To be fair, there are exceptions, and some reporters or publications consistently do better at oarticular kinds of reporting. It just takea a lot of work to reliably figure out which are which.
The first few that came to mind have, it turns out, already retired since I last talked to them.
The next few are basically all bloggers with a tighter focus that I learned about either here on LW or through recommendations that ultimately chain back to SSC/ASX.
There are a lot of good sources of data in the world, and very few good sources of analysis, and those that exist have very little relationship to popularity or price or prestige.
Beyond that, it really is “buyer beware,” and learning to know your own limited and improve your own speed at sorting the nonsense and spotting the bad assumptions and wrong inferences. That’s why I’m not being more specific—without knowing your own habits of thought, it’s hard to guess whose habitual mistakes and quirks will be transparent to you, and which will mislead you or just not paint the intended picture for you.
Probably my advice is, if something you read seems worth understanding, try to spot and discount (what Zvi calls) the Obvious Nonsense. Back in 2008 my aunt sent me a NYT article that (seemingly) claimed having granite countertops was like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Obvious nonsense. It was basically pretending the cancer risk from cigarettes was radiological and not chemical, but unless you knew enough about biology and physics it was easy to miss. I was primed for that, because I was a physics undergrad and because I’d recently been reading about how coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants even if you ignore all other chemical pollution. Eventually this kind of thinking became habitual for me, and it became easier to learn useful things from inadequate sources.
It’s also been educational to go through a few healthcare situations where you need to find doctors that are Actually Good and not just cargo-cult-style going through the motions. There’s a vibe, a style, that just shines through regardless of specific topic, related to curiosity and excitement about something new and different.
To be fair, there are exceptions, and some reporters or publications consistently do better at oarticular kinds of reporting. It just takea a lot of work to reliably figure out which are which.
Can I piggy-back off your conclusions so far? Any news you find okay?
The first few that came to mind have, it turns out, already retired since I last talked to them.
The next few are basically all bloggers with a tighter focus that I learned about either here on LW or through recommendations that ultimately chain back to SSC/ASX.
There are a lot of good sources of data in the world, and very few good sources of analysis, and those that exist have very little relationship to popularity or price or prestige.
Beyond that, it really is “buyer beware,” and learning to know your own limited and improve your own speed at sorting the nonsense and spotting the bad assumptions and wrong inferences. That’s why I’m not being more specific—without knowing your own habits of thought, it’s hard to guess whose habitual mistakes and quirks will be transparent to you, and which will mislead you or just not paint the intended picture for you.
Probably my advice is, if something you read seems worth understanding, try to spot and discount (what Zvi calls) the Obvious Nonsense. Back in 2008 my aunt sent me a NYT article that (seemingly) claimed having granite countertops was like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Obvious nonsense. It was basically pretending the cancer risk from cigarettes was radiological and not chemical, but unless you knew enough about biology and physics it was easy to miss. I was primed for that, because I was a physics undergrad and because I’d recently been reading about how coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants even if you ignore all other chemical pollution. Eventually this kind of thinking became habitual for me, and it became easier to learn useful things from inadequate sources.
It’s also been educational to go through a few healthcare situations where you need to find doctors that are Actually Good and not just cargo-cult-style going through the motions. There’s a vibe, a style, that just shines through regardless of specific topic, related to curiosity and excitement about something new and different.