Fox News
Article
Fox News is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 12, 2021 and April 09, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “anyone familiar with Fox News, YouTube, Twitter, or the federal government”; “as our hypothetical liberal and FOX News”; “in an interview with FOX News said”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, United States, S14.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 12, 2021
- Last seen: April 09, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- S14 (1 shared issues)
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- 2009 flu pandemic (1 shared issues)
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- 2013-16 West African Ebola outbreak (1 shared issues)
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- 2017 presidential election (1 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- Abdullah Abdul (1 shared issues)
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- Abraham Lincoln (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adam larson (1 shared issues)
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- Alexandre Hassanin (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
He concludes that "liberals win because they care about politics more". This may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Fox News, YouTube, Twitter, or the federal government, but he has lots of data in support (and note that Hanania himself is conservative, so this isn't a cheap attack). Liberals donate more, even though both sides control about equal pools of money. Liberal protests attract orders of magnitude more protests than conservative ones. Liberals express more willingness to shun people for being conservative than vice versa. And liberals are more willing to take low-paying (but important-for-gaining-power) activist jobs. He writes:
Suppose you're a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News. One day you're at the airport, waiting for a plane, ambiently watching the TV at the gate. It's FOX News, and they're saying that a mass shooter just shot twenty people in Yankee Stadium. There’s live footage from the stadium with lots of people running and screaming.
I'm a liberal who doesn't trust FOX News, and sure, I believe it. The level on which FOX News is bad isn't the level where they invent mass shootings that never happened. They wouldn't use deepfakes or staged actors to fake something and then call it "live footage". That would go way beyond anything FOX had done before. Liberals might say things like "You can't trust FOX News on anything, they are 100% total liars", but realistically we still trust them quite a lot on stuff like this.
A conservative might end up in the same position vis-a-vis the Washington Post as our hypothetical liberal and FOX News. They know it’s a biased source that often lies to them, but how often?
In an interview with the Daily Mail on 3/4/20, he said that his kitten died, after a two-day illness, on the ninth day of him (Connor) having COVID. He said “I don’t know whether it had what I’ve got, or whether cats can even get human flu” (speaking as if it was him in the past, who thought he had flu because he hadn’t heard of COVID yet). This is a weird inconsistency! In the Wales interview, the cat got it before him (at least that’s how I interpret “I don’t think I caught it from her”). In the Mail interview, he got it nine days before the cat. In The Wales interview, it’s “the feline coronavirus”. In the Mail interview, he doesn’t know what the cat got and speculates that it might have been COVID. But also, if it was “the feline coronavirus”, how would he know? Wouldn’t you need a vet to diagnose that? But in the Mail interview, he said he didn’t leave the house for a week around the time his cat was sick. So how did he go to the vet? It gets worse. In the Mail interview, he gave a day-by-day account of his sickness. On Day 12, he goes to Zhongnan University Hospital. He says: As soon as I get there, a doctor diagnoses pneumonia. So that’s why my lungs are making that noise. I am sent for a battery of tests lasting six hours. And then says that he went home either that day, or the next. Day 13: I arrived back at my apartment late yesterday evening. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for the pneumonia but I’m reluctant to take them But in an interview with FOX News said: He said he went to the hospital after he struggled to breathe and experienced a bad cough, both of which are signs of the pneumonia-like illness. "I was stunned when the doctors told me I was suffering from the virus. I thought I was going to die but I managed to beat it,” he told the outlet, adding he was hospitalized at Zhongnan University Hospital for two weeks following his diagnosis. In his earlier story, he was at the hospital for less than a day. Now it’s two weeks. But also, the doctors “told [him he] was suffering from the virus”, but this is impossible - the virus hadn’t been discovered yet. The whole point of Saar bringing him up is that he’s a supposed anomalous case before the official pandemic. So how did the doctors tell him this? In the Mail interview, he tells a different story of how he learned he’d had COVID: Day 52: A notification from the hospital informs me that I was infected with the Wuhan coronavirus. I suppose I should be pleased that I can’t catch it again — I’m immune now. Day 52 would be January 11th. So I think he’s saying that, a month after he recovered, the hospital “informs” him it was coronavirus. Charitably, maybe they kept his samples (really?), then re-tested them after COVID was discovered, found he had it, and told him. But, at a time when the eyes of the world medical establishment were fixated on Wuhan and its new pandemic, didn’t they think to tell anybody that they’d confirmed a case two weeks before any other known cases? Just called Connor and said “Hey, you’re the first ever COVID patient, congrats” and did absolutely nothing else? And then he didn’t show up in any of those WHO searches for early cases? There’s one more weird inconsistency. Connor said in his interview that he thinks he might have gotten COVID at “the fish market”: Maybe I caught the coronavirus at the fish market. It’s a great place to get food on a budget, a part of the real Wuhan that ordinary Chinese people use every day, and I regularly do my shopping there. Since the outbreak became international news, I’ve seen hysterical reports (especially in the U.S. media) that exotic meats such as bat and even koala are on sale at the fish market. I’ve never seen that. This sounds to me like a reference to the Huanan Seafood Central Market, ie the wet market with the raccoon-dogs where the first confirmed cases were found. He says “the fish market” like he expects us to know which one he means, and adds that “since the outbreak became international news”, he’d seen “hysterical reports” in US media about it. US media was covering the Huanan Market because that’s where the pandemic was first found; it didn’t cover any other fish market in Wuhan. During the debate, Saar objected that Connor lived on the opposite side of Wuhan from the wet market; it would have taken him about an hour to get there. It would be weird to “regularly” do your shopping somewhere an hour away. Saar speculated that Connor meant somewhere closer to his home. I can’t deny that it’s weird to do your regular shopping at a market an hour away, but it really sounds like he’s referring to the wet market where all the cases started here. But also, isn’t it weird that the first ever coronavirus case is a white person? And that he’s 25 years old, yet was hospitalized with COVID (about 1% of people in their 20s with COVID require hospitalization)? I think the best explanation for all of this is that Connor was making this all up. He told whatever story sounded cool at the time, and all of his stories ended up contradicting each other or making no sense. This would also explain why he said he had COVID at a time when, by the standard narrative, it either didn’t exist yet or was confined to a single-digit number of people. 1.11: Rootclaim Response Saar and Rootclaim wrote a response to my earlier post. You can read it at COVID origins debate: response to Scott Alexander. I’ll post the introduction and first summary, you can go to the link for the rest of the case, and I’ll respond to parts I disagree with below. We were initially excited to have Scott cover the story, hoping that someone with an affinity to probabilities would like to dig into our analysis and fully understand it. Sadly, Scott seemingly hadn’t enough time to do so and our exchange focused on fixing factual mistakes in earlier drafts of his post and explaining why rules-of-thumb in probabilistic thinking that he proposed do not work in practice. We did not get to discuss the details of our analysis, resulting in a post that is essentially a repeat of the judges’ reports with extra steps. His post has two main messages: It’s hard to get probabilistic inference right – we fully agree with this and ironically his post is a great example, containing many probabilistic inference mistakes, some of which are listed below. While we agree it’s hard, our experience taught us that it is far from impossible.