pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en
Maybe it's just me, but I use journalists as a stepping stone for learning more about a topic. I see them writing summaries (sometimes inaccurate) of things that happen in the world and then if I'm curious, I try to dig deeper into the primary sources to learn more.
I'd imagine almost every primary source believes journalists get the story wrong now and then, as the journalist doesn't say it the way they would say it. But I marvel in today's world, where I have such quick access to priamry sources to learn more.
> Jessica and I had dinner recently with a prominent investor. He seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. But no one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle.
Lots of qualification and uncertainty.
> What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face "down rounds," which can be damaging.
More qualification and uncertainty.
I think the biggest challenge is in the author taking something so qualified and making it seem much more confident and certain than it actually was.
Would you agree that he was exploring whether start-up investments may decrease?
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.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236980342667575296?s=20
The NYT writer isn't mistakenly summarizing, they're actively misleading. They had to read through PG's post and selectively pick a line that they could stuff into the position they already had, to say the thing they already wanted to say. It's just motivated reasoning and the primary sources aren't being used as sources beyond something they can vaguely mention to pretend it supports what they wanted to say anyway.
That isn't journalism - or at least it shouldn't be.
In reading the PG post, it seems that a conversation with prominent investor, who was confident that FB's bad stock performance would hurt the IPO, led PG to write a post exploring how that may happen.
In re-reading the NYT blurb, I still don't see it as the author saying PG said the FB stock would not go up but rather as the author believed that PG said that "start-up investments would dry up."
And I think it's in that last sentence, in particular, the third to last word, "would," where the majority of the problem lies.
PG in his post included a tremendous amount of ifs, mays, and qualifying statements talking about how he wasn't sure in which direction it would go. The NYT author, I think, just changed his uncertainty into certainty, both with putting "would" in that last sentence, and removing the "If you haven't raised money yet," part of the quoted link.
So, I see it as the author attributing more certainty to PG than he had in his post, and yet, at the end of the author's post, saying that there is less certainty about this, "The party can’t go on forever, but the infamous question must be asked: Is this time different?"
By you saying, "they're actively misleading," I'm assuming you're attributing malice to the NYT author. I guess I just see journalists and politicians (and many people in general) speaking with an utmost certainty on behalf of people who speak with qualifications and attribute it more to the desire to condense words and present a confident argument than the former. Qualifying statements often use a lot of words. I like to qualify most things that I say and I think journalists and editors often remove them out of seeing them as extraneous—e.g., removing the "I'm assuming", "I guess", "often", "most", and "I think" out of the previous paragraph.
Not so much malice, but having what they want to say predetermined and looking to frame support in what they already believe to be true. (Rather than trying to find out what's true and reporting that).
Basically the writer believes X to be true or wants to write a story that X is true and digs through things to find quotes they can narrowly pull to support X.
However, to your point, I find myself doing that sometimes without even realizing it and I wonder what drives it internally and externally.
This post dives into it a bit: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...
Just because an argument comes from motivated reasoning doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but I think it's more likely to be wrong (and it's also likely to be framed in a misleading way or ignoring good contradictory examples). It's also hard to discuss things with the person to learn what's true because they're often not arguing in good faith.
I think this is actually a reason people are often skeptical of debate (since a clever arguer can argue a wrong position and win against someone who is right, but not as good at manipulating rhetorical devices). Also why lawyers can have a bad reputation. People can know something is wrong, but may themselves be bad at articulating why. Other people that are wrong may be good at making themselves seem right. The smarter the person is the more they can effectively rationalize bullshit.
A good example of this is Ben Shapiro and a lot of his arguments (particularly the ones I've seen around religion/abortion) are mostly motivated reasoning nonsense.
That said, while this may be true on an individual level debate should still be true at scale (the best argument from one side should still be pitted against the best argument from another). I think this is what free society and liberal democracy is all about.
I often prefer dialogue to debate—a conversation of cooperative learning instead of competitive proving.
The main idea is a clever arguer can start with any conclusion and then retroactively select the points that support their conclusion while ignoring any evidence or points that contradict it. If you do this then the points you bring up don't inform much because you've already decided the conclusion based on something else (in the example it's whoever paid the most for their arguments).
It's better to start with trying to understand things and then using what you learn to inform a conclusion.
Again, I can understand why PG would be upset they misrepresented his words, but I admittedly am confused you don't seem to think that other investors, including the one PG referenced in his post, have boldly proclaimed that the bubble will burst and then it doesn't. I think if I were PG I'd feel frustrated the author lumped me into the category of bold predictors, especially if I had written such a qualified essay.
In one story, they tried really hard to push for authoritarian laws to protect children and ended up wading through history to find a retracted and discredited paper. All this to make criminals look more dangerous than they actually are. They even admitted it was an old retracted paper in the article. But downplayed it.
If the evidence was so solid, they could have cited a more recent paper of higher prestige.
PG explicitly said no one knew what effect it would have, and yet the prominent investor with whom he spoke "seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups."
So I agree that the author attributed the certainty to PG when it wasn't he who stated it so certainly, and was more concerned with how to mitigate the effects of a potential slowdown in funding.
I also don't think that discredits the whole article and the point that many people have stated, and I'm sure much more certainly than PG, that the latest news story is the sign of the startup apocalypse and funding will disappear.
So yes, I feel frustrated they attributed that certainty to PG himself and not the prominent investor with whom he spoke, but I really don't think that's enough to discredit the whole article, or that it was the author's intention to twist PG's words. Maybe it was. I guess I just don't think the author was trying to not be neutral.
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-...