Beware what sounds insightful

One reason I almost always read the comments before the article on Hacker News is that the comments have less control over the narrative, so it's harder to get away with these tricks. People also love to write things like "well duh: of course writers optimize for attention, that's literally their job!" which, while a little bit snotty, helps highlight occurrences of this. By reading the top few comments on HN first, I feel like I get a good idea of whether an article is worth reading, and if I do read it I can go in "armed" to protect against this.

The hard part is forcing myself not to respond to those comments until I've actually read the article myself.

Amusing quotes:

"A “steering” event at the CEO level is a reorientation for the entire company, and for reasons I’ll get to, the best way to accomplish it is to replace the CEO with a new one who is already locked on to a more desirable orientation vector."

In other words, it may be easier to change the CEO than the CEO's mind. (A possibly useful criterion: when did the CEO last admit a mistake? If the answer is "never", and reality indicates the need for a change of direction, the CEO has to go.)

"Also: look at how I use the phrase ‘optimised for attention’ here, when I could have just as simply said ‘liked to be read’."

Not quite. "Optimized for click-through", more specifically. Here's a topic from CNN right now: "Certain health conditions in adolescence may be linked with faster aging in adulthood, study says." Note that this doesn't tell you what those conditions are. You have to click to find out. That's become all too common. Until recently, the unit of consumer buy was the book or newspaper, not the article. There was no incentive for article titles which deliberately gave too little information. That stopped at headlines and book titles. Now it extends to each little snippet of information. The actual article can be summarized as "Teens who are fat, smoke, or have psych problems age faster." If they said that up front, fewer people would click on the article.

To take this further. A world made of words and ideas, detached from real observation, must necessarily be completely psychotic.

We're talking Bosch's Garden here. Demons, skulls, fire and snakes.

Consider our modern nigh-solipsistic society. And videogames. And us, wrapped in an airtight bag of propaganda and entertainment.

Consider that excellent insulation. Consider the anaerobic ravioli.

Beware of logical sounding narratives in general. They almost always miss a variable or four.

A similar point was raised in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348755905_The_Seduc... which was surfaced at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30354969.

> If you read something on the internet today, the odds are good that the writing was produced to capture your attention.

This. And not just the writing, but the framing between stories too.

I get very frustrated when people assume "framing" in the news was somehow "accidental". Like when putting otherwise independent stories on the front page together, in order to create an argument by association, without either of the articles offering support for that argument by themselves (e.g. putting stories about crime and immigration side by side; or priests and pedophilia; or refugees and terrorism, etc).

The framing effect is hugely known to journalists and news editors. If two items are presented in sequence, then that is intentional. Next time you see this happening and catch yourself wondering if it was by accident, just realise that this would have to be such an elementary mistake that the news editor would have to be fired.

That sounds insightful tho...

Also:

Beware of commercial advertiser funding!

Media doesn't bite the hand that feeds it. This severely limits the truths it's allowed to talk about.

Half the time I read something insightful or have a realization, a few seconds later, I think "but want am I going to do with this?" As in, the insight is interesting, but not particularly actionable on its own, and rather than being a jumping off point, it's a concise dead end.

I really appreciated the named names and real examples. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to break free of the insight distortion field and see the examples as dumb. I'm the same with academese -- as long as I know all of the big words, I feel like they've said something intelligible.

Also the illusion of explanatory depth.

Tarbell's portrayal of JD Rockefeller is certainly worth reading again in today's New Gilded Age era, biases and all. I suppose Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" is a more objective history, although it glosses over some of the more outrageous history of the industry (Standard Oil providing critical airplane fuel for the Nazi invasion of Poland, and also fueling Nazi Uboats until 1942 when Congress passed the Trading With The Enemy Act).