nednobbins

There’s significant investment in green alternatives. Particularly in China, but in many other places as well.

If I'm being honest with myself I do steer towards and away from certain news outlets based on my perception of their overall trustworthiness. In my ideal world I'd judge articles on their individual merits.

For example. When I was a kid, the Wall Street Journal was top tier in reliability. Nothing changed immediately after Rupert Murdoch bought them but over time I noticed some changes. In particular I started seeing editorials less clearly marked as such and mixed in with regular articles. That struck me as shady editorial decisions. I've read enough shoddy WSJ articles since then that I don't really trust them anymore. That said, they still put out individual articles that are accurate and well sourced.

For practical administration reasons I suspect you'll have to take the broad approach of just banning some sources that are egregious repeat offenders. Ideally I'd like to see a set of criteria that define what gets sources on that ban list and what can get them removed. If we can identify reliable fact checking organizations perhaps we could use them as a metric (ie any publication that has more than X fact corrections in an N month period is auto-banned).

I hate clickbait but I don't know how to define it. How do we differentiate them from well written, attention grabbing headlines?

I'd love to see more attention paid to self policing. Eg Ira Glass did the most epic retraction I've ever seen. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/460/retraction When they figured out that their story was wrong they didn't just say, "Oops sorry." They invited the source back on, and spent a whole hour analyzing where they went wrong. My respect for NPR shot way up that day. It would be great to see a score of how good media outlets are at admitting their mistakes. That would greatly increase my trust in them.

edit: typo

replacement theory

I had to look that up but it was basically what I expected it to be.

Short answer. No. I have no particular fear of white people (or anyone else for that matter) being replaced.

I'm talking less about any concerns of what the demographics should be and more on identifying what we're talking about. That's why I brought up the two contrasting demographics of the US vs the world.

Americans, even those with diverse ancestral backgrounds, tend to view the world through the lens of Americans. Individual subgroups within the US tend to view America through the lens of their subgroup. I've noticed that diversity means different things to different people and I'm wondering what it will mean here.

A comment elsewhere in this thread illustrates the potential conflict. They note that we want to avoid islamophobia, which I agree with and we want to avoid homophobia, which I also agree with. But they make it sound like it will be easy to reconcile the two on a global scale. I suspect that will be much harder to pull off.

No ulterior motive. My post is intended to be interpreted literally. You seemed to be saying that the MBFC rating is good evidence that we should trust MJ. I'm following up and saying that DN meets the same criteria and should be judged the same way.

The first post in this thread questioned if either DN or MJ should be included in the list of reliable sources. You pointed out that while MBFC cites MJ as having a left bias they also cite them as highly accurate.

DN gets basically the same grade from MBFC as MJ.

Even though "high" accuracy is only their second highest rating, "very high" is typically reserved for academic journals and that makes "high" the best rating that you can reasonably expect from a non-academic journal.

The page for DN also notes that there have been 0 corrections in the past 5 months.

They consider Democracy Now! to have a bias left of Mother Jones but also highly accurate. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/democracy-now/

Asside: I just discovered https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/2023/07/17/the-latest-fact-checks-curated-by-media-bias-fact-check-07-17-2023/ I found that when I was looking at what it takes for MediaBiasFactCheck to consider a source to have "very highly" reliability rather than simply "high" reliability. Spoilers, you basically need to be an academic journal.

I'm with you on opinion pieces but I wouldn't over pivot on the objectiveness of "news".

I'm not sure there actually is such a thing as true objectivity, in practice. There are a ton of ways to inject subjectivity into seemingly objective news. An obvious one is selection bias. Journalists and editors decide what to write about and publish. They decide who gets quoted and which facts get presented. Even if they tell no lies, that leaves a lot of room to present those facts in a variety of different lights.

I think the best we can hope for is independent verifiability. If an article makes a claim, do I just have to believe them or do I have some reasonable way to check, that doesn't involve the author?

I agree. The acceptance threshold for editorials and opinion pieces are just too low. Even in the Gray Lady they sometimes amount to little more than conspiratorial rants with better grammar and more sophisticated vocabulary.

The standard should ideally be on the articles themselves rather than the publication.

This is a difficult question. I try to focus on the article itself rather than the news site.

The first thing I look for is if they're rambling. That's probably not the best criterion but it's so obvious. If an article doesn't get to the point in the first few sentences it probably doesn't have a point.

The second thing I look for is verification. I already know some stuff about the world. If know the article made some mistakes I'll assume they're making other mistakes. If they are correct about less well known facts I mentally bump up their reliability a bit.

If they make a statement about a fact I expect them to source it. If their source is some equivalent of "trust me bro" I'm getting out my salt shovel.

Beyond that I'll look at the track record of the author and the publication. Do they consistently pass or fall short of the reliable news threshold? If so, I adjust my expectations.

The individual articles or statements come first though. I may have very little confidence in Fox and Friends or in Donald Trump but if they get on TV and make independently verifiable statements that check out then it's true.

In terms of a simple rule that could be practically implemented. Maybe something like, the article must have independently verifiable sources for its claims. One corollary would be, if article A cites article B as a source, don't post A, just post B directly.

It would be great if there could be some discussion of what exactly "diversity" means. It's one of those words that people seem to assume is well defined but I can't get anyone to define it.

I don't know what the definition should be but I've seen variations that assume different definitions and I'm more comfortable with some than with others.

1. I have a friend who works at a bank. He bragged that his team was 100% diverse. When I asked him what that mean he said there were no white people on his team. Personally, this seems like a bad definition. I have trouble thinking of "diversity" as the removal of some group, even if that group is otherwise over-represented elsewhere. It also ignores any potential diversity around any other factors; either the traditional political factors such as gender or religion or any diversity of thought (do their analysts include both Frequentists and Baysians?)

2. Reddit mostly has users from the US. Should we consider a Lemmy community diverse if it represents the predominant views and voices of the US? If that's the case the image above needs more white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Race_and_ethnicity

3. The world is a big place and anyone could join Lemmy. Should we consider a community diverse if it matches the demographics of the planet? In that case the image above has too many white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Global_demographics

The above focuses on race but it's more widely applicable. This community will most likely consists of mostly US citizens for the near future. If the community is firmly focused on US ideas it will be more about US opinion of the rest of the world than actual diversity. If it actually does include a globally diverse set of ideas it's likely to get pretty uncomfortable for the majority of the people here.

Debt is likely less of an issue here. These are PhDs and they tend to be funded by grants. Students typically pay no tuition and get some stipend for expenses.

Of course, graduating debt free with a PhD in molecular biology from a top program is less exciting when you can’t land a single interview for a junior faculty role.

Industry may pay twice as much but if you love research and China offers you lab space, you’ll consider it.

I think it’s primarily two things.

China now graduates almost twice as many STEM PhDs as the US does. A lot of people move after their PhD but they tend to stay in country.

I also think, anecdotally, that new PhDs have a harder time finding a job here.

Overall China just seems to make more effort to attract scientists. They promise, and deliver, the two things scientists care about, funding and academic freedom.

There’s a bigger picture at play too. China has been making itself attractive for researchers in general. It’s not just Chinese scientists moving back. An increasing number of other scientists are choosing to work in China over the U.S.

In fields where China was pushing it earlier we’re starting to see the results already. There are several fields where a plurality of top tier publications come from China.