Btw, I'm not trying to draw a simple equivalency here. "Thinking for yourself" isn't as easy as saying "both sides distort" and plotting a naive midpoint between extremes. You have to read everything critically.
HN is, overall, a high-quality source for many things. I also daily see things stated with absolute conviction that are flat-out wrong and so I don’t trust it blindly either.
If the "Gell-Mann amnesia" technically refers to your tendency to forget the unreliability of the source, then the takeaway when you learn about it is to be wary of your own forgetting. But in common parlance, "Gell-Mann" has started to mean "Gell-Mann awareness", so you might well read "wary of Gell-Mann" as "wary of skepticism", not "wary of credulity".
Is that where we're getting mixed up?
Wikipedia/wikinews with all its faults gets a lot closer than the NYT. Because it's not static, it's not maddening fluff and drivel (when every fucking "article" is a story, "Abigale stood in the doorway in a chilly afternoon, disoriented by the bad news that her application by the Local State Office of Nobody Ever Heard of Ever was denied ..." and seven paragraphs later we will finally find out some new nugget of information, maybe even at the end of every such amazing certified five-times-Pulitzer piece there will be some hard data "statistic").
There's simply not enough demand for such an outlet with rigor, standards, etc. (Or maybe there is and it's a market niche, or it's an outright market failure that this need is not satisfied.)
Log on as a moderate and you will rage that the "paper of record" can spin such lies and obvious bias.
Log on as a progressive and you will rage because of the lies confirming our biases.
Outrage sells. The root cause lies in the reason why people need to seek entertainment and outrage from news, rather than from other areas in their lives.
I think it sustains itself because they are incentivized to go after left-wing outrage clicks to make money, but then there is always the fall-back of left-wing conviction: "I wrote this piece that wasn't accurate and may damage the paper's reputation because I need to make a stand for left-wing values and get pats on the back from my peers".
I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
> Outrage sells
Yes, exactly. It's just the usual "things are bad" porn. Winter? Things are bad. Summer? Things are bad. Sure, it's their "job", but at this rate why even check it? The problems are clear, even the solutions are pretty well characterized. (From small scale local zoning, policy and voting reforms through more of the same stricter EPA/cap-n-trade/carbon-tax stuff to big structural energy/healthcare/education/copyright/tax reforms to a few constitutional amendments and new free trade agreements [that incentivize free movement of people, goods, services and information]. Arrogance lvl 100.) For everything else you'll hear about it eventually.
> I don't think there is a single person left there who is thinking about the integrity of the paper.
Wow, that's ... damning. But doesn't seem particularly false either :|
That leads to grass roots competition from voices in local communities, and (in this case) some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
>some other outlets could run articles fact checking the NYT.
Why would anyone trust them? Who fact checks the fact checkers?
Some of that mistrust comes from the centralized ownership and control of a lot of "local" stations.
> My ultimate problem is that once this fact becomes apparent to people, many of them tend to go down the rabbit hole of getting what they perceive as the "real" news from blogs/forum posts/opinionated tweets/random guy with a youtube channel. As in, the eventual consequence to mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting is that people will migrate to sources that have even poorer standards. TBH, I don't really know what the solution to the problem is.
What leads to that isn't "mass media having poor rigorous standards of reporting", it's the presence of any error at all in the mass media. Unless the mass media is inhumanly perfect (which it can never be, being a human endeavor), there will be scores of people who will use "Gell-Mann amnesia" as an excuse to descend into a cocoon of reassuring group-think.
Invocations of "Gell-Mann amnesia" are invitations to generalize single errors into general skepticism of media. However, people are biased, so general skepticism almost always means acceptance of things that support one's biases and rejection of anything that challenges them.
