There is a difference between making a mistake or being wrong while trying to be right, and intentionally doing something bad or refusing to acknowledge error. Everyone is in the first category sometimes, but you don't really have to be in the latter category.

If the NYT is intentionally doing bad things, even once or a handful of times, then I don't think it makes sense to forgive and forget until they show me they understand and have corrected the issue.

The problem is that for most things I can't tell if they're right or wrong or arguing in good faith or not. If something comes up where I can definitively tell, and they are definitely acting wrong - it destroys lots of credibility because that's really one of my rare chances to evaluate their performance. I can't trust them in domains I don't know about if they aren't very good in domains I do know about.

Edit for clarity, since I'm getting downvoted: My point is that the analogy is not great. You can judge one person for their actions directly towards you. It isn't necessarily reasonable to judge a large number of people by the actions of a single person or small subset of the group, especially when the actions of the NYT are not directed at you specifically, which is pretty different to someone spitting on you.

You're right that the NYT has a lot of employees. If this were one guy writing a bad review, and the NYT took some disciplinary action against him, wrote a retraction and wrote a new article, then I wouldn't hold it against the NYT and I would probably increase my respect for them. They had a problem, employee did bad work, and they corrected it - that's good.

Instead, they just stood by the bad work and kept on without doing fixing the core issue. "It's just one person" doesn't really make sense because it's actually the whole organization not correcting problems originally caused by one person.

Put another way, if they're willing to lie and district to get a more sensational car review, what else are they willing to lie about? Who knows, perhaps they'll lie about some country having weapons of mass destruction to help trick the country into a pointless war. Okay, maybe that's a bit extreme - obviously they'd have to be extremely far gone to do anything like that.

But regardless of that, the decision to not apologize and admit they lied was an editorial one. It was their choice to die on this hill.

I'm just saying that the analogy to an (offensive) action by a specific person, toward a specific person, is a poor analogy for the actions of some subset of a large organisation, which almost certainly isn't directed at a specific person.

And I doubt many people would equate the actions of the NYT with literally being spat on.

Remember that next time you read news about something you are not already well versed in.

I was absolutely shocked by the basic inaccuracy and skewed writing in literally every single story that was written, every single video that was recorded, everything.

I mean it was all complete and utter nonsense and bullshit. Basic facts, the names of people involved, their roles, the applicable laws, EVERYTHING was wrong EVERYWHERE.

They’ve reported on 3 more events I was deeply familiar with since then, different subjects/industries, same story. Everything is wrong everywhere.

They’re always wrong in the same way and for the same reasons: A more scandalous narrative, with more compelling villains and heroes. If a legal entity with a lot of money is involved, attribute the misinformation to another source so you won’t get sued.

Highly-technical subject + lots of nuance + financial journalism = absolute disaster for the truth.

Something being a complex topic doesn't help, but the problem often isn't one of not being able to understand, but choosing not to understand before even making an attempt.

Even when that's not the case, any professional needs to know the limits of their capabilities. Reporters that don't understand a subject shouldn't be reporting on it (without help, at least). That they do is a reflection in their professional judgement.

If you can't understand, and also form a series of arguments for yourself, as to why the tin foil hat conspiracy theorist is wrong, why the earth almost certainly isn’t flat, or run by a cabal of shapeshifting alien lizard people, 5G, etc. how are you going to respond to the more insidiously cogent arguments about other more important things that are just as wrong but harder to spot?

I personally credit my upbringing by my religious parents into creationism (the concept that the earth is only 6 thousand years old and evolutionary science is a conspiracy against God.) as what ultimately led to my development of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, as I dug myself out of that belief system and deconverted in my late teens.

I remember feeling so deeply and irradeemably stupid, for being so completely convinced without any reason or evidence. And then, as a result, feeling so desperate for a specific formula or system of thought that could let me avoid this kind of personal failing in the future.

Which led me to listening to debates, learning about things like burden of proof, and the preponderance of evidence. And the very simple and straightforward concept of spot checking whether a stated “truth” used by someone in an argument is actually valid, or if they are lying to bolster their points, expecting (correctly, unfortunately) that the vast majority of their audience will never even check to see if they are telling the truth or a lie.

How else are you going to teach someone to think critically without showing them the examples of what a bad argument is, and how to respond to it rationally? Tell them to just trust the “good” sources? That’s arguably worse than telling them nothing at all.

It certainly is largely the fault of our garbage public schooling system, but the existing penchant to call for the banning and censcoring of stupid conspiracies online as if it were some sort of panacea for stupidity itself is certainly not helping the problem.

Take the current virus. We realize that the republican version of 'it's a hoax and everything is fine' is a lie. But so is the democrat version of 'you need to never leave your house or you're a murderer'.

The simple fact is that without having solid numbers for:

1). The true infection rate.

2). The true age-adjusted mortality rate.

3). The asymptomatic r0 rate.

Any policy anyone suggests tells you more about the person suggesting it than about how effective it will be. It could be that reality is closer to the republican version, or the democrat one. But without a lot more science that no one is doing we will not know until decades down the line when people start digging up corpses and testing for the virus and finally doing some basic statistics.

And that's before we even look at what the economic impact is of the virus.

Saving lives by preventing viral spread sounds good until the economic and societal damage of the preventative measures lead to more harm than they prevented.

Funny enough many of this and other virus worst symptoms are the bodies natural response to the virus. Inflammation for instance is the bodies response to damage, bit it can in turn cause more damage than the original source of issue.

I personally don’t consider it the journalists’ fault at all, otherwise we would just end up with an academic journal. It is important, however, to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism when reading the news.

>They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp to it and change. The days of BSing people are over.

There is a clear difference between reserved skepticism you are talking about and the "FAKE NEWS!" type rhetoric that has grown over the last half decade.

I don't think that's actually true. It's probably most true with science reporting, but does anyone think reading the firehose of specialist research output is a practical alternative to journalism for a general reader? Filtering and summarization are important functions when dealing quantities of information larger than an individual can handle alone. IIRC, even specialist research groups have paper reading circles to filter research papers in their own fields.

Then there's everything else. For a lot of stuff, you'd just be wading through PR and rumor without much ability to dig past that. For some news topics, like foreign affairs for instance, I'm not even sure where you'd even find timely, raw information to replace journalism about it.

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.”

― Michael Crichton

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

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 somehow has exactly the same quantity and quality of errors about Palestine as the baloney you just read. You turn the page and vastly overestimate what you think you can critique based on your vast knowledge of show business.”

― Crichael Michton

[1] based on evidence ascertained through the Mell-Gann Memory effect

Edit: clarification

This sounds like it should be a named law. Like Amdahl's Law or Moore's Law, or Sturgeon's Law!

> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works 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 with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

> - Michael Crichton, Why Speculate (26 April 2002)

From Wikiquote Murray Gell-Mann https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

Edit: Remove markdown formatting.

pg repeatedly questions the integrity of nyt and has personally been the victim of their bias.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152?lang=en

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236979160100343812

Maybe it's just me, but I use journalists as a stepping stone for learning more about a topic. I see them writing summaries (sometimes inaccurate) of things that happen in the world and then if I'm curious, I try to dig deeper into the primary sources to learn more.

I'd imagine almost every primary source believes journalists get the story wrong now and then, as the journalist doesn't say it the way they would say it. But I marvel in today's world, where I have such quick access to priamry sources to learn more.

And that's the thing: if you cannot trust that someone makes their point as neutrally as possible, they become worthless for me as a source of condensed information. Rather look up the original source then for myself.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236980342667575296?s=20

The NYT writer isn't mistakenly summarizing, they're actively misleading. They had to read through PG's post and selectively pick a line that they could stuff into the position they already had, to say the thing they already wanted to say. It's just motivated reasoning and the primary sources aren't being used as sources beyond something they can vaguely mention to pretend it supports what they wanted to say anyway.

That isn't journalism - or at least it shouldn't be.

In reading the PG post, it seems that a conversation with prominent investor, who was confident that FB's bad stock performance would hurt the IPO, led PG to write a post exploring how that may happen.

In re-reading the NYT blurb, I still don't see it as the author saying PG said the FB stock would not go up but rather as the author believed that PG said that "start-up investments would dry up."

And I think it's in that last sentence, in particular, the third to last word, "would," where the majority of the problem lies.

PG in his post included a tremendous amount of ifs, mays, and qualifying statements talking about how he wasn't sure in which direction it would go. The NYT author, I think, just changed his uncertainty into certainty, both with putting "would" in that last sentence, and removing the "If you haven't raised money yet," part of the quoted link.

So, I see it as the author attributing more certainty to PG than he had in his post, and yet, at the end of the author's post, saying that there is less certainty about this, "The party can’t go on forever, but the infamous question must be asked: Is this time different?"

By you saying, "they're actively misleading," I'm assuming you're attributing malice to the NYT author. I guess I just see journalists and politicians (and many people in general) speaking with an utmost certainty on behalf of people who speak with qualifications and attribute it more to the desire to condense words and present a confident argument than the former. Qualifying statements often use a lot of words. I like to qualify most things that I say and I think journalists and editors often remove them out of seeing them as extraneous—e.g., removing the "I'm assuming", "I guess", "often", "most", and "I think" out of the previous paragraph.

Again, I can understand why PG would be upset they misrepresented his words, but I admittedly am confused you don't seem to think that other investors, including the one PG referenced in his post, have boldly proclaimed that the bubble will burst and then it doesn't. I think if I were PG I'd feel frustrated the author lumped me into the category of bold predictors, especially if I had written such a qualified essay.

Not so much malice, but having what they want to say predetermined and looking to frame support in what they already believe to be true. (Rather than trying to find out what's true and reporting that).

Basically the writer believes X to be true or wants to write a story that X is true and digs through things to find quotes they can narrowly pull to support X.

However, to your point, I find myself doing that sometimes without even realizing it and I wonder what drives it internally and externally.

This post dives into it a bit: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom...

Just because an argument comes from motivated reasoning doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but I think it's more likely to be wrong (and it's also likely to be framed in a misleading way or ignoring good contradictory examples). It's also hard to discuss things with the person to learn what's true because they're often not arguing in good faith.

I think this is actually a reason people are often skeptical of debate (since a clever arguer can argue a wrong position and win against someone who is right, but not as good at manipulating rhetorical devices). Also why lawyers can have a bad reputation. People can know something is wrong, but may themselves be bad at articulating why. Other people that are wrong may be good at making themselves seem right. The smarter the person is the more they can effectively rationalize bullshit.

A good example of this is Ben Shapiro and a lot of his arguments (particularly the ones I've seen around religion/abortion) are mostly motivated reasoning nonsense.

That said, while this may be true on an individual level debate should still be true at scale (the best argument from one side should still be pitted against the best argument from another). I think this is what free society and liberal democracy is all about.

I often prefer dialogue to debate—a conversation of cooperative learning instead of competitive proving.

The main idea is a clever arguer can start with any conclusion and then retroactively select the points that support their conclusion while ignoring any evidence or points that contradict it. If you do this then the points you bring up don't inform much because you've already decided the conclusion based on something else (in the example it's whoever paid the most for their arguments).

It's better to start with trying to understand things and then using what you learn to inform a conclusion.

In one story, they tried really hard to push for authoritarian laws to protect children and ended up wading through history to find a retracted and discredited paper. All this to make criminals look more dangerous than they actually are. They even admitted it was an old retracted paper in the article. But downplayed it.

If the evidence was so solid, they could have cited a more recent paper of higher prestige.

PG explicitly said no one knew what effect it would have, and yet the prominent investor with whom he spoke "seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups."

So I agree that the author attributed the certainty to PG when it wasn't he who stated it so certainly, and was more concerned with how to mitigate the effects of a potential slowdown in funding.

I also don't think that discredits the whole article and the point that many people have stated, and I'm sure much more certainly than PG, that the latest news story is the sign of the startup apocalypse and funding will disappear.

So yes, I feel frustrated they attributed that certainty to PG himself and not the prominent investor with whom he spoke, but I really don't think that's enough to discredit the whole article, or that it was the author's intention to twist PG's words. Maybe it was. I guess I just don't think the author was trying to not be neutral.

> Jessica and I had dinner recently with a prominent investor. He seemed sure the bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. But no one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle.

Lots of qualification and uncertainty.

> What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face "down rounds," which can be damaging.

More qualification and uncertainty.

I think the biggest challenge is in the author taking something so qualified and making it seem much more confident and certain than it actually was.

Would you agree that he was exploring whether start-up investments may decrease?

Well, yeah. Sounds like some serious Gell-mann amnesia.

I'm surprised Paul Graham would act surprised by this.

The current affairs article was extremely tedious, whatever good point they might have made was hurt by its self-assured hostile tone and personal attacks (basically an example of the kind of thing PG's essay was talking about).

There are a few essays that get into the weeds and give more explicit examples of problems (something PG probably avoided because of the issues he talks about, but it seems he was also attacked for avoiding them anyway).

Some that give more direct examples/arguments:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres...

https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt...

Also: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-...

Some others recently: https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-...

https://nypost.com/2004/05/27/nyt-whispers-apology-for-wmd-s...

You can try reading e.g. The Intercept, local papers, Democracy Now for a different spin on things, but there's only one thing that actually works is reading several sources, including the papers from "the other side" and trying to figure out which story line makes logical sense. Usually lies are poorly constructed and contain a combination of paradoxes, deference to authority, and appeal to various fears without a firm logical basis. Pay close attention to verifiable information and evidence. Those are the only pieces of information that can be trusted from either the state or journalists.

I smile a bit as I think about visiting the Hearst Castle in California—I wonder how news ownership has changed over the years.

Regarding the rest, I appreciate how you framed it and love that approach of various sources, plus really dig the process suggestions you put. Thank you.

https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+epstein+maxwell&tbm=...

Is this "The Truth"?

https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti...

Are you suggesting as long as a news outlet is telling the truth in more occasions than lies, the organization can still be treated as trustworthy? Even if the organization intentionally ignore the need to verify and correct lies?...

Logically and emotionally, this is outrageously offensive to liberal value! You are playing the cards advocated by CCTV backed by CCP. Their integrity certainly "passed your standard"...