I think this is somewhat useful already, as a sort of true-in-spirit rant against the media that is a helpful reminder of things most of us probably already knew.
I’d love to see this grow into a more ambitious project:
1. Get a random collection of media articles you haven’t read before, ideally on topics you are unfamiliar with. 2. Spend some amount of time (30min?) on each one, using the current List of Rules to read between the lines and write a short analysis proposing various hypotheses, e.g. “Probably so-and-so had some pretty good reasons for what they did—I’m guessing it was X or Y. As for the headline of this article, my guess is that the exact opposite is true, because while the events cited in the article did happen and are evidence for the titular claim, they aren’t enough evidence to overcome the standard argument, which wasn’t even mentioned in the article, presumably because they didn’t have a good rebuttal to it.” 2.5. In parallel, have some guinea pig volunteers (ideally a diverse group) read your rules & ask some clarifying questions, and then read those same articles and write their own reports as best as they can, making an attempt to follow the rules & noting when they think a rule is unhelpful/counterproductive/false, or just unclear. 3. Compare notes and see how much overlap there was between your own interpretation of the rules and everyone else’s. 4. Spend several hours doing a deep-dive investigation into each article, attempting to get to the bottom of who is right—are the hypotheses you each conjectured in your analyses correct? By the end of this you should consider yourself, if not an expert on the subject, at least fairly well-informed. 5. Reflect on everything that’s happened thus far & come up with a new and improved List of Rules that reflects what you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t. Make some testable predictions for how the new List of Rules will outperform the old List in the upcoming experiment.
6. Run an experiment where fresh guinea pig volunteers are sorted into a control and experimental group, the control group sees the old List and the experimental group sees the new List, then both read & analyze some new articles. 7. Publish the results, perhaps with a List of Rules: Third Edition that incorporates your learnings.
I imagine you won’t want to do this because it’s a lot of work and you have other things you’d rather do, but if you did do this, I’d be grateful and would read the best-performing List of Rules with keen interest and probably noticeably shift my reading-behavior accordingly. I’d also signal-boost the List to all my friends etc.
By 1: The article has a narrative. I’m not entirely sure what the narrative here is, perhaps “the far right is attacking democracy across the world”?
By 5 and 10 and 4 and 8 and … and “A stronger version, with less qualifications or weasel words, would have been against the rules”: The article is presenting a maximally biased view of the matter, based on careful selection of the evidence. I guess the big question mark from the story is, what were the protesters’ motivations for it? Zvi’s rules would seem to suggest that they are suppressing information about the protesters’ motivations, and that this information would undermine the articles’ narrative. They also talk about the protestors entering government buildings, but never about any people working in those buildings being afraid or hurt, so according to Zvi’s rules this would imply that the buildings were empty or something.
By 6 and 7 and 11: The article is often not coming up with the journalist’s own views, but instead repeating the views of others, which the rules suggest are pretty biased. For instance the key event was something that “Reuters witnesses said”. Since Reuters is pushing the “attack on democracy” narrative, probably according to Zvi’s rules this means that the police were a lot more brutal than implied by the article (which combined with the assumption that the protestors have honorable motivations would imply that this has been a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests).
If I was seeing this interpretation in the wild, my median guess would be that it was a batshit crazy conspiracy theory. But again I don’t know much about the situation so I would be curious if anyone knows anything that can be said about it.
They also talk about the protestors entering government buildings, but never about any people working in those buildings being afraid or hurt, so according to Zvi’s rules this would imply that the buildings were empty or something.
I think this is somewhat useful already, as a sort of true-in-spirit rant against the media that is a helpful reminder of things most of us probably already knew.
I’d love to see this grow into a more ambitious project:
1. Get a random collection of media articles you haven’t read before, ideally on topics you are unfamiliar with.
2. Spend some amount of time (30min?) on each one, using the current List of Rules to read between the lines and write a short analysis proposing various hypotheses, e.g. “Probably so-and-so had some pretty good reasons for what they did—I’m guessing it was X or Y. As for the headline of this article, my guess is that the exact opposite is true, because while the events cited in the article did happen and are evidence for the titular claim, they aren’t enough evidence to overcome the standard argument, which wasn’t even mentioned in the article, presumably because they didn’t have a good rebuttal to it.”
2.5. In parallel, have some guinea pig volunteers (ideally a diverse group) read your rules & ask some clarifying questions, and then read those same articles and write their own reports as best as they can, making an attempt to follow the rules & noting when they think a rule is unhelpful/counterproductive/false, or just unclear.
3. Compare notes and see how much overlap there was between your own interpretation of the rules and everyone else’s.
4. Spend several hours doing a deep-dive investigation into each article, attempting to get to the bottom of who is right—are the hypotheses you each conjectured in your analyses correct? By the end of this you should consider yourself, if not an expert on the subject, at least fairly well-informed.
5. Reflect on everything that’s happened thus far & come up with a new and improved List of Rules that reflects what you’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t. Make some testable predictions for how the new List of Rules will outperform the old List in the upcoming experiment.
6. Run an experiment where fresh guinea pig volunteers are sorted into a control and experimental group, the control group sees the old List and the experimental group sees the new List, then both read & analyze some new articles.
7. Publish the results, perhaps with a List of Rules: Third Edition that incorporates your learnings.
I imagine you won’t want to do this because it’s a lot of work and you have other things you’d rather do, but if you did do this, I’d be grateful and would read the best-performing List of Rules with keen interest and probably noticeably shift my reading-behavior accordingly. I’d also signal-boost the List to all my friends etc.
Interesting idea.
I’ll do a simplified trial run. I went in to Reuters and picked this top article, Brazilian troops clear pro-Bolsonaro camp after protesters storm capital, which is about a subject that I know ~nothing about.
Now according to Zvi, the rules seem to say:
By 1: The article has a narrative. I’m not entirely sure what the narrative here is, perhaps “the far right is attacking democracy across the world”?
By 5 and 10 and 4 and 8 and … and “A stronger version, with less qualifications or weasel words, would have been against the rules”: The article is presenting a maximally biased view of the matter, based on careful selection of the evidence. I guess the big question mark from the story is, what were the protesters’ motivations for it? Zvi’s rules would seem to suggest that they are suppressing information about the protesters’ motivations, and that this information would undermine the articles’ narrative. They also talk about the protestors entering government buildings, but never about any people working in those buildings being afraid or hurt, so according to Zvi’s rules this would imply that the buildings were empty or something.
By 6 and 7 and 11: The article is often not coming up with the journalist’s own views, but instead repeating the views of others, which the rules suggest are pretty biased. For instance the key event was something that “Reuters witnesses said”. Since Reuters is pushing the “attack on democracy” narrative, probably according to Zvi’s rules this means that the police were a lot more brutal than implied by the article (which combined with the assumption that the protestors have honorable motivations would imply that this has been a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests).
If I was seeing this interpretation in the wild, my median guess would be that it was a batshit crazy conspiracy theory. But again I don’t know much about the situation so I would be curious if anyone knows anything that can be said about it.
I don’t know about the other stuff, but https://www.vox.com/world/2023/1/9/23546507/brazil-bolsonaro-lula-capital-invasion-january-8 says
Oops, they seem to have updated it over time, I should probably have made an archive link.
Another thing that might be interesting would be to apply Zvi’s list to Zvi’s writing.