It is exceptionally rare for a human to care about the epistemological roots of any claim
I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology”
Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
I'm confused why we are fact checking viral slop. First, you would have to confirm she wrote it. When and where was it published. If you can't confirm that, you shouldn't post it. Stop, go no further.
What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?
The BBC pulled that article/episode - which is the main difference between different media spheres today.
We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.
High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.
The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.
With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.
That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.
The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.
We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
I've done a fair amount of data-intensive fact checking for journalism articles and have had fact checking done on my own data-intensive reporting.
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
Factcheckers are QA. If there is anything for them to do, then the publisher has failed by not providing the writer with tooling for establishing unit and integration tests for all information within an article.
I hope not to derail, as the core of the author's point is valid and important for people to understand.
Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".
Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
Yuval Noah Harari has a great quote (paraphrased) about slop/fake news etc:
People always ask how we will deal with AI generated fake images and news etc. My answer is the way we have always done it: by creating institutions to deliver accurate information
I like this quote for two reasons:
1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
> I hope I've demonstrated that it takes almost no effort to perform a basic fact check. It isn't a professional skill.
First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.
In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
There's a chapter in John McPhee's "Draft No. 4" (which is quite a time capsure of how writing was done in the last century) about the fact checking topic, and how much effort went into it for stories posted in The New Yorker.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
The root problem is that the media's business model has failed. We need a new business model before the situation improves. What might that business model look like?
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
I agree with the author that this is important. I do not agree that it is easy.
In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.
I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.
10 years ago there was a famous article in the German Bild about the 10 craziest laws in America. Something like that it's illegal for woman to wear pants in some parts of Arizona etc. A lot of other big publications started to feature the same laws in their trivia sections until a journalist actually checked if they still exist. It turned out that none of the laws existed or were still enforced. It would have been so simple to check their facts but nope over 10 publications reprinted it and nobody bothered.
When a writer reaches a national platform they see themselves as a taste maker, not a reporter. So they write what they think you should think. That's why so many articles tell you how you are supposed to feel about a thing, rather than tell you about that thing. If that means ignoring facts that disagree what they think, well, too bad. Thus we end up with headlines and paragraphs that use words and concepts that are meant to make you feel something. We get headlines like "ICE Breaks Into A House Where There Is A Baby" and "Trump Illegally Indicts Billy Bob."
I mean the Indy is one of Lebvdev's vanity papers and the Express is part of the Reach newspaper group where the authors are incentivised on a per-click basis - you'd go to neither expecting anything other than dross.
40 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadNot only was the article slop, but the author kept responding to comments/criticisms with MORE slop. I must scream.
There must be a corollary somewhere about how much you should read the average newspaper.
Still. In many case I think there should be moments where people just stop for moment and do most basic sanity checks.
I would go so far as to say that the median human with a 100IQ doesn’t even understand the concept of what constitutes a “fact” or how you would dicriminate fact from opinion or has even heard the word “epistemology”
Expecting anything close to that in the context of celebrity gossip… well at that point the author needs to manage his own expectations of humanity
For myself a quick fact check like this is also low effort. Unlike the author, I recognize this is a professional skill. We are fortunate enough to be incredibly proficient in a large set of skills. Language, literacy, reading quickly, tech skills, research, touch-typing, critical thinking, searching, subject matter expertise, etc. Most people don’t have those skills! For them to do the same fact check it would be an enormous effort, if they could even accomplish it at all. If these skills were common, our society would not be where it is right now.
Imagine a very tall professional basketball player casually performing a slam dunk. Then they tell you it’s super easy and berate you for not being able to dunk.
Us terminally online people who spend all day reading, searching, and writing are mostly interacting with other similar people. I’ve been doing that almost daily for over twenty years. It’s a skill, and it is an incredibly rare skill. This is easy to forget when you mostly interact online only with other people who have a similar level of proficiency.
What if the information was plausible, or even accurate. If she didn't write it, what value is it?
We are habituated to think of information as the fundament of the internet. When in reality the foundation is simply content.
High quality information is content which is verified, or has a chain of sources. This is expensive to produce.
The information consumer primarily consumes emotionally salient content. Maybe 20% of the time they are willing to exert themselves to consume cognitively demanding content.
With the end of classifieds, the end of ad revenue, the dominance of platforms - news is a dumb ass business to expect to survive. They make expensive goods and sell it for cheap.
That’s why theres entire media spheres which are incredibly effective today - because they don’t spend the money to verify, they spend the money to platform narratives that take off.
The economics of the fourth estate dont make sense, and this needs an answer.
We depend on informed voters to have functioning democracies.
Couple things:
1. Fact checkers are not paid enough to do what they do. They're usually freelancers and they're usually financially struggling. The dynamics of that are difficult to say the least.
2. Editors change things last minute without informing the journalist whose name the piece is in. It's really not fun to receive threats of lawsuit from a powerful government agency because your editor added something that you never would have added. Once told an editor in-writing three times not to add something and he did it right before publishing.
It sucks being a journalist. Donate to your local investigative newsroom.
Isn't this a bit like saying "The compulsive liar lied! He should stop doing that." Or "The propaganda agency is posting propaganda; they should stop doing that".
Focusing on details like this is assuming good faith, or assuming that the problems pointed out are exceptions, when they are the rule.
Good. The author didn’t make the mistake of calling it the “news”.
I have for a long time felt that there is nuance about our “press” that doesn’t have good words in the public dialog. I struggle to articulate it myself.
Our modern “free press” is only free in that government is mostly not censoring it. But the press of today is a for profit endeavour. So it is not free to waste time “speaking truth” or something like that. It is incentivized to be whatever it takes to grab and keep eyeballs.
While there are people/institutions who publish things purely for information they feel is important, this is largely drowned out by the “trying to make money” crowd.
So our supposedly “free press”, while possibly free of despotic controls, is still a slave to the feedback loop of economics. Very much unfree. A sort of irony.
1. In other words, people paid good money to the New York Times or the Atlantic b/c they had excellent fact checking departments. You could argue people did this for business reasons with the WSJ or Financial Times too. They still do it with Bloomberg terminals.
2. My grandfather made a Christmas card back in the 1950s showing the whole family shrunk down and on various parts of the mantle above the fireplace. He did this using photoshop (as in the skill not the software) and it looked fantastic. I highlight this b/c "slop" has been around a long time.
First, it takes effort when you're paid a pittance per every article you crank out. The reality is that a lot of newspapers now operate more as content farms (publish a lot of stuff as quickly as possible) than as outlets for investigative journalism.
In fact, for a lot of these clikbaity stories, you could cynically say that the truth just doesn't matter. "Research shows that the kitten was never stranded in the storm drain in the first place." OK, so? How were you harmed by an untruth? Why did you click in the first place?... I can get angry at being lied to on principle, but maybe there's some soul-searching I should do.
Further, we don't actually fact-check the vast majority of what we take to be true. When you're dunking on people for not fact-checking, you're essentially just saying "the things you accept as true differ slightly from the things I accept as true". You're probably not better than that gullible journalist. You just happened to know a bit more about this topic, or had some other arbitrary / subjective reason to investigate this particular thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45583336
TLDR: HN commenter saying that "Newspapers are usually correct with the facts when they do report on a story." which spawned a whole discussion.
The amount done todays seems to be almost nil, especially when coming to a different conclusion wouldn't agree with an overarching narrative being pushed.
My preference would be for consumers of news to pay for that news. This aligns incentives and gives us power to choose the media companies that serve us best. We're seeing part of this transition with all the news orgs putting up paywalls and name-brand journalists starting their own Substack.
But I don't know if this will work--are there enough people willing to pay? I subscribe to 4 streaming services (Netflix, Disney, Apple+, and HBO) but only one news source (NYT). And I've never been tempted to pay for a journalist's Substack, no matter how talented. That's a revealed preference right there.
Maybe the answer is to bundle entertainment with news. If each of those streaming services came with a news channel and cost an extra $2 per month, would I subscribe? Maybe.
Of course, that's how it used to work!
In some cases it is relatively easy, but in many cases it requires some subject area expertise.
I do wish it was easier to punish media organizations for slop; however any feedback mechanism would also be (ab)-used for political purposes and reputation laundering.
Modern media is a combat arena.
*laughs in Taylor Lorenz*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_1#R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_2#S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz/Archive_3#B...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Taylor_Lorenz#Age
Also, in case you're wondering when it is, here's Taylor Lorenz's own Flickr page, which she can delete any time she wants, but hasn't: https://www.flickr.com/photos/taylorlorenz/6265483352/