Can't say I was too impressed by this one. When you leverage your influence to take a stance on something, it's fair game to attack your influence. Journalists absolutely should be applying a higher level of scrutiny to people who speak out. If there's a problem there it's jourbalists' bias, not their methods.
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition. I didn't read him as making a huge value judgement here. To be a good Bayesian, you have to reason properly about the process that produces the evidence. People who don't operate on the presumption that the media "targets" people are going to be systematically wrong.
I read it as saying "smearing is irrelevant" when I find it very relevant. More to the point, in the real world, where arguments are not usually logical propositions, I'm a big believer in ad hominem. I'm a lot less likely to look into someone's theory of quantum gravity if it turns out their phd was faked. Ad hominem is a very useful heuristic.
The media targetting people is a separate thing and has a lot more to do with media bias than with the smearing/sniffing out personal details itself.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
I guess I'm not big on the plagiarism train because I already assumed Gay's academic credentials were hogwash. From [Wikipedia:]
"Claudine Gay (born 1970)[2][3] is an American political scientist and academic administrator who was the 30th president of Harvard University, and is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard.[4] Gay's research addresses American political behavior, including voter turnout and politics of race and identity.[5]"
This isn't quite the same as saying someone is "The L. Ron Hubbard Professor of homeopathy and psychoanalysis", but it's pretty darn close. I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
You're already sold on homeopathy being bad, but a plagiarism scandal is absolute gold if other methods of convincing others that the journal is bunk have failed.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
Well I'll definitely agree that's a false proposition, but to me the article seemed more focused on "hitpieces are bad" than on "actually journalists do write hitpieces."
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Notes -
Can't say I was too impressed by this one. When you leverage your influence to take a stance on something, it's fair game to attack your influence. Journalists absolutely should be applying a higher level of scrutiny to people who speak out. If there's a problem there it's jourbalists' bias, not their methods.
It feels like vintage Scott to me. He is loudly and explicitly calling bullshit on a clearly false proposition. I didn't read him as making a huge value judgement here. To be a good Bayesian, you have to reason properly about the process that produces the evidence. People who don't operate on the presumption that the media "targets" people are going to be systematically wrong.
What's the false proposition?
I read it as saying "smearing is irrelevant" when I find it very relevant. More to the point, in the real world, where arguments are not usually logical propositions, I'm a big believer in ad hominem. I'm a lot less likely to look into someone's theory of quantum gravity if it turns out their phd was faked. Ad hominem is a very useful heuristic.
The media targetting people is a separate thing and has a lot more to do with media bias than with the smearing/sniffing out personal details itself.
The false proposition is "journalists don't target hitpieces against people they don't like".
I guess I'm not big on the plagiarism train because I already assumed Gay's academic credentials were hogwash. From [Wikipedia:]
This isn't quite the same as saying someone is "The L. Ron Hubbard Professor of homeopathy and psychoanalysis", but it's pretty darn close. I don't care if a homeopathy journal has a plagiarism scandal. That doesn't affect my opinion of it's accuracy.
You're already sold on homeopathy being bad, but a plagiarism scandal is absolute gold if other methods of convincing others that the journal is bunk have failed.
Well I'll definitely agree that's a false proposition, but to me the article seemed more focused on "hitpieces are bad" than on "actually journalists do write hitpieces."
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