Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
math.columbia.edu
math.columbia.edu
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
>The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation
https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform...
(archived: https://archive.is/liFTX)
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate.
Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in anticipation of these rhetorical chisels that will try to pry into any minute crack to dismiss the entire issue at hand.
or whatever fallacy nerds like bringing up in debates, just pick your favourite one and insert it here.
Which is not-quite but sometimes leads to a Fallacy Fallacy comeback: Just because the argument is unsound doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong. :p
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-f...
As a general rule, you can sit there and moan about problems or you can spend 5min to find proven solutions. It's hard to do both.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.
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EDIT: Chain: https://pastebin.com/raw/Mch2XTiQ
That said, I'm not having this issue at all. Strange.
As a former math sysadmin... I apologize on behalf of math sysadmins
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They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
That's a good general takeaway, not just for physics drama. I can think of several people whose books are great or at least pretty good, but their social media presence is...Flanderized, would be a kind way of putting it.
I also just finished a four-and-a-half-hour defence of modern physics by Sean Carroll which has some really good counterarguments in it, as well as a whirlwind history of the last century in physics. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-...
I am conscious of the irony of responding to this post by posting podcasts.
What do you mean when you say this?
> prematurely rejected
What does this mean?
> What does this mean?
I'm assuming it means rejected "without giving them sufficient attention or effort in their development," as stated in the rest of the sentence. What do you think "prematurely" means?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
It's funny how this new generation of professional antiestablishers are using the same tactics (even though they would vehemently attach postmodernism)
It's all a power play really, when politics is involved. That's not science
I can think of two ways to interpret this, and I'm not sure which one you intend:
1. They hold modernist views, that there is a distinct and meaningful direction/progression for how societies must change over time.
2. They don't know what postmodernism means, and consider it a generic bad-word to attach to things they don't like. (Comic example: [0])
The Sokal affair was a physicist attacking the postmodernists for attacking physics (and scientific realism) by showing the postmodernists would publish complete nonsense.
The current attack is saying the physics establishment is backing a theory that doesn't adequately make predictions (not adequately supporting scientific realism).
It can be viewed outside the realm of power, that's a very postmodern view.
Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.
I think it was just yesterday, I saw an article about an ICE raid of the Samsung plant in Georgia. It was a pretty long article, and even the tone of the article was pretty level. That said, there was a critical and very important piece missing from the article altogether... "Why?" As in what law(s) were broken and how/why the raid was used. TBH, I don't know that a raid was necessary over revised negotiations between DoJ/ICE, Samsung, Korea and the people in question... That said, the fact the article clearly didn't even attempt to report the ICE reasoning was pretty damning of the author and the site.
Or maybe this was a rhetorical point? Even today, there are articles that are trying to piece together who informed on the plant and what the basis for an ICE raid was. It seems you and the authors retain a similar understanding of the situation.
This was reported in other articles on the situation... it was clearly missing from the article I was referencing which changes the context to place a shift in narrative.
I think your comment implies that journalism in some previous time did not 'just hire for pedigree' and 'end up with careerists.'
When was this time and who were the specialist writers from that moment? How can one write anything without taking a political stance? We make much of the odd era of doublespeak we endure (when is a 'special military operation' a 'war'?). But it's hard to imagine that there has ever been a time where even the selection of a descriptive phrase carries political weight. My imagination may be limited, I suppose.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting your argument and you mean that content meant for general consumption has always (read since its inception) been 'generic' and with '[injection] of political opinion.'
Maybe you mean that those journalists were more specialized than the writers of today?
It seems that there may have been more journalists in the 1970s (when we consider people who call themselves reporters and work in 'news').
1972 - ~39,000 ( https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/occupational-outlook-han... ; a great resource to find out about what journalism was like)
2022 - ~17,000 ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes273023.htm#nat - search for Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers. If you want to add social media companies one needs a reasonable way to discount media streaming services. At any rate, this doesn't match what was being done in the 1970s so it's immaterial to your argument)
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Something seems to be wrong...
Okay, then this blog post was essentially useless. The WSJ is wrong about something, but the author can't be bothered to tell us what. Pity.
There is a huge gap between - we should change funding priorities vs "Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science". One is a reasonable but potentially controversial viewpoint. The other is batshit insane. These 2 views should not be grouped together.
In short, I'm predicting port 80 and 443 as we know it today will see much less usage because of LLMs. Or that it'll move to more curated one off blogs like it used to be. Stack Overflow died because of LLMs. I'm not certain if other social media is next or not. Anyone want to guess at when HN will be a hot mess of bots and garbage?
Who cares what Trump says. Responsible reporting would be getting the information from primary sources, not fettering responsibility for determining newsworthiness to whatever Trump says.
Journalism is the one part of this equation that has changed the least since then. The way I see it, there are two bigger forces at work:
- The demand that normal people have for this sort of knowledge. People today believe they should have a front row seat to everything and be an active participant. And to a lesser degree we have encouraged this as a society through television, social media, or even the way we assumed every student needed a well-rounded undergraduate college education.
- Academia has exploded in size and scope in the last century. The prestige, the hierarchy, the social ladder climbing, the funding battles, the publishing race, the sheer number of graduate students in these programs. These programs are meat grinders that pump out all sorts of noise and failed academics with grudges. We have conveniently forgot that there is a massive ongoing replication crisis that is still largely being ignored.
Journalists and scientists can point fingers at each other as much as they want and claim the other knows nothing about what they are speaking of. But at the end of the day the sheer amount of information (right and wrong) at our fingertips is bearing down on our society like a great weight ready to destroy us all.
That shifted with Watergate, which, afterwards, journalism began to have a certain prestige as "crusading truth seekers." Journalists doubled down on that view, cultivated it, and began to believe in it. Nowadays, journalism (at least in major markets) is more about prestige and access to power. Some journalists have a complex and believe that they have the access to the truth, leading to much handwringing about its "professionalism".
In reality, journalism is closer to writing in a journal after a party: they just offer accounts of events. That we expect better from them is, in part, a creation of their own making that is now starting to bite them in the ass.
In short: because it’s simply who they are by definition
Because it's cheaper and lets it survive.
The unspoken undercurrent is that Google and Facebook ate the ad spending that used to fund journalism, without replacing its function.
Google and Facebook don't fund journalism at scale -- that's why their profit margins stay at 23% & 40%.
Without revenue, reporters don't get paid, high quality reporting doesn't get done, and newsrooms grovel for any source of margin.
Which currently seems to be {minimal cost "journalism"} + {catering to power in exchange for access}.
From the number of press people jailed or killed it does not seem they enjoy any special rights of they speak truth to power.
This was overturned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/business/media/appeals-co...
Regarding the East Room, according to the White House Correspondents' Association website (https://whca.press/covering-the-white-house/), reporters either need to have a hard pass or a temporary pass from the White House Press Office to enter. The Press Office generally only gives press passes to the press. That's why even if we restrict the conversation to the East Room, it's still a "special right" (or special privilege).
Regarding the Oval Office et al. (which admittedly is what the term "press pool" actually refers to), the Trump administration's entire argument was that press access to those spaces is a "privilege, not a right." So keeping in mind the courts affirmed an actual right to the East Room, the White House itself still grants other journalists a special privilege (because they're journalists).
You can make an argument if you'd like that the guy earlier in the thread should've said, "The press has special privileges because accountability and informing the public was supposed to be their job." (This ignores that it's still a "right" in other cases, like the East Room.) Squabbling over that word choice doesn't do a lot for the topic of this thread, which was journalists no longer serving the interest that justified giving them those privileges/rights.
This study of circular journalism at that paper was pretty eye-opening:
https://css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times-a-case-study-in-in...
The press has a lot of problems right now:
* Most of the big outfits are owned by oligarchs. See the decline of the Washington Post for instance.
* Local papers struggle to make ends meet. The paper in the city I live in keeps getting cut and cut and cut. There's little left.
* Social media suffers from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law at the same time that fewer people read real news sources.
IDK how we fix those things... but they're all deleterious for our society.
This has more or less always been the case.
Pressure due to the Internet killing their business models (see the last season of The Wire for a view of what this looked like when it was getting into full swing and the old serious-journalism newsrooms were rapidly being destroyed by cost-cutting and chasing dwindling numbers of eyeballs, even if the outlet survived in some form) plus changes to laws, including the ones referenced above but also a drastic weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, have made things very different for our news media than they were from the end of WWII through roughly the '90s.
They did say "The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal", so there is probably an element of attacking what is high quality though. [I dont follow us media landscape, i have no idea what the relative quality of various papers are or if you are correct about NYT]
That said, more generally when constructing arguments, you generally want to attack the strongest version of your opponents argument. Attacking a paper known for being higher quality is always going to be more convincing than attacking a paper that is less known.
In any European country the New York Times opinion pages would be seen as pretty centrist, or even centre-right.
That so much of US media and political sphere skews heavily to the right distorts the overall picture.
“Other places are further left” seems irrelevant to this discussion.
Even if a particular source somehow manages to perfectly balance between whatever the current "left" and "right" are in that political environment, that doesn't make it free of bias. Sometimes the people on one side of the political spectrum in a given environment are genuinely, collectively, doing bad things! Sometimes there are personal biases! Sometimes the political environment shifts, and leaves you behind!
In general, it's much more important and productive to be aware of and transparent about your own biases than it is to try to present yourself as "unbiased".
But a bias towards centrist American politics doesn't mean a lack of bias — far from it.
For example, 30 years ago a "centrist" report on global warming might have given equal space to right-wing and liberal perspectives, even though the vast majority of scientists at the time sided with liberals on the facts.
20-ish years ago a centrist report on Iraq would have parroted the administration's lies about WMDs and the urgency of going to war. And the New York Times was one of those organisations!
But the article is literally about the culture war, so of course it is framed in a culture war narrative.
I guess you can claim the WSJ shouldn't have written this piece at all, but I didn't see anything glaringly wrong about it.
Sure, but what do you do if the subject matter is the question of whether the experts are being myopic and the system in which they're operating is no longer fulfilling its intended purpose? Where's the expert for that?
If you just ask those same experts, well, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.
I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.
Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.
Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?
Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.
That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...
Insane take. Just GPS, MRIs (high temp. supercondutors), electron microscopes, quantum computing, and chip fabs alone are relevant to us here at HN.
"There’s zero intelligent content about the underlying scientific issues (is fundamental theoretical physics in trouble?), just a random collection of material about podcasts, written by someone who clearly knows nothing about the topic he’s writing about. The epistemic collapse is total when traditional high-quality information sources like the Wall Street Journal are turned over to uninformed writers getting their information from Joe Rogan podcasts. Any hope of figuring out what is true and what is false is now completely gone."
Now extend this to the state of all public discourse in the US degraded by propaganda.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Did it ever have it?
Things such as this remind me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, when you notice the media is wrong about something you know, but still trust it on everything else.
This all reminds me of the Gell-Man Amnesia which is an absolutely real thing, and this turn of events with regards to WSJs capability (if it can be called that) shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Of course, this is quite a bit different than bought and paid for corporate media shills that currently represent "journalism" at large. In that space they do pretend to have the prestige of being about news, truth and information. For television in particular is pretty bad... MSNBC, CNN, Fox, etc. all are just not great between selection/coverage bias, misinformation, out of context contortions and opinions masked as news. I will separate Fox's written/web coverage as a bit better than their TV counterpart (and the others in general) though. I used to find BBC coverage decent, but they've slipped a lot in the past few years. Similar for Al Jazeera, at least for content outside middle east concerns.
I regularly check Fox's website along with CNN and NewsNation, which gets me ostensibly right/left/center views on things. Having not seen much TV Fox, I assumed Fox News Digital put more spin on things. It could just be the stupid little quip taglines they put over all of their image thumbnails that made me think that, as opposed to the actual article content, though.
On Fox content, yeah I'm more referring to the written news content (not editorial).
All said, I'm probably going to unplug for a couple weeks regarding social media, news and politics... some of the posts on Bluesky and Reddit the past couple days just make me feel a bit ill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows
The groypers are not antifascist, so the reported symbolism doesn't add up. If there's evidence of the shooter being a groyper, then I'm curious to see it.
Actually you don't even need an account. TIL. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ais7KJXx8Gyd0hsrbakKW
ETA: And you have the wrong "three arrows" iconography.
Maybe the arrows are a video game reference? I still don’t see a groyper tie there.
Meanwhile mainstream sources are reporting that the shooter appeared to be motivated by left political ideology.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/12/charlie...
Doesn't seem that way to me. Tyler Robison thought Charlie Kirk was "Full of Hate and spreading hate", that is something left wingers would say, you see that sort of language all the time on the left wing parts of reddit, not some other right wing faction.