[scarhill]

WRT the how could they get it so wrong question, I guess it's time for the obligatory link to Michael Crichton's essay "Why Speculate?" and his discussion of the "Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" [1]

Money quote: "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 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."

1 - http://larvatus.com/michael-crichton-why-speculate/

[Symmetry]

There really are some publications where you can read an article on a topic you're familiar with and they get it right. For instance I have a subscription to The Economist and sometimes their coverage is a bit shallow. And sometimes it repeats an expert consensus I disagree with. But most of the time the coverage is as good as it can be in the number of paragraphs allotted and sometimes it's downright excellent[1]. You probably have to actually pay money for high quality reporting.

[1]https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/12/01/the-semiconduc...

[ghaff]

And I’m guessing a lot of people here conflate simplifying for a mainstream audience as getting it wrong because they’ve omitted a lot of details.

Mind you, simplifying with a degree of accuracy is difficult and top writers like those with the Economist do it better than most. With tech stuff, I find more poor and incomplete explanations than I do outright errors. Mind you, back when I provided commentary for a lot of news stories, there were some reporters I always dreaded calls from because I knew steering them in the right direction was going to take an hour out of my life.

[garmaine]

Funny I’ve had the opposite experience with the economist. Whenever they touch my area of expertise they demonstrate their substantial ignorance and inability to fact check even the simplest things.

[gdy]

Except for almost any article about Russia.

[Spooky23]

The Economist is good, but tiring. They are sort of like an old school “chamber of commerce” republican version of NPR.

The writing is good and interesting, until to read for a year and realize that formula is pretty much the same, and you can predict the arc of the article after reading a paragraph.

[kingofpandora]

Just don't try to cancel your subscription ... Suddenly they become impossible to communicate with.

[hannasanarion]

Not that Michael Crichton should be treated as an authority on truth in reporting. He believed there was a vast worldwide conspiracy to defraud poor innocent oil companies by manufacturing evidence of global warming.

[briandear]

For reference here is a Michael Crichton speech on the topic: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/publica...

[exolymph]

Michael Crichton himself doesn't need to be any type of authority for the reasoning in that specific quote to make sense.

[hannasanarion]

The point is that "the baloney you just read" is not necessarily baloney if your "expertise" derives from conspiracy theory blogs and propaganda.

[dkonofalski]

AKA the Reddit Effect. Everyone on Reddit posts as if they know what they're talking about when, in reality, they only have a cursory knowledge of it and yet the entire site is somehow treated as a curated collection of high-quality, factual information.

[malshe]

This is right! I think there is another, perhaps unrelated Reddit effect. Blogs and some news sites pick up on Reddit and then feed them what they know will be popular on Reddit. The cycle continues. That's why Reddit is so good for astroturfing.

[garmaine]

Don’t think HN is any different.

[dkonofalski]

For whatever reason, HN is different to me because, when discussions center around the things that I actually have expertise in, the information tends to be mostly correct. Every now and then some nonsense slips in but, for the most part, keeping people from being able to downvote and upvote everything eventually leads to a pretty informed view of whatever the topic is. Even in instances where I disagree with something, there's usually a well-reasoned response that includes some support whereas, with Reddit, it's just a bunch of unfounded statements with no backup whatsoever.

[garmaine]

HN is generally correct about established computer science and tech stuff. Anything frontier or controversial (e.g. bitcoin) or outside the narrow domain of typical Silicon Valley startups gets the exact same ignorant herd response. The point is that when the topic aligns with the expertise of the community you get quality, whereas when the topic varies you get ignorance and BS spoken just as authoritatively. Always be aware of the latter outcome!

[dkonofalski]

Good point. I think it's probably the case when a community is self-selected vs. when it's open for anyone to both create and contribute.

[jcranberry]

I saw AskHistorians and thought that it was exactly that. I thought I would put together a small collection of subreddits that produce similar quality content. Little did I know that the rest of the website is memes and the same flavor-of-the- month jokes recycled on every post...

[Wowfunhappy]

I would expect newspapers to be more knowledgable about politics and international relations than scientific topics like physics. The latter is too broad a category, the former is usually the paper's primary focus.

[hopler]

Politics and International relations are opinion fields, not fact fields. It's impossible to be wrong about things that are impossible to falsify.

[ufmace]

I wouldn't quite say that. Some aspects are opinions, but there's plenty of facts. Such as "House Reps A and B are cooperating on a bill regarding X" - that's a fact. What your position on X is, whether the bill is a good or bad idea, and why A and B are cooperating on it are opinions.

[ghostly_s]

To be clear, this is not an actual 'effect' that anyone has done any research on to demonstrate it exists or has real implications. It's just something that some pop-science writer idly speculated about once, so I question why you would introduce it into this discussion.

[suls]

Brilliant. Thanks for sharing this.