The Media Very Rarely Lies
Article
The Media Very Rarely Lies is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between December 29, 2022 and January 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies”; “In The Media Very Rarely Lies , I argued that a graph showing an apparent COVID-vaccine-related spike in miscarriages”; “and The Media Very Rarely Lies”. It most often appears alongside New York Times, DogeCoin, 2023 Prediction Contest.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: December 29, 2022
- Last seen: January 08, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- New York Times (2 shared issues)
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- DogeCoin (1 shared issues)
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- 2023 Prediction Contest (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri (1 shared issues)
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- Adobe Illustrator (1 shared issues)
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- Ahmed Chalabi (1 shared issues)
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- Albion’s Seed (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Jones (1 shared issues)
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- Alex Tabarrok (1 shared issues)
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- ALS (1 shared issues)
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- American intelligence officials (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.
Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies. I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context. This is true of establishment media like the New York Times, but also of fringe media like Infowars. All of the “misinformation” out there about COVID, voter fraud, conspiracies, whatever - is mostly people saying true facts in out-of-context misleading ways.
Inline links: The Media Very Rarely Lies
3: In The Media Very Rarely Lies, I argued that a graph showing an apparent COVID-vaccine-related spike in miscarriages was probably just an artifact. I think the overall story I cited there was mostly right but I got some of the details wrong; I endorse this comment by Bob English. And here is another helpful comment making the (I agree) true point that we can’t entirely rule out a real effect but have to partly go off priors (while also giving some reasons why we should have a prior for low harm here).
Priesthoods make things up differently from normal people. Even when they’re corrupt, they still have a reputation to maintain. I’ve written about this before at Bounded Distrust and The Media Very Rarely Lies. Because priests are so focused on their reputation, even their mistruths follow certain ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest who lies to support a political cause will repeat some un-fact-checked lurid anecdote, or some utterly idiotic misinterpretation of garbled data. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant. They’ll publish a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then bury something in the footnotes which reveals that it’s irrelevant to any of the real world situations that people would expect it to be relevant to.
Inline links: Bounded Distrust, The Media Very Rarely Lies