For those of us who don’t know yet, criticizing the accuracy of mainstream Western news outlets is NOT a strong bayesian update against someone’s epistemics, especially on a site like Lesswrong (doesn’t matter how many idiots you might remember ranting about “mainstream media” on other sites, the numbers are completely different here).
There is a well-known dynamic called Gell-Mann Amnesia, where people strongly lose trust in mainstream Western news outlets on a topic they are an expert on, but routinely forget about this loss of trust when they read coverage on a topic that they can’t evaluate accuracy on. Western news outlets Goodhart readers by depicting themselves as reliable instead of prioritizing reliability.
If you read major Western news outlets, or are new to major news outlets due to people linking to them on Lesswrong recently, some basic epistemic prep can be found in Scott Alexander’s The Media Very Rarely Lies and if it’s important, the followupposts.
We shall see. I’m just ignoring the mainstream media spins at this point.
For those of us who don’t know yet, criticizing the accuracy of mainstream Western news outlets is NOT a strong bayesian update against someone’s epistemics, especially on a site like Lesswrong (doesn’t matter how many idiots you might remember ranting about “mainstream media” on other sites, the numbers are completely different here).
There is a well-known dynamic called Gell-Mann Amnesia, where people strongly lose trust in mainstream Western news outlets on a topic they are an expert on, but routinely forget about this loss of trust when they read coverage on a topic that they can’t evaluate accuracy on. Western news outlets Goodhart readers by depicting themselves as reliable instead of prioritizing reliability.
If you read major Western news outlets, or are new to major news outlets due to people linking to them on Lesswrong recently, some basic epistemic prep can be found in Scott Alexander’s The Media Very Rarely Lies and if it’s important, the follow up posts.