
Littlewood's Law and the Global Media - evilsimon
https://www.gwern.net/Notes#littlewoods-law-and-the-global-media
======
gallerdude
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
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
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."

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

