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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31052 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.

This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:

if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation

...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?

We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?

I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence

When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says

...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.

"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?

Then his point is dumb. The media gets everything important wrong and everything unimportant right. The media isn’t that bad!

It would be like going to a doctor that can correctly diagnosis the specific variant of cold you got but misses easy signs of the cancer growing in your body until it becomes terminal.

Or to borrow from finance it is picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.

If Alex Jones starts reposting AP press releases, while keeping his usual material, will people start writing articles about how he's "honest and good"?

When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says

I agree that this is absolutely wrong. It is constantly wrong in the scientific and legal fields I specialize in. In addition, when it is correct at reporting sorta what the paper says, the paper is usually trash itself! Well guess what!? Most of the papers that receive the most media attention are from the fields that are the most prone to bias and capture. "Objectively" reporting a psychology result is typically akin to misleading your entire readership.

Yeah agreed. I am an expert in a certain narrow legal field. Whenever it is discussed in the broad media, they get things about 90% wrong.

I'm guessing it's harder to be biased with science reporting (save for global warming, climate change). An article about fusion cannot be viewed through a political lens like anything to do with race.

I wrote an advocatus diabolus back in The Old Place about how "hard science academia is mostly taxpayer funded adult daycare for Israelis and Chinese stealing bread from the mouths of black bodies on whom that money could have been better spent". Fusion power especially: the meme of "we'll have it in 5 years" for the last 50 years is not just funny, it also represents a tremendous quantity of spending without results - aka grift.

So the fact that journos don't leverage rhetoric against it is a failure of their imagination, not because there's no political hay to rake.

It is interesting that funding is almost always through government.

If fusion were developed, it would represent the single greatest achievement in human history and would create tens if not hundreds of trillion in value to the inventor. If there was a 1/10,000 then a 9 figure figure investment doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why don’t we see it in the private sector?

Why don't we see it in the private sector?

We do. There is even a trade association for private fusion companies. Of the ones on that list, Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Helion are all serious operations that have raised nine-figure sums of money from private-sector investors. I suspect some of the others are as well - those are just the three I am familiar with.

The last time the US built a nuclear plant it took 40 years. That's an outlier but even in other countries it's frequently over a decade. By the time you were able to make any money off it the patents would be expired.

Fusion power especially: the meme of "we'll have it in 5 years" for the last 50 years is not just funny, it also represents a tremendous quantity of spending without results - aka grift.

If only.

"Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research"

See http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/ for sum total of this "tremendous quantity".

I'm guessing it's harder to be biased with science reporting

Science reporting is hilariously bad, falling for every pseudo-scientific scam you throw their way. The fact that it's easier to verify these stories only makes it worse.

The state of fusion power is one of the worse examples he could have picked.

An article about fusion cannot be viewed through a political lens like anything to do with race.

I mean, it can, but more importantly an article about fusion can be easily viewed through an “I have no idea what I’m talking about” lens. This usually manifests as asking and answering the wrong questions rather than providing flatly incorrect information.

Regarding fusion in particular, I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure that the prospects for fusion being much of an improvement on fission are very low with most current designs (because they'll still have similarly high capex costs), but this is almost never mentioned in articles about fusion power.

Perhaps one way to test this would be to check how the NYTs reports on non-political stuff compared to sources which are presumed to not have a political agenda, like science websites.

Perhaps one way to test this would be to check how the NYTs reports on non-political stuff

Non-political stuff? Hard to find something like this in the current year. If NYT decides to give space to something, it must have some political importance.

compared to sources which are presumed to not have a political agenda, like science websites.

As others in this thread said, mainstream science websites and magazines have the same agenda as NYT.

So, how can normie noobs check whether NYT coverage of, for example, Australian cockroaches, is accurate (without spending few years of their lives studying entomology)?

Well, they cannot.

Best hope is to find some world class cockroach experts (fortunately, in the age of twitter, you can find genuine experts on every conceivable topic here, broadcasting to few dozen followers) and ask.

Do not ask directly "Is NYT article about cockroaches scientifically accurate, or as accurate as usual?".

Just no not mention NYT at all, just write that you are interested in cockroaches and want to learn more, ask curious questions about their life, and among these questions send some about topics covered in NYT.

"Is it true that North Australian giant cockroach regularly changes gender?"

I would assume most science websites have more or less the same agenda as the NYT.

+1 Pop sci websites share both the biases and incompetency of the NYT.

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