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Comment by quailfarmer | Hacker News Reader

All written by freshman reporter Theo Baker: https://twitter.com/tab_delete/status/ His parents are NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.

It’s an interesting story for sure.

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I checked his bio, and Baker appears to be a computer science student doing journalism as a hobby.

It brings me to wonder how much choice people really have in choosing their paths…if both your parents are journalists or [insert whatever profession], it’s as if you’re likely to pick it up no matter how hard you try not to…

It’s also likely that having grown up surrounded by journalists and people working for newspapers, his education allows him to properly write articles as a freshman. That doesn’t prevent him for learning computer science if that’s what he likes doing.

Yeah if you have insight into why a field is interesting from a younger age, you are more likely to be interested in it yourself as well.

That also goes the other way. My dad was a lawyer, and I know a little more about the law and legal profession than the average joe. However that was enough information to tell me I had no interest in being a lawyer.

I realize this is not the point of the article, however you hit on something here I always thought.

I think Journalism is a great dual major choice (or maybe just a minor), with whatever it is you want to study, particularly if its in conjunction with engineering, computer science, physics, biology, finance / accounting etc. Why?

Because Journalists are trained to be good communicators and summarize ideas (a worthwhile skill in most professions) and they are also taught to be ferocious in finding and corroborating information for its "truthiness". Having these skills would give most people an edge in whatever line of work you are in.

My father majored in Journalism, despite having a much more mathematical leaning mind, and small business career. He swears it was the best decision with similar arguments. I'm not 100% convinced it should be the one and only major as he did, but a dual major/minor does sound great.

Don't we think this probably applies to any of the humanities though? What you described, at least, is the practice of careful, critical research followed by exegesis.

I think there's still a difference here with respect to writing styles and audiences. In most humanities specialties you'll be writing for an academic audience (and depending on your focus, potentially one with a very narrow band of shared knowledge/terminology).

A lot of what you learn there can get in the way when you need to reach a general/lay audience.

Journalism is the same way though. They write highly technical papers for academic audiences. Journalism is just distinct in that there are marginally more jobs you can get where you practice direct skills/techniques around the domains. In the rest you can still get this kind of with teaching!

Sure, but we aren't discussing how everyone should just go teach journalism or the humanities.

I think it applies most of the time, but some fields and academics (like Judith Butler to pick a famous example) seem to rejoice in the opposite, complicating your language to make your point more difficult to grasp. So I wouldn't be quick to generalise.

Not trying to come across as partisan by bringing up Butler's name. Here is another academic, Talal Asad, making the same point in an entirely different context that the writing style of academia tends towards unnecessary complexity:

"For some years I have been exercised by this puzzle. How is it that the approach exemplified by Gellner’s paper remains attractive to so many academics in spite of its being demonstrably faulty? Is it perhaps because they are intimidated by a style? We know, of course, that anthropologists, like other academics, learn not merely to use a scholarly language but to fear it, to admire it, to be captivated by it."

I am not sure I quite understand, is the implication here that some disciplines overtly try to stifle understanding by making things harder to grasp? Why would they do that?

It's perfectly fine to read Butler and not understand it, in the same way as it would be for another to read a textbook on quantum mechanics. There seems to be a hidden assumption in what you say that holds that the domain/area-of-discourse Judith Butler is working in is one you should be able to understand without difficulty, but you really have no good reason to feel that. It's really not her job to ELI5 to everyone, or at least, its not something her peers or publishers care about. And why should they?

Yes, like in STEM, there is false positives, paper's and researchers that rise to the top that maybe shouldn't, but that is different than saying entire disciplines are sustained by bad faith.

I can't speak for the Gellner paper, but if you spend some time with it, understand a little about where she is working, Butler is a very rewarding writer that is incredibly influential to many many people. There isn't some conspiracy or shared delusion here. And the fact that she can say things that resonate with so many people in her domain, shows huge evidence of her general abilities around information comprehension, articulation, and communication.

I think in retrospect that I was too dismissive and hyperbolic about my comment that some fields seem to enjoy having an unnecessarily complicated style, but I think the characterisation of some academic writing in the humanities having an unnecessarily complex style is ultimately fair.

I know from my own time with the humanities that some adopt that kind of style to make themselves seem more profound and out of a desire to impress others because I was one of them (although I'm happy to have comparatively flattened the ego since then).

There's obviously a diversity of intentions behind why people would adopt a complex style (although I have no doubt the motivation I had is common) and some would be justified but I don't think it's wrong of me to point out that Butler's style is needlessly complicated as an example. When reading her words in particular, I sometimes find myself rephrasing in my head to make her point more digestible to myself (and I can't help feeling that random archaic English texts like Francis Bacon's Of Simulation and Dissimulation would be more readable to most, despite the outdated and unfamiliar language).

That's a sign of needless complexity in my opinion.

> is the implication here that some disciplines overtly try to stifle understanding by making things harder to grasp?

That's how I read it. IME with social science academics, it's accurate.

> Why would they do that?

To create a mystique of knowledge or superiority; to obfuscate controversial points; to prevent mainstream scrutiny; to exclude outsiders from giving criticism.

There are times where a Big Word is more precise than a smaller, common one, and the Big Word is preferred to writing 20 small words.

Then there are times where a Big Word is not more precise than a smaller, common one, and may even be less precise -- but it's chosen because it limits who can comprehend the work.

Listen, beyond any of the culture war you find yourself enlisted within, the sooner you can, as simply a human being, separate out "I do not understand this" from "I do not understand this, there must be something wrong with it," the sooner you will gain deeper understandings of things, make better connections, and honestly just be a happier individual. Like, it's fine, I guess, if you want to spend your life fighting huge swaths of intellectual history and human advancement, but you can't just be like overtly anti-intellectual about it! It's just not good for you, you will be sustained in fear and anger forever.

The point is that people should right more in plain english

I majored in journalism. I learned how to write clearly and concisely, and do it on short notice, too. I learned a process for writing, which is something most people don't have. I also learned how to ask good questions, and be skeptical about what organizations and people say when their job or profits depend on it.

Any videos or online courses that you would recommend?

You learn by doing. Find some online pub (or open source community) that will give you decent editorial support and start writing for them.

Journalism is a very large field with a history going back to the 17th century. Your question is roughly analogous to asking to recommend something about computers.

Funny, I quit newspaper club because I couldn't tolerate writing articles in that useless newspaper style: irrelevant fact, lede, quote, counterquote, irrelevant speculation end.

It's just a tool in the toolkit.

I dropped my entire comp-sci major when I realized I couldn't bear even the first of two required technical writing courses. It was wringing all of the joy out of something I loved.

Later, newswriting was... maybe not quite "fun", but I did enjoy the challenge of remaining creative within the form while keeping a demanding instructor happy.

Screenwriting was similar. It's not a form I really ~enjoy writing in, but I think learning to write from that perspective also leaves you with something good for the kit.

That seems like a questionable reason to ditch CS to me. Was it really that bad to do the technical writing courses?

Yes, having done all kinds of styles, I can see wanting to avoid technical writing. It's a highly rigid form, with lots of rules about how to arrange information. Sometimes just the tools are enough to make you want to quit: I'm looking at you (La)TeX.

Thanks for questioning my reasons (anonymously).

As such things tend to be, it was the last straw. I was an angry, shy, lonely young person. I didn't know it at the time, but I was 1 year in to 6 years of ~writing-my-way-out of the worst two of those.

I came to school thinking I'd study writing or programming. I started with the one likely to pay more to please my dad, but only found one of the intro CS projects remotely engaging.

Yes; we were sitting in technical writing (second semester) discussing what we'd done for the first assignment and why. Through the lens of the only thing that I really found engaging (and catharctic, and joyful) in high school, I could see that my heart wasn't in it. Any of it.

(I would later return to programming through art projects.)

never heard of this style. afaik the "inverted pyramid" is the commonly-taught method for reporting in journalism schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

the whole point of this style is to remove all irrelevant information.

Specifically for newspapers. Less so for magazines. Certainly it was followed fairly rigidly for historical wire service journalism because the newspaper using the copy would (literally) cut the article at a more or less arbitrary point to fill a space (between ads) in the paper. Obviously the constraints don't exist in the same way but writing from most important down to least important still makes sense for a lot of reasons.

I was taught to aggressively look for and cut irrelevant facts. Back in the day newspapers and other printed material had space limitations. If your story didn't fit in the allotted column inches, the copy desk would cut it.

I also worked on a copy desk in college. Ideally a story has the most important information up front, in the inverted pyramid style, so that if an editor has to cut it for space, they can just cut from the bottom and not lose the main story. Given the very limited time the copy desk has to look at all the stories before deadline, writers than failed to lead with the key facts would know very quickly that they needed to work on their stories more.

That sounds so valuable. Even for other fields, like the parent commenter said.

I’m in engineering, but I have a growing interest in journalism. I’ve already graduated and here in Norway we don’t really do double degrees or minors anyway.

My main interest will remain engineering, but if I want to scratch that journalism itch some day, I wonder if I should go for a part-time degree, or just try amateur journalism. I think I’d favour the former.

Not only the truth finding part but also the understanding nuance part. Great journalists excel at identifying important nuance to complex situations and bringing it to light. A very good skill to have as an engineer, especially when moving up the ranks.

> Because Journalists are trained to be good communicators and summarize ideas (a worthwhile skill in most professions) and they are also taught to be ferocious in finding and corroborating information for its "truthiness".

While that's certainly the ideal of journalism, the field routinely falls pretty short on this, IMHO. Sensationalism and clickbait isn't anything new. Just lookup Yellow journalism.

Unfortunately nowadays it feels like the truthiness aspect is just conflated with corporate group think. But it's great to see instances like this where a journalist doggedly question those in power.

The negative outcomes you describe are fairly independent from the training curriculum in school though. An equivalent would be saying that computer science degrees are worthless because sometimes people become parasites who work in adtech or fintech.

Agreed. Those are all straw men, rather than the the natural consequence of a journalism education.

I'd argue that the "evils" of modern journalism are more a consequence of economic failures in their employers than journalist themselves.

As came out in the Dominion v Fox News discovery, even the most political journalists are still disgusted by the things they have financial and management pressure to peddle.

Not disgusted enough to leave their job even though many are wealthy to extremely wealthy. Not disgusted enough to stop supporting Republicans.

I can understand someone who works at a newspaper and makes 70k a year so they have to report on sensational stories but Tucker Carlons net worth is $380~ million.

The key people at Foxnews were shocked and mad at the outrageous claims but for them the ends justify the means.

People do what they must to live. Like many other professions, some people are paid to do things they probably would rather not.

There's even more insidious influences on how narratives are built and propagated than just lying or not. Saying things that are "not even wrong" but redirect the discourse so severely that good faith discussion breaks down on inflamed, sectarian lines due to the shaping of the zeitgeist around this or that topic.

Yes it's been bad for a long time. I recall the "George Bush encounters barcode scanners" story back in the day. YEARS later, working in data-capture technology, I learned the truth. It wasn't a run-of-the-mill supermarket barcode scanning system. But that wouldn't have made as 'good' of a story that matched the papers pre-conceived notions.

https://apnews.com/article/61f29d10e27140b0b108d8e12b64b839

Here's a (free gift) link to the original NYTimes story

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the-su...

It's certainly one of the more misleading stories I've read in a national paper.

A newspaper is not a single entity. In its life it will have hundreds or thousands of employees with a range from good to bad. You can claim that there's a management structure that should know what's going on but they put trust in their employees even if they are ultimately responsible. If a reporter claims a government source said X but doesn't want to be revealed they need to make a decision based on that reporters history. Basically it's difficult to prevent rogue employees from putting out garbage stories.

------------------------------

Here a more recent article from the NYT examining the original reporting about the Bush scanner story showing how it was mostly misleading and the paper's response to those claims at the time (that they were misleading)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/us/politics/fact-check-pr... (See EDIT at bottom for pastebin link)

For any single news organization over a period of time a certain amount of articles will be inaccurate, sometimes purposefully. The NYT has been around for 150+ years and what matters it is how they manage their reporters and sources. We also need to look at the positive accomplishments. Shouldn't that be weighed against the negative when making a judgement of trust?

The NYT is probably responsible for more breaking news and investigations than any other paper in US history. Stories we might not have have known about without the resources they allocated and their contacts (i.e. government or business sources)

I don't think trust is black and white and that people who claim it is may have an ulterior motive. If you dismiss news organizations based on having a few misleading stories without considering what they have accomplished you wouldn't trust any news organization. This of course would greatly benefit corrupt governments, businesses, and people.

EDIT: Here's a pastebin link to the section of the 2018 article where they examine the original reporting

https://pastebin.com/VKHyGARK

I gave up on the NYT with the Judith Miller WMD non-sense. The NYT failed the United States during the run up to the Iraq war. All they had to do was honestly report what they knew.

(it was a then-uncommon combo scanner/scale with error correction)

I remember that and thought George H.W. was a busy guy and probably only got out to the supermarket in Kennebunkport. Where they mail the bill at the end of the month.

A lot of "yellow journalism" these days comes from editors, who are actually a different profession than journalists, though I think people reasonably don't care about that.

The NYT editors are the ones who write all the headlines like "The economy is great - here's how that's bad news for Biden".

I wonder if it works in the opposite direction too. If you dual majored biotech and journalism maybe it'd give you a leg up on writing about biotech; you'd know what to look out for and what's BS.

Yes, but you'd make 3x as much in biotech.

The problem is that you'd probably be a good journalist writing about biotech but journalism is a pretty awful way to pay the bills these days, not that it was ever all that great.

Interesting! I’ve always thought engineering and Philosophy were good for the same reason. Builds logical reasoning and ability to communicate.

There's something about the liberal arts and sciences that gives a person skills for life. I wonder if anyone's studied that phenomenon.

I'm a product designer and would never have fallen into this career if not for working for my college paper, The Auburn Plainsman.

A story—My first semester working on the paper I was at the bottom of the food chain as an associate news editor. So it was my job to sit in Auburn City Council meetings and fill my page with a summary of those meetings. I don't know how many of you have sat in small town council meetings, but all that really happens is they announce what restaurants are granted a liquor licenses and table interesting topic indefinitely. It's boring. On occasion there would be a heated debate about installing a speed bump on some neighborhood street, but usually nothing.

I would have an assigned amount of space to fill with city council notes and I never—never—was able to fill it. So I taught myself photoshop and started creating infographics to take up space. I started a weekly gas monitor price fluctuations and would add several other graphics to fill my section. That's how I got into design.

EDIT: Also, breaking a story about a kid stealing a Tiger Transit (Drunk Bus) to get home from the bar was a crowning journalistic achievement of mine. https://www.theplainsman.com/article/2009/09/tiger-transit-s...

I put a lot of thought into how I would respond to your comment, and I'd just like to say Roll Tide.

I'm a PM, and I spent time as a writer and editor of my high school newspaper that was probably more useful to my career than anything else I did in high school or college. Learning how to ask the right questions, understand people's perspectives and biases and to take a bunch of related information and turn it into a coherent narrative that keeps people engaged are useful skills just about everything and certainly in this job.

Did they find out who stole the bus??

They never found out who stole it! The bus story became somewhat of an urban legend.

And I'm with ya. I learned so much working for the paper. Perhaps one unexpected skill was cold calling. In sales getting over that fear is an enormously important barrier to cross. Once you do it though, it makes a lot of things in life easier.

For stories I'd have to call people or go find them, frequently when they screwed up, frequently when they did not want to talk to me. Just like the story above—the transit manager did not want to talk to me, but I spent a day and a half hunting him down. He didn't answer my calls, so I went down to where the buses get dispatched from in the afternoon and asked a driver where to find him. That "Somebody just didn't want to wait" quote came from that interaction.

About a year later I started a coupon website. I went door-to-door trying to get local business to buy in. That's probably not something I could have done, if I hadn't worked for the paper first.

Man, good for you - I hate hate hate hate hate cold calling. I think the job I would want least in life is outbound cold calling. But I totally agree with you - I wouldn't say I ever really developed the skill, but I learned just shove the anxiety down deep and go do it, because it's gotta be done. That has served me pretty well.

Did they ever find the bus burglar?

Also, funny to think there were probably multiple reporters in those city council meetings all trying to figure out their own way of filling space. While not good for people's career prospects, having a single reporter [maybe rotating each year] write once and disseminate to all (AP style) feels more optimal.

> While not good for people's career prospects, having a single reporter [maybe rotating each year] write once and disseminate to all (AP style) feels more optimal.

I find that having a single source of information too often leads to very sub optimal outcomes.

Now a days we have zero sources of information for these city council meetings given newspaper industry can’t afford to cover local news.

Teaming would be better than that.

I'm not sure there would even be anyone to team with. I've maybe been to a couple of town or selectman meetings in the 25 years I've lived in my town. Most are incredibly boring and have zero direct impact on me.

Hence how silly it would be to send multiple reporters and the point of my original comment.

I had a colleague who’s degree was in comparative literature - we’d walk out of meetings and the rest of us would be talking about the engineering side of what we’d just heard while he’d go through and enumerate the different things each person had been talking about while using the same words as everyone else. The amount of latent conflicts that dude caught before the rest of us got torched made me really appreciate the value of an art degree.

That's very interesting! Would you be able to give an example without being too specific?

The former guy is pretty simple example. My partner refers to as being a squid, spraying ink and making a get away.

It's been a long time and I don't remember specifics, but - we'd regularly be meeting with people from multiple different departments, and it'd be things like two people talking about testing, where it turns out one is talking about unit tests & CI and the other is talking about user testing, and you can go very far into that conversation using all the same words and meaning very different things.

A fairly simple one I've seen is "when will this be done?" - stakeholder means to ask when will it be in production; engineer hears "done" as in "my task is done" and answers about when the PR will land.

Ideally, merging the PR and having it be in production is a 30-60 minute automated CI process.

I don't have the degree but I often notice (or think I notice) people not answering the question that was asked, reframing questions to answer the pet peeve they love to bring up, and people agreeing with each other while sounding like they're arguing with each other such that the conversation never ends. It annoys the hell out of me and it feels quasi-impossible for me to relay to others what is going on.

Yeah, the violent agreement is usually a big tell. I've gotten much better at throwing the flag in meetings to have that conversation - "Hey, when you say X, do you mean <what I'm hearing>? Can you expand on that?". I think people are hesitant to do it out of fear of sounding stupid; I think I'm lucky enough to be far enough into my career that I don't really worry about that anymore.

The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating. I don't have a polite way to stop that one yet. I think some of it is just that we all pick up traumas and trigger words, and you've gotta recognize when someone said "banana" that doesn't actually mean "the thing I slipped on five years ago."

> I don't have a polite way to stop that one yet.

Selective doses of being impolite can be extremely effective, especially when you're otherwise very polite.

"A gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude."

(One of several variants: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/21/offense/>)

> The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating.

The most effective method I've found is making that person responsible for resolving whatever the issue is. Not always possible, but especially when it happens in group settings, some verbal judo can work even if you can't "officially" task them.

(Make sure to memorialize that in an email afterwards, or it will probably retroactively never have happened.)

One of the best advices I got: "stop acting like you're the smartest person in the room, even if you are" so I started acting like the stupidest person in the room. Often times, by asking the dumbest question in the naivest way possible, you can expose a lot of bad ideas.

A thousand times, yes. They're not dumb questions, of course. They're pure, simple, and relevant. They're the strongest questions one can ask. The best.

The Columbo Method

Or the Feynman one.

Oh my god yes. It's also So Much more fun and interesting! You get to learn from people!

Well... it's more like by asking an extremely dumb question helps other people in the room know when they're being bullshitted.

"So, I see your business model is to make widgets. But ... uh... I don't really understand these ideas but that's called capital intensive, right? So, you're gonna have a factory, with a bunch of workers... in San Francisco? Won't that be really expensive, and ... uh, I guess that means your profit margin will be small? Could you put your factory in Kansas?"

(paraphrased but essentially accurate question I asked when being pitched by a hardware startup at a major VC that I advised)

I think we could benefit from more directness and bluntness of the right kind. To a large degree, what is considered "polite" is conditioned. I don't say absolutely conditioned (there are absolute limits), but cultural conditioning can either blunt perception to the impolite, or oversensitive us so that we interpret normal things as impolite. Gen Z in the US, for example, seems hypersensitive compared to prior generations, though it didn't begin with them. It is not unexpected that correcting someone's bad behavior, even in normal speech tone, will be seen as "yelling". This is very bad because an inability to receive feedback, let alone survive impropriety, essential to adulthood. Softness suffocates reason and weakens action, and it softens the person who wants to avoid perturbing the softness of another. Hemming and hawing and hedging, too, is an enemy of clear communication.

But more to the point, I find that asking for clarification is the best tactic in the aforementioned circumstances. That way, you avoid having to make accusations. It removes all pretext for getting defensive and focuses the discussion on the substance and merit rather than the character flaws and lack of speaking skills of the other. If the other person starts to get unjustifiably angry, this reflects poorly on them, not you, so there is no need to feel any guilt. Be honest and never lie. Do not pretend to understand someone just because you think asking for clarification will make you look less competent. Maybe you are less competent, in which case pretending to competence you don't actually have is dishonest and unjust. You also close off the doors to learning. And if you are competent, then there's nothing to worry about. Bullshitters feed off pretense, and honest people are dismayed by it.

It's an extremely valuable observational skill. It's also an extremely valuable skill to be able to get everyone in alignment, but much much harder to "git gud" at (so to speak).

A few suggestions for getting more value out of your observations:

* in the moment, particularly if it's heated, you won't make a ton of headway unless you really know the parties involved and know how to frame "i think you agree with each other" well enough to be heard over the argumentative mindset. Instead pointing it out to each party individually in a later/follow up discussion can help a lot!

* If you have a good "people person" mentor or manager, just pointing it out to them can often result in positive outcomes, because they can take it on themselves to have the discussions in the background or if you ask for it, mentor you in how to get that across in a well-received way.

* sometimes when people are arguing with each other in agreement, the issue is usually semantics and someone (or everyone) has a different take on some word/phrase/name whatever being used. A good tactic is to try and identify where that bit of disagreement is and play dumb (it works best when you're in a "junior" position but can work in any situation) and say something like - "wait, sorry to interrupt but I don't quite get the difference between foobar and barfoo can you help me understand?" and then when they explain to you, the neutral third party, they'll come to the realization that they are arguing in agreement after all.

I've been in your shoes before and the above advice helped me get going so I'm passing it along. For me the difficulty in relaying the info came from a couple places:

* I was afraid of speaking out of turn, or looking dumb. It turns out that the "dumb look" i was afraid of is often interpreted as "wow this guy is asking smart questions", and at worst it's interpreted as "this guy needed a bit of a different explanation to grok it".

* I didn't realize that people don't need to understand that I was seeing them argue in agreement or avoid the question. I just needed to ask my own clarifying questions until everyone got the info/agreement they needed. If they get that I was driving at "arguing in agreement" or if they think I resolved a conflict, it doesn't matter - the goal of "we're all on the same page" was successfully reached.

I've still got a lot to learn in this whole area, but even trying to address those things often helps smooth out the rough bits and is useful. HTH!

I like to call "not being afraid to look dumb" "weaponizing my own stupidity." I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if you aren't worried about looking like a dope from time-to-time, you can help the actually smart people in the room agree on stuff.

Whole heatedly resonate with this. In my experience, people love questions (stupid questions, simple questions, doesn't matter), it gives them an opportunity to feel informed and impactful.

If you ask a question and someone is scornful ("you should know that already!"), First time it's on them, second time it's on you, third time update your resume.

I use dumb questions a lot as a manager - although my hiring intentions are to try and make me the actual dumbest person on the team anyway.

I don't use it so much for the teasing out agreement or highlighting problems angle though - one of my goals is setting the accepted threshold for dumb questions low enough that junior/newer or less confident team members aren't afraid to ask their own "dumb questions". Those questions are usually more important than mine, and teams that don't have that "no question is too dumb" culture are often dysfunctional or heading that way.

I think it's really an indictment of (software?) engineer's communication skills. So much of us seem to come from a self-taught/introverted background and ignore the importance of clear communication required to work in a team.

The "pet peeve" thing in particular I catch myself in regularly, where I realize I didn't actually answer someone's question, instead mapping their meaning to my preferred topic. It's interesting how just listening is a skill.

The Communications class I attended early in my career has been incredibly useful.

Spending time in meetings with someone who insists on near-complete terminological clarity from everyone involved ~illuminates just how hard it is to communicate precisely and consistently. (In my case, this person is a CEO who's had past lives in engineering and finance, IIRC.)

Setting aside the communication skills of specific engineers, various stakeholders can still have both wildly and subtly different senses of what they mean by common terms.

For example, I find there's a fair amount of chaos surrounding very common terms like "product" and "content" that tend to mean different things in different systems and to people in different roles/departments.

I've interacted with government and insurance attorneys for various work gigs and some of them have impressed me with their insistence on clarity, too. I find it challenging and fun to communicate that way, albeit I've only ever done it in small 'doses'. (I'd guess it follows a dose-response relationship that veers off toward madness pretty quickly.)

I get a similiar kind of kick from observing people communicating technically and precisely to complete a task-- launching rockets, doing performing surgery, controlling air traffic, etc.

Being precise (not vague) with your language is a learned skill. I started practicing is after reading 12 rules for life (it's one of them).

It really makes a difference in everyday life. It prevents so many arguments with my wife: we agree on most things, when we don't it's usually because we disagree on the meaning of the words we're using. At work I have far less misunderstandings with coworkers, I understand expectations better and I don't get caught out by people using vague language to hide or gloss over major problems. Last month I was evaluating a contract and it took me a week to get a clear answer about terms. I suspect the people involved subconsciously knew that if they gave a clear answer the contract would be deemed unecessary and cancelled. It was.

Ugh... I am a very precise communicator, and my wife --- Not so much.

I love her dearly, but I cannot count the number of times I have enraged her by asking her to elaborate or seeking clarification about a pronoun or some other vaguery by asking questions she believes "I should know the answer to because I'm too smart not to know"

We're getting there, though :)

Lol my wife is the same and it drives me nuts. She will say go get me "x". I'm like where? And then she'll say "the closet" or something like that and I'll have to ask "which closet" and so on.

(Taking light-hearted commentary too seriously)

Something that young children have to grow out of is assuming that "if they know it, their parents must know it too", such as where they put (not hid, because "the parents know") the phone or the keys. As a child they haven't yet developed the, obvious once developed, concept of the individuality of knowledge and experience.

It does feel as if this regresses for long-term partners. The volume of shared experience must blur the boundaries of individual experience, or something.

My wife will often blurt out something totally incomprehensible to anyone but her, but since she's spent the previous 5-10 minutes reading / watching all the context leading up to it, she expects the rest of us (who may have only just strolled into the room) to know it to its core.

A punchline without context is nothing!

I do like the sideways glances my kids give me when it happens though. That's a shared understanding :)

I've known lots of intelligent adults who assumed their particular knowledge was common knowledge. Most were polite about it and realized their mistake; a few were quite obnoxious and learned nothing.

Anecdotally, I wonder if/ to what degree this has been affected by increased job specialization, where a person who spends all day working (and perhaps socializing after) with folks who share their particular knowledge and jargon will then err when interacting with folks outside of that bubble.

> It does feel as if this regresses for long-term partners. The volume of shared experience must blur the boundaries of individual experience, or something.

This is so true, and painfully so. I was fortunate to have an epiphany a few years ago when I realized I was failing regularly to see my wife as a separate individual and part of the whole of "us."

More accurately, there were times when I probably viewed her merely and extension of myself. It honestly changed the way I view the world, and I somehow managed to extrapolate that understanding to life itself. It was a glorious dose of ego death, and one I sorely needed.

Cannot not think of this quote from C.S. Lewis' "That hideous strength":

> “The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”

Ironically, given that the discussion is about clarity of language, I had to look up the meaning of “phatic hiatus”; it refers to a pause in conversation. For more on this, see https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/592225/is-the-fo...

I looked up phatic also. Great word. denoting or relating to language of a general purposes of social interaction.

What a sexist comment.

The longer I spend on social media the more I have learned that the only differences between men and women is that men are terrible and women are awesome. Right?

> What a sexist comment.

Indeed. The author seems to imply that men are so bad at understanding contextual clues that communication with them is virtually impossible, almost as if they were primitive machines and not full-fledged human beings capable of observing and thinking. Even worse, when confronted with this uncomfortable truth, instead of learning how to communicate properly, they react with frustration, almost as if they were primitive animals driven by instincts and emotions and not full-fledged human beings capable of learning.

Still, I find it hilarious, even though I am a man myself!

And on a more serious note – why, when presented with two different phenomena (in this case: men and women, but there are many more cases, like "SQL" and "NoSQL", or "Rust" and "Clojure", or "GUI" and "CLI", etc., etc.), so many people automatically assume that one must be somehow strictly "better" and the other somehow strictly "worse"? Of course, it's sometimes (maybe even often) the case, but neither "sometimes" nor "often" does not mean "always"!

Wholeheartedly agree! We are drowning in false dichotomy and always wanting to know what is "the best" as if there were an absolute measure of goodness. You just can't project a high dimensional space down to a single dimension.

I love your rhetorical twist on sexism, which exposes a harmful aspect of stereotypes. The positive stereo type, "all X are good at Y, or naturals at Z"

We both know people who are dogmatically over precise in their language, it has its use, but becomes exhausting after while, esp where not needed. Here comes the generalization, but the use of overly pedantic forms of communication come from either an environment with high complexity, or a person using another as an extension of their own self and that manipulator (the assistant) literally has no context, so everything has to be over explained. When your groovin, all you need is a look.

Part of this is sharing of effort. Given a vague request, you can demand clarity or you can go try to work it to your best ability. Guess the most likely closet and go check it. If not there, go check the next one. Etc.

This approach is harder on you… but easier on her. And that is a sort of gift that one can choose to give to a spouse. Allow them to be quick and vague sometimes, and choose to invest effort to pick up some of the slack they drop.

Not all the time, but some of the time.

> At work I have far less misunderstandings with coworkers [...]

You have fewer* misunderstandings ;)

In case your point is that using "less" instead of "fewer" for countable nouns is an example of unclear communication, let me disagree with the point.

Less so (more awkward) here than in other cases, but it's as if the misunderstandings were smaller in magnitude rather than quantity or frequency.

"portal" is a good one. Depending on the speaker it can mean an entire website, or a single link, or just about anything in between.

Or a very specific iframe-like HTML tag!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/po...

Similarly, how many people in meetings won't actually speak up if they aren't familiar with a term or acronym in context. I'm often surprised when I ask, and then several others mention they weren't sure either.

Listening is a skill, but understanding is the bigger one. Actually being able to fit someone else's ideas into a bigger framework, finding points of similarity and conflict is super challenging, and not really taught in engineering.

Cannot agree more. Communication shouldn't be a specialized skill like writing code or designing bridges. It's a universal that is accessible to everyone and should be taught to everyone. It's exactly why colleges have general education.

If someone finds that their team keeps getting in trouble or failing due to mis-communication as a pattern, then something deeper is wrong.

From the other side of the water, as an art teacher, I can say that I really appreciate the precision of computer/software engineers. Artists/designers can be so 'fuzzy', so 'hand wavey' and so prone to mystification and grandification.

I will never forget attending an science/art symposium where the guest speaker was an artist. I quote them verbatim: 'Art can exist without science, but what happens if science tries to exist without art? Hiroshima!' Never in my life have I felt so ashamed of being an artist.

We specifically don’t educate engineers in writing or analysis, and high school preparation varies a lot.

I dual majored CS and History. Computer Science got me in the door and provided core skillsets, but reading and writing, analysis skills really made me a better and more effective person.

"Communicating" is often used to mean "sending" information, but for communication to occur that information must be received.

Yet, sending is easier than receiving, just as generating is easier than parsing.

+1. To riff in this, I play competitive paintball (long story happy to elaborate)

The most key skill in this sport of paintball is communication. Among the highest circles of ability communication is understood to mean: "receiving information and repeating it until confirmed by first party"

A lot of wasted effort, needless mistakes, can be eliminated by confirming your understanding. Communication is not speaking, it is not listening, it is both at once.

So what you’re saying is, TCP is better than UDP?

> Yet, sending is easier than receiving, just as generating is easier than parsing.

Generating data is easier than generating useful data or easily comprehensible data; time spent generating good data can reduce time spent parsing it.

In a communication context, I don't think sending is necessarily easier than receiving, I think it's that we've ignored the sender's responsibilities and put the obligation on the receiver. (This should be expected when organizations reward the quantity of sent information over the quality of sent information.)

Can you give an example? What you're saying sounds interesting, but I don't understand. What kind of conflicts did they catch?

> they are also taught to be ferocious in finding and corroborating information for its "truthiness"

Agree with the rest of what you said, except for this. Unless you said "truthiness" in quotes instead of truth (without quotes) to indicate this is a failing.

Today's so-called journalists are ideology merchants. Their fitness function is guided by such things as their ideological alignment (or indoctrination), that of the organization they work for (what do I have to say to keep my job?) or whatever it takes to get clicks.

Journalism has not been equated with truth-seeking in a long time. From my perspective, I see it as a disgraceful profession. In other words, if someone says "I am a journalist", I will assume they exist to sell lies and ideology, not to uncover the truth at all.

This is the only profession that enjoys constitutional protection (in the US).

What do they do with that protection? Elevate lies and misinformation to a virtue.

Given that our system of education does not produce people who are able to think critically, what you have are masses who believe what is being repeated by these puppet masters. Collectively and through their actions, they are damaging society in ways we have yet to discover.

I am certain this is not at all what the authors of the US constitution had in mind when they offered that protection.

Perhaps that's along the lines of what you meant when you said "truthiness", which sounds like a way to have a chuckle at the idea of them actually seeking truth at all.

let's apply that extremely broad comment to another group: computer scientists!

> Today's so-called journalists are ideology merchants

Today's so-called computer scientists are distraction merchants

> Their fitness function is guided by such things as their ideological alignment (or indoctrination), that of the organization they work for ... or whatever it takes to get clicks

Their fitness function is guided by such things as their financial incentives (or indoctrination), that of the organization they work for ... or whatever it takes to make money

> Journalism has not been equated with truth-seeking in a long time. From my perspective, I see it as a disgraceful profession.

Computer science has not been equated with technological advancement in a long time. From my perspective, I see it as a disgraceful profession.

> In other words, if someone says "I am a journalist", I will assume they exist to sell lies and ideology, not to uncover the truth at all.

In other words, if someone says "I am a developer", I will assume they exist to sell user data to the highest bidder, not to engage in any kind of technological pursuit.

> Given that our system of education does not produce people who are able to think critically, what you have are masses who believe what is being repeated by these puppet masters. Collectively and through their actions, they are damaging society in ways we have yet to discover.

no changes.

>Journalism has not been equated with truth-seeking in a long time.

Why do you believe it was ever about truth-seeking?

My understanding of journalism specifically - and the flow of information generally - is that those in power have always sought to control it, and they were just as successful in the past, perhaps more so.

One might say that debugging is a form of investigative journalism, and vice-versa.

Particularly when the error cannot be reproduced/captured on-demand, and you need to develop--and test--a story for how the final state could have been reached.

At a party, a coworker's partner (who is in law enforcement) asked what I thought about how to help people upskill to write better reports and such, and without hesitation I said they should try taking a newswriting class (ideally, IMO, on a condensed schedule as in a summer semester).

I'm not sure how common this is, but newswriting (a sophomore-level course) was the weed-out class for all mass comm degrees at the state university I attended. I went into a summer newswriting class with quite a bit of writing experience and it still had an impact on me.

(I double-majored in English + public relations and went on to get an MFA in creative writing. I doubt any 8-week period since elementary school affected my writing as much. It was a great counterweight to the kinds of academic writing styles you tend to pick up in English and philosophy. Caveat: I went into newswriting with a full toolchest; I can't speak to how it would go as a ~beginner.)

>I'm not sure how common this is, but newswriting (a sophomore-level course) was the weed-out class for all mass comm degrees at the state university I attended. I went into a summer newswriting class with quite a bit of writing experience and it still had an impact on me.

Definitey. And reading good writing is also an excellent way to improve one's communication skills.

It doesn't even need to be related to subjects you might be writing about either.

Good novels, well written essays/non-fiction books, etc. can provide examples of good writing and, if one continues to read well written stuff, it will likely rub off.

That's not a substitute for your suggestion (which is a good one), but another way to improve how one communicates in writing.

I have never been a reader. I've read maybe one book on purpose in life. Also, I almost never read the posted article.

I think reading is bad.

100% agree. All the best engineers I've worked with are decent problem solvers, decent coders, but phenomenal communicators, both written and verbal.

I think a correlation to this are people who are good teachers.

One of the most knowledgable security people I know is also consistently rated as one of the best presenters in the company.

>I think Journalism is a great dual major choice (or maybe just a minor), with whatever it is you want to study, particularly if its in conjunction with engineering, computer science, physics, biology, finance / accounting etc. Why?

Just working for the college paper isn't a bad alternative. Honestly, at this point, having been involved with several college papers and having done a lot of writing is probably way more valuable than any individual engineering class I've ever taken. (Though I certainly wouldn't dismiss what I learned with my engineering degrees in their totality if not in the specifics.)

ADDED: Didn't have a journalism minor per se but there was a lecturer (had been a senior editor at Newsweek, etc.) in undergrad who ran a Friday morning basically seminar where he brought in all sorts of interesting journo-related guests. It wasn't (for obvious reasons) literally limited to people on campus newspapers. But a 9am Friday slot kept most of the riff-raff out :-) (And every now and then someone else would wander in and wonder how everyone else in the room knew each other.)

>and they are also taught to be ferocious in finding and corroborating information for its "truthiness"

And yet most practice the exact opposite.

"And yet most practice the exact opposite"

And yet you just made a sweeping generalization about journalists without any corroborating information.

When did people lost the ability to experience empirical reality, and generalize and draw conclusions from it, as opposed to having everything force-fed in the form of some statistic?

Finding "corroborating information" should be the province of journalists, scientists, the police, etc.

Being able to draw first level conclusions from their empirical experience of reality (and, in this case, their years of exposure to watching media, reading media, reading about media, and seeing media coverage unfold and evaluated), is table stakes for being a citizen.

Without that direct experience and the ability to distill it into a general understand, you're just someone reading statistics and reports, who they can't evaluate or corroborate with any of their experience, might as well be reading for some fictional land.

You said 80% of blah blah then drcry the use of statistics. You just forced-fed that to everyone

When did people lost the ability to experience empirical reality, and generalize and draw conclusions from it

No one lost this ability it's just an objectively worse way to come to a conclusion. Making generalizations is bad, it's weird you would openly propose doing it.

empirical experience of reality (and, in this case, their years of exposure to watching media, reading media, reading about media, and seeing media coverage unfold and evaluated)

You're simply describing anecdotal evidence which has little value especially if there's alternatives and it's being used to make a conclusion. It's fine to offer up anecdotes but with supportering information. However what the media does and tells you isn't your own personal experiences.

Also, watching and observing all media or just your own selected media where people tell you something is the way it is.

The issue is a persons limited ability to observe as well as confirmation bias,and memory lead to faulty conclusions.

as opposed to having everything force-fed in the form of some statistic?

You're claiming statistics have less value than limited personal observations?

You also used the phrase "forced-fed" as a manipulation tactic to make people think whatever you mentioned after it is bad. Like if I said "My mom force fed us hamburgers for dinner" instead of "My mom made hamburgers for dinner".

>You said 80% of blah blah

Huh? Did you LLM-like hallucinate that part?

>No one lost this ability

You'd be surprised.

>Making generalizations is bad, it's weird you would openly propose doing it.

Making generalizations is the cornerstone of understanding the world, and the basis of science. The alternative is taking each element of larger clusters of things and behaviors as some unique snowflake, and never learning any greater lesson ("missing the forrest for the trees").

>You're claiming statistics have less value than limited personal observations?

Merely claiming? This is reality 101. Anything you can directly observe is more real than some third or fourth-hand statistical "knowledge".

>You also used the phrase "forced-fed" as a manipulation tactic to make people think whatever you mentioned after it is bad.

Or, you know, I used it to accurately describe the way statistics are created, manipulated, promoted, and used to paint all kinds of pictures state and private interests want to promote. Which is how they got their place at the worse end of the scale after "lies" and "damned lies".

Or, you know, I used it to accurately describe the way statistics are created, manipulated, promoted, and used to paint all kind

Another generalization without evidence?

Merely claiming? This is reality 101. Anything you can directly observe is more real than some third or fourth-hand statistical "knowledge".

No where did I say your observations are false. If you use limited observations to reach a conclusion. You're not even documenting your observations if you are simply relying on your memory.

This is literally how racists think. They observe behavior then generalize about a race. However confirmation bias, media manipulation, and cultural bias muddy your "recorded" observation. I'm not saying you're a racist but I'm showing using your own input of the world to generlize leads to faulty conclusions.

Making generalizations is the cornerstone of understanding the world, and the basis of science

No, the scientific method is the cornerstone of science. Observations are only the first step to creating a hypothesis then attempting to disprove it.

Statistics can be wrong but that doesn't mean you should dismiss them.

I mean, have ya looked around lately?

Vitalik Buterin is another famous example. He was a journalist (writing for Bitcoin Magazine) before he started Ethereum.

He (or his dad) said that they believed in writing as a way to clarify the mind. It seemed to work for Vitalik.

Writing is for constructing oneself

hi, great

hi great

Journalism is an excellent minor. Criminal justice and psychology are excellent complements.

- Journalism will teach you who to ask questions of [to achieve the goal of accountability].

- Criminal justice will teach you what questions to ask [to achieve the goal of conviction/correction].

- Psychology will teach you how to ask questions [to achieve the goal of interrogation]. All interrogation and sales techniques are rooted in exploitation of psychology, but some people just have a natural knack for this. In both, the goal is to groom/break you into giving [something] you are inclined to withhold.

Philosophy likely factors in here too but I'm less familiar with that field. People appreciate Ethics about as much as they appreciate someone pulling the fire alarm and yelling racial slurs at evacuees in the parking lot. I've never found much use in naming logical fallacies (IME it's the domain of pseudointellectual internet bullies and pre-law students), but could see it being a way for oneself to reason why you're pursuing something. Self-righteousness substitutes well enough.

Ad-hominem fallacy comes up pretty frequently, as people buy into it a lot. Pointing it out doesn't make someone a bully, usually the other person saying those things in order to convince others is the one being a bully.

Yes, I study logical fallacies and how to use them. Ad-hominem is a really powerful one.

My wife is a journalist by training and the skill of expression of information at an engaging level for a layman audience has made her a killer marketer, fundraiser, philanthropy officer, and now director of philanthropy. She works for a pretty major international aid org.

> Because Journalists are trained to be good communicators and summarize ideas...

Good to remember next time someone whinges about bad science journalism.

Blame the editors, publishers, and owners. The constraints on journalists are ridiculous. While op-eds and columnists are granted soapboxes to blather on.

Also, a bio+journalism dual degree is going to be much better at biology journalism than a straight-up bio major.

Those are important skills, but does a journalism major really teach you that? Nearly all of my daily interactions with journalism involves endless amounts of agenda-driven spin, and consistent use of intentionally divisive and provocative language. Journalists are responsible for some of the least effective communication I see on a daily basis. Perhaps it would be more useful for teaching you how lie all the time, whilst holding on to a few shreds of plausible deniability.

I think you're spot on.

I have a journalism + mass communications bachelor's, but only because I dropped out of the CS program -- too much math. Once I had mouths to feed, I couldn't make it work financially as a journalist, so I started freelance in software and my career has grown from there.

The communication skills, and more critically, the understanding of how information is gathered and disseminated in groups (i.e. mass comms) is by far my biggest strength. That foundational understanding has served my career far more than any of the programming classes I took before switching majors.

Having these skills would give most people an edge in whatever line of work you are in.

Absolutely. In the last few years I’ve moved into a role with a lot more interaction with non-engineers. At minimum, being able to politely re-state somebody else’s point in a concise manner is massively useful. Particularly when two people are talking past each other and I’m pretty sure they actually agree.

>Having these skills would give most people an edge in whatever line of work you are in.

Yes, and you can probably learn 80% of those skills yourself without having to spend years and a small fortune on a formal degree in journalism.

Yes. I also majored in economics and psychology whilst during my CS undergrad, and having to write a ton of essays and submitting for journals, taught me that communications is a key skill to have.

> Because Journalists are trained to be good communicators and summarize ideas

I don't see how a freshman is 'trained' in this sense. Could it be that good communicators and people who can summarize ideas naturally gravitate towards journalism?

I hope to God any decent journalist (if any are left) is looking for the actual truth and not just "truthiness."

You do understand that Stephen Colbert coined that term, right? And that he coined it as a deliberate satire of politicians and journalists who had what we'll call an open relationship with the truth?

> they are also taught to be ferocious in finding and corroborating information for its "truthiness".

If they are actually trained in that, there's no evidence of it. Journalists shape their articles to fit their narrative.

Well I managed to not get into law at all.

I do know more about patent law than is probably relevant for a layperson though lol

My daughter went into an entirely different career path than me but she's still the one to fix her employer's Wifi when it goes down.

Both of my parents are journalists and I'm a big tech ML engineer... so there are alternative paths available :)

Meh, both my parents practice law and I went into software dev. Had no interest in following in their footsteps.

Both are careers with a foundation of reasoning and logic so the apple didn't fall too far from the tree.

Same, but now I am studying law

Culture is inherited, you’ll get the most influence from the people you grew up around. Kids tend to be either a lot like their parents or try to be nothing like them at all (trying to be the opposite is still a huge influence)

In this case it’s probably not so much that the author was forced into journalism, and more that the student was empowered to cover this story without fear of retaliation due to his parents’ large megaphone.

With the sheer volume of scandals coming out of Stanford these days, it wouldn’t shock me if a critical mass of former students start feeling empowered to speak out now as well.

"Hey, your parents are journalists right? I think that guy's works is fishy. How would I report this or investigate further?"

There's definitely an attractive force based on generational expertise. I'd guess more people would be likely to feed them information as well as they would innately have more experience (learned growing up) and definitely have more access to expertise. Considering someone said the student was in CS I don't think I'd say they were forced into journalism, but it does definitely relate to the skills and resources at their disposal.

> a computer science student doing journalism as a hobby

Y'know, sometimes CS gets slow and you gotta go do some award winning journalism to keep busy.

Part of it is that people like what they are good at. Having both parents providing years of mentoring and experience will invariably give their child an edge in that skill set, which leads to a higher chance of embracing it in adulthood.

> It brings me to wonder how much choice people really have in choosing their paths

I believe the correct answer here is "not a lot," but not in the way that you probably think.

I couldn't be more different from my German-immigrant parents. Neither of them were college-educated, my father was the general manager of a moving company before he retired and my mom was a travel agent before she had me. They were both very generally hardworking and I (frankly) only work hard in very specific circumstances (ADHD brain). I excelled academically and was pretty immediately drawn to computers (I'm talking like 1982, with the Commodore PET; I was 10). Neither of my parents were technical, or even that literate, or even that successful (my dad, even as a mere "general manager of a small moving company", was nevertheless the most successful person in his family). Nevertheless they managed to put together enough money to send me off to Cornell, where I got a Psych degree with a "CS minor" (you don't declare minors at Cornell, but let's just say I hounded the CS department for courses I could take; I didn't like the inflexibility of being a CS major, though, and I had messed up a critical calculus course that was a requirement for many of them)

I also did a 4 year stint in the USAF (after a very poor first-year showing at Cornell where I bombed academically due to no study habits, having coasted through HS) wherein I was an aircraft mechanic and pushed computers away as far as I could (this was literally just 2-3 years before the Internet would explode in 1995, and sentiment about people who were really into computers was very much still "big nerd"; I was a late-bloomer ::cough:: virgin ::cough:: and felt the need to push anything "uncool" away from me as much as possible). Despite this overt conscious effort to avoid computers, one day the commander calls me into his office (my immediate reaction was "oh sh--, what did I do?") and proceeds with this spiel:

"Airman Marreck, word has gotten back to me about your giftedness with computers." (Wait, what? And then suddenly, with some horror and trepidation, I remembered flashes of memory: Walking past VT100 terminals that were inop to keyboard input until I couldn't help but set them right. Hearing about someone complaining about some Windows 3.1 issue and helping them. Fixing a formatting issue with printouts of flight records. Helping another person ranked above me with an Excel issue. Etc. Etc. Etc.)

He continued. "I am offering you the opportunity to cross-train into [whatever the USAF's version of software engineer was, I forget]"

My honest thought: This f---ing thing has boomerang'ed back to me despite every effort I've made to avoid it. (Clearly, I let SOME efforts slip through... And truth be told, I was ready to accept it, having felt I matured a bit. And gotten my V-Card stamped, of course.)

I asked "What's the catch?" He says "Extending your enlistment for 2 more years."

I thought "if I'm supposed to do this, then I'm going to do it in the civilian world, and benefit from civilian salaries."

I said "Thank you, but no thanks."

Anyway, the thing you love (and we could have a very deep discussion about where that comes from, because I certainly never consciously chose it) is the thing you will do. I feel I don't really have a choice, since you can't really choose what you love, you just either do or don't.

So... For some at least, there may not be much of a choice. But it may also have nothing to do with their parents.

The closest relative that might have had anything to do with me being into computers is my mother's father, who was an accountant, and could add up a column of numbers just by sliding his finger down them (and that quickly). That is literally the only "analytical" type of person in my entire extended family.

That's a wonderful story (and told well).

> The closest relative that might have had anything to do with me being into computers is my mother's father, who was an accountant, and could add up a column of numbers just by sliding his finger down them (and that quickly). That is literally the only "analytical" type of person in my entire extended family.

How much of that was because relatively few jobs 50/ 75/ 100 years ago required "analytics" as we think of it? For your parents and others of their generation, how many of those jobs were gated behind education (and the English language) they didn't have as kids?

Research has shown that environment ("nurture") have huge impacts on development, but it's also shown that genetic inheritance ("nature") plays a major role and perhaps a bigger one that environment. That doesn't mean it's easily recognizable when comparing someone born in the 1940s versus the 70s versus the 2000s.

My experience is very little choice if you follow your aptitude.

What if it really takes two generations to be good at something?

Since 1789 (in France) we postulate that inheritance in a societal curse, and postulate that everyone must be equal at birth.

However, there are countless examples where sons of doctors make better doctors, sons of journalists make better journalists, and sons of presidents make better administrators of oil companies in war zones (joke intended).

We should still aim so that it is possible to succeed as an orphan, of course, but we should also recognize that the best tricks ate learnt during teenage years, when you ask “Hey dad, how come the board of a company isn’t salaried? Dad, how did you deal with your last board where you had too many naysayers? How does it work when you have to fire an employee?”

Of course I’ve read my share of books by Ben Horowitz, but of course being the son of such a person gives tremendous advance on how to deal with a lot of situations.

It's not just conversations around the dinner table. It's also how you get started vis a vis introductions to the right people, prized starter jobs and educational pathways that may not be widely known (eg, an internship at ___ will set you up for a job later at ___).

> What if it really takes two generations to be good at something?

This really is the recipe for success. The majority of success is intergenerational.

Someone can come from nothing and become wildly successful, it's true. But it's extremely unlikely. With 8 billion people, occasional rags-to-riches stories are going to happen; even if it's a 1-in-100,000,000 chance that would be about 80 people. These are not the stories to aspire to; they're random anomalies. The stories we should aspire to are the ones of humans setting up future humans for success. Ideally, not even just their children...

> This really is the recipe for success. The majority of success is intergenerational.

I think it's better said that the majority of success is from _iteration_.

In lots of ways, I'm not just a product of my parents' (lack of?) success or their parents' (lack of?) success and so on, but also a product of my iterated local communities and iterated larger society.

> The stories we should aspire to are the ones of humans setting up future humans for success. Ideally, not even just their children...

Be wary of claimed benevolence, for it justifies corpses in the name of the greater good.

History has shown that rising tides lift all boats. We are all the product of millennia of selfish pursuits by bigots, rapists, war profiteers, etc. And yet, the long-term trajectory for the masses is up -- because success iterates not just along family lines, but broadly across society.

It can definitely be an influence. My parents were both in the life sciences and I was definitely gently pushed in that direction. And I got interested in nascent biomedical engineering.

Then I took organic chemistry.

Switched to pure mechanical engineering. Would probably have liked EECS more when all is said and done and have had more aptitude for it. But, at the end of the day, can't really complain about the circuitous path I took which, like so many in my cohort, ended up in computers anyway.

Genetics certainly plays a heavy hand in terms of what we end up doing occupationally. It's not the whole story, obviously, but it's one of the chief protagonists. There's also the matter of constant reinforcement and exposure to your parents' careers as you grow up. So it's mostly genes (nature) and parenting (nurture). Extrafamilial social interactions provide a lesser, but not insignificant, influence.

Yes, genetic variability, which was largely set in prehistory, definitely "plays a heavy hand" in determining whether someone will enter the workforce in one of several occupations that cluster closely in terms of skill set, yet vary widely in terms of pay and prestige. This guy will probably be a journalist instead of, say, a private investigator, or a novelist, or a technical writer, or a marketer, because it's in his genes. /s

Different occupations require different temperaments, personalities, and so forth. These things are largely determined by genetics. How is any of that controversial, or worthy of your scorn?

>Different occupations require different temperaments, personalities, and so forth.

No, I don't think I agree with that. Widely varying workplace cultures across businesses in the same field or market are driven by widely-varying temperaments, personalities, etc. in each business's labor force. (This is the saving grace of, say, police officers, where many decorated vets have been shown to be bullies and sociopaths; I would hope that there is some variance there.) There isn't just variance in how different companies and even teams do things, but across time; the job of a journalist today is quite different from the job of one at the occupation's inception, and even of one who is now retiring as this young man is beginning his career. In fact, assuming that in-built assets truly vary non-trivially, many retire BECAUSE theirs are incompatible with the shifting needs of a modern worker. That a job's responsibilities change over time would alone seem to falsify the notion that one can be born with a proclivity for it, the same as one's parents.

>How is any of that controversial, or worthy of your scorn?

It's unscientific, Panglossian garbage.

I dunno, I'm nowhere close to doing worker's compensation claims adjustment even though my dad did it for 40+ years.

Picking it up doesn't mean it's your career path. You learn a lot from your parents, including bits about their careers, but I'd say such learnings add to your career choices rather than dictate them.

> if both your parents are journalists or [insert whatever profession], it’s as if you’re likely to pick it up no matter how hard you try not to…

How likely is it for you to be {Catholic,Muslim,Hindu,etc} if your parents are? What about the food you like? Interests? Etc

The answer is high, but not 100%. I say this as someone who comes from a _very_ religious family (I'm more areligious), the only person who does anything even remotely STEM related, and has a very different diet than my parents. So triple whammy (but probably unsurprising to get both given one).

It's just likely that you are going to be more similar to your parents than not. Not sure why we should expect otherwise. As an example, growing up in my house there was a lot of discussion of politics and business. It is probably no surprised that almost everyone works in sales. But friends who have parents who are professors grew up listening to and discussing academic ideas. Essentially what is happening is that at an early age we're all being trained and this training is heavily influenced by the teacher models, I mean parents. Sorry, the ML is creeping in ;). I would not be surprised that someone who grew up in a house where both parents are journalists that they wouldn't be explicitly trained to scrutinize authority, gather evidence, and write that down. Lots of learning is done by imitation.

Is this a bad thing? Probably not. Does it mean you don't have free will? Definitely not, but it does mean heavy influence. I think an important aspect is to recognize this, especially if we are going to have conversations about meritocracy and fairness. Understanding this early learning does give credit to claims of quality through generational experience. The question is how much this matters by the time we reach adults and finish our education (wherever that is). I think the longer the education, the less this matters. But it definitely means there's a bias in prestige of that education (and quality if you believe that prestige strongly correlates with quality). It probably isn't a surprise that kids from academics tend to end up at higher ranked universities than kids from non-academics (we see a strong effect when looking at race or class, but these are most likely not causal variables but confounders). It also means that any "meritocratic" system (personal belief is that these are fools errands) will be substantially benefited by generational experience as children will at a young age learn how to optimize for the metrics (which are not necessarily aligned to the goals of those metrics though, which is why the previous note).

Momentum is one hell of a force. Compounding interest isn't just important for money, but nearly any form of resource. There are a lot of benefits to momentum, but the problem is that we often don't account for this in our models and this makes for poor evaluation. I would be very willing to bet that a lot of things people make evaluations on are far more random than they believe. For example I'd put money on that were everything else held equal (making this hard to measure) that high school grades would not significantly affect student outcomes. We can use the studies on students who were admitted through affirmative action to get an indication of this, where we generally see similar results to students admitted normally. There is some noise, but it also isn't unsurprising that if you are doing poorly in high school that this might correlate with problems at home, which can cause a higher likelihood of dropout. But generally, this would suggest that you could shuffle all applications, randomly select, and you wouldn't see a large difference in your students' performance nor outcomes post university (my hypothesis). Some of this is already done, given that many top universities have more applicants that are nearly impossible to distinguish than they have seats for, making selection at least nearly arbitrary for these applicants. But where this may matter in the real world is that prestige definitely correlates with opportunities like internships and work, as companies prioritize recruitment from these locations and prioritize building connections with these professors (who connect students with opportunities). These are probably where we could make adjustments to make a more fair system, but is likely harder than suggested.

TLDR: heavy influence, but you still got free will. Should make you think though...

Pretty simple to see how this happens.

One can not isolate one's self from cumulation of being that is one's life.

During this individuals life in sure he was often exposed to talk and thought about journalism. But also maybe form additional interests and ambitions.

This is not about choice persay, but rather a life lived.

You can tell he's not a real journalist because he wasn't digging dirt and attacking anybody who questioned The Science™ or carrying water for the ruling class.

Not necessary - both parents were doctors but I became an engineer. And no - They were not in it for the money.

Although they worked really hard they were always passionate about their work and truly loved helping people getting better.

But I realized early enough that I did not have the same level of commitment.

There's no inevitability about picking up a career you're familiar with. My dad was a pilot and a professor - yet I'm a computer nerd.

My father was a school gym coach and then a flight attendant. My mother was a sales clerk. Neither of them were into computers.

I have no idea about none of their areas either.

So I guess this only applies to a prestigious occupations.

Theo Baker also became the youngest person to win a Polk Award because of this story, at 18. Very cool!

And because of this, The Stanford Daily became the first independent student newspaper to ever win a Polk Award.

oh wow that's useful context. Congratulations to the Daily.

Despite the lack of name recognition, the Polk Award is a serious award which is well respected among journalists.

Wow! You can't make this up.

It's like one side of the "legacy elite" came around and smacked down a whole different side of the "legacy elite."

Why would you classify Baker’s family as “legacy elite”?

Are you serious?

> His parents are NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser.

Your opinion that the people working at those position are 'legacy elite' is clearly not universal.

I'm not even sure what's 'legacy elite' supposed to mean, other than that it is I suppose negative?

You're unaware there are people who more easily get into elite schools because of their parents?

Educate yourself. It is a widespread systemic problem often called affirmative action for Whites: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

"Nepobaby" (as in nepotism baby) or simply "Legacy" is more commonly used.

This skips what is supposed to be a meritocracy and can quite straightforwardly be argued to be perpetuating an oligarchy and plutocracy

So yes, it's negative.

Legacy elite is not mentioned on that site, not sure how I was supposed to know what the poster means.

Anyway sounds pretty rude to claim that a specific student was admitted thanks to his parents without any evidence.

Thank you for your recommendation regarding the topics I need to educate myself on.

Basically folks have bought into conservative propaganda that white collar journalists are somehow equally “elite” as the ruling owner class.

Point is, his dad probably didn't write to the university president (which would be ironic at this point) asking him to admit his deadbeat son as a favor. The student earned his admission the same way anyone does: essays, grades, luck. I'm sure he was helped by the gift from his parents of good writing skills and some doggedness. "Legacy elite" tends to imply there's someone more deserving of his spot.

It's not about admission. Without his parents, he would be removed from school for harassing a lesser faculty member. Like imagine making the same accusations, as a normal person, against your PI. Like he could have direct, first hand evidence of fraud, and it would be career suicide, if it weren't for his parents. Do you see?

> Without his parents, he would be removed from school for harassing a lesser faculty member.

That's conjecture, not fact.

When I was at Georgia Tech (THWG), the administration, via the Diversity Task Force, wanted to quietly change the school fight song (better to ask forgiveness than permission). So, the Technique student paper got the story together and published it before the admin could sink it.

I don't know if anyone at the Technique ever suffered for it; my recollection was that the Diversity Task Force, and the Director of Diversity Stephanie Ray, were pretty hostile to anyone and everyone who opposed their re-education ideas, so I presume there was retribution.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090726171257/http://technique....

I too cannot believe it. Even the most diehard nonparticipating 20-year-old League-of-Legends-addicted coding-bootcamped hustlebro HN reader could fathom how being a senior journalist in the country's maybe #1 and #3 news institutions is like, a big deal.

Since it sounds like the other commenters are really confused about why it matters whose kid he is: like if you were just a regular person, you might be ejected from Stanford for pursuing something like this against a far lesser faculty member. It has nothing to do with admissions, which is such a hustlebro 20 year old POV anyway: to think that the privileges of nepotism are limited to getting admitted to fancy universities and money in a bank account. If only!

Imagine having first hand evidence of your PI doing fraud, which lots of people do by definition, and that is rightly seen as career suicide. Like even the postdoc in the story, who has the evidence, hasn't come clean! He can't just like, stop living the way this student can.

The students who relayed Marc Hauser's fraud to Harvard never went public with their identities. They don't get to win Polk Awards at all. They're not regarded as investigative journalists. This also prevents us from seeing what happened. I can tell you from my experience at least some of those students joined Hauser's prestigious lab for a medical school recommendation, which obviously didn't happen. In fact they may have only exposed him because, he was such an asshole, he refused to write them recs at all, for whatever reason.

Do you know what all those people at Genentech get for exposing this fraud publicly? Nothing. I mean, they certainly don't become eligible for journalism awards. They could very well have provided the first hand evidence, and maybe posted to a PR newswire that has more circulation than the Stanford Daily or whatever, and cause the Stanford president to resign, and they still will absolutely, positively, never win a Polk award. They will just have a blown up career at the end, either way. They have a 100% chance of exposing the truth, and yet a pretty, pretty low chance of ending up better off than they were before they started.

Nevermind research. Think about all the kids at e.g. private schools, younger kids, directly harmed by teachers molesting them, and you know, the kids are the ones who leave, not the teachers, for many decades and many institutions.

So it definitely mattered to be the son of some big deal journalists in New York. Jerry Yang is beholden to journalists in New York. It made this happen.

That said, of all the things to deploy your nepobabiness on, this is a pretty good one, isn't it? Investigative journalism of the finest degree. I don't personally think that a Polk award determines the merit of the investigation; nor does even the publication, clearly. Anyone, everywhere, can be not only be an investigative journalist, but indeed a great investigative journalist. It is a legitimately great story of bringing this guy, who has clearly dodged bullets for a decade, to task.

I like how, you write, and I agree. You have panache.

how being a senior journalist in the country's maybe #1 and #3 news institutions is like, a big deal.

Ok, so you've established how his parents may be considered elite. You haven't explained the legacy part though. Did his parents get their jobs based on his grandparents merits? Can they trace their lineage back to the Mayflower? If that is irrelevant, can you perhaps explain your conception of "legacy elite" and how it differs from regular elite?

[they] never went public with their identities[..] They're not regarded as investigative journalists

That's true. In order to be considered a journalist you have to go public with your findings. Otherwise, you may be an investigator but not a journalist.

That's an odd framing of what happened here, I don't really get what it has to do with "legacy elites". I guess maybe in the sense that his parents were exceptional, but when I think of "legacy elites" I think of multi-generational wealth and power that often has little to do with individual merit (and is probably correlated against merit, in my experience).

It certainly is fascinating though. Like it will be interesting to see what happens if the kid of Ashton Eaton (gold medalist, decathlon) and Brianne Theisen-Eaton (world champion / bronze medalist, heptathlon) decides to dabble in athletics in 10-15 years.

This is pretty much a journalistic version of that scenario; if there was ever someone born to lay waste to a fraudulent Stanford president, surely it was this kid.

Yeah this is exactly what I’m describing

His parents are “elite” and he’s following in their footsteps - hence the “legacy.”

It’s one of the few generational advantages that I’m generally ok with ethically (passing down a trade), so long as it’s not abused.

In this case that advantage seems to be being used for the greater good which is great!

It’s always interesting to watch the semi-elites & elites of HN discuss and rationalize the merits of class society.

Why would you consider two moderately paid journalists part of the "legacy elite", how are what they do comparable - at all - to the president of Stanford University?

Exactly, don't know why they are trying to frame the kid as part of some legacy elite. We should judge Theo for his actions (commendable), not who his parents are.

Theo's achievements wouldn't be possible without his parent's legacy to protect him. The average student journalist absolutely could not do the same thing Theo did here.

There are many yardsticks by which you can measure elite status, other than salary. I respect Dennis Ritchie, but not for his salary.

If you measure status by the yardstick "Number of people in the white house you're on a first name basis with" then I am reasonably confident that NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker scores higher than the president of Stanford University.

None of this detracts from what Theo Baker has achieved, of course.

Interesting. So, by that yardstick, a cook in the Whitehouse basement is legacy elite. So is my 20 year old niece. Sorry, but a more successful than average journalist is not part of the "legacy elite", whatever the fuck that means anyway.

The term 'legacy elite' is indeed ambiguous, so let me state things in a different way.

Imagine you're the President of Stanford, and some kid on the student newspaper is bothering you about some decade-old nonsense. You can barely even remember fudging the numbers and besides, everyone was doing it. Student newspapers have been railing against the university since time immemorial, but this guy seems determined to harass you personally. It bothers you and you want it to stop.

You could probably make it stop; almost everyone is guilty of something, and society has seen fit to give you your own police force. And even if you can't find any evidence of pot or drinking or piracy, why shouldn't rules about harassment, bullying and creating a hostile workplace be on your side? Even if that wouldn't hold up in court, probably someone can convince the kid that 'voluntarily' stopping would be in everyone's best interests.

Then you find out the kid's parents both write for major national periodicals. And not occasional contract work or writing the sunday style magazine, they're serious journalists.

You realise this kid has probably already received advice on the lines between journalism and harassment. Probably very well informed advice. And even if his parents don't personally write about rising censorship on college campuses, they undoubtedly know people who do.

You're going to have to do this one by the book.

> two moderately paid journalists

"Peter Eleftherios Baker (born July 2, 1967) is an American journalist and author. He is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC, and was previously a reporter for The Washington Post for 20 years."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Baker_(journalist)

I don't know what he's paid, but I doubt it's anywhere near the median for journalists, for US workers, or for the NYTimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction

> His parents are NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, and New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser

wow, his parents maybe can learn from this! How to doggedly pursue allegations against the occupant of the Whitehouse, without fear or favor, with a healty dose of Grabthar's Hammer (never give up, never surrender)

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