The usual argument, which I think is entirely valid, and has been delivered by famouser and more famously reputable people if you don’t want to trust me about it, was named the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” by Richard Feynman. Find something that you are really, truly an expert on. Find an article in TIME Magazine about it. Really take note of everything they get wrong. Try finding somebody who isn’t an expert and see what their takeaways from the article were—what picture of reality they derive without your own expertise to guide them in interpretation.
Then go find what you think is a pretty average blog post by an Internet expert on the same topic.
It is, alas, not something you can condense into a single webpage, because everybody has their own area of really solid expertise, even if it’s something like “the history of Star Trek TOS” because their day job doesn’t lead them into the same level of enthusiasm. Maybe somebody should put together a set of three comparisons like that, from three different fields—but then the skeptics could worry it was all cherry-picked unusual bad examples, even if it hadn’t been.
I will note that I do think that the great scientists of recent past generations have earned more of our respect than internationally famous journalistic publications, and those scientists did not speak kindly of their coverage of science—and that was before the era of clickbait, back when the likes of the New York Times kept to notably higher editorial standards.
I think you can talk to any famous respectable person in private, and ask them if there should be a great burden of skepticism about insinuating that a “major international publication” like TIME Magazine might be skewing the truth the way that Aella describes, and the famous respectable person (if they are willing to answer you at all) will tell you that you should not hold that much trust towards TIME Magazine.
To be clear, at the risk of repetition, the question is not whether journalists should be considered reliable in their explanations of academic research. Although some journalists explain academic research quite well, others lack the training to do this as well as professional researchers. I would much rather turn to a colleague’s blog than to a TIME magazine article to understand issues in academic philosophy, and I suspect that academics in most other fields would say the same.
The question is whether a major international publication should be considered a reliable source of investigative journalism into issues of sexual harassment and abuse. Most educated readers would consider such a publication to be among the most reliable sources on such a topic. Most readers would express some skepticism about the ability of a typical blogger to conduct serious investigative journalism of the same calibre. These readers would cite the relatively stronger training that journalists have in the practice of investigative journalism, as well as the relatively stronger track record of successful investigative journalism at major international news outlets, when compared to blogs. They might also cite specific institutional features of news outlets, such as more time devoted to research, more people devoted to fact-checking, and a higher reputational and legal stake in getting things right.
Is there a reason why we should distrust TIME’s discussion of sexual harassment and abuse within effective altruism?
Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
I’d never heard anything like it[...]
For the record, Vox has never told me that my coverage of something must be ‘hard-hitting’ or must be critical or must be positive, and if they did, I would quit. Internal culture can happen in more subtle ways but the thing the NYT did is not normal.
Matt:
But what happened is that a few years ago the New York Times made a weird editorial decision with its tech coverage.
The usual argument, which I think is entirely valid, and has been delivered by famouser and more famously reputable people if you don’t want to trust me about it, was named the “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” by Richard Feynman. Find something that you are really, truly an expert on. Find an article in TIME Magazine about it. Really take note of everything they get wrong. Try finding somebody who isn’t an expert and see what their takeaways from the article were—what picture of reality they derive without your own expertise to guide them in interpretation.
Then go find what you think is a pretty average blog post by an Internet expert on the same topic.
It is, alas, not something you can condense into a single webpage, because everybody has their own area of really solid expertise, even if it’s something like “the history of Star Trek TOS” because their day job doesn’t lead them into the same level of enthusiasm. Maybe somebody should put together a set of three comparisons like that, from three different fields—but then the skeptics could worry it was all cherry-picked unusual bad examples, even if it hadn’t been.
I will note that I do think that the great scientists of recent past generations have earned more of our respect than internationally famous journalistic publications, and those scientists did not speak kindly of their coverage of science—and that was before the era of clickbait, back when the likes of the New York Times kept to notably higher editorial standards.
I think you can talk to any famous respectable person in private, and ask them if there should be a great burden of skepticism about insinuating that a “major international publication” like TIME Magazine might be skewing the truth the way that Aella describes, and the famous respectable person (if they are willing to answer you at all) will tell you that you should not hold that much trust towards TIME Magazine.
To be clear, at the risk of repetition, the question is not whether journalists should be considered reliable in their explanations of academic research. Although some journalists explain academic research quite well, others lack the training to do this as well as professional researchers. I would much rather turn to a colleague’s blog than to a TIME magazine article to understand issues in academic philosophy, and I suspect that academics in most other fields would say the same.
The question is whether a major international publication should be considered a reliable source of investigative journalism into issues of sexual harassment and abuse. Most educated readers would consider such a publication to be among the most reliable sources on such a topic. Most readers would express some skepticism about the ability of a typical blogger to conduct serious investigative journalism of the same calibre. These readers would cite the relatively stronger training that journalists have in the practice of investigative journalism, as well as the relatively stronger track record of successful investigative journalism at major international news outlets, when compared to blogs. They might also cite specific institutional features of news outlets, such as more time devoted to research, more people devoted to fact-checking, and a higher reputational and legal stake in getting things right.
Is there a reason why we should distrust TIME’s discussion of sexual harassment and abuse within effective altruism?
Uhhh no, I don’t trust them, and consider trusting them to be a pretty intense mistake. I’m friends with some very well-known people, where respected journal institutions (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) report about their lives. So I get to know them up close, and I get to directly see how the reporting misconstrues them. I’ve come away from this with intense distrust, to the degree that, similarly to Eliezer, I just don’t bother reading stuff they write about people anymore (unless it’s simply to track what news outlets are saying about people).
I’ll grant that fancy news outlets are more careful about being technically correct about facts (I’ve been interviewed by both high and low profile news outlets, and have in fact found the high profile ones are more dutiful in doublechecking concrete facts I tell them), but they are not trustworthy in terms of trying to present an accurate picture. It’s trivially easy to say only technically true things in a manner that leads people to a misleading conclusion.
One example is how the New York Times decided that they wouldn’t cover tech positively: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
(Matt’s original tweet thread is saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104004538/https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553 )
My understanding from those links is that NYT’s actions here is a significant outlier in journalistic/editorial ethics, enough that both Kelsey and Matt thought it was relevant to comment on in those terms.
Kelsey:
Matt:
The NYT may be an outlier among papers, but this instance is not an outlier of the NYT approach.
Yeah I’ve heard elsewhere that NYT is pretty unusual here, would trust them less than other media.
Aside, but that was Michael Crichton.