Medium has also made the same mistake of introducing bias even though they claim to want to become a platform.
A lot of people see Medium as a place where a bunch of self-important people, wannabe activists, growth hackers, social justice warriors live.
You can see that by the type of posts they promote on their main page as well as their official Twitter account.
It's really hard to become unbiased when the organization has a clear owner. I am hoping that the new decentralized technologies will inspire some people to come up with a completely transparent and non biased system for true journalism.
You wouldn't want to read a defense of homeopathy right? Why do I have to suffer through denial of climate change, defenses of trickle-down economics, or "increased economic growth will counterbalance the tax cuts!"?
I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's.
I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information.
The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in.
This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job.
I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized.
Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda.
I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.
This also neatly sums up why “tell every side” is the same disastrous pitfall it’s been since creationists were advancing it on USENET. Expertise and facts matter, and on many issues they’re very unevenly distrusted. On things like climate change, evolution, etc. increasing the number of sides is simply increasing the number of known-incorrect things you’re exposed to, and most people lack the time or background to tell them apart, especially when many of them are actively being gamed by people who stand to profit from spreading those falsehoods.
Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, most of what he wrote was about Google's own culture anyway (and those parts were clearly supported by leaked communications), and in interviews he dwelled on his own firing - a fact.
To you it's just "science-y sounding" and "unsupported by evidence or logic". But what he said is all true. You can read the studies or look at the statistics yourself. There is a clear imbalance in interest (vs ability) between genders in the field of computer science.
By denying this you make yourself the gender-science equivalent of a climate change denier.
Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations) and peer reviewed publications in respected journals (of which he cited almost none), reading the few cited papers to see how they supported the claim being made and whether those results had been upheld or were suspect within the field (most of the remaining items), and using a logical framework to tell whether they were even relevant to the issue being discussed.
That’s a lot of work and most people are going to skip it in favor of picking the side closest to what they already believe, or which is the most entertainingly written, as you did. Most people are going to look at the issue, decide it’s too complicated and find something else, missing the fact that there’s far more scientific consensus among people who actually study the issue at hand.
As an example of what that looks like, consider https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... – someone went to the trouble of figuring out original sources, analyzing specific claims, citing everything … and the most common complaint was that it was too long. At some point, it’s unreasonable to expect a general audience to follow the details of a big topic and that’s where journalists act as a useful filter finding relevant experts and filtering out the guys with degrees in other fields speculating wildly.
But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientific facts or even common sense is apparently impossible. You're so filled with hatred for Damore that you can't see past your own biases. You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds. You hate the idea that men and women are actually different so much it's become a religion to you. You're a lost cause: far, far beyond science.
Defining your personal political viewpoints as “basic scientific facts” is why you're having such a hard time understanding this.
Should you want to talk about science, here would be a few places you could start:
1. What is Damore's thesis, anyway? Simply extracting a coherent theory from that essay would be good for making sure you're talking about the same thing as everyone else.
2. What data supports that position? (Peer-reviewed journals, not “frankly also common sense”)
3. How can you test that theory against the data? In particular, actual science is falsifiable and it'd be really important to find ways a speculative theory could be disproven.
For example, if I'm reading “The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.” correctly, you're making a broad claim that differences in the current makeup of CS participation can be explained by biology.
Looking at that like a scientist rather than a fundamental would reveal a few things to test:
1. Has it always been like that? 2. Is it like that in similar fields? 3. Is it like that in other cultures? 4. What skills could explain that gap? 5. Are there reliably measured differences in those skills? 6. Can we measure a difference in performance in those skills due to biological differences as opposed to socialization and practice?
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4... shows a big problem for a biological claim since the big drop in CS participation from the mid-80s onward is orders of magnitude too rapid to be explained by evolution, and since that trend has not been present in other demanding fields we'd need an explanation for while e.g. CS is so much more specialized than medicine, math, chemical engineering, etc.
Similarly, actual studies have shown that e.g. mathematical skills are extremely close (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-22162-004) so you're left needing to demonstrate that CS is so highly dependent on specific skill performance that anyone not performing at the extreme upper bound of the distribution cannot compete. This is especially unlikely when looking at the larger software engineering field given how multidisciplinary that is.
Finally, we'd be left needing to demonstrate that these unspecified critically important skills are actually innately determined rather than the product of practice. Simply linking e.g. the ability to rotate 3D models mentally would require more work to tell you whether that was innate or simply an uneven distribution of people who'd previously practiced that skill.
> You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds.
Or, if you care about the real answer, that it's merely the latest in a long line of people jumping into a long-running debate without having done their homework and being surprised when “You're wrong and I'm right” doesn't get more respect. It's like coming into a discussion of evolutionary biology and going “Hey, have you ever thought about how this violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics?” like you're the first person who's ever had that idea.
I never said the Google guy was correct or wrong. In fact, parts of it makes sense and parts of it doesn't.
What irritates me is that people are making a huge fallacy. For example two people can have a whole set of arguments that conflict with one another. Let's assume we can absolutely measure whether a statement is absolutely correct or not. And two people each make their own set of statements about a topic.
Person A: Right - wrong - wrong - Right
Person B: Wrong - Right - Right - Wrong
Instead of A and B sharing their ideas and coming to a conclusion which will be
Right - Right - Right - Right
They keep fighting over small details and say "Because you have this little part that's wrong, your entire argument is wrong" to one another. This will never resolve because they each have errors in their arguments for a fact.
Any humble person would agree that he/she is not a perfect being therefore prone to errors, especially when it comes to complex topics like politics.
Giving someone like that your attention is simply increasing the distraction level. It would be much better to get someone qualified — in this case, say, a neuroscientist or cognitive psychologist — who can do a better job representing that position.
thanks for the speculation, but no.
It sounds like what you actually want is a blog of opinion pieces that aligns with your own preconceived political notions. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's a perfectly reasonable product to want. But that would not be news.
Other than that: The fluff you're complaining about has the fantastic benefit of being pretty cheap. Op-eds don't need days of calling people or at the courthouse.
These parts of publishing may also work much like a non-profits advertisement, in that they look like a terrible waste of money that could be put to better use. Yet they bring in more than they cost, and are therefore in your interest even if you (don't want to read them/weren't attracted to the charity by the ad)
I stopped supporting NYT and the Atlantic once they became more sensationalist.
The opinion pieces' use of fancy words tend to obscure the fact that it's filled with junk economics that only very few people actually believe in. Then you have all these people on the right defend themselves with this, and journalists accept it because surely one side of the political spectrum couldn't possibly be guided by lies.
Financing that does not make me a happy camper
I'll still support them as my news source where I don't have to see vitriolic, polarizing headlines.
I'd like to say I cancelled out of principle but really it was more that I couldn't find time to read it anymore
That's about the price of a print subscription to the Financial Times, who are dry but reliable with good worldwide business-focused coverage.
> I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds
That kind of stuff unfortunately pays for the serious stuff like the opioid crisis coverage.
The FT panders just as hard, it has its own severe biases that result in deeply unreliable reporting.
My go-to example of how unreliable the FT can be is an article they published before the Brexit referendum. It said the FT had polled a panel of over 100 "experts" and "leading thinkers". Every single one thought a vote to leave would damage economic growth. In fact economic growth accelerated. The FT, by the way, literally flies the EU flag above its offices in London.
https://www.ft.com/content/1a86ab36-afbe-11e5-b955-1a1d298b6...
In the FT’s annual poll of more than 100 leading thinkers, not one thought a vote for Brexit would enhance UK growth in 2016.
Where is the line between spectacularly bad reporting and propaganda? If the FT really couldn't find a single "leading thinker" who could actually get it right in a pool of 100, and they didn't even realise that was a problem, how reliable can their coverage on other topics be? Like all newspapers the FT employs generalists who rely heavily on FT-identified 'leading thinkers' for analysis and facts. If they aren't able to spot self-created bias and groupthink on the topic of Europe then they surely cannot in other areas.
I agree with rtpg - journalism seems to have a serious sickness and I'd pay for news sources that seemed to have real commitments and processes in place to ensure wide-angle reporting.
Specifically, the article you linked to includes the full statements of everyone they asked. You can obviously accuse them of selectively choosing their panel's composition, but (a) it appears this is a group of people they regularly poll, meaning it doesn't have a specific anti-brexit slant because it predates that issue. And (b) I challenge you to find a group of 100 people with similar credentials that reflects your opinion.
I'd also like to see proof of brexit's positive effect in growth in 2016. Hint: that's impossible to do, unless you have an alternative universe.
If you invest the time to actually read the opinions, you'll also notice that almost every single one says they expect little effect on growth in 2016, which is probably pretty close to the truth, considering the referendum only happened in June, and the second half' numbers are completely within the normal range.
I'd also point out that several of comments quoted by the FT are as pro-brexit as you seem to want them to be. And that there are quite a lot of people today who would consider comments such as the following to be exactly the sort of contribution to public discourse that was regrettably underrepresented in the run-up to brexit:
We cannot count on the EU being prepared to grant continued access to the European market on the same privileged terms, particularly if the divorce turns vitriolic (contrary to received wisdom, in terms of trade flows "they" do not need "us" as much as we need them). And, if it were so easy to expand trade with the rest of the world to compensate, you would expect that to be happening already.
And (b) I challenge you to find a group of 100 people with similar credentials that reflects your opinion.
100 random members of the British public would have got it more right than this panel did. Obviously gaining a credential in this space results in less ability to analyse the situation, rather than more.
Really? Are you sure? It's still in the fractional percentage points: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth
And some of that article says "medium term". There is still no decision on what Brexit will look like and the number of businesses planning accordingly is increasing.
> "Don Smith, deputy chief investment officer at Brown Shipley, said: “The uncertainty generated by a decision to leave the EU would undoubtedly be damaging for sterling assets across the board and, indeed, the value of sterling on foreign exchanges"
Sterling was 1.3 to the euro just before the vote and is now 1.13.
Sterling was 1.3 to the euro just before the vote and is now 1.13
Because the BoE panicked and dropped rates even further, which always hurts the value of a currency. Regardless, my point was about the prediction I specifically named and more generally, the vast wrongness of the FT - a problem that has gone unanalysed and uncorrected, as far as I know.
I don't want to be too dismissive, but even though I like the coverage I get from the NY Times, I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds, "Republicans place doubt on Hillary for X"-style both sides pieces, etc.
I mean, sure, journalism. And its a big outfit, we don't all need to be writing about the opiod crisis. But I would like to think there's a market.
Bonus points if you make this and get a rich person to help finance it. The subscription can help ease the losses whatever billionaire ends up taking. Medium is already kinda this.