I largely agree with this article but I feel like it won't really change anyone's behavior. Journalists act the way they do because that's what they're rewarded for. And if your heuristic is that all journalists are untrustworthy, it makes it hard for trustworthy journalists to get any benefit from that.
A more effective way to change behavior might be to make a public list of journalists who are or aren't trustworthy, with specific information about why ("In [insert URL here], Journalist A asked me for a quote and I said X, but they implied inaccurately that I believe Y" "In [insert URL here], Journalist B thought that I believe P but after I explained that I actually believe Q, they accurately reflected that in the article", or just boring ones like "I said X and they accurately quoted me as saying X", etc.).
1
1Well I do talk to journalists I trust and not those I don't. And I don't give quotes to those who won't take responsibility for titles. But yes, more suggestions appreciated.
to make a public list of journalists who are or aren't trustworthy
This doesn't work, as you don't know if the list (or its creators) are trustworthy. This is a smaller version of something which is an unsolvable problem (because you need an absolute reference point but only have relative reference points) An authority can keep an eye on everything under its control, but it cannot keep an eye on itself. "Who watches the watchers?". This is why a ministry of truth is a bad idea and why misinformation is impossible to combat.
It's tempting to say that openness of information is a solution (that if everyone can voice their opinions, observers can come to a sound conclusion themselves), and while this does end better, you don't know if, for instance, a review site is deleting user reviews or not. (I just realized this is why people value transparency. But you don't know if a seemingly transparent entity is actually transparent or just pretending to be. You can use technology which is fair or secure by design, but authorities (like the government) always make sure that this technology can't exist.
The convenient thing about journalism is that the problems we're worried about here are public, so you don't need to trust the list creators as much as you would in other situations. This is why I suggest giving links to the articles, so anyone reading the list can verify for themselves that the article commits whichever sin it's accused of.
The trickier case would be protecting against the accusers lying (i.e. tell journalist A something bad and then claim that they made it up). If you have decent verification of accusers' identifies you might still get a good enough signal to noise ratio, especially if you include positive 'reviews'.
2You can still lie by omission, allowing evidence that shows person A's wrongdoings, while refuting evidence that shows either person A's examples of trustworthiness, or person B's wrongdoings.
If I do 10 things, 8 of which are virtuous and 2 of which are bad, and you only communicate the two to the world, then you will have deceived your listeners. Meanwhile, if another person does 8 things which are bad and 2 which are virtuous, you could share those two things. One-sidedness can be harmful and biased without ever lying (negative people tend to be in this group I think, especially if they're intelligent)
A lot of online review sites are biased, despite essentially being designed to represent regular people rather than some authority which might lie to you. They silently delete reviews, selectively accuse reviews of breaking rules (holding a subset of them to a much higher standard, or claiming that reviews are targeted harassment by some socially unappealing group), adding fake votes themselves, etc.
We can't solve all problems with journalism, but I hope we could at least solve the narrow problem of "I said X, journalist reported that I said Y". (Such thing happened to me, too.)
With other problems, at least I can take some lesson about how to talk to journalists more carefully the next time. Perhaps I should shut up and refuse to comment on things where I don't have a 100% certainty, because the journalist will make me sound 100% certain. Perhaps I shouldn't provide a list of 8 good things and 2 bad things, because the journalist will only report the bad things; I should instead only mention the one or two most relevant things. Etc.
But if I say X and the journalist writes Y, there is nothing I can do to protect against this kind of problem (other than not talking to journalists at all).
This doesn't work, as you don't know if the list (or its creators) are trustworthy.
Yes, so you could do this within an organization or a community where you generally trust the other members. To avoid even exaggeration or similar, the best way would be for the complainer to provide an exact quote of what they said, and an exact quote of what was reported.
Which would require recording the words you tell to the journalist, which is probably a good idea. (Check your local laws, whether you need to warn the journalist about this, or you can simply do it without them knowing.)
There is a worry about deepfakes, so even this would only work in a community where people trust each other.
If the journalist acts in good faith, I think you will be alright. If not, there's nothing you can do, whatsoever.
Coming up with reasons is almost too easy:
1: The journalist can write an article about you even if you've never talked to them
2: A journalist can start out trustworthy and then change for the worse (most untrustworthy authorities today grew powerful by being trustworthy. Now that they've created their public image of impartiality and fairness, they can burn it for years. Examples include Google and Wikipedia)
3: If you record me saying "I wouldn't say I'm very interested in cars", you just cut out the first part of the video, and now you have me saying "I'm very interested in cars". If I quote another person, "X said that Y people are bad", you could cut out the part of me saying "Y people are bad". The deeper and more complex a subject you can get me to talk about, the easier it would be to take me out of context. Making Jordan Peterson look bad is trivial for instance.
4: Even if you have evidence that your words were twisted, you'll lose if your evidence can't reach other people. So if your values don't align with the average journalist, or if your reputation is bad, you might find yourself relying on getting the word out by having a social media post go viral or something.
Personally, if I see a journalist or website treating anyone unfairly, I make a mental check that they're inherently untrustworthy. I'd contact such people only if they had a stake in releasing my story (so that our goals align). As you may imagine, my standards result in me not bothering with about 90% of society. I rarely attempt to solve problems like this, because I have solved them in the past and realized that the solution is actually unwanted (that many things are flawed on purpose, and not because they lack intelligent people to help them fix them)
Things would be better if society as a whole valued truthfulness, and if winning directly (rather than with underhanded tricks) was associated with higher social status. These are the upstream chances I'd like to see in the world
If the journalist acts in good faith, I think you will be alright. If not, there's nothing you can do, whatsoever.
That's wrong and ignores why journalists chose to write about people and the constraints under which journalists are operating.
For most people who are on LessWrong an who might be interviewed by journalists, they would be interviewed because they can be presented as an expert on a subject. If they aren't talking to the journalist, the journalist will usually try to find another expert to talk to them.
Right, a constraint is power. This constraint is actually the most important. In case of a power imbalance though, there's nothing the weaker party can really do but to rely on the good-will of the other party. It's their choice how things work out, to the extent that the game board favors them.
If the journalist isn't too powerful, and if they benefit from listening to you, and they're not entirely obsessed about pushing a narrative which goes against your interests or knowledge, then things are favorable and more likely to turn out well.
My argument is that we can consider these things (power difference, alignment of views, the good/bad faith of the journalist in question, etc) as parameters, and that the outcome depends entirely on these parameters, and not on the things that we pretend to be important.
Is it for instance good advice to say "Word yourself carefully so that you cannot be misinterpreted?" For how much effort Jordan Peterson put into this, it didn't do much to help his reputation.
Reputation, power and interests matter, they are the real factors. Things like honesty, truthfulness, competence and morality are the things that we pretend matter, and it's even a rule that we must pretend they matter, as breaking the forth wall (as I'm doing here) is considered bad taste. But the pretend-game gets in the way of thinking clearly. And I think this "advice for journalists" post was submitted in the first place because somebody noticed that the game being played didn't align with what it was "supposed" to be. The reason they noticed is because journalists aren't putting much effort into their deception anymore, which is because the balance of power has been skewed so much
Your argument ignores the positions you are arguing with. Nobody here has a naive idea of what drives journalists.
Generally, some of the ideas here are still potentially useful, they just don't get you any guarantees.
When I say "There's nothing you can do about journalists screwing you over" I mean it like "There's nothing you can do about the police screwing you over". In 90% of cases, you probably won't be screwed over, but the distribution of power makes it easy for them to make things difficult for you if they hate you enough. Another example is "Unprotected WIFI isn't secure", you can use McDonalds internet for your online banking for years without being hacked, so in practice you're only a little insecure, but the statement "It's insecure" just means "Whether or not you're safe no longer depends on yourself, but on other peoples intentions".
From this perspective, I'm warning against something which may not even happen. But it's merely because a bad actor could exploit these attack vectors. I'm also speaking very generally, in a larger scope than just Lesswrong users talking to journalists. This probably adds to the feeling of our conversations being disconnected.
But I will have to disagree about nobody being naive. When two entities interact, and one of the entities is barely making an effort in pleasing the other party, it's because of a difference in power. A small company may go out of its way to help you if you call its customer support line, whereas even getting in touch with a website like Facebook (unless its through the police) is genuinely hard.
The content says "Journalists exist to help us understand the world. But if you are a journalist, you have to be good enough to deserve the name" Which seems to mean "If you're going to trade, you need to provide something of value yourself, like offering a service". I think this is true for journalists as individuals, but not for companies which employ journalists. If these people won't treat you with respect, it's because they don't have to, and arguing with them is entirely pointless, even if you're right. Nothing but power will guarantee a difference, and if a journalist treats you kindly it's probably because they have integrity (which is one of the forces capable of resisting Moloch).
Repeating myself a bit here, but hopefully made my position clearer in the process.
I mostly agree, just some nitpicking:
If you record me saying "I wouldn't say I'm very interested in cars", you just cut out the first part of the video, and now you have me saying "I'm very interested in cars".
This is exactly an example where if you also record the conversation, and then write a short post saying "I said this ..., he reported that ..., listen for yourself here ...", this should make me dramatically lose credibility among anyone who knows you. (Plus a small chance of your article getting viral. Or at least anytime anyone mentions my name in the future, someone else can link your article in reply.)
Also, if e.g. everyone in the rationalist community started doing this, we could collectively keep one wiki page containing all of this. (A page with more examples is a more useful resource.) And every rationalist who doesn't have previous experience with journalists could easily look up a name there.
But things like that happen all the time, and most things that people know about most topics are superficial, meaning that they've only heard the accusations, and that they're only going to encounter the correction if they care to have a conversation about the topic. If the topic is politically biased, and these people spend time in politically biased communities, then it's unlikely that anyone is going to show them the evidence that they're wrong. You're not incorrect, but think about the ratio of rationalists to non-rationalists. The reach of the media vs the amount of people who will bother to correct people who don't know the full story.
It would also be easy for the website in question to say "You're been accused of doing X, which is bad. We don't tolerate bad behaviour on your platform" and ban you before you get to defend yourself. If the misunderstanding is bad enough, online websites can simply decide that even talking about you, or "defending you" is a sign of bad behaviour (I think this sort of happened to Kanye West because we had a manic episode in which he communicated things which are hard to understand and easy to misunderstand)
we could collectively keep one wiki page containing all of this
There's a Wikipedia page on "Gamergate", written largely by people who don't know what happened. And there's a "Gamergate Wiki" with tons of information (44 pages) with every detail documented in chronological order. I want to ask you two questions about this Wiki with the "other side of the story":
1: Have you ever heard of it?
2: Can you even find it? (the only link I have myself is an archived page)
By coincidence, 1 yes, but 2 no. And yes, that is a good example of how one side of the debate was nuked from the entire internet, which many people would believe impossible.
(Could you please send me the link in a private message?)
Solutions do not have to be perfect to be useful. Trust can be built up over time.
misinformation is impossible to combat
If you take the US government who at the same time tells Facebook not to delete the anti-vaccine misinformation that the US government is spreading while telling Facebook to delete certain anti-vaccine misinformation that the US government doesn't like, it's obvious that the institutions aren't trustworthy and thus they have a hard time fighting misinformation.
If the US government would stop lying, it would find it a lot easier to fight misinformation.
Outside of the government, nobody tries to fund an organization that values truth and that has a mission to fight misinformation with sufficient capital. All the organizations that have "fighting misinformation" on their banner are highly partisan and not centered around valuing truth.
The fact that nobody in the media asked Kamala Harris about whether Joe Biden was wrong to spread antivax misinformation as commander in chief, tell you a lot about how much the mainstream media cares about misinformation.
"Fighting misinformation" often means "Rejecting views which goes against ones own political narrative". Scientists care the most about truth, and they aren't afraid of challenging and questioning what is known. People heavily invested in politics don't actually care all the much about truth, they just pretend to do so because it sounds noble. The "truthseeking" kind of person is a bit of a weirdo, not a lot of them exists.
It's sad that the problem has gotten bad enough that even people on here have recognized it, but It's nice not seeing comments which essentially say "Official sources are untrustworthy? That's a bold claim. Give me evidence, from a source that I consider official and trustworthy, of course."
But I really want to point out that it's mathematically impossible to combat falsehood, and that it doesn't matter if you call it "misinformation" or "disinformation". The very approach fundamentally misunderstands how knowledge works.
1: Science is about refining our understanding, which means challenging it rather than attacking anyone who disagrees. It must be "open to modification" rather than "closed".
2: It's impossible to know if there's any unknown unknowns that one is missing. Absolute certaincy does not seem to exist in knowledge.
3: Many things depend on definitions, which are arbitrary. "Is X a mental illness?" is decided not by X, but by a persons relationship to X.
4: Any conversation which has some intellectual weight is going to be difficult, and unless you can understand what the other person is saying, you cannot know if they're wrong.
5: Language seems to have a lot of relativity and unspoken assumptions. If you say "Death is bad" you may mean "For a human, the idea of death is uncomfortable if it prevents them from something that they're capable of doing". Arguing against "Death is bad" is trivial, "If death didn't exist, neither would the modern man, for we evolved through darwinism".
6: People who know better always outnumber those who only have superficial understandings. Consensuses favor quantity over quality, but those who are ahead of the rest must necessarily be a minority who possess obscure knowledge which is difficult to communicate. I'd go as far as saying that getting average people involved in science was a mistake. 99% of people aren't knowledable enough to understand the vaccine, so their position on the matter depends on the political bias of the authority they trust, which makes everything they have to say about the topic worthless. Except of couse statements like "The government stated X, now they're staying Y, so they either lied in the past or they're lying now" which is just basic logic
There no reason why you would need absolute certainty to make progress in fighting misinformation.
When the US government wanted to Facebook not to delete the misinformation they spread to get people in the Philippines to oppose the Chinese vaccine, they did not argue to Facebook that their misinformation was truthful.
If it's not about truth value, then it's not about misinformation. It's more about manipulation and the harmfulness of certain information, no?
My point is about the imperfections//limitations of language. If I say "the vaccine is safe", how safe does it have to be for my statement to be true? Is an one-in-a-million risk a proof by contradiction, or is it evidence of safety? Where's the cut-off for 'safety'?
I do think fighting "bad-faith manipulation" is doable at times, but I don't think you can label anything as being true/false for certain.
Another point, which I should have mentioned earlier, is that removing false information can be harmful. Better to let it stay along with the counter-arguments which are posted, so that observers can read both sides and judge for themselves. Believing in something false is a human right. Imagine, for isntance, if believing (or not believing) in god was actually illegal
If you actually want to fight misinformation you need to to more than focusing on single claims. You actually need to speak about a domain of knowledge in a trustworthy way instead of just making claims for propaganda purposes.
A list of experiences of people with specific journalists doesn't give you certainty about the habits of the journalists but it's better than nothing. Additionally, it can pressure the journalists into behaving better because they don't want to be shamed.
I common criticism seems to be "this won't change anything" see (here and here). People often believe that journalists can't choose their headlines and so it is unfair to hold them accountable for them. I think this is wrong for about 3 reasons:
- We have a loud of journalists pretty near to us whose behaviour we absolutely can change. Zvi, Scott and Kelsey don't tend to print misleading headlines but they are quite a big deal and to act as if creating better incentives because we can't change everything seems to strawman my position
- Journalists can control their headlines. I have seen 1-2 times journalists change headlines after pushback. I don't think it was the editors who read the comments and changed the headlines of their own accord. I imagine that the journalists said they were taking too much pushback and asked for the change. This is probably therefore an existence proof that journalists can affect headlines. I think reality is even further in my direction. I imagine that journalists and their editors are involved in the same social transactions as exist between many employees and their bosses. If they ask to change a headline, often they can probably shift it a bit. Getting good sources might be enough to buy this from them.
- I am not saying that they must have good headlines, I am just holding the threat of their messages against them. I've only done this twice, but in one case a journalist was happy to give me this leverage. And having it, I felt more confident about the interview.
I think there is a failure mode where some rats hear a system described and imagine that reality matches it as they imagine it. In this case, I think that's mistaken - journalists have incentives to misdescribe their power of their own headlines. And reality is a bit messier than the simple model suggests. And we have more power than I think some commenters think.
I recommend trying this norm. It doesn't cost you much, it is a good red flag if someone gets angry when you suggest it and if they agree you get leverage to use if they betray you. Seems like a good trade that only gets better the more of us do it. Rarely is reality so kind (and hence I may be mistaken)
I didn't downvote, but I would've hard disagreed on the "privacy" part if only there were a button for that. It's of course a different story if they're misquoting you, or taking quotes deliberately out of context to mislead. But to quote something you actually said but on second thought would prefer to keep out of publication is... really kind of what journalists need to do to keep people minimally well-informed. Your counterexamples involve communications with family and friends, and it's not very clear to me why the same heuristic should be automatically applied to conversations with strangers. But in any case, not even with the former your communication is "truly" private, as outside of very narrow exceptions like marital privilege, their testimony (on the record, for potentially thousands of people to read too) may be generally compelled under threat of arrest.
I also agree with this to some extent. Journalists should be most concerned about their readers, not their sources. They should care about accurately quoting their sources because misquoting does a disservice to their readers, and they should care about privacy most of the time because having access to sources is important to providing the service to their readers.
I guess this post is from the perspective of being a source, so "journalists are out to get you" is probably the right attitude to take, but it's good actually for journalists to prioritize their readers over sources.
My understanding is that the OP is suggesting the journalists' attitude is unreasonable (maybe even unethical). You're saying that their attitude is justifiable because it benefits their readers. I don't quite agree that that reason is necessary, nor that it would be by itself sufficient. My view is that journalists are justified in quoting a source because anyone is generally justified in quoting what anyone else has actually said, including for reasons that may benefit no one but the quoter. There are certainly exceptions to this (if divulging the information puts someone in danger, for instance), but those really are exceptions, not the rule. The rule, as recognized both by common practice and by law, is that you simply have no general right to (or even expectation of) privacy about things you say to strangers, unless of course the parties involved agree otherwise.
I don't think this is actually the rule by common practice (and not all bad things should be illegal). For example, if one of your friends/associates says something that you think is stupid, going around telling everyone that they said something stupid would generally be seen as rude. It would also be seen as crazy if you overheard someone saying something negative about their job and then going out of your way to tell their boss.
In both cases there would be exceptions, like if if the person's boss is your friend or safety reasons like you mentioned, but I think by default sharing negative information about people is seen as bad, even if it's sometimes considered low-levels of bad (like with gossip).
There's definitely a fair expectation against gossiping and bad-mouthing. I don't think that's quite what the OP is talking about, though. I believe the relevant distinction is that (generally speaking) those behaviors don't do any good to anyone, including the person spreading the gossip. But consider how murkier the situation becomes if you're competing for a promotion with the person here:
if you overheard someone saying something negative about their job and then going out of your way to tell their boss.
Sure but I don't agree with their lack of concern for privacy and I think they are wrong to. I think they are making the wrong call here.
I also don't think privacy is a binary. Some things are almost private and some things are almost public. Do you think that a conversation we have in LessWrong dms is as public as if I tweeted it?
I also don't think privacy is a binary.
That's an interesting perspective. I could subscribe to the idea that journalists may be missing the optimal point there, but that feels a bit weaker than your initial assertion.
Do you think that a conversation we have in LessWrong dms is as public as if I tweeted it?
I mean, I would not quote a DM without asking first. But I understand that as a kind of charity, not an ethical obligation, and while I try my best to be charitable towards others, I do not expect (nor do I feel in any way entitled to) the same level of compassion.
I feel like if someone internalized "treat every conversation with people I don't know as if they may post it super publicly - and all of this is fair game", we would lose a lot of commons, and your quality of life and discourse your would go down. I don't think it's "charity" to [EDIT: not] increase the level of publicity of a conversation, whether digital or in person. I think drawing a parallel with in person conversation is especially enlightening - imagine we were having a conversation in a room with CCTV (you're aware it's recorded, but believe it to be private). Me taking that recording and playing it on local news is not just "uncharitable" - it's wrong in a way which degrades trust.
I don't think it's "charity" to increase the level of publicity of a conversation, whether digital or in person.
Neither do I: as I said, I actually think it's charity NOT to increase the level of publicity. And people are indeed charitable most of the time. I just think that, if you live your life expecting charity at every instance, you're in for a lot of disappointment, because even though most people are charitable most of the time, there's still going to be a lot of instances in which they won't be charitable. The OP seems to be taking charity for granted, and then complaining about a couple of instances in which it didn't happen. I think it's better to do the opposite: not to expect charity, and then be grateful when it does happen.
I think drawing a parallel with in person conversation is especially enlightening - imagine we were having a conversation in a room with CCTV (you're aware it's recorded, but believe it to be private). Me taking that recording and playing it on local news is not just "uncharitable" - it's wrong in a way which degrades trust.
I don't think it's inherently wrong. It may still be (and in most cases will be) circumstantially wrong, in the sense that it does much more damage to others (including, as you mention, by collaborating to degrade public trust) than it does good to anyone (yourself included).
Apologies, typo in the original, I do think it's not charity to not increase publicity, the post was missing a "not". Your response still clarified your position, but I do disagree - common courtesy is not the same as charity, and expecting it is not unreasonable. I feel like not publishing our private conversation (whether you're a journalist or not) falls under common courtesy or normal behaviour rather than "charity". Standing more than a 1 centimeter away from you when talking is not charity just because it's technically legal - it's a normal and polite thing to do, so when someone comes super close to my face when talking I have the right to be surprised and protest. Escalating publicity is like escalating intimacy in this example.
I feel like not publishing our private conversation (whether you're a journalist or not) falls under common courtesy or normal behaviour rather than "charity".
I feel like this falls into the fallacy of overgeneralization. "Normal" according to whom? Not journalists, apparently.
common courtesy is not the same as charity, and expecting it is not unreasonable.
It's (almost by definition) not unreasonable to expect common courtesy, it's just that people's definitions of what common courtesy even is vary widely. Journalists evidently don't think they're denying you common courtesy when they behave the way most journalists behave.
Standing more than a 1 centimeter away from you when talking is not charity just because it's technically legal - it's a normal and polite thing to do, so when someone comes super close to my face when talking I have the right to be surprised and protest. Escalating publicity is like escalating intimacy in this example.
This is an interesting pushback, but I feel the same reply works here: failing to respect someone's personal space is not inherently wrong, but it will be circumstantially wrong most of the time because it tends to do much more harm (i.e. annoy people) than good.
This article fails to account for the fact that abiding by the rules suggested would mostly kill the ability of journalists to share the most valuable information they share with the public.
You don't get to reveal stuff from the world most powerful organizations if you double check the quotes with them.
I think journalism is one of the professions where the consequentialist vs deontological ethics have the toughest trade-offs. It's just really hard to abide by very high privacy standards and broke highly important news.
As one illustrative example, your standard would have prevented Kelsey Piper from sharing her conversation with SBF. Is that a desirable outcome? Not sure.
You don't get to reveal stuff from the world most powerful organizations if you double check the quotes with them.
I don't think the most important stuff that journalist reveal comes from the people who misspeak in interviews. It rather comes from the journalist having strong relationships with sources that are willing to tell the journalist about real problems.
Investigative journalism is often about finding someone within an organization that's actually cares about exposing problems, and it's quite important to be portray the position of the person who's exposing the problems as accurately as possible to affect real change. If the journalists makes mistakes in portraying the positions it's a lot easier for a company to talk the problem away then when the problem is accurately described.
I have done this twice. One journalist was happy to accept responsibility and I gave them a quote, another wasn't and I didn't.
This makes it sound like it's the decision of the journalist you are talking to whether or not they are responsible for their headlines. Some outlets have an editorial policy where the journalist has a say in the headline and other don't. Historically, the person setting the page was supposed to choose the headline as they know how much space there's for the headline on the page.
Wouldn't it be better to use a standard that's actually in control of the journalist you are speaking to when deciding whether to speak with them?
This bit that precedes that suggests that he holds them responsible for their choice of outlet to work for:
jobs in journalism are hard to come by, but many of you are clever, hard working, insightful individuals. You have other options. … No one forced you to do this. If you choose to, it's on you.
And I agree with this. The headline is part of the article, much like an abstract is part of the paper.
There are many differences between outlets. I don't think that control over the headline should be the primary concern of a journalist who cares about informing their readers. It's just one factor of many.
I exert influence where I can. I think if all of LessWrong took up this norm we could shift the headline-content accuracy gap.
I don't think that's the case, because the journalist you are speaking to is not the person who's makes the decision.
At the moment you have some person who's trained to write headlines so that the headlines get a maximum of clicks and who writes headlines for a lot of articles.
If the management of the New York Times has to decide whether they are willing to get 20% less clicks on social media when they let a journalists instead of their current headline writers write the headlines, just so that people on LessWrong are more willing to give the New York Times interviews, I don't think that will change their management decisions.
Shaming the New York Times for misinformation might work better. You could write a bot for X and Threads, that uses an LLM for every New York Times article to judge whether the headline is misleading and then write a tweet for each misleading New York Times headline. Such a project could hurt the reputation of the New York Times among their audience, which is something they actually care about.
1
1I don't think that's the case, because the journalist you are speaking to is not the person who's makes the decision.
I think this is incorrect. I imagine journalists have more latitude to influence headlines when they arelly care.
1It's a bit dated but https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/40251/196 gives you some overview over the state of affairs from 2017.
What makes you think that journalists have more latitude to influence headlines in a way where they could take responsibility for the headline if they work at an outlet where journalists generally don't write headlines but headlines are written by people who are better trained at writing headlines that get clicked a lot?
If your goal is to influence journalists to write better headlines, then it matters whether the journalist has the ability to take responsibility over headlines.
If your goal is to stop journalists from misrepresenting you, then it doesn't actually matter whether the journalist has the ability to take responsibility, all that matters is whether they do take responsibility.
If the journalist accurately represents my position in the text of the article I would already see that as a win in most of the media interviews (I have given a bunch but it was a decade ago).
Hmmm, what is the picture that the analogy gives you. I struggle to imagine how it's misleading but I want to hear.
Ah, sorry for being so cursory.
A common trope about mathematicians vs. other math users is that mathematicians are paranoid persnickety truth-seekers, they want everything to be exactly correct down to every detail. Thus engineers and physicists often perceive mathematicians as a sort of fact-checker caste.
As you say, in some sense mathematicians deal with made-up stuff and engineers with real stuff. But from the engineer's point of view, they deal with mathematicians when writing math, not when screwing bolts, and so perceive mathematicians as "the annoying people who want everything to be perfectly correct".
Example: I write "E[E[X|Y]] = E[X]" in a paper, and the mathematician pops up complaining "What's the measure space? Is it sigma-finite? You have to declare if your random variables are square-integrable. Are X and Y measureable in the same space?" and my reply would be "come on we know it's true I don't care about writing it properly".
So to me and many people in STEM your analogy has the opposite vibe, which defeats the purpose of an analogy.
1
1Hmmmm. I wonder how common this is. This is not how I think of the difference. I think of mathematicians as dealing with coherent systems of logic and engineers dealing with building in the real world. Mathematicians are useful when their system maps to the problem at hand, but not when it doesn't.
I should say i have a maths degree so it's possible that my view of mathematicians and the general view are not conincident.
My n=1 datapoint is that this was so traumatic for me during my math Ph.D. that I almost quit with a dissertation draft in hand. I've heard my advisor was more pedantic than normal though.
Why do you think it's stretched. It's about the difference between mathematicians and engineers. One group are about relating the real world the other are about logically consistent ideas that may be useful.
One of the reasons I was drawn to this site several months ago was that the analyses that people would post followed basically all your wishes. It's a nice breath of fresh air from basically any other corner of the internet I've seen.
That being said, I don't know if the average reader of, say, the NY Times has the same preferences as you. I've shared some of my favorite LW and SSC articles around; the people who are the least neurologically similar to me seem to not like them very much.
Don't get me wrong --- I'm the first to say journalists are the absolute scum of the earth but I'd a conversation on how we can make this problem better. People follow their incentives. Currently, those incentives are bad in exactly the kind of ways you say.
Some suggestions have already been mentioned in the comments. Name and shame certainly seems worth thinking about - but don't forget the carrot; how do we reward upstanding honest journalists?
I don’t have the answer but it seems to me that it would plausibly be good if we had some longer-term feedback mechanisms with more persistent memory. E.g. although I know that most outlets can be untrustworthy in the ways you mention I would struggle to be able name enough cases in detail to convince a skeptical interlocutor. Perhaps the first basic step would be to create a database that systematically tracked this kind of dishonesty in journalism ?
New cause area !
EDIT: just noticted the first reply already mentions a good /naughty list for journalists. This seems pretty good.
People mention the problem of 'objectively judging' somebody's trustworthiness. I worry about that too - it seems that this is a reason factchecking websites don't really work.
Perhaps one could let people do some version of a political compass survey where the questions looks at specific highly contentious cases and ask people to judge those and based on their responses build a model of which journalism and journalists they will consider untrustworthy upon reflection
I interact with journalists quite a lot and I have specific preferences. Not just for articles, but for behaviour. And journalists do behave pretty strangely at times.
This account comes from talking to journalists on ~10 occasions. Including being quoted in ~5 articles.
Privacy
I do not trust journalists to abide by norms of privacy. If I talk to a friend and without asking, share what they said, with their name attached, I expect they'd be upset. But journalists regularly act as if their profession sets up the opposite norm - that everything is publishable, unless explicitly agreed otherwise. This is bizarre to me. It's like they have taken a public oath to be untrustworthy.
Perhaps they would argue that it’s a few bad journalists who behave like this, but how am I supposed to know which the good and bad journalists are? The general advice in many tech, EA, rationalist spaces seems to be “be very careful when talking to journalists”. So it doesn't seem like it’s a rare bad apple.
And even the ‘good’ journalists think that there are somewhat arcane rules about what can and can’t be shared from public conversations, to the extent that I have to weave the following magic spell even when talking to the ‘good’ ones.
“Hi can we agree this is all off the record and then I can agree specific quotes to be on the record? I almost always give quotes, but I want the ability to veto anything that goes next to my name”
And sometimes journalists I respect say no. Their standard negotiating position is that they get to take what they want from a private conversation and publish it how they want. Imagine what the bad ones do.
This is not the typical norm around privacy and I don’t agree to the inversion of it. I ask family and close friends whether I can tweet things they say even if I am pretty sure. But with journalists, even the ‘good’ ones, I have to specifically ask that they don’t take my words and tell them to 100,000s of people, far more people than most people have ever communicated with at once[1].
And worse, if challenged on this, I'm not confident they'll acknowledge it. It's not just the norm breaking, it's the gaslighting. Oh us? No, we're bastions of democracy. We’re the good guys. I have two fairly vague recollections of journalists mangling my quotes badly and several more where articles had misleading titles. If this was a friend I would be deeply upset, but in those cases there were low effort apologies, as if this happened all the time. It is crazy to watch.
Preserving meaning
I do not trust journalists to accurately convey what I said or what I meant. If I tell a journalist X, I have to go to great lengths to ensure that if my name is published it is attached to X and not some related statement. And it is even harder to ensure that the title of the article matches the content.
There are entire organisations staffed with people who regularly mislead, many of whom think they are noble freedom fighters. I don't understand how this façade is maintained. I understand why we respect The Economist, and surely the people who work at Fox News must know they are charlatans, but does The Guardian really deserve the high standing that its journalists get, given the misleading pieces it sometimes publishes. The Telegraph and Times are at least as bad.
I think my message to journalists is, “if you can't commit to uphold some reasonable standard of ethics, then do a different job”. I know that jobs in journalism are hard to come by, but many of you are clever, hard working, insightful individuals. You have other options. So either be the journalists you think you are or stop publishing misleading quotes under clickbait titles. No one forced you to do this. If you choose to, it's on you.
If I am to give reporters quotes, I require them to take responsibility for their headlines.
I have done this twice. One journalist was happy to accept responsibility and I gave them a quote, another wasn't and I didn't.
And again, if there are journalists who behave badly, I can’t tell the difference. I don’t know which papers are good or bad, who is trustworthy, who everyone hates. If you don’t teach me this information, the median journalist is untrustworthy to me and I will not trust any of you.
Reporters vs pundits
At this point, I'd like to make a distinction between what I think of as reporters and pundits.
Reporters discuss the world as it is, or will be. They write news articles and, in my preferred world, they would write forecasting articles as well. They are commentators at a football match, the engineers of the journalism world, reporting how things are, or realistically might be.
I also see another group I call pundits, who are spotting patterns and writing about them. Are men getting weaker? Does Trump speak to a deeper truth? What's going on with Iran? They give concepts that one might use to interpret the world, but accuracy isn't really the point. It's about ideas. I take these people seriously, but not literally. They are there to add patterns and colour, sometimes to speak truth that reporters might miss. They are like pundits at a sports match, with colourful stories, but dubious analysis. Rather than engineers, pundits are more like mathematicians. They write about a world only tangentially[2] related to the real world but they provide tools that might be useful later.
A friend who used to work in a hedge fund sometimes talks about Eric Weinstein. Weinstein was a talking head in the late 2010s and often seems like a crackpot to me. But for a time, he ran Peter Theil's hedge fund. How could a crackpot do that? Well, my friend says that some hedge funds have two types of guys - careful methodical guys and wild idea guys.
At a hedge fund people are looking for a way to predictably make money. Often they want a way that the world is connected that no one else has noticed. And in those days, you supposedly had both wild idea guys and careful guys. The wild idea guys thought all sorts of things, trying to spot patterns in correlated data. Take the (real) correlation between the age of Miss America and murders by hot air. This is a silly example but you might suggest that an older beauty pageant queen means you should sell your shares in ironing products. A wild idea guy might come up with something like this, then you got your careful folks to check if there is such a connection. 99 times out of 100 there wasn’t.
But 1 in 100 times, there was. And this is where the hedge fund makes its money, enough to cover the cost of looking up all those bogus ones. The above example is one I could find a graph for, I’m not suggesting that a hedge fund would actually have looked this particular correlation, but I imagine they did look up some pretty bizarre ones. Eg Pizza sales from branches near the Pentagon really might suggest that the US is about to go to war.
Anyway, Eric Weinstein was, supposedly, a great ideas guy. He would come up with all these wacky correlations that his careful folks would check over. Enough of the ideas were good that the hedge fund made a lot of money. And I don’t know if this story is true. Like the thing it describes, the story is a pattern, not an accurate representation of the world. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Weinstein is a crackpot and he was just a lucky crackpot.
But the rule of thumb stands. There might be ideas people and accuracy people. And this is what I want from pundits and reporters (Weinstein would be a pundit).
I would prefer a pundit who is blindingly insightful 1 time in 10 and a crackpot the other 9, to someone who has a pretty similar worldview to me - I already know what I think.
But when looking for reporters, I want someone who cares about the overall accuracy of what they write - that I take away the correct overall interpretation. Ideally I’d like them to check the pundits too. Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan are great pundits, but I want some more careful economists to redo their major works and tell me whether the consensus agrees about prediction markets or the state of education.
And it might surprise you, but I wish we had more, solid, trustworthy reporters. Everyone wants to be a pundit with the bombastic ideas that explain it all. But I would enjoy many careful, well-calibrated takes on AI, US politics, Taiwan, etc. Being accurate in underrated.
Accuracy
In my experience reporters (by the above definition) are not as accurate as I would like. They prioritise precision and justification of their writing, potentially compromising the accuracy of their reporting.
Remember the difference between accuracy and precision from your school science classes imagining someone doing archery. Accuracy is about getting near the centre of the target. Precision is about being closely clustered. It’s therefore possible to spend a lot more time focusing that your shots are close together than that they are actually on target.
Here is the classic graph courtesy of Momemtrix.
In the example here, I’d say accuracy is whether the reader comes away with a view of the situation that matches reality. And precision is whether the reporter sticks close to facts they can justify or to a single coherent narrative.
Many reporters seem to believe their job is to ensure every sentence they write is precisely true, rather than aiming for an accurate piece overall. They want their arrows to get close to what they intended for them, somehow missing that this can leave the overall picture very mistaken. How can this happen? Well if you only let yourself write true sentences, then there are a lot of sentences you can't write - those containing "maybe" and "perhaps". And a story that contains no “maybe” sentences might miss the point entirely.
To give an example, look at the reporting around SpaceX killing bird habitats. I included a link to a google search. Find an article at random. Such an article will likely discuss the process of some environmental agency. It will talk about rockets and perhaps have quotes from Elon Musk. It will discuss bird habitat destruction, or similar. But it won't discuss that more birds have probably been killed by the cats of the journalists than by SpaceX rockets. Reporters don't like this kind of ‘probably’ and don't see the comparison as relevant.
https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1810032112273350978
To me they have missed the wood for the trees. Their job, in my eyes, is to inform me about the world. And the most basic kind of information is “should I be reading this at all?”.
Now some reporters might argue that they aren’t doing. We aren’t saying it’s important, we’re just reporting what’s happening! Well I don’t buy it. I reckon most people read the titles of articles and little of the content. And even more read the content for a general view, rather than thinking carefully about what isn’t said. To publish an article is to say that we should care, and that we should update our beliefs towards the headline - an article about SpaceX killing birds implies that SpaceX is killing lots of birds or very valuable birds. To pretend otherwise is wrongheaded.
Worse, sometimes a reporter will report another reporter, further passing the buck. They will uncritically report or retweet another hack’s phrases, simplifications and accusations to 100,000s of people, with little consideration. When pushed here, they won’t say “it’s a thing someone said” they’ll say “It was said by John Barker, of the Enfield Times. Would such a learned fellow lie?”. Well I don’t know about lying, but John Barker, whoever he is, will probably do exactly the same as this journalist, laundering sayings into happenings without stopping to consider whether he would say those same things in his own voice.
If I put a gun to your head, do you think SpaceX are a significant percentage of rare bird deaths? If not, don’t write about it! Take some responsibility.
I want articles which have sentences like “Trump is 50% likely to win the election”, “China is 15% likely to attempt to invade Taiwan before 2030”. I want journalists to care about their calibration at least a moderate amount, seeking for their 70% claims to be accurate 70% of the time. I want them to have accurate views of the world, write accurate articles and give me an accurate view of specific topics.
Somehow reporters have focused on "is each specific sentence true?" rather than "is this article accurate?". And "can I defend why I said this thing?” rather than "will my reader believe more accurate things about the world after they are finished reading?". At scale, this seems pretty disastrous to me.
If you are a reporter reading this, I suggest you ask two questions:
In other words:
My personal stance
I lose respect for journalists who consistently spread inaccuracies, whether they wrote them or are quoting others. I do not accept mealy-mouthed words about how it's technically what happened or that the quotes person is respected. If you publish something, I consider it a bet by you on it being true. If it is false, I deduct points from your social score. Ideally you would lose money.
I encourage journalists to use prediction markets and forecasting tools can help improve the overall quality of reporting. These methods allow reporters to better calibrate their understanding of world events and increase the accuracy of their predictions. I can hardly underrate the value of having an accurate model of the world to report relevant goings-on within it.
Journalists exist to help us understand the world. But if you are a journalist, you have to be good enough to deserve the name. And if your colleagues aren’t, help me to know who is good and who is not. If you are a pundit, explain deep truths and teach me ideas that might be relevant in the next 5 years. If you are a reporter, give me an accurate view of the world as it is and will be.
Currently I deal with journalists like a cross between hostile witnesses and demonic lawyers. I read articles expecting to be misled or for facts to be withheld. And I talk to lawyers only after invoking complex magics (the phrases I’ve mentioned) to stop them taking my information and spreading it without my permission. I would like to pretend I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m really not. I trust little news at first blush and approach conversations with even journalists I like with more care than most activities.
I will reiterate. I take more care talking to journalists than almost any other profession and have been stressed out or hurt by them more often than almost any group. Despite this many people think I am unreasonably careless or naïve. It is hard to stress how bad the reputation of journalists is amongst tech/ rationalist people.
Is this the reputation you want?
Thanks to Josh Hart for helping me edit this.
It is little wonder that ‘media training’ is commonplace.
Don't think I don't respect mathematicians, it's just that their work can be correct without being relevant to the world we live in. In fact that's kind of the whole bit. Also I think my use of tangentially is really nice here, since, like a tangent often the specific mathematical rule we choose to represent a physically situation is locally accurate and globally inaccurate, like the tangent as an approximation to a curve.