Originally Posted by memento
The amount of data you collect is awesome. I’m a data guy but it’s so much easier to not collect data.
Data collection can be an end in itself. I think I mentioned that before I started doing it. On the bright side, maybe someday I’ll lose interest.
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* Trump was talking about this for coronavirus when the press accused him of telling people to chug bleach.
Back when “online services” were a thing (not AOL!) I had sold some writing, got an invitation to a closed writer’s group, and by association was a member of a closed journalist’s group. Famous names from NBC and CBS, the Washington Post and New York Times, Reuters and Associated Press, etc. I only looked in occasionally, not being particularly interested in their chatter.
Then one day one of them bragged about an article she’d written about an American politician, saying he’d mutilated a sentence and talked like a country bumpkin. Someone asked where and when it happened, probably so they could do their own take on it, and she admitted she’d made it up. Nobody seemed to see any problem with that. When the story “went viral” on the wire, others came up with their own versions, which were duly published. Eventually even “Saturday Night Live” did a skit based on it.
Oh. So that’s how “news” is made. And they were slapping each other on the back and high-fiving (well, as much as they could in 80x25 text mode) over their cleverness. Seeing how corrupt “journalistic integrity” was even forty years ago, let’s say I haven’t placed a lot of faith in the mass media since.