Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- "One thing that sets a serious newspaper apart from most other institutions in our society is that we own up to our mistakes with corrections, editor's notes and other accountability devices, including the public editor's column."

Always good to start with a joke. 

Since 2014...

- Gawker, which did such a great job reporting on Stanley was killed by Peter Thiel. Thiel was then given the chance to defend himself in the NYT.

- Stanley finally left and got what was probably a huge chunk of VC money to co-found Air Mail.

- The NYT neutered the position of public editor then eliminated it entirely. 

- Things continue to get worse. 

 - But, as Marshall suggests, at least we got Pitchbot out of it.


Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The Con(firmation) Artists of the New York Times

I was gathering notes for yet another post on the sad state of fact-checking at the New York Times, this time concerning Alessandra Stanley when I came across this from then executive editor Bill Keller:
Q: The NYT is taking considerable criticism for Ms. Stanley's piece, with many folks learning about the error via the Public Editor's column.

A: Just to be clear (and I'm sure you know this) we published a fulsome correction* on July 22. Many folks may have learned about this episode from Clark's column, but many (including Clark) learned about it because we published a correction, which is also appended in perpetuity to the archived article. The evidence for what I'm about to say is purely anecdotal, but I think a lot of readers check the Corrections column with the same avidity they apply to the obits. On a good day they will come across something like our March 11 correction of a 1906 article that inaccurately cited the text of an inscription inside Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch. On a REALLY good day they may come across something like this one, from October, 2000: "An article in The Times Magazine last Sunday about Ivana Trump and her spending habits misstated the number of bras she buys. It is two dozen black, two dozen beige and two dozen white, not two thousand of each."

But I digress.

While I'm telling you what you obviously already know: One thing that sets a serious newspaper apart from most other institutions in our society is that we own up to our mistakes with corrections, editor's notes and other accountability devices, including the public editor's column. We hate getting stuff wrong and we work hard to avoid mistakes. But when we make them, we try to set the record straight.
...

Q: Specifically, some people inside the paper believe that Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic, without sufficient punishment, because she is close with Jill Abramson. Your response?

A: We love a conspiracy theory, but the truth is simple: Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic because she is -- in my opinion, among others -- a brilliant critic.
It was an almost perfect example of why I have such problems with the New York Times, arrogant, dismissive of critics. Perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated the Keller's terrible journalistic taste and judgment. I went back and looked over the Shonda Rhimes piece again to confirm my first impression of Stanley's talents. It was, if anything, worse on second reading. It read like Stanley doing a bad job impersonating Maureen Dowd doing a bad job impersonating Pauline Kael. (I am a huge fan of Kael. However, as with Bob Dylan, there are things she can do brilliantly which you probably shouldn't try.)

I also read the Cronkite piece that prompted Keller to describe Stanley as brilliant. It too was awful, consisting almost entirely of threadbare cliches ("that his outsize tenure bracketed a bygone era when America was, if not a more confident nation, certainly a more trusting one").

Thinking about the Dowd analogy as I went through the tired and badly thought-out memes of Stanley's essays, it struck me that, like David Brooks, David Carr, and her friend Dowd, Stanley was yet another of the New York Times' con(firmation) artists.

What makes a con(firmation) artist? First and foremost, of course, is the desire to confirm the beliefs and narratives held by their colleagues. All of these journalists have poor track records when it comes to factual accuracy but they largely escape the consequences of these lapses because they are saying things that other journalist believe to be true (or perhaps more accurately want to be true).

Con(firmation) artists also rely on a veneer of "new journalism" to conceal the cracks in their work. When you read the flashy prose , the big analogies, the constant editorial sides, you can almost imagine them saying "it worked in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

There are at least two major problems with this use of new journalism. The first is that the original generation of new journalists were extraordinarily hard working and were held to demanding standards by editors like Clay Felker. The second, and more important, is the fact that the original new journalists and the con(firmation) artists had opposite objectives . The goal then was to be original and unexpected. When Tom Wolfe discussed the fashions of the radical left, he came to new and surprising conclusions. When David Brooks talks about Home Shopping Network or David Carr talks about Netflix, they get their facts wrong but they reach conclusions that agree with the conventional wisdom of their peers.

This combination of pretension and pandering has given these writers extraordinary standing in their communities. It has also allowed them to do considerable damage to their professions.


* With the caveat that Keller may not know what the word 'fulsome' means, here is the correction in all of its epic glory:
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 22, 2009
An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 1, 2009
An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”
If that's not enough, Gawker and CJR have more.

 

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Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Maggie Haberman thinks we're out to get her.

Fresh Air can be really good at collaborative interviews where the subject is working with the interviewer. When the subject is being evasive or has an agenda, it doesn't work so well and this is probably truer with Davies than with Gross.

Davies certainly deserves some of the blame here. His questions are badly worded, he doesn't seem to be up on the controversy, he doesn't ask nearly enough follow-ups, and he seems content to let Haberman take the lead.

Most of the show consists of sane-washing (mainly by omission) and  bad, often self-serving news analysis. This isn't just a Haberman problem -- news analysis at the NYT is now almost entirely without insight or original thought -- but the result is pretty much a waste of time except for one exchange.

DAVIES: So let's talk about some of the criticisms of the media. I mean, I will just say, you don't have to answer for all media or even the many reporters and editors at The New York Times who are working on this campaign. But I'm interested in how you respond when people say that The Times and the media have given Trump credibility by treating things he says as if they should be taken seriously when they don't deserve that treatment, or when he gives a garbled answer about, you know, say, child care, and it's rewritten to sound clear and credible. In general, I mean, is there a point here?

First off, this is a terrible question from Davies. He leaves out most of the criticisms being leveled by journalists and press critics of the stature of Fallows, Froomkin, Sullivan, Risen, and Marshall. Then he managed to sane wash a question about sane washing, greatly understating the magnitude of the misrepresentation. It was a question almost designed to let Haberman off the hook. All she had to do was stick with "I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does." and she would have been fine but this was a hole she was determined to dig for herself.

HABERMAN: I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. There are always going to be specific stories that could have been better, should have been better, that are written on deadline, and people are not being as precise as they should be. I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don't really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly - and the media is not a monolith. It's not a league. But this industry that exists to do that - I don't see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That's been very confusing to me.

DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the attacks are clearly are partisan. I mean, Republicans and Trump supporters are going to attack.

HABERMAN: I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about...

DAVIES: Yeah, well, who is the industry you're talking about? Yeah.

HABERMAN: I'm talking about criticism on the left. I'm talking about a lot of that Trump has used the language of despots to undermine the press is very well established, and it's very dangerous. And I've talked about that. The publisher of The New York Times has been incredibly clear about that. He published an Op-Ed recently in The Washington Post actually talking about that. So I don't think that anybody is - in - at The New York Times is trying to sanitize Trump's language. Do I think that there are occasional pieces at my paper, at other papers that probably should have been done differently? That's absolutely true. And that's - but that - what happens with this industry on the left that attacks the press is that it gets described as a grand conspiracy to try to help Trump somehow, as opposed to people doing their job on daily deadlines and not always hitting the mark because we are humans. And we are doing our best under a very challenging set of circumstances. But I actually think the media has done a very good job of covering Trump.

I think that what is frustrating to those people making those claims is that there is not the result they want to see, which is Trump melts or Trump no longer has, you know popularity. I mean, you were saying - I think your question was treat him with credibility. He's the Republican nominee. So there's a substantial voting bloc in this country - almost half - that take seriously what he's saying. And it's not because The New York Times wrote a certain story. And so to not understand that, I think, is problematic for folks leveling the charge.

DAVIES: I'm going to take another break here. Our guest is Maggie Haberman, senior political correspondent for The New York Times. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

Other than some vague assertion about the criticism coming from "the left." Haberman completely ignores the question and Davies just lets it drop, which is a shame because the answer's really interesting. Here is a very incomplete list of the people and institutions that have played a prominent role in the criticism.


James Fallows
Dan Froomkin
Josh Marshall
Margaret Sullivan
James Risen
Mark Jacob
Norman Ornstein
Tom Nichols
Matthew Cooper
Bruce Bartlett
Jay Rosen
Philip Gourevitch
Kai Ryssdal
On the Media

Implicitly (called out the policies but not NYT by name)

Nicholas Kristof
Thomas Edsall
Jamelle Bouie
Justin Wolfers

(Discussed in more detail here.)

Most of these names here would be considered center-left. Some would be considered apolitical. One or two would qualify as conservative. There not a clear ideological pattern here but they do share one trait. All are highly distinguished as either journalists or press critics. Haberman knows these people and she knows they and other highly respected people in the field have grown increasingly critical of the New York Times' political coverage. It would be next to impossible for her not to know the major players and have a general sense of what's being said.

For those whose political memories go back a while, complaints about a large, powerful, yet vaguely defined "industry" that is out to get her and her colleagues at the NYT is particularly ripe. It calls to mind Hillary Clinton's comment about a vast conspiracy, something that Haberman's paper mercilessly mocked Clinton over for years despite the fact that their own reporters such as James Stewart conceded that there was a large group of powerful and extremely rich men who were working together often covertly and sometimes illegally to destroy her and her husband.

There is, however, the bigger issue. Haberman's misrepresentation of who her critics are and of the issues they raise are in lockstep with and sometimes include the exact language of the NYT editorial leadership's responses to these criticisms. Haberman is in many ways the ideal example of a New York Times reporter, a second generation star with the paper, reflecting its strengths and weaknesses, in many ways a gifted investigator, but often focused more on access than revelation and never seen deviating from the standard narrative.

The New York Times leadership (of which Haberman is a de facto member) has reached the point where they have lost the ability to truly hear outside criticism or to generate it internally. When failures are pointed out, those in charge of the paper process what should be constructive feedback much like the dog in the Far Side cartoon processed her master's scolding, with only a few familiar words registering. (First losing Margaret Sullivan then deciding to do away with the office of public editor are mistakes that haunt the paper to this day.)

Fallow's response was thoughtful and, in my opinion, went way too easy on her.

Obviously I disagree w main points here: that press has overall done very good job covering Trump, and that there is a left-wing "industry" that is "dedicated toward attacking the media," especially NYT.

But (seriously, no snark) credit to at least one prominent  NYT figure for acknowledging that there is a critique.

Next step would be engagement on some specifics people have actually been asking about:

- Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories  takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot
- Why no retrospective public discussion, at all, about coverage in 2016 (Her emails!!!!) and lessons thereof. After Iraq WMD coverage, NYT under Bill Keller did a public retrospective  ("what we got wrong") etc
- Why no public explanation of diff between coverage of HRC/Podesta Russian-hacked emails and silence on Trump  Iranian-hacked emails
- Why diff between extent / persistence of Biden "fitness to govern" cognitive overage vs Trump-cognitive issues.
- Thoughts about proportion of "guy in a diner" stories, vs "women in the suburbs" stories. And proportion of "econ is good but feels bad" stories.
- Whether there's a diff in general outlook of coverage of US politics (need for "balance") vs coverage of the rest of the range of news.
And so on

Worth considering this as a start.
Pitchbot also got roped into this discussion then stepped out of character for another response more thoughtful than it needed to be.

Lots of typos and omissions (for reasons explained at the end) but well worth a read.

(1/X) I hate doing these, but I feel like I'm being baited to do so. A few days ago Maggie H did an interview where she complained criticism of her reporting, James Fallows answered back (mentioning this account) and Jon Chait and some Reason bro took a shot at Fallows for...
(2/X) praising this account. First things first...Jon Chait and some obscure Reason bro lecturing James Fallows about journalism is ludicrous. Fallows is a legend, a five-time National Magazine Award finalist. More on this later...
(3/X) But first, Maggie admits "The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he (Trump) often does." That's exactly the point of all the criticism...
(4/X) of her and the Times' coverage of Trump. It's not built for Trump. Trump is hold to lower standards. Let's just take a couple examples. The Times played a big role in forcing Biden out of the race (which has worked out great for Dems)...
(5/X) Two or three times a week, Trump does something that is more strongly indicative of dementia than anything Biden did during that debate. Is there any move to force him out?  
...
(8/X) I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered.
(9/X). That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates..
(10/X) That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them. What I find fascinating about the discussion of this obvious fact is that you have an in crowd (Times political journalists, ppl like Chait, large account Substackers),
(11/X) Who devote themselves to denying this obvious fact and those who assert its truth. It doesn't matter if the person asserting is a no name like or a legend like James Fallows or James Risen. Doesn't matter, they deserve scorn and derision.
(12/X) There are no serious arguments, just a lot of RESPECT MUH AUTHORITY and boiler-plate evidence-free assertions. Serious people know that Trump is getting tough coverage is the thrust of it.
 ...
 (16/X) And no facts or investigation can change any of it. The Times is tough on Trump because they are tough on Trump. Don't you get it, Resistance libtard?
This may be even more incoherent and typo-ridden than usual. I wrote it while monitoring my six-year-old's Minecraft video intake. 

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Monday, September 23, 2024

All of the good titles I can think of for this post are too tasteless for this blog

I don't want to spend too much time on this – – it has already gotten far more coverage than it merits – – but while the story itself may not be that important, it has important implications. And let's be honest, it is a great deal of fun, a freshly baked and fragrant soufflé of schadenfreude involving people who richly deserve to be taken down a notch or two.

New York CNN  — 

One of America’s most acclaimed magazine writers, Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine, has been placed on leave while a “third-party review” is conducted after the publication said Nuzzi disclosed that she “had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign.”

While the magazine did not identify the subject, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that the relationship was with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who ran for president as an independent candidate and recently endorsed Donald Trump. The person said the relationship was emotional and digital in nature, not physical.

A Kennedy spokesperson told CNN, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”

The alleged relationship was first reported on Thursday night by Oliver Darcy in Status.

In a statement to CNN, Nuzzi said her relationship with a reporting subject had “turned personal” and that she regretted not disclosing it to the publication.

“Earlier this year, the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal. During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” she said. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”

In a note to readers, New York magazine said Nuzzi is “currently on leave,” and the publication is “conducting a more thorough third-party review.”

By "digital... not physical," we of course mean...

The Daily Beast has more details:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s boasting to friends that star reporter Olivia Nuzzi had sent him intimate photos was what led the scandal to explode, the Daily Beast can reveal. News of the 70-year-old’s bragging reached the ears of the 31-year-old New York magazine correspondent’s boss—who confronted her over the photos.

Nuzzi repeatedly denied an affair to David Haskell, New York’s editor-in-chief, but eventually told the truth. Nuzzi has now been suspended, and is being investigated over her journalistic ethics by an outside party.

 

And since 2024's writers tend to be a bit on the nose...


Nuzzi is a tremendously influential journalist whose work has had a huge impact, particularly in this election cycle. Looking back now over her articles, interviews, and social media, there are numerous passages that suddenly stand out in a troubling way.


(Notice that she doesn't consider the possibility that you wouldn't want to platform an anti-vaxxer not because you were worried about criticism but because that would be a bad thing to do,)

About that Trump profile. Can't choose between ethically compromised and embarrassingly pretentious? Have I got the article for you.

 Here is a mercifully small sample of the ear section (I was almost tempted to work in the verb to wax, but my better angels prevailed).:

An ear had never before been so important, so burdened. An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence as it had not been in more than half a century. Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less. Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.

When I got to "Since the bullet had launched from the barrel of an AR-15 and pierced the Pennsylvania sky," I stopped reading and started skimming. It did not get better.

Nuzzi's reputation as a journalist was always based more on her ability to get access and her knack for syncing up with the narrative of the moment than on any literary or investigative skill. Her track record for insights, even of subject she should know very well, is not good.

The other key to her success has been her ability, along with her until recently fiancé, Ryan Lizza, to navigate the world of New York/DC journalism. This leads us to the second genuinely important part of this story. It gives us a glimpse into how incestuous, insular, and dysfunctional this community is. The very fact that, even given an ethical lapse this egregious, Darcy" agonized" over reporting the story.

(Remind me to tell you my Paris Kafka moment.)

Both Nuzzi and Lizza have been caught engaging in questionable behavior before, but they could always count on their friends and colleagues to circle the wagons.

(I'm not sure how this response qualifies as thoughtful. Given the little I've seen of Smith's work in the past, particularly at the New York Times, I suspect it means a vaguely positive word useful for describing someone popular with the right people.)

This time, however, Nuzzi may have gone one nude selfie over the line. Even with a group this experienced at defending the indefensible, explaining away a conflict of interest that goes to the heart of pretty much everything she has written or commented on over the past six months will be a challenge.


Which is not to say that she won't manage a comeback. The elite national press corps has always been remarkably good at forgiving each other their sins. Jack Shafer has based most of his career on it. Even if she can't work her way back into their good graces, the worst case scenario is a lucrative sinecure in conservative media where each week she can point an accusing finger at the former colleagues who couldn't bring themselves to forgive this one final trespass.

All of which gives us leave to mock relatively guilt-free. Nuzzi, Lizza, and most of all Kennedy will not only come out of this fine, they will almost certainly come out of it better than they deserve. So go ahead and have a little fun at their expense.


Have I mentioned that Nuzzi has been at this for a long time?

From 2022





The timing was pretty sweet on this one (and yes, we will be blogging on Haberman's God-awful interview).


If Harris wins, it will be in spite of, not because of the establishment press.


And maybe my favorite.
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Friday, September 20, 2024

"If Democrats were serious about diversity and inclusion, they would want there to be more Black Nazis" UPDATED

[Added 9:41 pm] Like we said, the Harris team moves fast.

_______________________________________________

I was planning on doing an abortion post today and eventually getting around to something about the Republicans' ongoing problem with vetting that would prominently feature Mark Robinson, but long-term planning is difficult during black swan season.

Though it hasn't gotten as much attention as it did in 2022, the GOP still has a serious vetting problem, likely to cost it otherwise winnable seats and possibly have an effect up and down the ticket.









Miller and Frum are both former conservatives, which might give them some insight as to what's going on here.


Quite a few people have pushed back against the idea that Robinson is a vetting failure since so much had come out before the primary.


This is partially right. Lots of damaging stuff has come out about candidates like Robinson and Hovde after they were nominated which is a failure of vetting, but what was known about them before the primaries should have been more than enough.

Of course, the news that broke today took things to another level. CNN did the heavy lifting for this very detailed report.

(CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

It gets much worse. If that weren't enough, this also came out.


As shocking as the details in the CNN article would be in a normal election year (and keeping in mind that piece is very much the television edit of an NC-17 story), nothing that came out today was that much worse than what we already knew about Robinson. Other than confirming what we already knew, the only major new element this reporting brings is an additional level of hypocrisy to complement his extreme MAGA rhetoric and a big enough rush of specifics to finally force the mainstream press to report on what is been going on in North Carolina.

You might think that, given all the disturbing revelations that have been surfacing about Robinson on an almost weekly basis, but the man had no trouble making friends both local and national.

Don (The Harris team moves fast.) 

Sound up








Glenn

Dan

Laurie

Ron

Jody

Mike

Eric


Marjorie

Jon

Jesse

And everybody at the RNC



Obviously, no one knows the political implications, but it seems likely that they won't favor the Republicans.

And a great deal of fun is being had by the usual suspects.







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Thursday, September 19, 2024

Two Trumps -- a side by side comparison

Take a minute to watch this clip. It's well worth your time.

 CNN deserves tremendous for making a point this important this powerfully.

A big part of the story behind Trump's catastrophic performance is how badly the press underestimated Kamala Harris (a topic we've discussed before and will be getting back to), but the bigger part is how Trump has changed. The man has been in a lot of debates over the past nine years and a lot of rivals have tried to throw him off his game. We can debate how many of those debates he won, but we never saw anything like the implosion of last week. 

Marco Rubio is an interesting point of comparison. Probably the most dramatic take-down of any of the 2016 election was when Chris Christie destroyed Rubio with one exchange (a blow so devastating that Trump congratulated him after the debate). Lots of people, including Christie, went after Trump, but no one ever scored that kind of point against him. 

 It is possible that Harris is the best debater Trump has faced. She's very good, particularly when a prosecutorial approach is called for (I first started thinking about Harris as a potential candidate during the Kavanaugh hearings specifically because of how a debate might play out), but I don't think she could have been nearly as effective against the Trump on the left.

We've all aged in the past nine years, but most of us haven't almost died of covid and survived an assassination attempt. Most of us aren't approaching eighty and very few of us are looking at the possibility of spending the rest of our lives in prison. All of these things have clearly taken and continue to take, their toll. 

For reason's too complicated to go into here, Trump's decline has never gotten the attention that Biden's did, but the signs have been there for a long time, and given that Biden is steady-tempered and surrounded by highly responsible and competent people, his decline was less of a concern. Trump is erratic, prone to rage, and surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and extremists. The fact the press paid less attention to his cognitive decline under those circumstances is indefensible.


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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

This week in tech messiah news


Serious "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" vibes here.




Whenever Thiel comes up in a political discussion, I am contractually required to mention this. [Emphasis added.]

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.


I would never speak for American women, but I suspect they'll deal fairly well with Musk fanboys leaving them alone.



As the saying goes, you dance with them whut brung ya.



Variety proves more details here.








There's always a skeptic.

This is quite a thread.


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Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- level 5 autonomy had been just around the corner for about three years

It's interesting what pops out at you ten or so years and look at what we were all talking about. The thing that stands out for me here is how optimistic everyone was (including us pessimists) that autonomous vehicles were about to revolutionize transportation.

This is a 2014 post that quotes heavily from another three years earlier referring to a public discussion that had been going on for years even then. 

Let's say we take this as our Kitty Hawk moment:

In 1995 Navlab 5 completed the first autonomous US coast-to-coast journey. Traveling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and San Diego, California, 98.2% of the trip was autonomous. It completed the trip at an average speed of 63.8 mph (102.7 km/h).

We could have a big and not particularly productive discussion over whether or not the comparison is fair from a technological standpoint, but in terms of public perception, this certainly looked like the problem was well on its way to being solved, arguably more so than powered flight seemed when the Wright brothers flew a few hundred yards in North Carolina.

1995 would put us almost 30 years past the breakthrough. It took airplanes about a dozen years to have a substantial impact on warfare and travel. Less than twenty for the first transatlantic flight. Eight years later Charles Lindbergh was taking a longer route and doing it solo. 30 years after the Wright brothers' first successful flight, airplanes really had changed the world. 

By comparison, technology that was supposed to be just around the corner thirteen or so years ago is generally still a novelty and is still years away from the kind of functionality and reliability needed to make a major impact. This is not because of onerous regulations, but because true full autonomy has proven to be an enormously difficult problem to solve (which smart engineers have been saying all along).

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Driverless Cars and Uneasy Riders



I had forgotten we've been having this discussion for over three years.

Tyler Cowen has a piece in the New York Times on how regulation inhibits innovation in transportation using the example of driverless cars. I'm not sure he's made his general case (that's the subject for an upcoming post), but his specific case is particularly problematic.

In case you haven't been following this story, Google has been getting a lot of press for its experiments with self-driving cars, especially after statements like this from Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun:
"Think about the car as a medium of mass transit: So, what if our highway-train of the future meant you go on the highway, and there's a train of very close-driving cars with very low wind drag, fantastic capacity, is twice as efficient as possible as today, and so there is no congestion anymore?"
Cowen is clearly thinking along the same lines:
Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers. And if you worry about the environmental consequences of packing our roads with cars, since we can’t do without them entirely, we still can make those we use as efficient — and as green — as possible.
Putting aside the question of the magnitude of these savings in time, road capacity and fuel effeiciency (which, given the level of technology we're talking about here, aren't that great), where exactly are these savings coming from?

Some can certainly be attributed to more optimal decision-making and near instantaneous reaction time, but that's not where the real pay-off is. To get the big savings, you need communication and cooperation. Your ideal driving strategy needs to take into account the destination, capabilities and strategies of all the vehicles around you. Every car on the road has got be talking with every other car on the road, all using the same language and rules of the road, to get anything near optimal results.

Throw just one vehicle that's not communicating (either because it has a human driver or because its communication system is down or is incompatible) into the mix and suddenly every other vehicle nearby will have to allow for unexpected acceleration and lane changes. Will driverless cars be able to deal with the challenge? Sure, but they will not be able to able to do it while achieving the results Thrun describes.

A large number of driverless cars might improve speed and congestion slightly, but getting to the packed, efficient roads that Cowen mentions would mean draconian regulations requiring highly specific attributes for all vehicles driving on a major freeway. The manufacture and modification of vehicles would have to be tightly controlled. Motorcycles would almost certainly have to be banned from major roads. Severe limits would have to be put on when a car or truck could be driven manually.
Based on the conversation that followed that post (check out the comment section), I should probably add that much of the benefit described by Thrun and Cowen could achieved by making special lanes and sections of road driverless-only. One the whole though, I stand by the point that much of what we've been promised (speed, fuel efficiency, road capacity) require an all driverless group of cars working together.

One point I made in passing could probably use more elaboration. Motorcycles are small, accident prone vehicles. They can accelerate very quickly, they often behave erratically, and they tend to function under a somewhat looser set of traffic laws. Their small size and low cost make them more difficult to regulate. And finally, as far as I can tell, there is no serious plan to introduce fully autonomous versions. If you want to get close to the level of performance Thrun promises, you do not want motorcycles on the road.

It's hard to see this not becoming a typical convenience-of-the-many argument for regulation. As autonomous vehicles become more common, it is pretty much inevitable that, while overall accidents and traffic jams will go down, those that still occur will be disproportionately caused by vehicles that don't lend themselves to autonomous control or those which routinely have to do things that are difficult to explain to a computer. The first group would include motorcycles and classic/antique cars. The second would include real pick-ups* or SUVs that actually leave the pavement. I would hate to see those vehicles forced off most major roads but that would seem to be the likely outcome.

* Those that do real work. Us country boys take this seriously.

 

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