I'm hoping we can avoid the 'noise' of the often-repeated generic criticisms of journalism and look at Younge's - a long-time journalist for the Guardian - specific critique.
Whenever you see news of something that has been going on for years or decades, that means the world ignored it. Younge talks about how and why. For example, many of the issues around law enforcement abuse that reached the world's attention around 2020 had been there, and had been talked about by its victims, for generations. How did we miss it all?
And remember that those internal memos are for us, not some other - for people on HN (I'd expand it beyond the upper class, perhaps $20M+ in assets, to the privileged class, perhaps can-safely-afford-whatever-they-need professionals). I've conditioned myself to ask, how did I miss it? Some answers:
* Most of all, human instinct is to follow the herd. If everyone says it's ok to overlook X, then that's what I tend to do. And also, it's hard to think for yourself, by yourself: we not only instinctively follow norms, they become our reality - if you observe something, and nobody else talks about it or notices it or accepts it as true, by a year later is it still real in your mind?
* While I think journalism is generally a fantastic institution, even the best journalism doesn't quite internalize these things. There might be an article here or there, but the journalists and columnists don't internalize it - they don't include it as context in other stories and analyses and opinions on the same issues, like they didn't read the article. So unless you happen to read and make efforts to remember that article, it gets lost in an ocean of news. They seem stuck on norms too though they are often on the leading edge of changing them. (Younge talks about this.)
Solutions, IMHO, which have worked very well for me:
* Shut up. I mean it. Shut the f- up and let people speak for themselves. When I finish their sentence or interrupt with my idea - even in my head, but if you do it out loud even a little bit, most humans will for whatever reason just forget themselves and follow your line, which means you never hear theirs, and that's why I don't know these things. Be curious, follow their line, let them paint their picture which has nothing to do with your norms, your experience, or whatever you expected - if I knew it all already (a ridiculous idea), I wouldn't have been ignorant.
* Evaluate things on their merits and not on social norms. It puts you far ahead of the curve, including in business and technology. Social norms can take a decade or generations to catch up, and people will push back against threats to them, angrily at times - it's the same thing any founder developing disruptive tech runs into. Expect it: First they'll laugh at you (ridicule the person outside the norm), then they'll say it's not in the scripture (or whatever the orthodoxy, when it becomes a threat), then they'll say they believed it all along (when it becomes normalized).
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 14.1 ms ] threadWhenever you see news of something that has been going on for years or decades, that means the world ignored it. Younge talks about how and why. For example, many of the issues around law enforcement abuse that reached the world's attention around 2020 had been there, and had been talked about by its victims, for generations. How did we miss it all?
And remember that those internal memos are for us, not some other - for people on HN (I'd expand it beyond the upper class, perhaps $20M+ in assets, to the privileged class, perhaps can-safely-afford-whatever-they-need professionals). I've conditioned myself to ask, how did I miss it? Some answers:
* Most of all, human instinct is to follow the herd. If everyone says it's ok to overlook X, then that's what I tend to do. And also, it's hard to think for yourself, by yourself: we not only instinctively follow norms, they become our reality - if you observe something, and nobody else talks about it or notices it or accepts it as true, by a year later is it still real in your mind?
* While I think journalism is generally a fantastic institution, even the best journalism doesn't quite internalize these things. There might be an article here or there, but the journalists and columnists don't internalize it - they don't include it as context in other stories and analyses and opinions on the same issues, like they didn't read the article. So unless you happen to read and make efforts to remember that article, it gets lost in an ocean of news. They seem stuck on norms too though they are often on the leading edge of changing them. (Younge talks about this.)
Solutions, IMHO, which have worked very well for me:
* Shut up. I mean it. Shut the f- up and let people speak for themselves. When I finish their sentence or interrupt with my idea - even in my head, but if you do it out loud even a little bit, most humans will for whatever reason just forget themselves and follow your line, which means you never hear theirs, and that's why I don't know these things. Be curious, follow their line, let them paint their picture which has nothing to do with your norms, your experience, or whatever you expected - if I knew it all already (a ridiculous idea), I wouldn't have been ignorant.
* Evaluate things on their merits and not on social norms. It puts you far ahead of the curve, including in business and technology. Social norms can take a decade or generations to catch up, and people will push back against threats to them, angrily at times - it's the same thing any founder developing disruptive tech runs into. Expect it: First they'll laugh at you (ridicule the person outside the norm), then they'll say it's not in the scripture (or whatever the orthodoxy, when it becomes a threat), then they'll say they believed it all along (when it becomes normalized).