Re:Avoid News, Part 2: What the Stock Market Taught Me about...
by PaulDavisThe1st on Tuesday June 15, 2021 @10:44AM
(#27516239)
It's not just about news and journalism.
When I was in my late teens and eagerly devouring the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor Coevolution Quarterly for their reviews and pointers to new tools and ideas, it was easy to trust what I saw written there. Until one issue when they had a long survey of backpacking equipment, which even at 17 was something I knew quite a lot about. It was ridiculous, so bad (*)
Most people who write for a living don't know as much about the things they write about as people who do those things as the central part of their lives.
But it's worse than that: even when the author is a bona fide expert in the subject, there's still plenty of room for disagreement within the field.
The dream of reading "authoritative" accounts of more or less anything is a dream. Instead of being mad that journalists and other writers don't live up to your dream, accept this situation as it is, and understand that deepening your understanding of anything will require significant effort on your part. That doesn't mean that there are not better and worse sources of information, and understanding how to identify this is important. But there's nobody who is going to write "the true story" because there is no true story, just a complicated mess that you can put more or less effort into understanding.
(*) granted, some of what made it so bad was the clash between my UK-based understanding of gear and conditions, and their western US equivalent.
When I was in my late teens and eagerly devouring the Whole Earth Catalog and its successor Coevolution Quarterly for their reviews and pointers to new tools and ideas, it was easy to trust what I saw written there. Until one issue when they had a long survey of backpacking equipment, which even at 17 was something I knew quite a lot about. It was ridiculous, so bad (*)
Most people who write for a living don't know as much about the things they write about as people who do those things as the central part of their lives.
But it's worse than that: even when the author is a bona fide expert in the subject, there's still plenty of room for disagreement within the field.
The dream of reading "authoritative" accounts of more or less anything is a dream. Instead of being mad that journalists and other writers don't live up to your dream, accept this situation as it is, and understand that deepening your understanding of anything will require significant effort on your part. That doesn't mean that there are not better and worse sources of information, and understanding how to identify this is important. But there's nobody who is going to write "the true story" because there is no true story, just a complicated mess that you can put more or less effort into understanding.
(*) granted, some of what made it so bad was the clash between my UK-based understanding of gear and conditions, and their western US equivalent.