Hacker Cinema
Meet John Doe
1941 · Film · 123 min
Directed by Frank Capra
As a parting shot, fired reporter Ann Mitchell prints a fake letter from unemployed "John Doe," who threatens suicide in protest of social ills. The paper is forced to rehire Ann and hires John Willoughby to impersonate "Doe." Ann and her bosses cynically milk the story for all it's worth, until the made-up "John Doe" philosophy starts a whole political movement.
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3 comments on Hacker News
> which one do you think leads to a healthier media environment
Hmm, apparently the answer depends!!!
What I believe is "healthier", e.g., for (1) my being informed or (2) click-bait headlines, eyeballs, ad revenue????
But, now, for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
there is a possibility, that is, from some changes from the Internet:
First, the basic ideas of click-bait, etc. go way back in the history of many decades of journalism publishers. They needed a lot of revenue: Printing plants, trucks to deliver literally tons of news print or magazines, ..., radio and TV studios, etc. were expensive. The number of publishers was constrained: Each major city had just two main newspapers, morning and evening. There were a few national magazines. Then, the number of large radio stations, TV stations, were similarly limited. Un, click-bait that works in one major city stands to work everywhere which creates the constraints on the number of national click-bait publishers.
> easily digestible value judgment and tell you how you should think
Well put. For the big publishers, that is what dominated.
For a good review and explanation going way back, see the ~1941 movie Meet John Doe.
Second, now the decades, 100+ years, of such journalism is also being attempted on the Web sites of the Internet -- thus, your well put objection.
BUT ...!!!! For an audience and a publisher for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
they no longer need be so expensive. A single tower case computer can send, what, 100+ Web pages a second?
Sooo, now the mass audience can have subsets.
Some simple arithmetic:
Assume 1 ad per Web page sent, revenue of $1 per 1000 ads displayed, sending a 24 x 7 average of 50 Web pages a second. Assume pre-tax earnings are 50% of revenue.
Then annual earnings would be
50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 572,400
dollars.
Assume the business is worth 100 times annual earnings, and get
100 * 50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 57,240,000
dollars.
A possibility for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
is the economy: A lot of data is available. Could present it in largely some simple X-Y graphs can do routinely with, say, Excel in Microsoft's Office.
Another possibility: For COVID, start with the crucial data in the report of the Phase III trials in
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389
COVID and medicine more generally are good subjects for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
Follow, say, common high school standards for term papers, e.g., careful references, hopefully to credible primary sources.
Get an audience that values credibility.
Then get a brand, a growing audience, and a successful business.
Hmm, yup, I have a related startup -- Web site code running as intended. Should go live this year.
Okay, mostly we agree:
When it is late summer in the northern hemisphere, e.g., August, it is late winter in the southern hemisphere and Antarctica with some months of low sunlight. Indeed, winter in Antarctica can mean some days of 24 hours with no sunlight. So, with no sunlight we don't get the reaction
3O2 --> 2O3
that makes ozone but do continue the reaction
2O3 --> 3O2
that sees unstable ozone convert back to oxygen. Similarly for low sunlight. Soooo, we get an "ozone hole". We agree -- no surprise.
But in this case, in this Hacker News thread, the main issue was the effects of CFCs (Chlorofluorocarbons). As I recall, some laboratory studies showed that CFCs can speed up the reaction
2O3 --> 3O2
that destroys ozone. Maybe my memory is correct that there was a Nobel prize for that result.
Sooo, okay, CFCs contribute to ozone holes.
Then a question is, how much? How much do CFCs contribute to ozone holes? I.e., 1 kilogram of some CFC destroys how many additional kilograms of ozone per day causing how many additional Watts of UV (ultraviolet) light hitting the ground? And what is the increase in percent?
Uh, and maybe what is the stochastic process of ozone concentration considering solar flairs, sun spots, the standard 11 year cycle of sun spots with or without CFCs?
I remember ozone -- it has a distinctive odor. As a child I had an electric train, and sparks from its electric motor generated some ozone, enough to smell. But the ozone didn't last very long, e.g., was gone within a few minutes, certainly in less than an hour, of stopping the toy electric train. Uh, I just looked it up:
Google search
"half life of ozone in air"
yielded
"Under normal conditions, the half-life of ozone indoors is between 7 and 10 min and is determined primarily by surface removal and air exchange. ..."
Point: Ozone is unstable and doesn't last very long. So, I can believe that with 24 hours a day of low or no sunlight over Antarctica, the ozone doesn't last very long, with or without CFCs.
Uh, but with low sunlight, there is little UV to cause skin cancer, whatever the ozone concentration!
So, to get concerned about CFCs and an ozone hole in August (late winter after some months of low or no sunlight) over Antarctica, I would want a good actual scientific answer to the question of how much?
For the media, much of the media I don't like. I've had decades where I concluded their content is usually (a) without credibility and (b) deliberately deceptive.
While I like entertainment, mostly what I want from the media is credible, relevant content. The deliberately deceptive parts I won't accept or excuse.
Maybe you suspected that I am angry with much of the media -- that would be correct.
I know something about writing credible content: I hold a Ph.D. in applied math from a world famous research university, have published peer reviewed papers of original research in applied math, statistics, and artificial intelligence, have taught at Indiana University, Ohio State University, Georgetown University, while at IBM's Research division gave talks at Stanford, Wharton, etc. The paper in applied math was on the Kuhn-Tucker conditions but also solved a problem stated but not solved in a paper by Arrow, Hurwicz, and Uzawa -- Arrow won his Nobel prize in economics long before and Hurwicz won his more recently and separately.
An analysis is that the media wants to make money and to do this pursues some old techniques of journalism that involve fooling people, grabbing them emotionally by the heart, the gut, and below the belt. Such journalism is not nearly new: E.g., there is a movie from ~1941 Meet John Doe about a newspaper getting several months of twice as much circulation from a continuing but fake story about a John Doe committing suicide. Of course the reason there could be a movie about fake news is that the movie audience knew enough about journalism to accept that fake news was common. There was also yellow journalism. And tabloids. Etc.
Of course, the technique of getting attention, power, and money by scaring people with threats from evil is much older even than fake, deceptive journalism, goes back 2000+ years -- apparently it's part of human nature and society, but we can try to fight it with good judgment, science, insisting on credible content, and rejecting fake content.
So, people who want to create political movements and, thus, get money and power have natural colleagues in fake journalism.
And, indeed and specifically, for CFCs, there was a movement with the media and politics: Due to the media touting threats to ozone, CFCs were actually outlawed.
So, when I look at claims of threats of CFCs causing a worse ozone hole I see two possibilities: (1) As loudly claimed by some of journalism, CFCs make the ozone hole significantly worse and, thus, contribute significantly to skin cancer in the southern hemisphere. (2) We have no good scientific evidence that CFCs contribute significantly to either ozone holes or skin cancer, and the claims of threats are fake journalism trying to make money by grabbing people emotionally by the gut.
Between (1) and (2), I select (2).
> so it strongly recommends posts that are low on quality but high on emotion.
Yup.
In the 1930s movie "Meet John Doe", see how a newspaper can try to increase circulation by (a) publishing something, a continuing narrative, emotional (in the movie, a poor person frustrated with the economy and politics and writing a FAKE letter to the newspaper on their decision to commit suicide), (b) creating controversy, (c) encouraging arguments to start, should he or should he not, etc.
The continuing narrative idea was to encourage the controversy to run for some months. The idea of such a narrative was formulated by E. Bernays, as I recall, also in the 1930s. Later Bernays was an ad executive in the US.
Sooo, an old, 1930s or before, idea to create strong emotions, headaches, stomach aches, upchucks, anger, frustration, stress, depression, various individual psychological problems, various political and societal problems, was for the media to create long running, continuing controversy.
Net, whenever start to feel emotions from what see in the media, guess that 90+% of the time you have just been fooled, manipulated, exploited, jerked around by the media looking for eyeballs for ad revenue.
Recall the old characterization of media values, "If it bleeds, it leads."
My old description has been the media just wants to grab you, by the heart, the gut, below the belt, always below the shoulders, never between the ears.
Objective, credible, important information? Nearly never. Brainless, groundless, manipulative emotionalism? Nearly always.
Sooo, I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise the MSM (mainstream media) -- they want to deceive me, steal my time and energy. So, for some years, I've flatly refused to pay any attention to the MSM.
Solution for the MSM and the old techniques of journalism? Easy. People just ignore the MSM. That will cut off their supply of eyeballs and ad revenue and they will go out of business.
I posted more at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33417798