Tuesday, March 22, 2022

"The explainers I found were bad — boring, biased, inaccessible" and if they can do it, why can't I?


This is bad, but it's bad in an instructive way for anyone who would like to understand the coverage of crypto, NYT's credulous attitude toward tech trends, bothsidesing, and the career of Kevin Roose. 
It would probably take more than 14,000 words to go through all the problems with this. I'm trying to get Joseph in on the discussion, but even between the two of us, I doubt we can do a comprehensive job of it. For tonight, the best I can do is give you a quick tweet-level view. 

[Before we go on, the phrase "the casino is a trojan horse with a new financial system hidden inside” needs to be singled out for special praise.]


[When I said "Given enough time and money, there's no question something along these general lines would work," I meant a maglev vactrain. Musk's air-caster idea was so bad that all the "hyperloop" companies quietly dropped it immediately. Not a penny of those hundreds of millions of capital raised have been spent developing Musk's actual proposal. All they kept was the name.]   

"A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality." — Norm Ornstein


Every good tech puff piece has to have a historical example of skeptics doubting some earlier revolutionary technology. These examples generally range from unrepresentative to complete bullshit. 

Here's a more thoughtful thread on this section.

Editors also love to see some hot strange bedfellows action, even if you have to fudge a few details.

Nor does the piece end on a strong note.


We have by no means mined out Roose's explainer -- everywhere you swing a pick, you're likely to hit paydirt -- and we seem to be less than halfway through the project.

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