It's not just technical subjects, either. In the midst of the chaos of Charlie Kirk's assassination, they ran an article [0] yesterday titled (it has since been edited) "Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology".
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
I believe it says quite a lot when a major and supposedly reputable institution like the WSJ will sacrifice journalistic rigor when they see an opportunity to potentially besmirch the image of a sharply unpopular demographic. Facts still matter over agenda. People should be fired for this.
The linked WSJ article has an interview-quote from Scott Aaronson:
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
> finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate.
Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in anticipation of these rhetorical chisels that will try to pry into any minute crack to dismiss the entire issue at hand.
The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
I agree, I actually often criticize people in the right (and I do consider myself conservative) for dismissing postmodernism when they clearly misunderstand it. A tipical argument in the right could go: 'big pharma funds the studies so what comes out of these studies are not objective truth, because of the social, economic, and cultural dynamics at play'. It's a Latourian argument.
I have a suspicion that Finland is able to do well against fake news mostly because it is Russian fake news and people know them very well.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
The US definitely has a global target for disinformation. I've lived in Latam and the propaganda was far more easy to spot. The link I gave a lot was concerted efforts by the democratic party but I do acknowledge there is Russian, North Korean, Chinese, and probably other propaganda that is looking to destabilize. However, I do think that we are at a moment where the idea of objectivity is loosing its foundation. That's a cultural philosophical moment we're having, and I don't know if you can say that Finland is above this epistemic shift.
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
The author is a member of the academic community and are known for their grounded and informed takes on topics which are extremely complex and only well understood by high level physics theoreticians and researchers.
They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.
>I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it.
The WSJ and other outlets are also completely failing at understanding the "chronically online" messaging from recent mass shooters, and are unintentionally spreading the memes and attention that the perpetrators are seeking out, thus feeding the cycle.
They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
The media has been failing at this since Columbine, if not before. They don't take the contagion effect nearly as seriously as they ought to, given that so many shooters have been documented now as idolizing previous shooters.
When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
Readit News
It's just incredibly irresponsible reporting. One can only assume it is a symptom of a wider problem within WSJ and media itself.
0: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/charlie-kirk-shot/card/ammu...
Deleted Comment
>The WSJ carelessly spread anti-trans misinformation
https://www.theverge.com/politics/777630/wsj-trans-misinform...
(archived: https://archive.is/liFTX)
> Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.
I feel this Futurama clip about evolutionary "missing link" fossils [0] captures a little bit of that frustration. Building any cohesive framework for understanding a big problem is always harder than finding and attacking a weak spot and declaring the entire thing flawed.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICv6GLwt1gM
It's funny because I've come to think of this exact thing as basically the defining characteristic of the HN rhetorical style. It's not unique to here of course but it's where this approach is taken most seriously as honest rigorous debate.
Long time commenters here have internalized it to the point where their writing is large defensive in anticipation of these rhetorical chisels that will try to pry into any minute crack to dismiss the entire issue at hand.
or whatever fallacy nerds like bringing up in debates, just pick your favourite one and insert it here.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-f...
As a general rule, you can sit there and moan about problems or you can spend 5min to find proven solutions. It's hard to do both.
I can also confirm that Ukrainians are doing amazingly well compared to the rest of the world in this regards.
The problem I see is that the west _loves_ russian propaganda. Listening to any popular US podcaster feels like they are taking their hot takes directly from the Olgino troll factories.
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.
They are writing for an audience of sophisticated non-experts who are curious about fields of advanced topics that are difficult to understand and thus are usually distorted in an unhelpful way by people who barely grasp it but are trusted by the public to be the authority on relaying that topic to laypeople.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit
Deleted Comment
EDIT: Chain: https://pastebin.com/raw/Mch2XTiQ
https://archive.is/wAtCw
That said, I'm not having this issue at all. Strange.
Deleted Comment
As a former math sysadmin... I apologize on behalf of math sysadmins
They seem to be seriously lacking experts on anything these days... culture, physics and anything between.
When you give a maladjusted freak a script that's basically "get your hands on this specific model rifle, go to this specific type of place, kill a bunch of people, and we'll make you famous," is it any wonder it happens over and over again? They show their photo, they name them down to their middle name, they write articles about whatever loony manifesto they wrote . . . none of this should be newsworthy, and it all feeds the social phenomenon.
https://archive.is/qGOmz