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The remarkable thing is not just how mistaken these reporters seem, but how sure they are of themselves. It must be a general reporter m.o. always to speak with certainty. Usually they get away with it, but when talking about startups this trick can blow up spectacularly.https://twitter.com/SamRo/status/1372132647795851272 …
Another topic that makes fools of reporters is epidemics. And startups and epidemics have something in common: exponential growth. Maybe we need to add an asterisk to the reporters' playbook: Drop the certainty when predicting the outcome of exponential growth.
Totally agree.
Reporters generally don’t have the experience to report. Insiders should just report on themselves. We can then ascertain bias.
Maybe they should just let the experts tell the story instead of injecting their own bias.
I suspect they did ask experts. Reporters talk to a lot more people than just the ones they interview live.
You should read a Newsweek article in 07 that pilloried Zuckerberg as one of those "People who don't matter" for not selling Facebook like MySpace did when the iron was hot according to the journalist.
It's exponential growth, within exceedingly complex, multi-layered systems with little precedent. The journalist's credo of discovering and sharing truth is certainly noble, but there needs to be a realistic humility about what is knowable and what is (practically) unknowable.
I think @nntaleb has talked about these sorts of things just a bit. Something to do with a barbell, fat tails, etc etc.
It is the same with any other field - do you think reporters are better prepared to report about physics breakthroughs, os archaeological discoveries?
I said this a year ago re: exponential growthhttps://twitter.com/msarna/status/1245149484683853830?s=20 …
Another dimension that I think is applicable: the people who can look at the data and reason about that to form their views, vs the people who form their views based on social proof.
Exponential growth moves too fast to be captured by social proof. But social proof also falls down with things that are outside of the “established norm”, like in the case of paradigm shifts.
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