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
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.
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?)
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).
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
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:
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)
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?)