gah I’m annoyed I didn’t think of Stephen! A great journalist. I don’t know Jeremy’s work well but I’ve heard good things
Tom Chivers
Karma: 256
all this makes a lot of sense, by the way, and I will take it on board.
OK I think that’s all the questions! Thanks for that and sorry again for the delay. I hope it’s been interesting! Best, Tom
no I don’t, and I was unaware of the idea. I am very unsystematic in my choices of what I write about and I don’t have any good way of measuring how many minds I change (just the hopelessly survivorship-bias-tainted one of people telling me that they’ve changed their minds). So it’s all very finger-in-the-wind.
Oh dammit I forgot 4). Hmm. This is such a big and important question and I should have some ready answer for it.
I suppose my most general answer, and it’s not all that recent, is that I’ve become MUCH less trusting of the scientific literature in loads of fields, especially social sciences, because I’ve become much more aware of the statistical problems. But that’s a bit of a dodge, isn’t it.
And relatedly I think in Covid times I’ve become less happy with the public-health-institutions model of scientific/health evidence, of thinking “there isn’t an RCT supporting it” equals “it doesn’t work”; I’ve become much more of a Bayesian, or at least I try to think in terms of probabilities and best guesses and cost-benefit analyses rather than “this works” and “this has not been rigorously shown to work ergo we will say it doesn’t work”. I was already on that route I think but it’s become very obvious in the last year
I’ve said elsewhere in this AMA, but I suspect that journalism, for all its many flaws, actually is really important, and that democratic societies would be much harder to organise without a free press. I suspect that journalism isn’t hugely popular among rationalists (and since I tend to think of EAs as being the same people, I assume it’s not hugely popular with them either), but I think it’s really important.
I think there’s a huge miscalibration about what’s “actually” important in the media – there’s a huge focus on problems of the Western world, and especially US problems (which then get exported to the UK and other places; eg I think problems with race in the UK are very different to the ones in the US, but we see everything through a US lens). A murder in the UK (or a school shooting in the US) is objectively less important than 1,000 people dying every day of malaria, but it gets many times the coverage. But it’s hard to say “actually this doesn’t matter” when it’s some named person dead in a horrible way, and compare it to thousands of real but faceless individuals dying off-camera.
Funnily enough I think Covid has shifted this a bit because it’s a genuinely global and important story about infectious diseases and vaccinations. But I’d love to see more focus in the mainstream media on diseases of poverty in the developing world, things like that. That said—as I’ve said elsewhere, you can’t run a media industry on the things that you OUGHT to write about, you have to give readers what they want as well.Since this is about journalism, I’ll stick to that example: I think EAs/rationalists tend to assume journalists are out to destroy people. It’s not that that’s wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete. For instance, when I’ve written about quack charities – autism charities telling people not to get vaccinated, say, or to have awful heavy-metal chelation therapy or whatever – it is 100% my intention to damage those charities’ ability to function, or get their CEOs to resign, because I believe that they are damaging children, and that revealing their bad practices is good for society. I think most people here would agree with me. But other journalists are doing the same thing—they’ve just sometimes made different judgments about what “good for society” is, and I very often disagree with those judgments. But they’re not out to destroy for the fun of it; they’re usually trying to do good. (That said, there is a tendency to measure journalistic impact in how many people you’ve forced to resign, which is understandable but kind of icky.)
Short answer: no.
Long answer: I think that what is underappreciated about journalism is the time pressure. If you’re writing for a daily paper, or some equivalent, you often have to become passably expert in some topic in a few hours. It is a miracle that, say, the Times puts together enough material for a medium-sized novel every 24 hours. Some of it is longer lead times, the mags and features sometimes you have a week or so, and the real glossy mags like the Atlantic and the Economist and so on you might have weeks or more to research. But it is absolutely incredible to witness a paper go from “literally nothing exists” at 11am to “here is a full paper, with relatively few typos and hopefully no libels and tens of thousands of words of news, analysis, criticism, a topical cartoon, sports reports, the weather” by 9pm. There just isn’t time to do a full fact-check. The sheer just-in-time nature of it is incredible. Same with TV and radio; everything is spinning like a gyroscope, seconds away from going wrong.
(The Atlantic and the Economist and the New Yorker, etc, it’s totally different, everyone sits around in oak-panelled rooms thinking deep thoughts and writing one piece a month which is then picked to the bone by fact-checkers like vultures on a dead buffalo. I exaggerate somewhat.)
And then you get the incentive issues that while journalists definitely think of themselves as performing a public service, and we are, we’re also contributing to a business and that business needs to sell papers or get clicks or whatever so “1,000 people died of malaria today” can’t be the splash headline every day. It just can’t. Journalism is in the public interest, but it ALSO needs to provide what the public is interested in, and if it doesn’t do the latter then it can’t be the former. And there’s a coordination problem that if I say “I will do only high-minded journalism that is in the public interest”, the next guy can say “great, I’ll do scurrilous celebrity hackery and sell 40 times what you do and put you out of business”.
AND THEN you have to remember it’s staffed by humans with biases and political opinions and families to feed and social status to uphold.
So with those limitations in mind, I think journalism does a pretty good job of giving readers/viewers/listeners a rough picture of reality. But they’re really big limitations and it’s unrealistic to expect anything approaching a clear, unbiased window on the world.
I think this is a really interesting question, but I don’t know enough about the business of journalism to have good answers. Somewhere else in the Qs I’ve talked a bit about the impact of journalism and why it’s important, which is probably relevant.
thanks Nathan!
I will look at that OpenPhil thing! I did do a calibration exercise with GJP (and was, to my surprise, both quite good and underconfident!) but I’d love to have another go.
hahaha!
FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK! https://www.howtoreadnumbers.com/
(thank you for this obvious setup)
It’s not a news site; it’s comment and analysis (I never know how much the distinction between reporting and commentary is clear to non-journalists). Essentially, UnHerd rarely breaks scoops, although I have done once or twice; it’s analysis of things that are already public knowledge, essays, opinion. Like a blog site in a way.
But it’s – I guess it thinks of itself as heterodox? In the Haidt sense. Saying the, ah, “unheard” things (also “not part of the herd”, it was a bit of a laboured pun). So it’s generally politically unaligned but has a fondness for the stuff that it is hard to say in The Current Moment, which often but not always cashes out as criticism of the social justice movement. I think that’s a fair description.
there’s this great book, The Rationalist’s Guide to – never mind.
I genuinely think that the Sequences are still great for that! And Scott’s Nobody is Perfect, Everything is Commensurable. I love 80,000 Hours’ podcast and Rationally Thinking. But if someone’s in the market, I’d start with Rationality: From AI to Zombies.
Hmm. I don’t know, I’m afraid. I took a chapter on Occam’s Razor out which I rather liked. But I’m quite proud of the book and I think it works fairly well as an intro to rationalist thinking. I’m sure there are some things I could think of and if I do I’ll come back and add them.
I wish I had a better answer to the first one than “become good at writing”. My own pathway was reading loads and loads, and writing loads and loads, and then essentially mimicking the writing that I liked (mainly Pratchett tbh) until eventually I noticed that I’d stopped doing that and had a recognisable style of my own. I sometimes go through my old emails from before I was a journalist and see I’ve just written needlessly long show-offy emails to friends, which I cringe about a bit now, but they were clearly practice for when I had to do it for real.
Actually, also, I did philosophy at uni and MA, and I found that the way I learnt to structure an argument in those essays has been really helpful.
Oh and this might sound silly but become good at typing. If you can type as fast as you think then when the ideas are flowing quickly then they just sort of appear on the page. I used to work as a medical secretary for a long time and I swear that helped me an awful lot, not least in transcribing interviews but also just in being able to get ideas down quickly.
As for getting it published: pitch! Ideally start by developing a relationship with some editor somewhere. It might be a good idea to blog as well, so that you can point people to stuff you’ve written.
For me, at least, Twitter is the way to get hold of me—my DMs are open, and most journalists’ are. But emails are good too and most journalists will make them publicly available.
Send us an email or a DM! But first make sure that the journalist in question is interested in the sort of thing you’re pitching. I keep marking PR emails as spam, because they’re obviously just auto-sending to some list, and I don’t give a toss if some tech company is having a roundtable meeting about some acquisition or whatever. If, however, I get a personalised email from someone who obviously knows my work and has thought that whatever they’re emailing might actually be of interest, I’ll always at least reply, even if I don’t use the info in a piece.
Yes, but don’t spam them out—see 2. Get the journalist’s attention and ask if he or she would be interested. (Although: it’s just occurred to me that this is like the breeding habits of elephants vs the breeding habits of frogs. Either spend years raising the baby and getting high rates of survival but low rates of actual birth, or fire out tens of thousands of eggs and fertilise them all at once and hope that one or two survive. Maybe the latter works and I am giving you a survivorship bias-tainted account because I, obviously, ignore the large majority of them, as they expect.)
Indeed it is: see 1.
I think it would be very hard to have a functioning democratic state without journalism of some kind. I may be overstating my industry’s importance, but if you don’t know what the government is doing, or how the machinery of the state is operating, or what the lives of the citizens are like, then how can you participate in your democracy? And you can’t rely on the government to tell you. So even though most journalism is not vital to democracy, if there was no journalism, there would be very little to stop the government from behaving how it liked.
I also think that in my field of journalism, science writing, there’s a lot of value in translating abstruse-but-important research and thinking into readable or even enjoyable material for laypeople. Also, you can convince people of things that are true, and help people make good decisions (I hope).
Plus, things like criticism are helpful for readers in allowing them to find the books/films/theatre they might enjoy (and I think they have a value even given the existence of crowdsourced review sites like Rotten Tomatoes). And, of course, people enjoy reading/watching, and that is a good in itself.
For someone like me who has no other skills than interviewing clever people and writing down what they say, I suspect that journalism is one of the places I could do the most good, because I can do it well. Of course, all the good outcomes I just mentioned are reliant on the journalist in question being good at their job, but that’s probably true of all careers, isn’t it?
On measuring it: re democracy at least, I guess you could try to do some sort of study looking at countries with strong independent journalism vs those without, but they would be so horribly confounded I doubt you could get good numbers on it.
I certainly agree with the Toxoplasma thesis, or I should say it sounds very plausible to me. I don’t think it’s unique to journalism at all—I remember in my MA reading about Israel and Palestine, a book called Through Different Eyes I think, and it fitted a very similar mechanism. Each side would highlight the other side’s “atrocities” as justification for their own retaliation, which would then become “atrocities” which the other side would use as justification for their retaliation, etc. Same thing here: some, I dunno, gender-critical feminist tweets something angry in response to some trans-rights activist; that tweet is then held up to show how awful the gender-critical types are and excuses a bunch of horrible comments; round and round we go.
Re 1), I think that’s rarer than you think. But as rationalist-adjacent types you’ll know that it doesn’t have to be deliberate. We’re extremely good at only noticing the data that is convenient, and fooling ourselves in the service of fooling others. I’m sure there are some cynics and grifters, but they’re nowhere near as common as people honestly saying what they believe. Debate is war, arguments are soldiers, etc, and you have to kill the other soldiers, but it’s not usually a conscious thing to think “I know that is true but I have to pretend it’s not,” it’s more “That is an enemy soldier, therefore it is bad, therefore I must destroy it.”
Oh I never replied to this one. BUY MY BOOK (either one, but especially the new one: https://www.howtoreadnumbers.com/ ). Or, I dunno, read my stuff and be available to chat if I need to speak to someone about some topic.