Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I think you're ignoring the real problem.
There are steps we could take to make this statement less true or eventually, untrue.  It doesn't have to be a given. 

That clickbait headline isn’t remotely close to being true. We aren’t social distancing and sheltering in place until 2022. Never happen in a billion years.

On Tuesday, General Motors revealed that its first ventilators are ready for delivery. The automaker has a contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services to license-build 30,000 Ventec Life Systems V+ Pro critical care ventilators, following criticism by President Donald Trump in March when he accused the company of "wasting time." These ventilators are designed to treat the most critically ill patients, who need invasive intubation (tubes inserted into the lungs) as opposed to non-invasive machines like CPAP or BiPAP devices, which are also often referred to as ventilators.

GM says that it will ship the first 600 ventilators by the end of April, with "almost half the order" ready by the end of June and the full 30,000 by the end of August.


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hopefully, these won't be needed

makes me wonder where the first 600 are going - I haven't heard there is a critical shortage this week

https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9

https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak-and-cover-up-ee65211a-afb6-4641-97b8-353718a5faab.html

None. As I said in a different debate recently... Whenever possible, try to go beyond the headline, beyond the article, and to get as close to the original source as possible.

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How many journalists who are trying to rush a story to print have time to read a 40-page legal opinion, truly digest and understand the nuance, and accurately get that to print, not just a 400 word outrage piece about how the decision is going to destroy America? Even more important, how many of their readers actually want nuance and accuracy over sensationalism?

They're playing to their audience. The American People. Who are an easily-led, barely-thinking mob that don't have time for nuance or accuracy, and just want to receive enough information to make themselves believe that they're informed. And usually do so only in the most confirmation-bias enhancing way, only taking information from the sources they already agree with completely uncritically and dismissing any opposing source as flawed.

So what does the MSM do? They craft "a tale told by an idiot [reporter], full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing."


In short, my ire for the entire profession of journalism is to find a journalist who has deep expertise in what they're writing about is usually impossible. Technology writers rarely come from an engineering or even a technical marketing background where they had to work in their subject matter every day. Legal journalists rarely have law degrees; if they did they'd make more money practicing law. Medical journalists rarely have medical degrees; if they did they'd make more money practicing medicine.

Often they're non-experts trying to cover a subject with incredible depth and nuance and get it across to a reader [also a non-expert] in a very limited format, and their paycheck isn't driven by accuracy; it's driven by circulation [or in the modern world, advertising/clicks]. And who's going to make sure they're accurate? Their editor? Not at all--he's just as much a non-expert as everyone else in the chain.

So there's no real inherent check and balance to ensure accuracy. So there's no real reason to believe that the accuracy is very good; hence going to original sources whenever possible.

I've brought up this quote by Michael Crichton regarding he and physicist Murray Gell-Mann before, summarizing what he calls the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect":

I've seen this over and over in my own industry, data storage. I see people who earn their living writing ONLY about data storage making completely wrong arguments, completely misinterpreting data, and drawing completely wrong conclusions thereby.

Not all of them. There are good ones and bad ones, and anyone IN the industry can tell the difference. For the lay people outside our industry? They don't know which ones are talking sense and which ones are full of it.

So when I read a subject in which I have no inherent expertise, how can I tell which journalists are accurate and which ones are full of it? Only by going to original sources and trying to determine if the journalist is accurately relaying what was in the original source. MANY, MANY, MANY times I find that they've completely missed the point and relayed it badly--if they ever read it at all.