JoshuaZ comments on Reliably wrong - Less Wrong

2 Post author: NancyLebovitz 09 December 2010 02:46PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (19)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 10 December 2010 08:28:01PM 0 points [-]

But the claim that the boss' interest are actively anti-correlated with readers is an incredibly strong claim itself. In the vast majority of contexts this won't be true. Who benefits if new technologies are discovered? Who suffers if there's a nuclear war or if we reach peak oil faster than generally anticipated?

It is conceivable that within the narrow confines of what the WSJ editorials generally discuss there's an anti-correlation. But even that set of narrow topics is pretty wide. To the point where this seems unlikely. It seems more likely to me that there might be specific ideologies which in their narrow realm are anti-correlated with truths about controversial questions. But to construct explicit unambiguous examples of that even in economics I need to do something like select merchantilism as the relevant economic theory.

Comment author: ciphergoth 11 December 2010 03:39:08PM 1 point [-]

I agree it's a strong claim, but I can see a mechanism that makes it a little more plausible. Where the owners of WSJ have the same interests as their readers, the WSJ need not write about it because the readers will do what is in their mutual interests. It is only when their interests are opposed that the WSJ has to work to persuade them to work against their own interests and for Murdoch's interests.