Comment by ehsankia

From the summary of the podcast:

> This is the story about the XBox hacking scene and how a group of guys pushed their luck a little too far.

Anthony (Clark) was one of said guys. Heavy spoilers ahead...

... He was convicted in 2016 for wire fraud related to EA FIFA coins. In 2017, he was found dead, awaiting sentencing.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/fourth-defendant-convic...

Not the OP, but I think you are misunderstanding. Not a legal condition, a physical one

> The physical cringe of wanting to correct the record is unbearable

It's like me when I hear someone at karaoke singing out of key and out of tune. The pain is almost physical and it hurts the brain.

I think they meant "condition" as in "medical condition" (tongue-in-cheek, presumably).

I think they're joking :)

I think by "having a condition" he means something akin to mental impairment rather than legal condition from an NDA.

perhaps a sarcastic reference to fingernails on a chalkboard type of negative phonotaxis

Michael Crichton, (as above quoted) didn't get to feel the pain of having the opportunity to correct the newspaper article, as we "do".

That's the pain I feel when facing this new instance of the affect, in a more palatable form:

I could comment on the internet - but knowing my comments will, despite immense reverence, or correctness, be ignored by the silent masses, turns the effect into an affliction.

The man reading the newspaper can mutter the facts under his breath. Had he yell louder, still, nothing will change - his breakfast partner bemoaned.

The miniscule chance of my comment correcting the record pains me. Had I yell louder, maybe someone will take note. But I can't - because they won't, and the possibility of my pertinent, small chance of making a difference gets irrevocably distant, as an algorithm pushes the topic of collective interest to someone else's disdain.

So I reload the page, and forget what I knew.

That is the best thing I've read in the last two years.

The internet undermines a lot of this though from a technical perspective. If you are interested in things technically (building PCs! Gaming! Development!) you read the sources from better tech sites and it is not as bad as back in the day when you had newspapers and empty pretty talking heads on CNN. Well, unless you're in the echo chamber as described here...

The other thing is just that mainstream media is just AWFUL at science and technology, because journalists inherit the general anti-scientist bias of the general population and humanities domains. On "people affairs" they usually have sociology and psychology and poli sci background and instincts... they are reporters of human structures and motivations.

So I suppose it is true that they have better reporting of the affairs of non-scientists to some degree.

Just because a reporter covering some fluffy science piece might things wrong does not mean a different reporter, in a different department, covering a completely different subject, got things wrong (to the same degree, or at all.) That "hypothesis" is a genetic fallacy.

It also doesn't distinguish between reporting ("Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain"), analysis ("Dr Bob says wet streets cause rain; is this accurate?") and opinion ("In the opinion of the columnist/author, Dr. Bob is an idiot who thinks wet streets cause rain! This is just yet another example of the violence inherent in the system, decaying the moral fabric of our system."

It also doesn't account for the Dunning-Kruger effect, or on Joe Q Public's near total ignorance on the subject of observational biases and dependency on anecdotes and personal experience.)

That "hypothesis" leverages Joe thinking some reporter covering global warming is "fake news" when it's been a cold, snowy week...to get Joe to think that reporting about current events or politics is equally "fake."

A reminder that a reporter who writes "Dr. Bob says wet streets cause rain" is not publishing fake news. It's reporting the fact that there is someone who said/thinks that. That is different from presenting their statement as fact.

Or the "Someone is wrong on the Internet" condition (https://xkcd.com/386/)