Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Chat GPT reveals that academia has fallen short of the trend as follows.

" When you are growing and everyone trusts you, you can do no wrong, and your mistakes shrink into nothing on their own."

" When you begin to shrink and your reputation sours, you can do no right, your wrongs balloon catastrophically and your rights slowly shrink into nothing like your wrongs used to"

Academia I'm sure provides tons of stuff, but once you sour your reputation and you pop your balloon, it's very very hard to recover from it. We've gone from a world where the average person trusts institutions to a world where the average person doesn't.

Even I don't trust anything coming out of any large institution anymore. If I look up news, and I see CNN and MSNBC and any of those big networks, I keep scrolling until I find someone showing me the raw event with no commentary.

If I search some review I scroll past all of the official review sites and find some random nobody who appears to be expressing their own experiences.

Why?

Because I don't trust anything bigger than an individual. Doctors hide themselves behind hospitals with a million accountant sent number punchers who are incentivized to screw you over.

Companies pull the journalists into their wings so that the journalists are beholden random advertisers, and can write whatever they want without much risk to their own credibility.

I'm confident academia is falling to very similar issues. These institutions take responsibility and spread it thin like butter over toast, and when you do that everything and that institution needs to be considered not credible.

All of these opinions of academia probably come from the behavior of a small fraction of bad actors who get popularized in the news, but because those bad actors aren't named and shamed as individuals, the institution takes the blame and all of the good things that come out of it are no longer worthy of trust.

> "If I search some review I scroll past all of the official review sites and find some random nobody who appears to be expressing their own experiences."

That strategy has been tainted for a while. Lots of seemingly legitimate comments from nobodies on social media like Reddit are actually from old accounts bought by companies, especially for product reviews (this is an explicit strategy by certain marketers). Even many enthusiastic product recommendations from YouTubers are influenced by sponsorships (oftentimes, even if they disclose that they were paid to make the sponsorship, they then say that they "genuinely" support the product even if it turns out to be defective).

The best way to evaluate a review is more based on examining the content of the review (instead of skipping to the conclusion), rather than who the person is. A person's small blog with in-depth reviews is often very reliable. YouTubers with in-depth reviews (rather than quick product recommendations) are also reliable. Certain review sites are also likely reliable (Wirecutter is okay, though sometimes their recommendations are biased towards ease-of-use rather than getting the best result from a product), but it's best to look at what the reviews actually say (as I agree that other popular review sites are influenced by undisclosed sponsorships).

you say, We've gone from a world where the average person trusts institutions to a world where the average person doesn't.

we've never been in a world where the average person trusts institutions

you're in a tiny usa bubble

established institutions in most of the world are openly corrupt, nepotistic, and kleptocratic, and they always have been, so average people trust their families and traditions, not institutions

people in the usa are not average people

> If I look up news, and I see CNN and MSNBC and any of those big networks, I keep scrolling until I find someone showing me the raw event with no commentary.

Here's a raw event.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJuyn0WAYNI

There are a small handful of significant characteristics to notice about the raw event to prove to others you are a sentient human using actively using your music cognition.

Here's a hint: disco chord. (Another hint: the answer isn't merely, "hey, I hear the disco chord now!")

If you can hear the event and articulate it's significance, great!

But if you cannot do that with something as ineffectual as pop music, ask yourself: what could you possibly achieve with raw data and no commentary in a domain with high stakes like epidemiology (for example)?

Edit: typo, clarifications

> Even I don't trust anything coming out of any large institutions anymore

Learn to differentiate between facts and editorials/opinions.

Alternative media isn't very good at presenting basic facts correctly, something institutions still do well and can only spin so far. Alternative media outright lies about facts.

For me, it’s not that I can’t differentiate, but that it’s tiresome. Major news sources frequently blend fact and opinion so it’s extra effort to read their material rather than to just read the source directly.

This doesn’t mean I read “alternative media” but being slightly better than a cesspool doesn’t mean I want to use them.

And what is your take on Brian Sicknick [1]? He's the officer who died following the January 6th riots. [1] All big media sites ran an identical story. He was not only killed, but he was bludgeoned to death, in the head, by a rioter wielding a fire hydrant. Quite the visceral and disturbing imagery. The problem is that it was not true, at all. Not only was he not killed by rioters - the medical examiner would later testify that he was completely physically unharmed as a consequence of the riots. He didn't even die on January 6th, and was texting his brother that evening. He died the next day following a series of strokes, from a preexisting clot in his brain.

Any media outlet which did even the bare minimum of research would have known it was a lie: contact the brother, the hospital, the coroner's office (seeking only a date confirmation), let alone actually having done any real investigation whatsoever into the claims. But they didn't. Politicians, including the president (who all would have had 100% certainty that he was not killed) then continued to actively lie to the public and exploit his death for political gain, even including having a formal ceremony at the Capital Rotunda that's been traditionally reserved for individuals such as Rosa Parks and RBG.

When it was finally revealed to be a lie, where was the reckoning? An exploited media anxious to discover how and why they were misled, and hold those responsible accountable? For that matter what of holding the politicians accountable for their own behavior? They were actively and maliciously lying and propagandizing a man's death on a national level.

Instead, the media tried to shift the story to the strokes being caused by pepper spray - which was also another completely fabricated lie with no basis in reality. Then when the chief medical examiner refused to play ball, they just buried the story. There was 0 interest in the truth from the beginning to end. And here you are saying the big media is good at presenting basic facts and can only spin so far. This is not a swipe at you, but rather emphasizing how they're able to really get away with this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick

media was led astray by law-enforcement officials and delay from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

After the results were finally published, the information got out and was covered on media outlets (such as the WSJ etc) ..

You're looking for perfection in an atmosphere that is genuinely a fog of war and cherry picking 1 example. the point is that statistically speaking your better off with instituitonal media over alternative media.

Institutions will still lead to the right answer over a long time scale Compared to whatever other non-institutional media you look at.

Obviously, in any case consider many sources, weight them appropriately, consider recency of the data, and synthesize knowledge according to bayesian principles.

If you still disagree, what non-institutional sources do you prefer, and what do you think their track record is compared to instituional media, and will I be able to find examples even worse for them than the one you linked.

There was no 'fog of war', as this went on for months. The ceremony I spoke of happened nearly a month after his death, on February 3rd. I'm not looking for perfection - merely some vague concern for the truth over agenda, and I'm not finding it.

And the idea the media was misled, instead of a participant in misleading, is rather belied by their lack of their concern about such 'deception.' Were this a case where they were genuinely misled, this would have been grounds for a defacto inquisition. Instead not only did they seem completely unconcerned about that, they actively tried to keep pretending he was killed - even when it became clear he was not.

They never pursued, in the slightest, why they just lied to the American people for months. Sites, such as YouTube, which claim to care about disinformation still host hundreds of videos pretending he was killed. And it's not a cherry picked example. The media has been rife with lies as of late. The issue is that this is one where there's no way to do what you're trying to do, and argue for some sort of plausible deniability.

You ignored my question. What's your alternative?

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. it is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. the real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c &c. but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. he who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]

---

20 years ago this quote would have been quite hyperbolic. Now it's certainly scathing, but it's also completely appropriate and rationale. The current apparent chaos, deception, and disorder we are now entering into is not some novel and unprecedented era. The brief era of peace, trust, and general "sanity" that we "all" grew up in was the novel and unprecedented era. And so as we return to the past, the wisdom of that era becomes more meaningful than ever.

Welcome to the past, my friend!

https://www.founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-...

so your answer is you have no answer. very well. quick to demonize any/all, but not even interested in a solution. have fun being the eternal critic. chow.

I'd encourage you to read the quote, it's incredibly insightful. If you'd like cliff notes in our world of 140 characters - the news is largely irrelevant. The details, if not inconsequential, are largely unreliable. By contrast the big picture of events that truly matters will get to you whether you read the news or not.

To take a safe and neutral example, consider quantum computing. It's obtained a vast amount of headlines that consume substantial time and mental energy to assimilate. Yet years after those headlines? The largest number we've factorized using "pure" quantum computing (as opposed to drastically reducing the search space using tricks like cherry picking numbers optimized for rapid solving by Fermat factorization) is 21. Yes, 7 * 3. All of the mental energy, interest, excitement, and general 'consumption' one might have dedicated to quantum computing over the past has largely been a waste of time, energy, effort, and interest.

In cases where people become much more emotionally or mentally invested in the news, it's largely just quite sad. Even more so because the news regularly works to manipulate and exploit people's emotions, as in the case of Sicknick. And they're quite good at it!

Ciao (chow is what you eat).

What political gain did Pence and Trump get from honouring his death with such a ceremony though? Not saying there was none, but it's not an obviously strong motive. Seems more like a simple case of someone getting the wrong story and nobody thought to doubt/verify it even at the highest levels. FWIW I'd never heard anything about it until just now (but I'm not in the US).

It was Biden/Harris. As for the exploitation of his death, search YouTube for something like 'officer killed in capitol riots.' For a company that claims to care about misinformation, they're perfectly happy having hundreds videos, full of misinformation, actively exploiting this issue to this day.

And while I have become extremely skeptical of the competence of our government and agencies, I can safely assure you they are more than competent enough to at least determine whether somebody was murdered at the Capitol on a given day, or not.

It explicitly said in the wikipedia article "The following weekend, Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-staff at all federal buildings, grounds, and vessels for three days". Biden didn't assume office until the 20th.

Flags being flown at half-staff is a pretty normal event, not a rare honor. The ceremony was held on February 2nd. The picture chosen for the Wiki article entry is from that ceremony.

Perhaps, but there seems little reason to suppose had Trump/Pence still been in office the decision would have been any different. Just seems you're reading more into the story than is justified.

> I keep scrolling until I find someone showing me the raw event with no commentary.

Parent said they look for source material, not alternative media

I think traditional media manipulates by selectively omitting context. Let's say a police officer died of a heart attack during January 6th, it would be presented as "capital police officer dies during the riots". While technically true, different people would interpret this as murder or accident.

Journalists argue that too much context makes for grueling reading but it's too powerful of a tool to wield selectively.

I think there are a few typos and missing words in this comment, just notifying you so you can edit it

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