A model for journalistic copypasta

HN itself is one of these curators, and it does require effort. You can find others.

It usually starts with an article being written in not-chronological order, jumping ahead at first, rewinding, maybe sprinkling in a few interludes, and then some journalist hastily copying it assumes it's in chronological order(?) and gets everything completely wrong. A common theme with accident reports involving something the journalist in question clearly doesn't understand.

I have no idea where it ends, there are even AI driven sites dedicated to reword text that is copied and pasted into them, so there's an endless supply of resources for plagiarism now. I think the only real thing I can do is keep my deepest ideas and inventions to myself and to not share them until Wikipedia feels like I'm relevant enough to vouch so I can be verified.

Many of the people and resources that steal text over years have already achieved verification off the back of content and idea paraphrasing. The Internet has turned into a steaming pile of misrepresentation lately... Be careful what you share on it. Some of my most dedicated followers might even be the ones waiting for me to post IP so they can claim it first... The common factor on most content scheme sites is how verbose they are, and how grammar is often suspect, in non-human looking ways. I also notice high engagement numbers with my most pirated posts, but often no likes, that's a sure sign that something is afoot.

I have noticed hijacked ideas on even resources that would normally be considered reputable. I'm pretty sure this is happening to everyone who posts input that makes sense. I have even observed questions posed on sites like HN bust for the purposes of crowd-sourcing research in a very lazy manner. Be careful what you share publicly if it's patent-worthy folks... As opportunity for growth and recognition shrinks online, content and idea theft will only increase.

Copywriting may eventually make a strong, shocking, and quite disruptive comeback once a content paraphrasing search solution is reverse engineered.

They are giving others way too much credit here. If Wirecutter is aware they could do it they probably also think that their test and this test are equivalent.

Maybe it can use the fact that multiple outlets will copypasta at the same time to help

Are there any websites that just cut the middleman and link or reproduce the press kits themselves?

In the speech where Crichton proposes the Gell-Mann amnesia effect he argues against almost all forms of attempts to predict the future. Crichton opposes most or all "speculation"; I think he would find probabilistic reasoning distasteful at best. His approach is a remarkably nihilistic response to the normal human situation of reasoning under uncertainty.

Read it for yourself. He proposed this 20 years ago ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070714204136/http://www.michael... ).

And to his great credit, he gave a specific example of what he was talking about!

He claimed that it was "useless" to write or read a March 2002 newspaper article quoting experts predicting the impact of the 2002 United States steel tariffs. Specialists should not be quoted, he said, because "Nobody knows the future."

Can we check this out?

Let's look at the 2002 United States steel tariffs. Crichton is dismayed by the following predictions in a newspaper article:

(1) Mr. Bush's action "is likely to send the price of steel up sharply, perhaps as much as ten percent.."

(2) American consumers "will ultimately bear" higher prices.

(3) America's allies "would almost certainly challenge" the decision. Their legal case "could take years to litigate in Geneva, is likely to hinge" on thus and such.

(4) In addition, there is a further vague and overarching speculation. The Allies' challenge would be "setting the stage for a major trade fight with many of the same countries Mr. Bush is trying to hold together in the fractious coalition against terrorism." In other words, the story speculates that tariffs may rebound against the fight against terrorism.

He hates that someone wrote this. He thinks it is the biggest waste of anyone's time. None of it should have been printed, he says.

So - let's check. Were these predictions useless? Were they correlated in some way to reality?

I argue that these predictions do two valuable things:

First, they may help a contemporary reader know what's coming.

Second, they may help future readers judge whether the quoted experts were capable in the past of predicting things, which might be useful to know.

So:

(1) The price of steel did not go up ten percent as predicted. Instead, the price of some steel products rose 60-80% from January 2002 to July 2002 according to this random PDF I found from a group that publishes studies about trade (page 6 : http://www.tradepartnership.com/pdf_files/2002jobstudy.pdf ) whose authors appear to have international-trade credentials. The authors say that the tariffs contributed to the price increase along with other factors.

(2) Whether US consumers bore higher prices is unclear. I do see at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif... that a study determined 'the impact of the tariffs on the U.S. welfare ranged between a gain of $65.6 million (0.0006% of GDP) to a loss of $110.0 million (0.0011% of GDP), "with a central estimate of a welfare loss of $41.6 million."'

(3) Whether allies challenged the decision is an easy one! Yes, the decision was challenged, and an overwhelming, strong international trade war occurred. The US backed down. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif... ($2B of WTO sanctions threatened, threat of retaliatory tariffs from the EU).

(4) I could not find any evidence that the steel tariffs made it harder to enlist other countries in the Iraq War.

Side note -- contra Crichton, I think I am glad that people publicly predicted what would happen with the Iraq War and that we are able to compare their predictions versus reality ( https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2011/1222/Iraq-... ).

If defense officials had instead merely said "well, we're launching a war, but we will not speculate on how long it will take, what it will cost, or how many people will die, because no one can know the future", well gosh, that would really have been something.

Overall, I think 3 of the 4 pieces of expert speculation about the 2002 United States steel tariffs which Crichton cited as "a complete waste of time" were interesting. They presented an expert's testable hypothesis about the future result of actions; and they helped others judge the credibility of those experts in the future.

Crichton seems to be saying instead that there is no point in publishing anything about how air purifiers perform, because who can know the future? Maybe they will change how they manufacture their air purifiers and consumers will start buying bad ones instead of the tested good ones. Maybe your house will be totally different from the test house used in the dynomight tests. Maybe forest fires will make your air quality so bad that you enter a regime no one tested in advance.

Now, in retrospect there is a bit of irony in Crichton choosing to "predict" a certain future prediction as being a bullshit one -- and in being able to see after the fact that it was pretty spot-on.

But the deeper irony to me is that Crichton does not ever give any evidence for his claim -- he does not publish any percentage of news reporting which is bullshit!

Imagine if he said "I have analyzed predictions made in news articles for the past X years, and judged the accuracy of N predictions -- Y% of them were accurate. Frustratingly none of them expressed any degree of confidence in their predictions so I treated all equally for this analysis. This percentage is [no worse than guessing | worse than guessing, so you should expect the opposite of what is predicted with weak/strong confidence | better than guessing, so you should expect what is predicted with weak/strong confidence]. Here are my data so you can see for yourself."

Did Crichton do his homework? It feels like, when he defined the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, he just give up in dismay and cherry-picked his best examples of failed predictions. I find it hurt to trust his anecdotes.

With respect to opinion columnists (not the same as newswriters), this work has been done at an undergraduate level -- see https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/pundits-as-accurate-as-c... , https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura.... Crichton says that pundits are worthless, but this one study found that certain specific opinion writers tend to make predictions which are accurate, and certain others tend to make inaccurate predictions.