Publishing a partial document is, flatly, not unjournalistic behavior?
Meta note: this was at +19 karma when I read it. I’m 80% sure LessWrong becomes uncalibrated and entitled when discussing journalistic ethics. It’s a bad look with bad consequences, because LessWrong acts its most irrational on exactly the topics where journalists are most likely to see and notice it.
I mean, I think it’s good when people publish all the data associated with some piece of research, and it feels similar that I think journalists should also generally publish unedited interviews and such somewhere, to help the public audit the work and inspect what happened.
Seems strange to not include it, and needlessly frustrating to redact information of the public interest.
I agree publishing partial documents isn’t unjournalistic, and that LessWrong doesn’t seem to be the most calibrated when it comes to journalism-related takes, but I also don’t really understand Roose’s reasoning for only publishing part of the document. His reasons for publishing what he did are:
It’s an important document for historical reasons
It helps give insight into Amodei
To give an example of the type of juicy details you can get from his new book
To me, it seems like (1) and (2) would favor publishing the entire thing, especially (1). If you think its important to preserve these types of documents for history and that there is a strong public interest in people being able to read and study them, surely that would apply to the entire document? And the reasoning that the full document is long, dense, and technical doesn’t seem to counteract that. I’d guess that lots of historical records that have been of immense value in hindsight to our current understanding of history were some combination of those things, shouldn’t part of the point of preserving documents for history be that we may not know ahead of time exactly what the historians of the future will find to be relevant?
Publishing a partial document is, flatly, not unjournalistic behavior?
Meta note: this was at +19 karma when I read it. I’m 80% sure LessWrong becomes uncalibrated and entitled when discussing journalistic ethics. It’s a bad look with bad consequences, because LessWrong acts its most irrational on exactly the topics where journalists are most likely to see and notice it.
I mean, I think it’s good when people publish all the data associated with some piece of research, and it feels similar that I think journalists should also generally publish unedited interviews and such somewhere, to help the public audit the work and inspect what happened.
Seems strange to not include it, and needlessly frustrating to redact information of the public interest.
Copenhagen Interpretation of Journalism
I agree publishing partial documents isn’t unjournalistic, and that LessWrong doesn’t seem to be the most calibrated when it comes to journalism-related takes, but I also don’t really understand Roose’s reasoning for only publishing part of the document. His reasons for publishing what he did are:
It’s an important document for historical reasons
It helps give insight into Amodei
To give an example of the type of juicy details you can get from his new book
To me, it seems like (1) and (2) would favor publishing the entire thing, especially (1). If you think its important to preserve these types of documents for history and that there is a strong public interest in people being able to read and study them, surely that would apply to the entire document? And the reasoning that the full document is long, dense, and technical doesn’t seem to counteract that. I’d guess that lots of historical records that have been of immense value in hindsight to our current understanding of history were some combination of those things, shouldn’t part of the point of preserving documents for history be that we may not know ahead of time exactly what the historians of the future will find to be relevant?