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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science.

I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.

Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.

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Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again.

There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.

The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.

I studied journalism as an undergraduate

Objectivity is impossible

These two statements are at opposition with one another.

I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.

>"A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."

Except no reporter would write this single sentence as a story.

Please present an example story which is both realistic (could be published or broadcast as is) and also completely objective.

How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.

The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.

Facts that are included in a story or left out at the journalist's discretion have the power to create very different impressions on people.

For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.

All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.

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