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Alexander Kruel Profile picture
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14 Feb, 20 tweets, 7 min read
Is journalism even a real profession? What valuable skill could someone like Scott Alexander learn from studying journalism?
Some skills you learn as a journalist:

1. How to interview people.
2. Providing a helpful physical description of the people you interview: frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cr…
3. Maintaining high ethics and standards concerning discriminatory references in news based on race.
4. Avoiding sensationalism.
5. Avoiding to mislead your audience by omission: nytimes.com/2019/12/11/nyr…
6. Avoiding hyperbole and character assassination: thedailybeast.com/how-paul-krugm…

“If you use the most vile language available on a good man like Romney, or on real candidates like Rubio and Cruz, you find you have none left for the Donald Trumps of the world...”
7. Avoiding to secretively alter records in order to hide embarrassing errors. quillette.com/2020/09/19/dow…
8. Rejecting mob mentality and populism: bariweiss.com/resignation-le…

'Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.'
9. Valuing integrity and truth over ideology.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…
10. Tolerating dissenting opinions. google.com/amp/s/amp.theg…
11. Employing the principle of charity and taking into account intentions. nypost.com/2021/02/11/rea…
12. Being able to tackle controversial topics based on data rather than emotions. politico.com/news/magazine/…
13. Healthy skepticism and the ability to think independently rather than to appeal to authority.
14. Conduct impartial fact checking and peer review.

"Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, outright lied about the events, deliberately misleading his readers. In 1932, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting." tabletmag.com/sections/arts-…
15. Cultivate a culture of ideological diversity in which everyone can voice constructive criticism.
16. Build trust through respectful communication and consistency.

google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.…
17. Don't jump to (politically convenient) conclusions.

web.archive.org/web/2021021422…
18. Practice humility and don't view journalism as a fierce competition for the sovereignty of interpretation that you can only win by discrediting others.
19. Politics is the Mind-Killer: journalism dies if you hate your political opponents more than you love truth.

washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03…

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Alexander Kruel Profile picture
12 Feb
Whenever someone publicly "wastes" food for a purpose other than eating, someone else comes along and complains about it by citing "hunger in Africa".

What's your best steel man argument in support of this complaint?
For example, if I, living in Germany, was to take a bar of edible chocolate and just threw it in the garbage, how would this behavior negatively affect the food supply in poor countries like Yemen?
Some answers I got so far:

1. Wasting food will raise prices for globally traded food commodities, which will mean that those on lower incomes can afford to eat less.
Read 5 tweets
Alexander Kruel Profile picture
20 Dec 20
Expert opinion can be a starting point when one tries to figure out the truth but definitely not the last word on a topic.

Prediction markets, rationalists, and generally people with skin in the game are all better sources of truth than experts.
How to weigh expert opinion:

- Large penalty if the topic is politicized.
- Medium/large penalty if it pertains soft sciences.
- Medium penalty if the opinion seems to be in conflict with more fundamental principles.
- Small/medium penalty if it involves financial incentives.
The classic example of what I mean by being "in conflict with more fundamental principles" is the perpetual motion machine.

But it can also be more subtle like claiming that border closure won't slow down a pandemic when it obviously does in the limiting case.
Read 9 tweets
Alexander Kruel Profile picture
9 Oct 20
In late January, rationalists on Twitter were already warning about COVID-19 and stocking respirators. So why did America fail so miserably? Was it only Trump's fault? ImageImageImageImage
New York Times, January 31: "At this point, sharply curtailing air travel to and from China is more of an emotional or political reaction..." nytimes.com/2020/01/31/bus…

New York Times, September 30: (see screenshot) nytimes.com/2020/09/30/wor… Image
The Washington Post, January 31: “In disregard of WHO recommendation against travel restrictions, the US went the opposite way,” the ministry’s spokesman said in English-language messages on Twitter on Friday. “Where is its empathy?” washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020…
Read 22 tweets
Alexander Kruel Profile picture
28 Aug 20
What's the most counterintuitive fact of all of mathematics, computer science, and physics?
Here are some suggestions I received. Let's start with some of the classics:

Monty Hall problem en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hal…

Unexpected hanging paradox en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpecte…

A shape with a finite volume but an infinite surface area (Gabriel’s Horn) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel%2…
Suppose you tie a rope tightly around the Earth's equator. You add an extra 3 feet to the length. All around the Earth the rope is raised up uniformly as high as is possible to make it tight again. How high is that? puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/fortyone.htm
Read 35 tweets
Alexander Kruel Profile picture
5 Aug 20
The Beirut blast is estimated to have been equivalent to a few hundred tons of TNT. Hundreds of people are still missing and at least 300,000 are displaced. The Tsar Bomba, a Soviet hydrogen bomb, had a blast yield of 50 million tons of TNT.
LIGO [The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts
The loudest sound in the world was so loud that it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away. kottke.org/14/10/the-worl…
Read 12 tweets
Alexander Kruel Profile picture
12 Jun 20
The course of history now critically depends on whether GPT-4 and GPT-5 will show diminishing performance returns.
600 billion parameters: arxiv.org/abs/2006.16668

"We demonstrate that such a giant model can efficiently be trained on 2048 TPU v3 accelerators in 4 days to achieve far superior quality for translation from 100 languages to English compared to the prior art."
reddit.com/r/MachineLearn… Image
Read 14 tweets

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