One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
I've been thinking about this recently with internet comments on here, reddit, etc. There are very few topics on which I'd consider myself an expert, but whenever one comes up, the "top" comment (often something contrarian/snarky) is always significantly incorrect.
100%. It's extra disastrous when the topic is polarizing or charged. The topic of US politics for example will very often work off of some false dichotomy or fundamentally flawed premise and twist into some horribly deformed conversation.
Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.
I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.
I think this is a significant contribution to imposter syndrome. It took me a long time in life to realize that the confidence some people have in their opinions rarely comes from true expertise; rather, it comes from their personality.
Are you claiming expertise in computing or non-computing topics? HN tends to be - as we might expect - quite good at computers and bad/average [0] at everything else.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."[0]
This is why I'm rather bemused when people "freak out" about LLMs hallucination rates. The number of comments I've seen on Hacker news (ostensibly the intellectual sister of reddit) that make extraordinarily confident outlandish claims about various subjects with zero citations, sources, etc across what would otherwise be considered highly scientific disciplines - neuroscience is a particularly egregious offender - is far more worrisome to me than the latest hallucination from Gemini.
My experience working at Apple on both Music and Maps: anything that I had worked on that was reported on was usually wildly inaccurate. Mainstream news, bloggers, HN comments... so much assumption and usually way off.
Covid was the litmus test for me. I happened to know a lot about a lot of topics that became wildly reported on, from virology to immunology, and I had to watch in horror as every single media presence and expert weighed in with at best non-existent data to support major changes to existing wisdom, and at worst (and most common) obvious lies that contradicted not just available science but the very nature of how viruses operate.
For me, it’s often a case of semantics. Like, if I watch a YouTube car repair video, and the presenter is diagnosing an issue and says something like “ok, so we can see here the battery is draining far too quickly so I better check the alternator first,” in my experience, it’s rarely the alternator and often either a bad battery or a short somewhere. My first check is either of those two things. I might eventually arrive at the alternator but it’s all just semantics and interpretation at a certain level. I don’t feel like they’re breathtakingly _wrong_, they just probably have had a different experience than me, leading them to a different conclusion.
Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
The accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.
I never really knew about, or thought about, this phenomenon until I started trying code generated by ChatGPT. Then I started to realize ChatGPT's answers seemed really good for programming languages I knew little about, but pretty bad for programming languages I knew a lot about.
Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
> Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones?
Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
In the context of articles the answer is simple: because the journalist isnt the specialist, they likely just interviewed a few people and wrapped it up the article.
For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments.
Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
I have found people receptive to that observation though.
That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.
Absolutely true, but also people who know about a subject often can't see the forest for the trees and an outside perspective brings new detail you haven't seen before.
> As someone that works in the crypto industry, I feel this every time I see the news or articles report on it, or comments here talking about it.
It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the "Graphical portion of the Internet".
With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
And I love the comments in that video about being "Confused, but on a higher level".
That's why I prefer to read books by scientists that are established in the field. Granted, I might miss some spectacular insights that some revolutionists might propose, but I can be relatively sure that most of what I read is actually true in the sense of representing reality relatively accurately.
I described a time where a friend summarized this effect and how it stuck with me since, which is the same effect described in the article? And saying that it's a bummer to think about? I didn't say it was original insight on anyone's part, just that it was a sticky thought when it was wrapped up in a small 1 sentence explanation. You're right, there's no great insight in my comment, all it said was "yea this happens to me too all the time" but for some reason it got upvoted.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
For us old timers this is nothing new. For people that know what a 3 digit /. userid is, the meme of not reading the article is as old as internet news boards.
It's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.
Even worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. 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."
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Since I've started working in finance, I find all those conspiracies about banks and "wall street" a bit cringe: HSBC is actually a nice bank, they helped me a lot, hedge funds do lose as much money as they make in aggregate across all of them because end of the day it's all a random 0-sum with losers paying winners, inside an investment bank, risk is very managed and boring, deal makers spend lots of time trying to reject proposals, loans are rarely predatory and not always easy to get because nobody wants bad payers, bonuses are scarse, etc.
The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ...
Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...
The flip side of this is that I’ve repeatedly seen people in some industry subject to new regulation claim that some effect of it is an unfortunate accident (when it’s actually the point, the behavior it’s stopping that you think is good is actually unethical and system-wide contributes to huge problems in ways that ought not be hard to understand) or that much-needed regulation is some terrible mistake that people will regret when we have strong evidence (like, real world examples) to the contrary.
Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually)
See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up)
Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.
"loans are rarely predatory" misses the point why they are bad. They are bad for the economy because it's you (not the market) who decides who gets resources.
And now just think of all of the people who will be getting their knowledge from LLMs which are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.
> LLMs are literally making up stuff through statistical linguistic inference on a grand scale from hearsay.
Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.
Maybe you are referring to articles on the internet that are meant for SEO?
The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts).
OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j
"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'"
(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.
The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.
I know Orwell's work pretty well, and I read that sentence, and thought to myself: "Cant remember where he said anything like that, but what the hell, I haven't read everything Orwell ever wrote". So I just rolled with it.
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.
About 10 years ago I accepted that I didn't know what was going on, and I also realized that even if I did, 98% of it doesn't affect me in the slightest way.
I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.
Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.
Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.
After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.
Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.
Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.
Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).
Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.
what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much.
If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.
Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.
A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why.
But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !
Here's a potentially relevant quote from "The Man Who Solved the Market" by Gregory Zuckerman[0].
"One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say."
The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”
> But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know why stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
They move due to information about the stock and the perception (which is a type of information) about the stock. But since you don't know when new information about a company/stock will become public, nor when the perceptional information about it will shift, the changes are effectively random:
And if there is new information about it, those that get it first (unlikely to be you) will be able to capitalize on in better; and as it spreads that information will take more and more of an effect on the stock price. To paraphrase William Gibson: the information is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Yes, but not always - in the case it goes in the opposite direction, they will write 'investors priced it in already' :D
There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market.
Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
Disagree- plenty of times in my career the company I work for beats/misses guidance and the stock moves in the “wrong” direction. To the point where it was independently a joke in multiple companies
Nobody knows why, because it's meaningless noise. It's just what the stock was traded for in that particular moment, somebody offered to trade for that much and somebody accepted that offer which alone is a meaningless number. You need some longer term average according to volume, not points in time to gain any meaningful information.
My favorite style to dislike is "Fed sees inflation as astronauts are trapped on ISS." They really want to make it sound like a causal relationship, using "as" as "and [with unspoken implications; nudge, wink]" instead of simply posting two articles.
First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.
It'd bad to rely on a small selection-biased sample of anything as an indicator of the general case, regardless of whether the sample data is acquired firsthand or secondhand.
Similarly, a lot of people believe in what we could call "ghosts" based on firsthand experience, yet the expert consensus is that there is no such thing.
I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.
I was listening to the latest Lex Friedman podcast from the Amazon jungle and there was an interesting comment that the “reality is a simulation” folks have never had to survive in the Amazon and that the belief is somewhat of a side effect of the relative safety of everyday life.
The realm of the quantum does not care about the Amazonian wildlife and the converse is also true.
The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano.
Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh."
Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm.
Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.
Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.
Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.
GPS wouldn't work if relativity was wrong. Radio wouldn't work if our theory of electromagnetism was wrong. Satellites wouldn't stay in orbit if Newton was wrong. Modern medicine wouldn't work if our understanding of biology was wrong. And chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and so forth all overlap, all require each other to some degree... and each of these interconnected areas of knowledge need to be correct, because we want to use it to build things or solve problems or make discoveries.
That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.
To a certain extent I agree, but I think you're missing a lot of nuance there. Boeing, for example, have built a lot of planes that fly as expected. The problem is the ones they built that don't: where bits fall off them or where their sensor systems don't work.
So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?
I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact.
Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.
Readit News
Kind of a bummer to think about.
Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.
I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/27/us/required-reading-smith...
I can’t go back to ignorance ever again.
Caveat: I often work on old cars where a short is far more likely.
Then I realized this probably applies to many different subjects.
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Why wouldn't the accuracy be higher? Extrapolating that way from limited experience is not something I would personally do. I would read everything, learn gradually, and continue learning and testing information with experiments and more information.
For comments it's a different story. You do occasionally get the real experts, but more often then not, you just get another mediocre human like myself that just voiced their opinion. Furthermore, there is a strong correlation with experts not commenting as they've got better things to do vs the average Joe that is commenting with little effort, essentially outputting significantly more comments. Another detrimental factor is that mentally unwell people will often output orders of magnitude more comments then everyone else, complicating everything even more.
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That is, it's not yet a widely noticed thing and I feel it helps to spread it around and people generally seem to welcome and understand the concept. It probably does not immediately change how they read - biases are very hard to fight. But it goes in the right direction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
Dead Comment
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
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It was the same way during the 90's Dot-Com era, journalists would explain the World Wide Web with word salad, e.g., the "Graphical portion of the Internet".
With regard to Crypto, I decline to discuss it without mentioning the 3Blue1Brown video, sometimes the gambit works and triggers a better discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4
And I love the comments in that video about being "Confused, but on a higher level".
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Should I only comment if I have a counterexample?
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
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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." – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
The headlines about some crisis with uneducated comments about how rich bankers exploit the weaks make me hesitate to trust journalism. Often incompetence is way more prevalent than nefariousness ...
Each time I say stuff like that I get comments saying "maybe but it's not a reason to defend banks", completely missing that it's exactly my point: this hatred of banks is a bit irrational, I think it's fine sometimes to defend them...
Granted I’ve mostly seen that in the real estate world, so maybe other industries are less-shit about saying plainly dumb stuff based on “insider knowledge” (self-serving bullshit, actually)
See also: cops and all manner of things, like the relative riskiness of their own job (and which parts of it are risky—all that driving is a lot of the risk, and Covid-19 vs guns is a fun comparison for some years) or how dangerous it is to be within one meter of a small amount of fentanyl or whatever, or how we’ll all just super regret it if we keep them from trampling on civil liberties (common view, not making that up)
Sometimes the insiders know better and everyone else is wrong. Sometimes the insiders are all sorts of mixed up over some comically basic shit.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_Crichto...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
Hearsay being some personal "truth" it may be useful to know what the statistical average of that "truth" is. If we do it right perhaps we can get the various personal errors to cancel out.
The internal white papers I've written and also help co-author (which are for discourse/dissertation on successful project implementations and to be used as reference for future work), or when on a stint with IBM doing ITSO Redbooks, were (are?) highly accurate, and involved subject matter experts (which, as the name would imply, were the SMEs that people would contact specifically as THE experts in that field; and, back then, we were really the experts).
OK Ok, you can stay on my lawn for a while longer... /j
(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.
The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-wrote-The-UA.znXC3SXGjv...
(AI search engines are just going to get crappier and crappier as more junk is put in the web.)
- Abraham Lincoln
The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.
I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.
I think it affects you, and everybody.
Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.
Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.
After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.
Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.
Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.
Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).
One solution I found is this service that texts one sentence, fact based summaries of 8-10 current events every morning [1].
An alternative free solution is the Wikipedia current events portal [2].
[1] https://thenewpaper.co/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.
Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.
I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote:
"Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah
But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about !
As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !
"One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher. Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest, rather than Renaissance’s miscue. [...] “Any time you hear financial experts talking about how the market went up because of such and such—remember it’s all nonsense,” [Peter] Brown [CEO of Renaissance Technologies] later would say."
[0] https://www.gregoryzuckerman.com/the-books/the-man-who-solve...
They move due to information about the stock and the perception (which is a type of information) about the stock. But since you don't know when new information about a company/stock will become public, nor when the perceptional information about it will shift, the changes are effectively random:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
And if there is new information about it, those that get it first (unlikely to be you) will be able to capitalize on in better; and as it spreads that information will take more and more of an effect on the stock price. To paraphrase William Gibson: the information is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market.
Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
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Also, an absence of evidence is not proof of absence, though it usually appears that it is.
The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano.
Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh."
Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm.
Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
People believe it is representative, they literally link to it as proof of their claims.
In this way (and there are many others), reality is simulated.
Another way is Indirect Realism, knowledge of which is rarely in working memory.
Another way is that people believe there is only one possible form of simulation, as in "the" simulation theory.
How much work is it to answer that question?
A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer.
Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed.
Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions.
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Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0
You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't.
One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.
That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
This is a true/false Boolean is it?
> And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding.
What if it's probabilistic, and rare?
So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?
Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.