Comment by bretthopper

“Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.” - Michael Crichton

I'm a middle-aged, white, cis male heterosexual married father that has started and run companies, hired and managed engineers, make ok money, lean a bit right of center politically, worked for the government, large banks, healthcare and retail and lives in a rural location in the midwest.

What you've described is something I experience in almost every facet of my life. I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast majority of time that I don't even bother to argue because there's nothing to even work with as a ground truth.

The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity. Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that platform.

We can translate that to pretty much anything that we hear/read/watch second-hand from any source (including the news media). I grew up in a South Asian country and came to the US in early 2000 for college. Before then, I listened to BBC, RFA and VOA religiously and thought what they report there about my country is the truth (we were ruled by the military regime back then and most of the population assume everything the government said is a lie. An example in which people were already desensitized to disregard the government--the military government broadcast a public health service announcements after 8pm news everyday and those includes things like not using too much oil in the food for fear of heart disease. The general public would assume the government cannot import sufficient amount of edible oil from abroad--because of economic sanctions--so they are discouraging everyone to use less oil in cooking!).

But when I came to the US and started to learn who is feeding these news to the VOA, RFA, etc. and how these people and organizations (including the UN orgs) got funding, I realize not everything that I read is true. This became very apparent when I read news about my country (reported by NYT and other reputable media outlets) that are too simplistic and one-sided. Then I stopped reading news altogether since 2016 and quit FB.

That was the best decision ever and nowadays I only use Reddit to follow very specific subreddits (just sports, aww and funny). People are very opinionated about things that they have not experienced, and with online anonymity, people can sprout baseless stuff and easily buy into believing things that are simply not true.

Everything I said here applies to HN as well. There are a lot of very poorly-informed-but-opinionated users here just like everywhere on the internet.

I've noticed this regarding companies I've worked at too. When it involves any knowledge that wouldn't be available to the public, people on HN spout plausible-sounding theories as though they're fact, but they actually have no basis in reality. "Turned out Company X was having trouble monetizing Feature Y so they've decided to pivot and adopt a new marketing strategy which is why customer support now takes so long to respond if you're not on an enterprise tier." And for other random companies that stuff sounds perfectly plausible, but every time I've been in a position to fact-check against deep personal knowledge of the company in question, it's been total BS. Just wild speculation presented with an air of authority.

On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the kool-aid.

I've also worked at companies where wikipedia has more accurate and detailed information than the internal wikis.

So maybe some of those insane people have - expertise and perspective.

Now not all. A lot of press is fawning. And nowadays, maybe due to algorithmic feedback, a lot of stuff is sort of fake controversial.

I’ve worked for two companies now that are high-profile HN fodder. Discussions of both of them have been complete batshit—from the technical engineering to the business decisions, and everything in between.

I will never understand why it’s so hard for people to realize and admit when they don’t know what they’re talking about.

One thing that helped me was when I was taught how to answer questions in a legal context. (Patent deposition.) Every answer has two parts: the answer to the question is the second part, to be preceded by your confidence in the answer. “I believe,” “I think,” or just plain “I don’t know,” and so on. Ever since then I’ve just habitually asked myself, “do I actually know this, or do I just think this, and on what basis?”

Do this enough and you’ll be surprised at how little you actually know.

Especially about what goes on inside companies you’ve never worked for.

It's much broader than just public perception of companies. A lot of stuff that passes off as information is actually entertainment.

For example, news about some new nutrition study typically don't involve any of the hard scientific line of inquiry that actual science work entails (e.g. critically thinking about potential methology flaws, for example.)

Reading about some politician slipping out a gaffe says nothing about what is happening in terms of law making (and nuances are often lost in translation when an article does talk about new laws). Etc.

A lot of articles are filled with rethoric and/or "real life" stories that don't really have a direct impact on the reader other than to elicit some form of emotional response. Contrast to actual educational material that is denser and drier, and can make a real impact in the reader's future when studied properly.

The fish is the last to know it lives in water.

Often companies deal with their own staff very differently to how they treat their customers or their competition. The average Oracle developers probably has no inkling of how Oracle screws over their customers with onerous licensing, for example.

Insiders that aren't in very senior management positions may not even be aware of the high-level decisions being made by their company. You often hear stories of employees being completely blind-sided when scandals or corruption are revealed.

Similarly, I've noticed that employees tend to make excuses for their company's behaviour, casually dismissing bad behaviour that isn't so easy to ignore for everyone else. This is tribalism at its finest.

Lastly, you hear rationalisations galore from people in senior management positions, carefully avoiding any mention of the real motivations for their bad behaviour. These lies are especially important when they speak to internal staff, especially staff they're screwing over.

As a random example, I worked at a large company recently where they essentially fired their entire IT department and replaced them with an outsourcer that charged half as much. I was an outside consultant working for senior management, so I got to see the real inside story. The staff were deliberately kept in the dark, and even outright lied to.

The real reason for the whole thing was that outsourcers cycle employees through every three months on temporary working visas, avoiding income taxes and essentially all mandatory payments such as worker's compensation. The whole thing was a huge tax dodge.

I read an article in a newspaper calling this out. The article was mostly true, but I guarantee you that 99% of the people at the company would have never known any of this.

Being an insider only gives you really detailed information about your own team, perhaps a dozen people. If you're at a FAANG, this might be 0.01% of the company at large...

"Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they have"

- Dr. Hildern at Camp McCarran.

Great quote from a fictional game (Fallout) character.

Older friends lament that you used to be able to have perfectly good conversations arguing about trivial questions of fact. Now there's always some asshole with a smartphone to look up the right answer and ruin the fun.

It helps to look at HN the same way. It's not about the truth, it's about enjoying the conversation.

It's sobering, to put it mildly.

    It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people 
    who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things
    like they are facts.

In the early days of the Internet, there was this widespread naivete that the truth would win. People generally wanted the truth, right? And this "global information superhighway" would act as sort of a de facto peer review. We wouldn't always get things right, but overall it would surely be a win for "the truth" or at least, for reasoned opinions.

Or so we thought. How naive we were.

> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts.

Sounds more like stupidity than insanity. People do this to express an uninformed opinion with unearned authority because that opinion and any resulting agreement are more valuable than facts and boring predictable conclusions.

The same happened to me after I started at a company than HN hated and realized that it’s much different inside that the picture painted here. I became really skeptical of any big claims about other big corps too.

I had a similar experience at a bigco that had a minor controversy on HN/Reddit a while back. In this case I was literally able to look at relevant source code and internal documents. Many of the comments were wildly inaccurate and conspiratorial, although there were a couple voices of reason mixed in.

I've had exactly the same revelation about traditional media a few years back.

I listen to talk-only radio a lot, they have some of the best experts in the country supposedly, a lot of famous names.

And then they talk about some topic I am familiar with (like Polish army modernization or computer science) and they spew bullshit for 1 hour with 100% confidence and there's 10 people in the studio who I'm sure know it's bullshit but they say nothing.

It's surreal. It means they don't even spend 5 minutes on the most basic research before a 1 hour debate.

I used to read editorials on Slate.com, the articles seemed interesting and discussed topics I didn't know much about. I did that until I read an article about something I did know something about, and I realized they were getting everything wrong. And I realized that they were just taking a devil's advocate position about everything and writing things that were contrary to how things are, presumably to get clicks.

People aren’t psychologically equipped to handle this kind of dishonesty. We evolved to deal with small groups. People would either be forced into honesty by socialization or reputational fears, or they’d be exiled or executed.

Now, you just go on Twitter and virtue signal about some nonsense idpol stuff while robbing everyone blind, and the people will love you.

I have had the exact same experience with my most recent employer. They certainly didn't do everything right, but, generally, it seems they are quick to acknowledge and fix their mistakes, and, certainly they try to be as ethical as possible internally. This company is pretty universally hated across the internet, yet, in the 2 years I was there, I didn't see even a tenth as much unethical or otherwise bad behavior there as I did from Facebook, for instance. Surprisingly, relatively few people outside of a techie / HN-type bubble seem to hate Facebook.

I have experienced exactly this.

I worked for a company who is highly covered in tech news. The most popular stories and themes knew almost nothing about the reality of we were doing. Maybe one in five voices was correct. It was totally disheartening to the point that I completely stopped reading any related topic. Way off base.

To this day, I am frustrated by misinformation about the work we did. The internet (and general knowledge) is not intelligent.

> It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts.

That's true with everything. Everyone has their own way to feel superior to everyone else, and for a lot of people, that superiority comes from knowledge, real or imagined.

Or you just trust people who qualify their statements, moderate they views, and have balanced and nuanced opinions.

I treat nearly every comment online like they are a user who is actively trying to deceive me and it's sad.

When general media has some report about my specific field, they're usually filled with nonsense, then I realized the only logical conclusion is that other fields face exactly the same problem, it's just that I couldn't identify the bullshit in them.

I got that like 15 years ago.

What were some of the inaccurate things said by the HN/Reddit crowd?

I always wondered how do Google, MS, FB, {popular_game e.g Riot Games/CDPR} and so on employees feel when they read that bullshit

You see a bunch of blatantly wrong things about countries as well that would be obvious for anyone who lived there. As a uncontroversial example, Winnie the Pooh clearly isn't banned in China, given how much merchandise is manufactured there. The "ghost cities" that were reported in about in China a few years are largely populated. They were empty at the time because they were new.

Case in point: Palantir. People would rather spread bizarre FUD they hear in the media than face the fact that they just don't know how much good Palantir does.

The problem is that the masses are not equipped to separate fabrication from reality. It often takes hours of research to actually get to the bottom of a story. Nowhere is this more prevalent and hideous than in US politics. Media outlets, under cover of constitutional protection lie with impunity, consequences be damned. All they care about is hitting resonance and feeding it. It is hard to estimate the damage they have caused this nation.

In some cases discovering the truth has a time element as well. I remember a very specific case from the 2016 elections that drove this point home for me.

I was watching CNN. They featured this story about a black church that had been burned down and the phrase “Vote Trump” spray painted on the side. The network pounded on this story for a week or so. They painted Trump as the racist instigator who inspired someone to do this.

None of this made sense for me. Unless crazy, a supporter of any political candidate would know that burning down a church would not be a net positive for their candidate. Something was wrong, yet it was impossible to discover at that time.

I was so puzzled that I set a calendar reminder to look into the story a few months later.

Sure enough, three months later they arrested the guy who did it. Who was he? A member of the church. Yes, a black man. Why did he do it? Because he had a problem with the pastor. Why did he spray paint “Vote Trump”? Because he thought that would send investigators in a different direction.

Do you think CNN devoted a week’s worth of 24/7 coverage to correct the absolute falsehoods they spread? Of course not! They could not care less! Millions of people walked away from a one week carpet bombing campaign across most of the media with lies upon lies pounded into their heads.

This one event truly changed my views. I started to research everything. I can say that in nearly 100% of the stories I look into the media lied with impunity.

While I don’t consider myself a Trump supporter, I started to understand what the man was dealing with. He has had to endure this for four years. This is a horrific violation of the trust and privileges granted to the media by the US constitution.

Some might be OK with this because they dislike Trump. That is a terribly myopic position to adopt. Today the media attacks those you dislike, yet nothing in life is constant. Tomorrow, whenever that may be, the tables might change...sadly that’s when people finally realize that a principled unbiased position in favor of truth and justice is the only one that can protect everyone.