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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Article about LW: Faith, Hope, and Singularity: Entering the Matrix with New York’s Futurist Set - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (231)
D'you think? You'll understand better after being reported-on yourself; and then you'll look back and laugh about how very, very naive that comment was. It's the average person's incomprehension of reporter-distorting that gives reporters their power. If you read something and ask, "Hm, I wonder what the truth was that generated this piece?" without having personal, direct experience of how very bad it is, they win.
I think the winning move is to read blogs by smart people, who usually don't lie, rather than anything in newspapers.
Actually, I feel that I have sufficient experience of being reported on (including in an unpleasant way), and it is precisely that which (along with my independent knowledge of many of the people getting reported on here) gave me the confidence to suspect that I would have managed to separate from the distortions an amount of information that described reality.
That said, there is a bit of fail with regard to whether I managed to communicate what precisely impacted me. Much of it is subtle, necessarily, since it had to be picked up through the distortion field, and I do allow for the possibility that I misread, but I continue to think that I'm much better at correcting for the distortion field than most people.
One thing I didn't realize, however, is that you folks apparently didn't think the gal might be a reporter. That's of course a fail in itself, but certainly a lesser fail than behaving similarly in the presence of a person one does manage to suspect to be a reporter.
Just for fun, here's my villification at the hands of the tabloid press. Naturally the majority of it is rubbish. It's striking how they write as if they hadn't spoken to us, when we actually spoke to them at length. For one thing they could have asked us if we were students - we weren't...
That is just blatant. It's like a parody of bad journalism.
Today I went to show this to a friend. I remembered reading a more detailed version of the story somewhere and after some searching I found the copy hosted by the good folks at archive.org, which I'm posting here for reference: "How To Be Notorious or Attack of the Tripehounds"
Oh that's great! Thank you arundelo, thank you Wayback Machine!
What sample size are you generalizing from?
My personal experience is that I have been reported on in a personal capacity zero times. I've had family members in small human-interest stories twice that I recall off hand. I've read stories about companies I worked for and had detailed knowledge of the material being reported on several times; I don't have an exact number.
My experience with those things does not line up with yours. I conclude from this that the normal variance of reporting quality is higher than either of us has personal experience with.
Data point: I was reported-on three times, by a serious newspaper. Most information was wrong or completely made up. Luckily, once they forgot to write my name, and once they wrote it wrong, so it was easier for me to pretend that those two articles were not about me.