Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in.
The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd inevitably toss together a bunch of meaningless buzzwords, make a series of vague statements that sounded insightful, and play fast and loose with the facts. A journalist's job is to sell newspapers, or clicks, not to keep anyone informed.
In this case, the article is by a guest author. They are not a journalist and this isn't, technically, "journalism".
"Journalism" also isn't monolithic enough to warrant the accusation that the trade itself is lowering its standards across-the-board. There are plenty of examples of deeply researched stories or elaborately crafted features on anything from pop culture to science to politics. While some publications may have succumbed to the easy fix that is viral content, and many local papers are but a shade of their former glory because nobody cares, the are plenty of publishers who escaped the other way, to quality.
Your complaint about selective quoting also really isn't really about anything being rushed. I presume you could lock the author in a dungeon for a few hours and they might be willing to say whatever you want, but not because they suddenly agree with it.
If you disagree with the author and work in AI, I would suggest that it isn't entirely impossible that the topic of cognitive biases is relevant here in more than one way.
Since the former has become the norm, and the latter the exception, the former has become, technically, "journalism". Just another case where a word's meaning has changed due to ubiquity.
It certainly feels that way to me. There are still holdouts of really good journalism, like Reuters, but even the likes of the New York Times seems to have significantly degraded. Good journalism seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Yes. And to propagandize on behalf of his and his organization's preferred political views. Seldom do they probably consciously realize they are doing this. The echo chamber synergizes with their prejudices and steers them in that direction. And for them, it's a job. Their reward is the editor's approval, or at least the absence of his disapproval.
“I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
The argument is, essentially:
- people used to believe that being a chess grandmaster is universally considered proof of high intelligence
- people also believed that opening a refrigerator requires strictly less intelligence than becoming a chess grandmaster
- we now have build artificial "intelligence" that easily beats any human in chess. Ask it to open a refrigerator and see what happens.
-> Therefore, our concept of "intelligence", as a single, ordered, continuous, and measurable quantity, is demonstrably wrong.
You can proof plenty with a single datapoint or two. As long as you don't care about the color, half a sheep proofs sheep exist. There's no n and no p-value attached to that because it is not subject to measuring errors and confounders. Sheep just is.
They article isn't quite clear on how our biases are potentially dangerous, because it happens to be the point of warnings to come before the actual damage occurs. But when someone is setting out to revolutionise all our lives with something that uses the term "intelligence", and neither they nor we can actually come up with definition of the concept, maybe the burden of proof should be on those saying it's all fine, and not those asking for a bit of occasional reflection.
I also just don't get what's controversial about the article. It doesn't even ask for anything dramatic, or specific. It's the MIT robot tech leader, who knows what they're talking about. And when people start invoking the human rights of abused robots, I am confident the robotics community wouldn't object to that being either a joke or misguided anthropomorphising.
I remember Microsoft introducing an early AI in a game and they made it a young boy. This seemed like an artful/deceptive attempt to take advantage of human biases to make it seem more inpressive than it was.
Which is fine, up to a point, for showbiz, but probably not ideal for wider applications.
I'm not sure if this technique has a name but I see it more and more like "<unhealthy thing> has more <good quality> than <healthy thing>". They're not lying but they are taking advantage of human biases to very specifically talk about a minor truth to distract you from the overall truth.
"Rinsing your recycling (in water heated by electricity generated by coal) generates more carbon than the recycling saves". Again true, but carefully crafted to make you think the opposite of the truth.
Notably, no evil, mustache-twirling villain is required for this. The people who make boring, reasonable assertions will be automatically filtered out in favour of the people making wild and sloppy claims that appeal to people's biases and when they get caught out they'll be replaced by another similar person.
But a few villains will intentionally take advantage of it too.
Let’s say that I read "Rinsing your recycling (in water heated by electricity generated by coal) generates more carbon than the recycling saves", investigate it, and convlude it’s true.
What is the additional truth that statement is making me think the opposite of? I lost you there.
edit: I removed a "not" to clear up the ambiguous double-negative. Summary, my position is that science says recycling is a good thing. Numerous media stories will focus relentlessly on any small flaw in it, either to get a reaction from the people who do it and think it's a good thing, or support the people who fight against it for political reasons as it represents (like global warming) a massive failure of free markets.