I feel like a lot of today’s mistrust of news stems from publications not verifying sources, or checking evidence, or at least scrutinizing what others are saying.
Wish we could fix that
I wish LW-style rationalist circles didn't attract such obnoxious people, because I don't know of any other collection of people who recognize and try to adjust for things like this.
It’s not a satisfactory answer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sharing some anecdata, because I enjoy when others do.
I've got some very dear friends born in a highly prescriptive culture where credential-ism runs deep, being an intellectual is extremely valued -people are often denied leases due to their non-academic status- and authority figures and strangers get the "Mrs." and "Mr." treatment for years after you've met them. Early on in our friendship we would discuss and rant about everything and anything. We would often talk about my attitude of trusting no one and how I believe there are, truly, no experts, in the colloquial sense of the word. We've often had late-night discussions about my "stubborn and deeply misguided attitude", about how it's wrong that the only experts I trust are those who deeply distrust their own abilities, instincts and continuously attempt to disprove their own claims.
Shockingly, they defended the aforementioned views until many of their countries top virologists and they themselves, often and loudly, shared their opinion on covid-19 around March, April and May: covid-19 was nothing special, national mortality trends were unaffected, their country is rich and they had a high number of ICUs, it was basically just like the flu and nothing to worry about. Then, as we all know, shit hit the fan and we saw cooling trucks being turned into mortuary vehicles. I simply told them what I've always told them, and for the first time since we're friends they nodded with some sadness in their demeanour: trust no one, acquire evidence, make your own judgments, try to find hidden risks and the only so-called experts worth trusting are the ones who, in their own words, publicly and candidly express their skepticism towards their very own claims and try to help you reproduce their methods and conclusions.
Turns out the answer is math ;) more specifically stuff which didn't exist back then.
Anyway, according to Wikipedia: "Some mathematicians and historians, such as Carl Boyer, hold that Zeno's paradoxes are simply mathematical problems, for which modern calculus provides a mathematical solution.[6] Some philosophers, however, say that Zeno's paradoxes and their variations (see Thomson's lamp) remain relevant metaphysical problems.[7][8][9]"
So it seems like a few people are still wasting their time with this.
(I found LW/rationalism through philosophy circles, incidentally)
Sadly, I am not a comedian.
You can't simply extrapolate from finding one mistake in a book to declaring the whole book wrong. Likewise, you can't extrapolate from finding few bad publications to "everything is crap". I'm not trying to claim journalists are all good or even consistently good. But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good.
So the situation is bad enough when I am encountering a new source. But if I'm already familiar with a source, and it's consistently wrong about the things I know, then I can only be even more suspicious of everything else they say; and sadly, an awful lot of publications do fall into that category. Finding a mistake in a book does make it more likely that it contains other mistakes, and it does make any given fact in the book more likely to be wrong.
If you can only check one thing and it's wrong, then it is entirely and clearly irrational to assume that everything else is correct.
It's not fully defensible to assume that it's 100% wrong either. Just by plain statistics you may assume almost anything must have some correct portion.
What's rational is to make as few assumptions as possible, and where guessing or informed guessing is necessary, use only the information you actually have. That means back to the beginning, if you can only evaluate one part, and it has a many errors, then that is the only thing you can use to make any assumptions about the rest, unless and until you get actual credible assertions about the rest from someone else who are themselves credible in that domain.
(If you want to read more about this then google "single observation unbiased estimator")
That's exactly the wrong kind of extrapolation I'm pointing out. If you found a flaw in one chapter, the book can be trash, and the chance of it being trash is definitely higher than without any other data, but whether the absolute chance of it being trash is sufficiently high enough can only be determined based on the nature of the flaw, and even then, the confidence for that conclusion can't be really that high.
Determining whether a source is trustworthy is an ongoing process: you're seeing one portion where you have some expertise or evidence and then another portion where you don't. You have to extrapolate from what you can validate to whether what you can't is valid.
The complaint behind Gell-Mann amnesia is that we're too quick to dismiss clear evidence that a source is untrustworthy, that we have a bias towards trust.
To put it in perspective, let's imagine the opposite, call it Crank Awareness. If you see a document and it's laid out poorly, uses weird boldface, all caps, colors and blinking text, you'll, at the very least, get the impression it's written by a crank before you even start reading.
> But believing they are always bad is the same logical fallacy as believing they are always good.
Again, this comes back to the problem of strict logical reasoning vs. treating trust as a larger process. We have limited resources to evaluate sources, so we're stuck making fallacious generalizations when we need to make a decision based on our sources. What we want in the long run is to incentivize authors to exercise care and diligence.
That would indicate we should punish known bad information by deprecating the authors. So another way of reading Gell-Mann amnesia is that readers aren't doing this. They're seeing stuff that they know is wrong and continuing to patronize the publications regardless, thus authors can be untrustworthy and still collect a paycheck.
Well then why did you write about liking the book and whether it's good as the cause of disagreement? That's a very very different thing from whether the book is an accurate source!
Even a specific section you prove to be wrong can still be good.
"That was a super interesting book, it brought up lots of ideas and explanations, lets discuss what parts if any we think are true." !
Folks call out information and facts as fake news, not apply healthy skepticism but a rejection of all knowledge and then at the same time falling for hoaxes.
The whole country needs to take a gap year and learn the scientific method.
Problems only really come in when ignorant people read too many stories and start to think that how they present things is actually real. And some people who know a particular area very well may find whatever the story does too patently absurd to suspend disbelief.
Sometimes books about magical properties of crystals get their geology right. Sometimes they get it wrong.
If I apply your superficial filter I essentially give up my ability to convey the difference to your friends.
If I ignore your filter and pay attention to the entirety of each book, it's trivial for me to help them separate wheat from chaff. (Or at least chaffy-wheat from pure chaff.)
Imagine I give you a dictionary purporting to contain descriptions of the referents of the following words: (I assume you know what a sprint is, but not a bilparyoti or a zambungar)
* sprint - to run at a rapid pace for a short distance
* bilparyoti - a kind of bright blue butterfly, found in Congo-Brazzaville
* zambungar - a muddy colour, specifically that created when a landslide enters a clear river
Now, based on knowing that 'sprint' is 'correct', what is your probability, posterior to being supplied the dictionary, that you know what a 'bilparyoti' references?
Now, imagine that I tell you that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong and you are able to be convinced that the 'bilparyoti' is wrong. Is your prior for the accuracy of the 'zambungar' reference the same as the posterior after being supplied the information about the 'bilparyoti'?
Matticus, there, presumably laments the fact that the zambungar accuracy probability has not moved. Rationally it should move towards zero. By varying amounts, certainly, but towards zero. With his friends, P(zambungar_correct | bilparyoti_wrong) = P(zambungar_correct|bilparyoti_unknown), truly a situation worthy of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Granted. But OP seems to be at the other extreme which is equally problematic:
> Everyone reads a book, everyone but me likes it.
That strongly implies a boolean value judgment to me.
> In all seriousness . . .
> I have no problem with NPR. NPR is great. That’s why I’m bummed when it falls for junk science.
And if we keep repeating that they'll likely fix it. It's absolutely fixable. NPR are not a total write off.
On the other hand, I listen daily to their flagship science show "Shortwave" and science-adjacent shows like "The Indicator" and their general news updates, and they are pretty great both in terms of being pedagogical and in not being misleading when they simplify something.
Same is true of criminal courts. "If you select only the examples of fraud of course my client looks like a fraudster."
Seriously if NPR had good science reporters why on earth aren't they tapping their colleagues on the shoulder and saying "Don't" or maybe "You need to correct that, it's NPR's reputation, not just yours." I mean, on the standards of popular journalism they're pretty bad. And NPR is the punchline when someone publishes research by media release fitting some model to noise and booking their TED talk[1]. NPR are always there.
[1] Some people think TED is good science too. Maybe it's not all garbage? I don't know, my search is not exhaustive once the pattern is established.
It's also a frustrating argument. What does it actually say? "Journalists are often wrong". No shit! That's why it's called "the first draft of history". Meanwhile, everybody is often wrong. But we don't have a "Djikstra amnesia" to describe all the times we fall short of the ideals of our own discipline, but forget about that when holding other people to our notional ideals of their disciplines.
Journalists, unlike say bloggers or marketers or think tank authors or pundits, have a fairly robust ethics/rules system about how to publish. Does it fail them at times? Of course, but do they fail at a higher % than other outlets?
I’ve never seen any actual evidence to suggest that. That there is a pithy quote from a Nobel prize winner isn’t interesting.
There isn't even that! The Nobel laureate is just part of the schtick.
Perhaps we should?
(And then, of course, someone can post:
> Nitpick: Its Djikstra amnesia, tptacek's name for Edsger Djikstra's amnesiatic behavior, not an effect discovered or promoted by Djikstra.
when it eventually gets rounded to "Djikstra effect".)
Fortunately, most journalism is useless for information transmission and likely rarely alters behaviour - the latter having been chosen first with the journalism being used as justification. To that degree, the fact that most journalists are usually low quality information sources is not particularly dangerous since you never use them to do anything different from what you'd do.
There are lots and lots of people undecided about an issue, reading some journalistic drivel. They are most easily influenced on that undecided issue.
One anonymous source at the topic of the article that bolsters the claim, then all the experts who were willing to attach their names to their words all temper the articles claim are towards the end of the article.
> Since we weren’t actually given the opportunity to comment in that story
So it may just mean they were not given enough time to respond before publication, or even that they were contacted post-publication. In the race to front page "breaking news" the responses are expected to be published as updates to the story.
I imagine this is quite common behavior with journalist when they want "breaking news"
It's 1:30pm.
"Accuracy" is moot here: BBC's headline is misinformation.
It’s a time waster that entertains- not a reflection of truth. How could any business be considered “the best” in its field and create such a shitty product? Simplest explanation: they are not trustworthy and never were.
This is a focused campaign, this is not just random occurence of incompetence.
What's the evidence for this?
I tried to get the default password changed to unique-per-unit randomly chosen uuid, just to be so obnoxious as to convince the customer to set their own password. Encountered resistance of the "but then they'd need to be retrained" sort.
I wish I could say we didn't deserve the bad name, but we kinda did.
First, a nitpick: that is a thought not a feeling: you didn't state how it made you feel, you stated an idea.
Moving on... That's not why people mistrust the media. They mistrust the media because they are told to by politicians seeking to discredit journalism and control the narrative.
And do you think this episode is evidence of trustworthiness on the part of the BBC?
I agree with you that politician sow distrust, but poorly researched pieces are the fault of no one but the journalists.
> poorly researched pieces are the fault of no one but the journalists
Agreed. THey should have consulted with HN, look at all the experts here.
> literally wrong to describe an opinion as a feeling.
I don't know the gender of the OP, but one area where therapists and psychologists struggle with male patients is that they often say "I feel" instead of "I think", ann when asked what the feeling was, they struggle.
You can't feel an opinion. You can have one, and it can make you feel suspicious, or doubtful, or confused, because those are feelings.
This is a good example of how words used incorrectly are symptomatic of a deeper issue: male avoidance of feelings beyond hungry/angry/horny. It's not exclusive to men, but it is very common.
We HAVE seen enough evidence to know that much just by tabulating stats and things like that John Oliver bit showing all the tv news stations using the exact same supposedly off the cuff remarks.
I am a counterexample to your main point. I distrust most media sources because I've not once seen one present rigorous, transparent, verifiable research about a current event of interest to me.
I think I've seen every media source I've followed get significant facts wrong about things I know well.
I try to fight back against Gellman amnesia in my own head.
By "distrust", I just mean that I do not default to trusting any news source I know of. I try to take what they say as plausible but not likely the complete picture. I also keep an eye out for what their overarching narratives tend to be and try to compensate for that in my own interpretation of events.
"Because I've never seen it, clearly it does not exist."
That's called faith and religion.
You cannot rationally make decisions based on anything other than what you know and have seen or can reasonably project from there.
IE, I can't see an atom with my eyes, and I can't duplicate all the research of history myself, but I can see some things with my eyesb and I can duplicate some research myself, and I can follow a reasonable, logical, defensible chain of trust from what I can directly prove to myself, to proofs I can accept indirectly, and distinguish those from fairy tales.
Except I never said that, whereas the previous post had a congruent summary of OP.
Strike one.
> You cannot rationally make decisions based on anything other than what you know and have seen or can reasonably project from there.
True. But that isn't what we are talking about, you ventured into strawman territory all on your own. The person was claiming they've never seen a truthful source, this is called the No True Scotsman fallacy. We're not talking about god, we're talking about the fact that some journalism is unbiased. There is much of it out there, but OP seems to think there isn't, or has convinced him/herself due to their own desire to not be wrong.
Strike two.
> can follow a reasonable, logical, defensible chain of trust from what I can directly prove to myself, to proofs I can accept indirectly, and distinguish those from fairy tales.
You've demonstrated that you aren't very good at following a "logical chain of trust" because you've reasoned to yourself, poorly, something that wasn't even being discussed.
Strike three.
First time playing with logic?
It never ceases to astonish me how people who throw around the terms "logic" and "rational thought" really, reeeeeally don't know how to deploy either.
However, if I've yet to see it, I don't know why I'd trust that it's happening regularly just outside my view.
Until I see evidence that it exists and is in fact the default state of journalistic reporting, I am not going to trust that it is.