Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

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This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average".

It starts with the assumption left, right, and centrist sources all have biases, but those biases cancel out. That the "middle" of those things is meaningfully better.

I see no evidence that that's the case. All popular news sources these days seem to be biased towards corporate profit.

"Left" and "right" both exist relative to each other more than they exist relative to the truth.

Reading several news sources to find the truth begs the question of if modern news sources, regardless of political bent, are meaningful sources of factual information vs sources of advertisements and outrage.

For the sake of presenting a counter argument, I think that keeping up with the constant inflow of news doesn't get you meaningfully closer to the truth compared to reading well-regarded books on recent history around the world, and using that as a lens to understand the present. Well-regarded non-fiction books are generally better researched than stories on "this senator just had a haircut", and the recent past shapes the present significantly, not to mention repeats itself shockingly often.

By reading left and right sources, you're assuming you can find similar stories on similar matters, when the most important matters are not "the president tweeted X" (which both sources will report on), but rather information about the structure of cities, the human condition, and changes thereof ("a postmortem on this transit project shows that we, as a society, should think in this way"), which usually no news agency will report on. It's just too dry, unless the researcher dresses it up and makes it flashy.

The thing with those books is, they are 100% based on faith. There are no underlying facts that they're based on. They're independently constructed origin myths and allegorical morality tales.

With an article in the NYT, it's a narrative representation of objective facts as filtered through the lens of a reporter. If you think it's B.S. check Reuters, check WaPo, check NPR, hell check Fox reporting on the same core set of facts.

If the story is important, it's going to be out on the wire feeds, and other major outlets. The narratives average out, the facts (mostly) stay the same.

That's the whole point of college. So we can learn to think about complicated things and draw on multiple sources to paint a cohesive picture.

I don't accept your premise that books are not factual and news media is more/entirely factual. Do you have any evidence on that?

The evidence I've got generally sways towards well-regarded non-fiction book authors generally having more expertise in the area they write about than well-regarded journalists. This also makes intuitive sense - journalists often write about many subjects and act as second-hand sources, while researchers and authors are often first-hand sources and write about fewer subjects.

My point is not that most news organizations don't publish similar articles. My point is that they do, but them doing so is not evidence that what they post is useful factual information for staying informed.

Just because you consulted multiple sources doesn't mean you get a true picture. 3 bibles all will tell you there is 1 god because those three sources share the same underlying bias.

A dozen news sources will tell you the same thing, but that could also mean that they share the same underlying biases (the bias towards a quick and profitable news cycle vs a slow and thoughtful conveyance of meaningful fact).

The fact that NYT, Reuters, etc are all reporting on a fast news cycle and using similar content doesn't mean that the content they're reporting is intended to inform me and give me a more realistic grounding necessarily. It could also mean they all have the same profit motives and all optimize to produce more clicks rather than inform more meaningfully.

To make sure I'm not being taken the wrong way, I do think the news generally does strive to be both true and to convey information. I think that the competing need to drive clicks/ad-dollars/etc results in it conveying information poorly. It frames true facts in ways that drive outrage to drive clicks. It tries to create a quick news cycles so there's always new things to publish. The faster news cycle favors reporters creating quick pieces, and disfavors serious investigative reporting. I don't think the news media succeeds on informing me well of important things, but rather succeeds on making me weary with a deluge of facts that won't matter in 2 weeks.

With regard to the first point, I meant those particular religious texts you cited. I'm a huge fan of nonfiction books in general.

When I open NYT, Politico, and WaPo I see:

> Justice Dept. Plans to File Antitrust Charges Against Google in Coming Weeks > Justice Department expected to file antitrust suit against Google > The Justice Department could file a lawsuit against Google this month, overriding skepticism from its own top lawyers

Based off of this, I figure the Justice Department will probably do some antitrust stuff involving Google in the near future.

It's probably not 100% a sure thing that it's going to happen, but it probably will, and it's now on my radar to keep an eye on since that might actually wind up being a big deal.

That's what I want out of the news. I'm not sure what else I would expect? If I open and read any of those articles, there will be different takes on the Justice department's plan to go after google, and I can read into those however much I want, but the core facts are that the Justice department is planning on going after Google. I don't think that's made up, and I think antitrust + big tech is a pretty important issue to keep an eye on.

Ah, yup, on the first point I misunderstood what you meant. Apologies for reading your comment in a poorer light than it was.

We agree in some broad strokes, but seem to disagree on other points.

The original comment I wrote was contesting the idea that averaging multiple points of view necessarily mean that you're getting closer to the truth. It can mean that, but it doesn't have to if there's a shared underlying bias.

I think we'd also disagree on the value of being informed about current things similar to your example of a google anti-trust suit. I would personally expect that reading the average news article on it does not make me meaningfully more informed (since journalists digest the original court filing or whatever prompted it into a piece devoid of value in my experience).

I'd say that you get more value out of understanding the broader context: how anti-trust suits in the US generally go. In all probability, in 4 months that headline will be completely irrelevant and nothing will have happened. It's more likely that it's a clickbait bit of news churn based on a fragment of truth than that it's both true, and the implication that it's meaningful and important news for us to know is also true.

In retrospect, when you look at that particular example I gave, I'd maybe have to say you're right.

>>>This reads to me like saying "the best way to determine if god exists is to read the hebrew bible, the koran, and the book of mormon and take the average".

That's kinda what led Aleister Crowley to create Thelema. In a very broad sense, he learned about belief systems from around the world, especially focused on "Messiah" type characters and the similarities in their experiences/stories/methods of enlightment, and then built a system that was somewhat of a fusion of all methodologies, largely as an extension of Jewish mysticism.

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

Part of the problem with sticking to recently-published books is the lag time involved. Consuming a variety of current news sources can not only lead you toward a "ground truth" for that particular case, but can also frame a better understanding of other evolving situations, and arm you with a better frame of reference to not only understand those as well, but shape your actions in yet a third actively-developing scenario.

Well said. The problem is not bias but just the absence of any real content.

What happened in the world today? CNN: Trump is rude and orange! etc.

I know it's hip to be pathologically cynical about the news media, especially in a thread like this, but that hot take flies past hyperbole and right into farce.

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