All of Mostlywrong's Comments + Replies

This is a good take targeted at the wrong example, I think. (Though, I understand why it was the impetus for your take.) I’d argue one wants expressly identity based opinions (like the velentine one) to be filled with all the assumptions that make that opinion actually (or potentially) interesting. If valentine tried to hem and haw and be inclusive he would have provided a less interesting observation. It is then all the other articles that purport not to be expressly identity based that are the problem when they encapsulate all the identity assumptions and implicitly present them as the norm/standard/goes-without-saying-ness that are the problem. 
 

Hi Trevor1 - It seems to me that you don't know what your point is in this post and your various responses. And you are casting various aspersions in this last post without backing those up either. Shrug emoji.

Most of this looks like motivated reasoning. You're trying to reinvent the wheel, and you're falling into the usual pitfalls that have trapped people smarter and better people than either of us.

Huh? You are just using words here without any meaning associated with them. I listed a bunch of article that are recession alarmist to counter your assertion... (read more)

This is a very bad take. It is plausibly true that the wsj does not have your (whoever you are) best interests at heart. But this post has done nothing to substantiate that view. The OP has cherry picked a single article that happens to have a time horizon the OP does not like and used that to imply (the OP implies in the post but more explicitly asserts in comments) that the wsj has a mendacious and overarching objective to "persuade millions of people that There Is No Recession". If the article referred to is proof positive of this (in a win for synecdoc... (read more)

1trevor
Most of this looks like motivated reasoning. You're trying to reinvent the wheel, and you're falling into the usual pitfalls that have trapped people smarter and better people than either of us. Anyone with policy experience intuitively and inevitably begins to understand various ways that news websites frequently mislead people. One of the less-well-known strategies is to put the dishonest article on the front page (which millions of people see) and then putting honest articles elsewhere that only a few thousand will see. That only scratches the surface of the complexity of how this sort of thing happens. It's definitely true that I forgot about expecting short inferential distances. which, in other words, means that I did a bad job writing this post. In a group with only economists, the image alone would suffice. individuals getting duped by large organizations is pretty commonplace in modern civilization; as far as I'm aware, it's always been that way, although history is outside of my area of expertise. Exploitation and deception scale pretty effectively, especially when it comes to extreme information asymmetry (aka the ignorant masses).