Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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> ...while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.

You're right about the layperson, but that's a low bar, the p50 of the population.

What measures did you take to avoid Gell-Mann Amnesia on this point? This seems to be one of those things that everyone takes to be true, but which I have frequently found to be false on manual inspection. Here are examples where I tested this by chasing to the primary source in areas not of my expertise:

- California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.

- Indian Railways budget reporting. This was Bloomberg, and it was re-reported elsewhere. The numbers were wrong. This informed decisions I made in the next case.

- SuperMicro spychips. Bloomberg again, but rebroadcast by other media outlets. This was one of my directional trades. I bought SMCI calls off the fact that Bloomberg was poorly informed and that reporters were mostly low-grade GPT-3 copy-machines off each other.

In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.

So, yes, better than the layperson, but not better than the average techie I know. And this yields a data pipeline problem: if you have a lossy compressor in your pipeline, the loss cost can overwhelm the compression advantage. I think for anyone reasonably intelligent, news has passed that point.

You seem to be suffering from the belief that techies are smarter than everyone else, which is not only offensive but just wrong. While techies spent four years in college learning math and CS theory, journalists spent four years learning how to suss truth from fiction. That is in fact their main skill -- finding truth amongst unreliable sources.

> California Prop 22 reporting. Universally wrong about the significance of the 7/8ths rule. Actually, I found it very hard to find a mainstream reporter who got this correct considering the text of the bill.

I am however quite curious about this one. I followed this closely and did not see the bias you claim. What was it that all the journalists got wrong about the 7/8s rule?

> What was it that all the journalists got wrong about the 7/8s rule?

If you would mind explaining what you understand the rule to be, which sections of the proposition text helped you reach that conclusion, and how confident you are in that interpretation, I will happily describe my side of this.

> You seem to be suffering from the belief that techies are smarter than everyone else, which is not only offensive but just wrong.

Ah, no. I stick by what I said, which is not what you seem to have read. But I'll quote it here anyway:

> In my experience, if you ask a random SF Bay startup software engineer or medical doctor to spend 30 mins on research they will outperform a professional journalist over the same period of time. This makes sense: it isn't that journalists are better at news; it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news.

Imagine that I used those words intentionally and also purposely avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that. And since I didn't explain "outperform", we will interpret it as "model the world in a more accurate way".

> If you would mind explaining what you understand the rule to be, which sections of the proposition text helped you reach that conclusion, and how confident you are in that interpretation, I will happily describe my side of this.

Usually the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. What did the journalists say and how was it wrong? You said they all got it wrong, but do you have an example? What is the "right" interpretation and what in the bill text makes you think that?

> Imagine that I used those words intentionally and avoided saying "smarter" and "everyone else" and all that.

"it's that they are the ones who aren't good at anything specific and are therefore doing news."

That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.

regarding prop 22's 7/8ths, i commented on this at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24867819

IIRC, the comment to which I replied reflected a pretty common understanding of the issue and was in some of the reporting on prop 22.

jedberg, if you want me to convince you of something, then you have to pay my consulting rate - for which I last successfully charged $800/hr, min two hours. If you just want to have a conversation, then you'll understand that I enjoy these when we're both being useful to each other, and it's not just me doing work for you. But if you don't like that, it's okay: we can just decide not to talk about that.

> That's just a coded way of saying "they aren't smart enough to do anything specific so they do something I think is easy". You clearly think techies are smarter than others and are better at doing a job the journalists spent years in school learning.

Nope, people say "smart" for innate talent. I make no claim to that. I'm only making a claim to outcome. I think they lack skill (a trainable thing) in comparison, yes.

If you think journalists lack a skill for which they go to college for but techies just have that skill innately, then you are incredibly misinformed.

And if you don’t actually have the evidence to back up your claims just say so. You don’t have to hide behind this faux intellectualism or whatever you call bragging about your consulting rate.

I’m not sure what my opinion on the 7/8ths matter has anything to do with anything. You claimed the journalists got it wrong, and I asked how.

Mate, you keep going for this innate thing or whatever, and I keep saying it's something that comes from practised experience. It's obviously touched a nerve because you're clearly upset and calling me names but I can't imagine why. It's not a particularly controversial thing.

And it's obvious why I'm asking you to put in some work: the standard on this board is to go "citation needed" and then not contribute equal work. So I want either an expression of good faith from you by you doing equivalent work or by you paying me.

And come on, you live in the Bay. You know that's (to my embarrassment) not bragging.

> It's obviously touched a nerve because you're clearly upset

I'm upset because you said that someone who knows how to make a website is better at journalism that someone who studied journalism in school and has spent years honing their craft. I've worked with journalists -- the real ones who write for reputable publications, not the ones who write for the blog of the week. I have friends who are journalists. I've sat side by side with them. Their primary skill is separating truth from fiction, and you just said that someone who can construct a URL is better at it. It's an insult to them and a reflection of how poorly informed you are.

> So I want either an expression of good faith from you

Lol, where is your good faith? You made a claim, I asked you for a link to evidence of said claim. If it existed, it should take you no longer than 60 seconds to find one example. I didn't ask for an essay, I asked for a single link to a single example and a single sentence as to why it's wrong. Should be pretty easy for you if it exists.

But sure, you can win your petty game of "who will provide evidence first". The 7/8ths rule was bad because it requires 7/8s of the legislature to change provisions in the law, which is basically impossible, so it's meaningless. Sure, most propositions require a new proposition to change, but adding the 7/8ths provision is just a red herring to make it looks like they are being so generous.

Evidence isn’t just saying something. If that’s the standard your journo friends have for evidence I’m unsurprised that you are impressed by them.

But fine, I can do equivalent evidence: Journalists claimed it required 7/8ths to overturn. They were, of course, wrong. Because they were just reporting based off each other. There’s your equivalent “evidence”, I suppose.

I’m kidding, I can do better. Behold, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/uber-ly...

> Prop 22 sought to invalidate AB5′s impact on Uber and Lyft drivers, and it included a provision saying a seven-eighths legislative supermajority would be required to overturn it. Its passage effectively rendered AB5 moot.

Now, you can ask your journo friends (who are 4-year-college-trained experts at separating truth from fiction) what’s wrong with this. Compare with bill text as an exercise, if you’d like. Should be easy for the master truth seekers.

You didn't ask me for evidence, you asked me what I believed about the 7/8ths provision, and I told you.

Is your concern that they used the word overturn instead of modify? That's pedantic at best.

>journalists spent four years learning how to suss truth from fiction. That is in fact their main skill -- finding truth amongst unreliable sources.

AHAHAHAHAHA *inhales* AHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!

This is some fantastic post-irony.

There are two pieces to this.

First, past wars involved journalists directly embedded into forward units. If they said 7 rockets were fired into City X because they were present and witnessed it, then what they were reporting was correct. It doesn't require expertise in anything to correctly report that. The vetting was on the part of the news organizations themselves, not hiring war correspondents who were blatantly making things up. Now that everyone has access to publish their claims to directly witness something, there is no longer any sort of filter on whether they're even actually there.

So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video. If your source of videos is TikTok, you no longer have much in the way of assurance that what you're seeing is even real video footage.

The second part is what you're talking about, whether the "expert" opinions of pundits writing in professional news outlets are any better at interpreting events than a layperson. This is much more of an open question.

> So if you're watching video taken by a professional reporter sent to a theater of combat by a reputable news organization, you can at least be reasonably sure they're not fabricating the video.

I agree with this, but specifically this. i.e. drop any of the nouns and adjectives in the first clause and the second clause changes.

Professional journalists are reliable eyewitnesses and can be trusted to transmit their eyewitness expertise, factoring out any active conspiracy. They are not, however, skilled at obtaining facts except through witnessing, i.e. I trust their first-party accounts but not their third-party accounts. They are easily misled, but it can't be helped: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

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