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I've become frustrated lately at the news environment I live in. I get most of my information from the internet, and I get it by way of little blog posts from various sites. While I enjoy the back and forth of the blogosphere, I feel like it has a real mile-wide-inch-deep quality a lot of the time. I notice that when I don't log on for a week I'm scarcely worse informed for the omission.
I was thinking about Thomas Jefferson and how he would engage the internet and it occured to me that while he would enjoy online back and forth over issues, he would use primary sources a lot more than I do. He might read the commentary on Vaughn's gay marriage ruling, but first he would read the ruling in its entirety.
So I'm trying to mix up how I take in information and read more primary documents. I just finished reading Vaughns ruling start to finish. It definately gave me something different than reading the talking heads on the topic. Next I think I'm going to read the IPCC's 2007 Climate Change Report.
What do you guys think about the merits of trying to absorb more directly from documents rather than commentary? Any suggestions about what I should put on my list?
I was thinking about Thomas Jefferson and how he would engage the internet and it occured to me that while he would enjoy online back and forth over issues, he would use primary sources a lot more than I do. He might read the commentary on Vaughn's gay marriage ruling, but first he would read the ruling in its entirety.
So I'm trying to mix up how I take in information and read more primary documents. I just finished reading Vaughns ruling start to finish. It definately gave me something different than reading the talking heads on the topic. Next I think I'm going to read the IPCC's 2007 Climate Change Report.
What do you guys think about the merits of trying to absorb more directly from documents rather than commentary? Any suggestions about what I should put on my list?
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Beyond that, modern culture pretty much demands that, if you have grown-up obligations, you choose between depth and breadth of knowledge. Reading, say, a court decision is cool, but in that same time you might be able to read about half a dozen other news stories. I occasionally read primary documents, but I more find myself trying to browse for snippets, so that I have a decent grasp of all the things going on in the world, versus an excellent knowledge of only a couple things.
I think either approach has merits.
It sounds like you want to read like an academic reads, and the most stark difference between academic reading and regular reading is intuiting the biases of the authors by intelligently comparing several works on the same material. This is a very difficult skill to develop, and basically requires you read several articles under the direct supervision of someone who has developed this skill, and under their guidance tease out how the bias presents itself even in the neutral tone of scientific (or legal, etc.) writing.
You've always got to keep in mind that basically everyone in the world is an opinionated asshole in some way, and our brains are completely oblivious to our own biases. And even if we are aware of our biases, we really can't completely keep them out of our work. It's like being aware that you're wearing red glasses... you know that you see everything in a red light, but you still see everything in a red light. It will colour your perception.
You might want to start taking some courses in critical reading before really tackling the heavy stuff, just so that you have the mental skills to learn and process information in an effective manner. They should be offered as evening courses by your local community college, and they're likely invaluable to what you want. Form there, I'd start by reading several texts on the subject you're interested in. Then, when you're comfortable with the material in the texts, move on to review articles. When you're comfortable with those, move on to primary literature. At all times you should compare the works and note differences in interpretation.
Oh yeah, and just... trash gets printed in primary publication journals all the goddamn time. Remember that the vaccine mercury bullshit was initially published in Nature (IIRC), one of the "respected" journals.
It's worth pointing out that one of the benefits of modern society, though, is that we have a wide selection of experts in virtually every field to parse that sort of information and give us the more understandable version. Unfortunately, not all of those folks are terribly trustworthy, and there really isn't a universal certification system for experts.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
You mean Jack Thompson may not be an expert on video game violence!?
I think picking good secondary sources and being able to identify biases / misinformation / loons is probably more important than reading primary sources unless you just have tons of time on your hands.
I think it's really a matter, like Jeffe said, of depth vs breadth. There's so much information out there that nobody is going to have time to be well versed in absolutely everything. So at some point you'll have to trust someone else's expert opinion anyway. It's probably best to figure out who you can trust, and develop your own broad understanding of the things that are important to you so that you can do a good job of separating the charlatans from the actual experts.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
With say cases (not necessarily the one linked in the OP), I think commentary is dammed useful and I'll use that as a primary filtering mechanism for work or things I am interested in. If the commentary (usually multiple points) suggests the case, or parts of it are worth reading, then I'll do so. This is far easier than it once was, thanks to the internet. Back when I started law school Lexis was the gold standard (and still is to a large extent) and it had a very clumsy and hard to search pre Web interface. There were other CD/early internet based databases or journals but they did not always work well. So it was often necessary to have multiple law reports and journals out at any one point to do one's research.
I'm not sure that this is necessarily/inherently true, but it will be as long as our commentators/analysts are journalists. Frankly, I am not a big fan of the press -- even the respected outlets (BBC, NYT, WSJ, Economist, Atlantic, etc). I think there's something fundamentally amiss with trusting the reporting of truth to people who are writers by training.
Human beings already struggle enough with our impulses to interpret events in narrative, and fudging facts to fit into clean storylines fraught with causation, intention, and individual influence. And then, we actively compound this in the case of journalists by teaching them, first and foremost, how to write. I actually think this poses a serious problem as to their capacity to deliver analysis in a manner that reflects reality accurately. Data-driven commentary would be the theoretical alternative; 538 vs the world, so to speak.
Statistics and data analysis are disciplines whose sole purpose is the understanding of reality -- of decoding causality. Writing is a discipline concerned with communication and story-telling. Journalism is about communicating reality to an audience, so surely journalists need some skill in communication, but I think the emphasis should first and foremost by on the reality. If you have a good grasp of reality, but communicate it poorly, you're still doing an alright job, whereas you can be a brilliant communicator, but if your grasp of reality is shit, you have still failed entirely. I pine for a world where our journalists/commentator-class are statisticians first, and writers second.
If you're willing and able to invest the time and energy, it can be incredibly rewarding, intellectually. The tradeoff is a decreased ability to discuss or debate with others, because issues are more complicated than most are comfortable with and you're more likely to alienate people than convince them. Then again, looking at the posters in this thread, it seems like we're all comfortable holding unpopular or misunderstood opinions, so this part is probably a non-issue.
Nature are a special case as they love publishing contraversial stuff. Remember the arabidopsis hothead thing?
Man, that makes me sound dumb.
Really though, there are lots of situations where without a fairly specific background and level of understanding, you'll wind up less informed by reading a primary document than you would by reading an analysis/news article from a source you consider worthy. How much good does it do to read an actual brief or an actual research document if you lack the background to really interpret it?
Take the IPCC report, for example. A layman can probably read most of that thing at understand it, but that's because a group has taken the time to collect a bunch of the primary data and assemble it into a report for non-scientists to read.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Man, this is so silly. Journalists are writers by trade because to actually communicate information to laypeople in a format they can understand and find useful requires training as a writer/communicator, not as a statistician.
538 only works because the data being analyzed is relatively simple. Polling data is peanuts compared to the scientific data that is regularly poorly communicated or misunderstood in the regular press. And Nate Silver can only in the barest sense be called "a statistician first and a writer second."
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
What I realized was that by doing this document thing I'm not really decreasing my knowledge of current events by very much. Actual news takes very little time to read. What I end up cutting out are, say, Andrew Sullivan's musings on the meaning of Glenn Beck's rally over the weekend that he took fifteen minutes to jot down.
In exchange it doesn't seem like I just gain depth - the time I spend online is being used much more economically because I'm paying attention to one thing and absorbing details about it rather than clicking around in a semi-haze reading the first three sentences of this and that. Long form reading seems to increase my net productivity when it comes to actually aquiring information.
Be angry at the sun if these things upset you . . .
But while this can work relatively well for flat-reporting, it's often quite bad for analysis (especially in science reporting, as you mention below). And, that's both the topic of the thread and a very important part of what the press does (perhaps even more influential than "straight" journalism). And I don't mean the disingenuous, ignorant, and those arguing in bad faith -- the Glenn Becks of the world.
It's not just political analysis either, nor openly partisan analysis. Plenty of magazine and long-form journalism is written not just to report facts, but to contextualize them and provide a method of understanding these facts and their significance. This is a hugely important part of journalism, and potentially very valuable.
The problem is that they deliver this analysis most often in narrative form, which is extremely misleading. And it's not just delivered that way, but indeed colors the arguments being made. Take articles like the Atlantic's "The End of Men." The author begins with a concept, a narrative, which is then "evidenced" by selection of choice facts. I think we can all agree that this sort of cherry-picking is not optimal -- it is considered unacceptable in logic, philosophy, forensics, and science -- but it seems to be the norm in journalistic analysis.
Even articles in the New Yorker that I may find extremely well-written and researched, I often can't dismiss the fact that the analysis still isn't approached from the standard of a thorough and transparent review of all available objective data. And yes, there is a dearth of good data on many subjects, but I believe this is at least in part due to the relative lack of demand for such data.
There's truth to this, and yet traditional journalists and commentators got so much of the 2008 election wrong. In fairness, also, post-election 538 was exceptional at debunking various media narratives, especially about how the public felt about a given issue/bill/etc. In many cases, print and broadcast outlets (from well-respected to hucksterish) would repeat intuitive, emotionally-compelling narratives that were in blatant contradiction of actual polling available on the issue. To this day journalists and commentators still vastly overreact to the findings of a single poll from a single firm (see Gallup's R+10 generic congressional from a few days ago). This is not, as you say, complicated stuff. Yet they still get it wrong, or ignore the available objective data altogether in favor of narratives that emphasize intention, the importance of individuals, social trends, and other interesting human behavior.
In that his formal educational training is in statistics and economics, and not writing? That seems pretty reasonable.
"Here are some numbers, here are some conclusions I draw from them." One piece of writing might be better sourced or more persuasive than another, but the fundamental point is the same. If we carry your argument out, it would seem that the only permissible thing to publish is a collection of charts and raw data.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I tend to just not care about Beck and Palin that much. I have a few sets of heuristics that I use to interpret the right-wing celebrity media and don't feel compelled to look for anything deep in any particular soundbyte or media event. I figure if something makes legitimate waves, I'll pick up on it via noticing more headlines on the topic than usual. This means that Talking Points Memo is something I almost never read any more. That I'm not into horserace stuff compounds this.
I don't do much with primary sources. I'm not sure what I fill in the gaps with, as I have a ton of free time these days and spend something like 4-6 hours a day on Google Reader, but I feel reasonably well informed--at least to the extent that I feel I have a good idea of how ignorant I am--on subjects that I care about.
I think that this is not the case, and one's ability to debate those issues are more related to one's rhetorical skill and style. If you ask the right questions and approach people in accommodating ways, you can do very well in otherwise adversarial discussions.
This just seems obstinate to me. His formal educational training is first and foremost in a data-driven discipline, with a whole boatload of statistical analysis. He was not formally trained as a writer -- and while he's a good writer, I'm not sure I'd call him excellent. I certainly wouldn't expect to see prose like that in a publication like The Atlantic or the NYT Magazine, or the New Yorker. He writes a solid blog post, but let's not exaggerate his talents.
No, it's about more than simply sourcing. It's about drawing conclusions in the proper manner. A chemist does not draw conclusions from data in the same way as a political columnist does, so let's not conflate things unnecessarily. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about (from good old 538):
Nate, having formal training in empirical discipline and stats understands that trying to discern out the precise cause of the Democrat's crappy position is all but impossible to do objectively or with any degree of certainty beyond "well, the economy sucks," which we know is pretty definitively linked to incumbent party performance in elections.
This doesn't stop every jerk-off commentator, columnist, pundit, and journalist from trying to weave a persuasive narrative about how the Democrats got here. You can't just sit in an armchair and reason out the way the world is; you need to examine it.
This is a notable distinction -- the empirically trained, when they can't find a distinct cause for something, profess to not-knowing. Journalists (among many other less empirical fields) when confronted with paltry empirical or objective grounds to make a conclusive decision about causality simply resort to, well, opinion. Not that opinion can't be sophisticated, well-reasoned, persuasive, compelling, sourced, and any number of other wonderful things, but at the end of the day it's still just opinion.
And frankly, I think we'd be better off with a public discourse that discounted opinion in favor of empirical fact, or that would even draw no conclusions at all if evidence were insufficient. Again, the reliance on opinion is such that even when we do have conclusive evidence (say, about how Americans feel about HCR) we have people who literally seem to just flat-out ignore (or are unaware of) the empirical evidence, because they're so wrapped up in the paradigm of making logically-valid, persuasive arguments that they forget that they're arguing about things that can simply be directly observed.
Absolutely not. You're enforcing a false dichotomy on something that is explicitly gradient.
Does anyone have any suggestions of documents?
I was just looking for the monthly employment report but, as with most government websites, the labor department's is a mess.
Many stats have similar sunshine laws you might want to familiarize yourself with if you find yourself looking for unpublished information, often. It might save you some time.
Sometimes you will have to pay a minor processing fee for niche information.
I am a freelance writer, mostly copywriting, but I've been doing some freelance journalism lately. I'm not an expert, by any stretch, but I've been doing a bit of work lately that has me fishing for government records, transcripts, and statements, as well as peer-reviewed scientific papers. Generally speaking getting information from state agencies has been painless. Tracking down some of the papers has been a bit more work, honestly, because I don't have the resources of a major metro daily newspaper. Do note, however, that Florida has some of the most progressive sunshine laws in the country, so my experiences probably aren't applicable everywhere.
The AP Style Book has some information about requesting information via FOIA and I'm sure the ACLU and Society of Professional Journalists probably has some information about it, as well.