Littlewood's Law and the Global Media

Littlewood's Law and the Global Media(gwern.net)

53 points by evilsimon 7 years ago | 11 comments

gallerdude 7 years ago |

This is what scares me about the slow death of old media. As newspapers and cable news become less and less profitable, they'll have to rely on more and more extreme headlines to draw people in. And as proven here, there's a lot of "true in the sense that this happened, but false in the sense that there's a trend."

Extreme headlines aren't a terrible thing, but it doesn't help that old media in particular is seen as the arbiter of truth, the lone warrior fighting against the forces of evil. And I'm even more conflicted, because in some cases, that description isn't even wrong.

quanticle 7 years ago | |

Ryan Holiday talks about this a lot in Trust Me I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. His take is that in the old days, the media used to lie by omission: it would choose not to cover certain stories, even though they were important. Today, the media "lies by transmission" -- they cover unimportant but sensational stories, and that drowns out the coverage of important but less eye-catching events.

stcredzero 7 years ago | | |

It goes even further nowadays. Get into niche media journalism, and you see groups of journalists who collude to purposely create emotional impressions which bend the "truth" in whichever direction they've agreed on. Niche media journalism also acts as a filter for mainstream media's coverage of their niche, which amplifies their narrative.

I see this as an extension of post 2000's web forum culture, which was often censorious and authoritarian in nature. You toe the line, or you get the banhammer, two orders of magnitude faster than the cold war eastern bloc secret police even dreamed. Posts that go against the mods were deleted in a brazen fashion that would've made Pravda blush. It's the generations who were kids and high school students when exposed to those modes of behavior, awash in online mini-regimes of instant totalitarian power, who are now getting into their 30's and are rising in power.

Freewheeling obnoxiousness has its downside online. There were parts of that chaotic side of the internet that I absolutely hated. However, I now see that the fakeness of the totalitarian version is ultimately worse. In future years, we'll look back on these years like we looked back on the 50's. The cultural milieu that bought all that "Midcentury Modern" furniture thought themselves fantastically "progressive."

malvosenior 7 years ago | |

Another symptom of the old media death spiral is an unrelenting stream of attacks on the “enemy”, mostly Facebook and other platforms that remove their gatekeeper status and push the value of data (articles) to zero.

For instance right now on HN there is a NYT article about a journalist quitting Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706254

Definitely a non-story but old media will use any chance it can get to tarnish internet brands.

matt4077 7 years ago | | |

It’s heavily upvoted on HN, so it would seem that, maybe, people disagree about it being a “total non-story”.

DomreiRoam 7 years ago |

I really like this: "(if you don’t have time to trace something back to its source, then you don’t have the right to share it to other people & use up their time)" from the last paragraph.

matt4077 7 years ago | |

It’s quite impossible to prove anything from first principle, unless you were an eye witness yourself. A society needs a certain amount of trust, or what is often disparaged as “proof from authority”.

People rail against trusting institutions like, say, the New York Times. But they will far more readily lone their car to their spouse than a stranger, even though the latter action relies on essentially the same mechanisms: knowing the person/institution’s track record, and knowing they have an ongoing interest in preserving the trust you put in them that outweighs any incentives to defraud you.

That’s because the first is easy to state —one may even call it the alt-right’s version of “virtue signaling”— while actually following through in daily life would show how unworkable the suggestion is.

Also: have you traced every single fact that went into your agreement with the sentence you shared back to its source, and verified their accuracy?

matt4077 7 years ago |

(A) blanket hatred of “the media” seems to be somewhat misplaced, considering this post itself starts with a link to The Atlantic’s “pretty good post-mortem”.

(B) why does this go right to the top on HN, while (as but one example) the recently released, data-driven analyses of the role of social media in the 2016 election get flagged to hell for being “too political” and having “nothing to do with tech”? Likewise, any mention of very real anti-semitism, like a guy shooting up a synagogue, or another guy sleeping in a truck plastered with Trump stickers sending pipe bombs to Jewish people, are almost certain to turn grey faster than a competent President’s hair.

kbenson 7 years ago | |

> (A) blanket hatred of “the media” seems to be somewhat misplaced, considering this post itself starts with a link to The Atlantic’s “pretty good post-mortem”.

I didn't read it as hatred of "the media". I read it as "be careful, it's increasingly easy to re-use existing high-quality but poorly known fictional media to support a hoax instead of the entertainment it was designed for." along with "be careful, statistical outliers will happen in large populations, and they make for good news".

> (B) why does this go right to the top on HN, while (as but one example) the recently released, data-driven analyses of the role of social media in the 2016 election get flagged to hell for being “too political”

Because one is specifically about politics, and the other is about media and communication. This is about tools and techniques which may or may not be political in nature.

> and having “nothing to do with tech”?

Tech related is not a prerequisite for being on HN.

drpgq 7 years ago |

I think unfortunately that there are a lot of hoaxes now and I'm no longer surprised by them.