Bloomberg, and many media outlets, use unqualified or questionably qualified “reporters” to cover complex topics in science and engineering. Such reporters learned what they know from media and interviewing others, who talk to the press as part of their own evangelism. This is not how the media should be doing reporting.
Youtube censors, probably sitting in a dense urban office building, censored a child’s video of her family’s farm in Canada, saying it presented a child engaged in dangerous activity.
Does it make sense for most reporters to report on technical subjects about which they have no specific training?
Why does everyone lie? Because it is effective and easy to get away with it, even when prominent people and organizations tell obvious grand lies. We have been trained not to question, not to think critically, and not to think for ourselves. Thinking for yourself is double-bad wrong think and should be punished.
If forests are not renewable, then nothing is renewable. This makes no sense. Source: Greta Thunberg on Twitter: “Climate strike week 233. #FridaysForFuture #ClimateStrike #ForestsAreNotRenewable https://t.co/IZN857fdjy” / Twitter
Another social media poster, this one about Tesla, makes the rounds and most of it is misleading or wrong.
In 1977, the US decided to classify people by race. We decided the world was made up of 4 “races” and 1 “ethnicity”. An indigenous heritage person in North America is “Native American”, but an indigenous person in South America is …. Hispanic. People in Korea, Japan, Singapore, Pakistan, India and more are “Asian” “race”, which makes no sense. And many people are of mixed racial heritage (including my family) – but oddly, even if only a tiny part of the heritage is an ethnic group, it is legal to declare yourself part of that group. As the interviewed professor notes, it is now possible for a majority of the U.S. population to qualify as a “minority owned business”. That’s funny when a majority can qualify as a minority 🙂 It is a big mess that was news to me as I had not thought about these issues before.
The AI – e.g. ChatGPT – may become the “appeal to authority” argument source within another year or so. Disagree with someone or something? Just quote them what The AI says – that will be seen as the authority. And those who control The AI will control the world.
The media loves the term “bomb cyclone”, a technical term from meteorology that sounds super scary. Most of the public has no idea what it means, and even with the official definition, it still is mostly meaningless to the public. But it sounds scary. And that’s the main point.
“60 Minutes” brings back Paul Ehrlich to make more scary fear-based predictions of the future. He’s been wrong about everything for more than 50 years – so why does the media do this nonsense?