All we want are the facts, ma'am. | Hacker News Reader

All we want are the facts, ma'am.

norvig.com

107 pointscdibona20 comments

Peter Norvig's new post on reporters, fact-checking, models and data.

"The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." -- Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, 1807. ME 11:225 (http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1600.htm)

thanks for citing your quote!

I love that Sussman story.

  In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
  "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe," Sussman replied.
  "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
  "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

  Minsky shut his eyes.
  "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
  "So that the room will be empty."
  At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

If you ever hear Sussman tell it, he'll claim Minsky actually told him "Randomly wired, it will have preconceptions--you just won't know what they are."

I love that story too! Can anyone point me to a collection of stories like that? I have read "Hackers..." by Levy and "The Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder.

The Jargon File has three more: http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_47.html#SEC54

The Tao of Programming contains ancient Usenet wisdom:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

Whenever I read an article in the newspaper, I have to remind myself to filter it through the lens of all the times I've been misquoted or have caught glaring mistakes in stories about which I have first-hand or subject-matter knowledge.

As much as I depend on the media for information about what's going on in the world, I rarely can point to articles about subjects I know and say they're accurate.

The day I stopped reading newspapers: there was an article on the front of the science section of La Vanguardia, a local 'respectable' newspaper of Barcelona (Spain). The headline of the article was (paraphrasing) "Organ donor headless human bodies".

I am a biologist and a geneticist by training. So I read on with naive interest.

The article was about how researchers managed to inhibit an homeobox gene essential for head development in tadpoles, and that tadpoles developed to some stage and then died, lacking a head. Then the article when on to the wild speculation that such silly experiment could one day lead to headless human bodies generated as clones and for the purpose of being organ donors, avoiding ethical issues (right, the author was sleeping when he wrote that.)

With my background, I knew the claims to be bullshit at several levels, including the ethical. Then I made the link: are all other newspaper articles as thinly grounded as that one? So I stop trusting anything from any source of redacted news such as TVs, newspapers, and radios.

I had the same eureka moment reading The Economist's science section. The articles are usually old info, superficial and misleading. Then I read an economist's blog post complaining about the same thing in their finance section. So I assumed the entire magazine was suspect and stopped my subscription.

The day I gave up on TV news: Driving around flipping channels on my radio, I heard that O.J. Simpson was suspected of murder and detectives were trying to find him. "Hmm, great." I thought, "Here comes another Hollywood scandal." I listened a couple minutes, then switched to music.

I got home to find my husband sitting on the carpet, leaning his face toward the TV, mere inches away, and blurting, "O.J. Simpson is getting arrested!" There on the TV was live helicopter coverage of a van surrounded by several cop cars very calmly making their way on an LA freeway devoid of traffic. The scene looked rather like a head of state with security cortège, yet this was the chasing of a suspected criminal. A very odd sight, quite the photo op, even if the van occupant were not a sports and movie celebrity.

I looked at the TV and my husband, and then it hit me: the purpose of TV news is not to inform you but to glue your eyeballs to your TV. This hit me so hard that I ran into my office and spent the next twenty minutes sobbing!

I present to you Chris Anderson, as theorized about by himself:

  The way Chris Anderson has traditionally published is unsustainable in the face of new developments,
  as outlined in this misleading neon spot-color info-graphic! *(not pictured)*

  In the face of such a massive increase in critical attention towards my trite editorial, the way I
  have traditionally published cannot continue. Each new dalliance I put on the cover of Wired is now
  savaged for it's idiocy by domain experts before it even appears on newsstands!

  How am I supposed to get an advance on the book version of my pop-science pablum if I'm not showered
  with uncritical adulation? How am I going to debut on the NYT bestseller list in four months if I'm
  already discredited?

  Clearly, I need to develop a *new kind of* [1] Chris Anderson. A totally new model of exerting my
  bloviations on the world. I need to find a way to publish to smaller, more sycophantic audiences in
  private at first; gradually sowing my trite theories into the public discourse so that they are not so
  easily mocked for what they are.

  I need to explore the depths of my own *long tail* -- I need to expose my genius to my *social graph*
  first. Publishing straight to the cover of Wired exposes my ideas to public ridicule by practicing
  experts -- if I could limit my audience initially to *self-facilitating media nodes* [2] like myself,
  I might be able to ride a wave of sycophancy right over any criticism!

  I, Chris Anderson, hereby usher in a new age of post-pop-science! Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell
  don't stand a chance against my cunning insights into this world of post-hype I herald!

[1] http://www.amazon.com/review/product/1579550088

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4mpJumHU-w

This is great, where did you get it ? Did you write it ? If yes, congrats, it's hilarious.

I wrote it as a comment on MetaFilter when the bullshit was making the rounds back in July: http://www.metafilter.com/73484/Virtual-Thinking#2191757

It seems endemic to modern journalistic media to never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Frankly this disturbs me.

Not just modern.

If you can get ahold of the New Yorker article Norvig cites, I highly recommend it.

To be fair, the quote isn't all that wrong. If you know enough to recognize the problems, you probably aren't getting much from the article anyway.

I thoroughly agree with Herring when he said, "To be fair, the quote is wrong."

If you're not going to quote correctly, why quote at all? In this case, it's because the best support Anderson could find for his argument is Peter Norvig's name. Norvig didn't want to give it, but Anderson went and took it anyway.

The most mystifying thing was the fact-checking call. Anderson might as well have said, "Hi, I'm planning to misquote you in a future article. Please say that's OK, because then I'd have slightly more journalistic integrity than when you say no and I go ahead and print it anyway."

Maybe people will take the hint and stop up-voting Wired articles?

Or how about a domain filter in my options?

Some people use Xichekolas' HN Greasemonkey script to filter domains:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

It adds a "Toolkit" link to the HN menubar from which you can set options.

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