One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to remember:
A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make.
Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all the time.
With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to support any viewpoint on any topic.
Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's some horrific crimes.
That's modern opinionated news in a nutshell -- here's a pile of extreme occurrences, look at how extreme they are, so you should agree that the other side is crazy.
An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc.
I've found arguing from questions rather than statements helps. What's the root question? And then what data would answer that question?
It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in.
Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students to review the data because he was himself surprised by the results).
People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments, reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, forcing him to get police protection, suffering calls for his resignation, and worse.
On the question of non-lethal uses of force, the study found “sometimes quite large” racial differences in police use of force, even after accounting for “a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioural factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction”.
In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, however, the study observed that when it came to the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – there were no racial differences “in either the raw data or when accounting for controls”. According to one case study of the Houston police department, black people were actually 23.5% less likely to be shot by police, relative to white people, in an interaction.
Wow, I hadn't heard this before l, and it made me pretty furious:
> An important scholarly intervention within a particular field of academic research, you might say. But Prof Fryer has now revealed that at the time the research was conducted, Harvard colleagues familiar with the results urged him not to publish his findings, telling him that he’d ruin his career.
This whole article is sad and disgusting, especially because, as a result of this research, Prof Fryer was proposing some actual interventions to reduce biased applications of non-lethal use-of-force, but because the data didn't fit the prevailing narrative, it was attacked. Just gross.
> An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc.
We've seen that even these aren't that hard to fudge. Selection bias, p-hacking, mobbing researchers who publish politically unpopular results as a deterrent, etc.
What you need is basically the opposite of that. Replication of controversial results in preregistered studies by independent researchers trusted to be honest by both sides of the controversy. Refuting results you don't believe to be true using evidence rather than silencing the original authors. A culture of good science.
I'd argue that we're at bad now, and specifically worse than even 20 years ago, itself worse than 20 years before that.
The pillaging of journalism funding, by Google and Facebook for ad revenue, substituted with "I dunno, the Internet will figure something out" isn't one of our better moments as a culture.
Everybody is always quick to blame the internet for everything, but I think we can actually pin this one on housing scarcity.
Journalism was funded by advertising because ad space was rare and journalistic outlets got a big chunk of it. Then the internet made ad space common -- it's on every web page full of lolcats -- and it was this reality rather than anything specific done by Facebook or Google that took the ad money.
But the internet also made it so you don't need a printing press to publish. That should have brought the cost down to what would still be sustainable after the drop in ad revenue. Until you have to make rent, because housing costs are out of control.
This is the same thing destroying our communities. You and some neighbors want to get a community lodge for local events? Forget about it, the cost is prohibitive. Stay home and don't even know your neighbors' names. And then where do you learn who to trust? The Internet?
I lay it at Google and Facebook's feet by the property of 'To whom the wealth is redistributed, also inherits the responsibility.'
They've raked in a huge percentage of the ad spend that moved digital (from print).
And they've done what with it?
They fundamentally don't want to be in the business of journalism, because it's a terrible business. So they don't create content, which now means no one does.
(And that's not even getting started on the recommendation algorithm choices they've made that have incentivized low quality content. See: YouTube)
Most of the revenue from AdSense etc. goes to the site, i.e. if there are Google ads on a newspaper's website, the newspaper is getting more of the advertiser's money than Google. The problem is this is less money than they used to get, and a lot of the sites aren't journalistic outlets, so the money gets spread pretty thin.
In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?
Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.
Do you have a breakdown in terms of ad host vs ad platform?
We know ad host revenue generated from e.g. Google Ads.
We know CPC to advertisers.
We know Google's top line ad revenue.
But I haven't seen the margin Google et al. take out of the transaction. (CPC - host revenue) / CPC
> In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?
I'd prefer that? It isn't that different than the historical funding model (plus loose regulation of what a newsroom meant).
> Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.
I think that's apples and oranges.
The "we have a news budget that can afford to pay a stringer or correspondent to do first-party reporting and/or investigative journalism" type organization is disappearing.
Citizen journalism is important too, but I don't think it's a replacement for the above.
As I heard quipped, "Nobody goes to every local council meeting and takes written notes, so they can catch the 1-2 agenda items a year that should be big local stories."
And absent that (or similar on an international stage), we lose transparency.
We've seen how citizen coding in open source has blind spots where security/cryptography is concerned, and I'd argue we run similar risks relying solely on citizen journalists.
> Like other recent live-action remakes—such as The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White—some users accused the studio of "going woke" by modernizing the original story.
> They'll make the hunter an evil White man, Bambi's mom will be a message about incel rage and Bambi will also be black," wrote @NintendoFan729.
I do not find the argument that “newspapers be newspapers” excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very forcefully at that.
And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in some form due to humans’s generous nature? Is it due to more people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization)? Is it, as the conspiracy theorists say, a small group of influential people? Is it the Russians who sponsor those groupes to divide us?
How many Fox-like outlets are there compared to the number of MSNBC-like?
I don’t think these things are equal even on the surface. I don’t know how people aren’t asking themselves all the time “Am I even sure I believe in the things I think I do?”
A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make.
Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all the time.
With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to support any viewpoint on any topic.
Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's some horrific crimes.
That's modern opinionated news in a nutshell -- here's a pile of extreme occurrences, look at how extreme they are, so you should agree that the other side is crazy.
An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc.
I've found arguing from questions rather than statements helps. What's the root question? And then what data would answer that question?