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Comment by paul | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental problem is real though. News sites, including social news like reddit, are riddled with errors. Finding the truth often requires a real effort on the part of the reader, and for the most part I'm just too lazy/busy.

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Maybe we could share the effort. It's just an idea, not very original, maybe bad but here it is anyway: PGP had the interesting concept of a "web of trust" (it was used in other places as well such as advogato.org). Maybe this concept could apply to news sources as well. E.g. my friend Bob is an expert on topic X, so I tend to trust him on said topic. I have a reddit-like website where I can see a selection of news "approved" by friends I trust instead of a website where a dozen of dumb high school kids (I'm actually talking about the reddit crowd here) I've never seen upvote/downvote articles. As it's a web of trust, I trust people who Bob trust as well (but a little bit less, maybe).

edit: found this on the front page after writing this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28980 ("All Transactions are based on Trust - Part III")

There is a traditional solution to this, in theory. The theory goes that a newspaper will meticulously edit and fact check, because at some point, they are bound to write about something I happen to know a lot about, and then if they are wrong, I will no longer trust them on other things. Unfortunately, the theory works a little too well: virtually all newspapers, if you read a few issues cover to cover, contain enough errors about things that you happen to know a lot about that you start mistrusting them. But there are a few publications for which traditional solution seems to work. I have rarely found any mistakes in The Economist, for instance, when they write about things I happen to know a lot about, which leads me to trust them more than most other news sources when it comes to things I don't know.

It's funny that you mention the economist, because I used to feel the same way about them, but then a few years ago they published some article about Google that was full of errors.

Clearly the old model isn't working though. I think the solution must be collaborative. I don't know if Thoof is it, but at least it's in the right direction.

I think anyone who is a general-purpose journalist rather than a domain expert is going to have this problem. Journalists don't actually understand the stuff they write about; no one could, probably; so instead they have a lot of hacks for sounding like they know what they're talking about.

Come to think of it, though, domain experts are often wrong too. Think about programming books, for example. I've now learned enough about several other fields to be fairly sure this problem is universal, except possibly in math. (Though even mathematicians have often been wrong in the sense of overlooking something that to later generations will seem obvious.)

Basically, you have to be a very critical reader. I doubt there's a "solution" beyond that. This is something the very smartest people struggle all their lives to get better at-- to take in all the stuff they're told, and from that figure out what's really going on.

Sometimes the problem has nothing to do with lack of domain knowledge. For example, before I went to MIT I saw a NYT article about students protesting the proposed removal of the pass/no credit system for the following freshman year. The article slanted it as if the students were selfishly interested in not getting grades. It doesn't take a domain expert to realize that if you're an MIT student now, you won't be a freshman next year, and could not be affected by the removal of pass/no credit. Students were objecting because they felt it would have a detrimental effect on others.

People give journalists such a bad rap... but no one asks any other profession to write definitively about lots of different subjects, often with only 24 hours to do it. Given the constraints, journalists do a pretty good job most of the time.

However, it is exactly this that makes general purpose journalism and newspapers a dying breed - as a big paper, you can't afford 1000 domain experts you might only use a few times a year. But bloggers are just this - domain experts who can distribute their content widely enough to be just popular enough.

There is some famous example to do with classification of simple finite groups where a big theorem had been proved over the course of many papers by various people over the years, and then when somebody tried to write a big monograph about it, they found all sorts of holes that took years to close.

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