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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's extremely irritating every time people trot out the same copy-pasted complaints about the BLS unemployment rate and how wrong it is, ignoring the fact that the BLS publishes six different unemployment rates, which specifically address most of those complaints. It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.

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It's also a sign of intense hubris - the idea that thousands of labor economists have never considered something they thought of after 30 seconds of reading means that either a) the economists are all idiots or b) the reader is orders of magnitude smarter than them.

This is also a sign that communication of the semantics in understandable terms is pretty bad.

The communications from the BLS are quite good and easily understandable. The problem is that the people making these complaints aren't reading those, they're reading the mainstream reporting on the BLS stats, which is extremely lossily-compressed, and then assuming this makes them qualified to criticize the underlying stats. Journalists deserve some flak here for the superficial way they report on the numbers, but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.

> but at some point it's on you to get the real thing before you start trying to correct it.

One thing is for sure is that people aren't going to do that.

Anyway, it seems disingenuous (or just completely irrelevant) to complain that people are attacking the BLS rather than how this is wielded to perpetrate a polemic.

My point is one doesn't have to go to the original sources, they simply have to ask themselves "is it likely no one has thought of this before?" before launching into a criticism...

This happens everywhere with lots of people in many different contexts. I call it the “‘why don’t we just’ disease”, or WDWJ Disease. When you’re in any leadership position, you have to stay especially careful to catch yourself from falling prey to this pernicious effect and behavior, and its equally debilitating sibling yak shaving when you over index on preventing WDWJ.

The mistake you are making is believing people are interested in the truth and the assumption that humans are rational truth seeking agents.

People mostly consume news as a form of entertainment with a dopamine hit from having their prior beliefs confirmed or for gossip. It is why the "news" is so popular.

I have thought quite a bit about building "real" news outlets but it is hard to not conclude it is a waste of time.

Reinforcing priors and gossiping is just what humans do. In the west, we really get off on a simulation of truth seeking even when the slightest bit of analysis can show the simulation is ridiculous.

The Titan submersible news event is really a great lens to grasp this in retrospect considering anyone with domain knowledge knew right away the truth that the Titan had imploded.

> It's a sign of terminal incuriosity and using only superficial and secondhand sources of information like news reports on the unemployment rate, and thinking this is enough to make you qualified to do critique.

Agreed, I just dismiss complaints about the unemployment rate unless the poster/speaker mentions/alludes to U1 to U6.

The OP in this comment chain is just ‘old man yells at clouds’ in HN form, complaining about a lack of statistics without checking to see if those statistics are measured (which they are).

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