars either individually or a group.

Additionally, it can be highly politically advantageous to frame, spin, or otherwise mischaracterize, on the thinnest evidence, both out of bad faith and naïveté.

So, about Truth with a capital ‘T’, I’d like to paraphrase PK Dick’s statement, “truth is what exists when you stop believing.”

I am starting to think that ultimately, though, the answer is one that no one particularly wants to admit because it boils down to two unpalatable options, one distributed and unregulated; the other centralized and regulated.

1) Unregulated: No one is the arbiter of truth, in which case a haphazard group of marketers, propagandists and psyops peddlers reign supreme. This eventually/inevitably consolidates into an organized propaganda outlet.

2) Regulated: A group is selected based on some credential or merit and you end up with essentially a Technocracy. More or less what the "Elites" boogeyman is. If the Technocracy is staffed by scientists and engineers, then it might be the best possibility available. But this also eventually consolidates and leads to an erosion of the eligibility credentials and then non-expert people will gain positions within it for ulterior motives.

If the technocratic group is limited in scope of what "truths" it can decide on, then that is potentially a reasonable compromise.

The rule isn't to positively identify liars. The rule isn't to positively identify non-liars either.

The rule is to dismiss as many liars as possible as fast as possible. By immediately dismissing anyone who doesn't want you to check their work or doesn't give you all the information necessary to recreate their work, you will dismiss a lot of liars with little effort.

You will also dismiss some people who aren't lying, but that's actually ok. It's better to dismiss an honest study that doesn't meet scrutiny rather than accept a dishonest study. Eventually, either the data will come out and you can vet the information, or someone else will reach the same conclusion and they will share their data. Liars can never reach that point.

Or regardless of the quality of the public option, you may find that you can no longer afford your private subscription. The public option isn't free, after all—just pre-paid with no ability to opt out—and you may not be able to afford two such services. Other cases where public services "compete" with private providers (e.g. toll roads) suffer from the same problem: You don't get to choose between paying for the public option and paying for the private option. You're either paying for just the public option, or for both, even if the private option is all you want or need.

My impression was that they were mostly older people (50+), and from their style of clothing I could tell that they were mostly poor people, maybe people who got wrecked by Hartz4 reforms in the 90s and early 2000s, and grew a deep hate on German politics and the mainstream. Fringe social media groups and conspiracy nuts just take advantage of pre-existing hate.

> The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre, Haymarket riot, or Haymarket Square riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

Not exactly helpful.

"Today there were protests, and during those protests these things occurred, we do not yet know if the people committing these terrible acts where part of the protest or not"

Instead we get

"During mostly peaceful protests everyone sat in a circle chanting defund the police" while in the background we see buildings on fire

I wish journalists had higher standards, but they don't. I wish the same for consultants, but they typically recommend whatever they're selling, not what the customer needs, so I don't know why journalists would be more ethically, they're human like all of us.

This is supposed to prove that hundreds of videos posted there (many of which are sourced and attributed) are all fake? This sort of ad-hominem nonsense is getting beyond ridiculous.

There's a quote that goes along the lines of "those who don't read the news are uninformed; those who read the news are misinformed".

For me, I see NYT as one of the more credible new sources, but it has a history of bias against reforms to wealth inequality, which is an important issue for me. Accordingly, I can't justify using it as my sole source of news, and I can't afford to pay more than $20/mo total for this sort of expense.

So, an option to pay $20/mo for access to 5-6 different news sources would be really appealing to me. Until then, I'll keep using my 3 free articles / month from the random news outlets that get posted to HN/reddit.

Reader was a synthesis of open web culture - it offered a hub of reading multiple streams of content in one formatted location, and it did so with the support of one of the largest companies on the earth with the ability to use its clout to affect change on other organizations and make that data available to them in the form they wanted. Google could have been the 800 pound gorilla of news publications a decade before Apple News even tried.

But they just, threw it away. That's what I want back - I don't care if it's RSS or some new fancy JSON-backed article exchange protocol - the transport layer and reader app itself is largely meaningless to me; the simple elegance of being able to read the news in one location without some designers notion of layout and overzealous marketers' idea of ad coverage, and having it be quick is much more powerful. No more 2-10MB garbage landfills to serve 20kb of textual information. No more fighting to make the content work on mobile - RSS was inherently responsive and accessibility-friendly.

The technological idea of federated content have largely died because Google decided it didn't want to support them, and nobody else - not Microsoft, not Apple, nobody - stepped up to take the mantle. It had a technological problem for Google - the fact that you could pick another reader meant that there was no instinctive centralization on Googles' service, unlike situations like AMP where they're literally the man in the middle.

And while Instant Articles and AMP are trying to fill that market gap, more often than not what I find replacing it is Twitter, which is comically filled with horrible misinformation and terrible sourcing practices that make it a haven of misinformation instead of... news. And that's a real damn shame.

UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good.

Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.

So no, you can't have it both ways. You can't point to objective reporting and claim it has a bias, when in reality you mean that the reporting isn't showing your preferred bias.

I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide whether to pay or not to pay.

At this point I don't think there's anything I can say that will convince you.

But yes, if you invent some contrived definition of "news site" that disqualifies every left-wing site, only right-wing ones remain.

And I don't understand how that is even relevant to the article - as long as you can "get your news" from some source, that's enough. It doesn't have to pass some made-up purity test of what qualifies as a news site, because readers won't be applying that test. To pretend only right-wing sites share news and opinion for free is just willful blindness.