Short Takes: May 18th, 2021
The NYT bows to Biden, the NYT drags Biden, and everyone makes the same mistake when explaining Bitcoin's energy consumption.
Something a bit different today. Instead of one big story, a rundown of smaller ones. Going forward I’ll be mixing these in alongside the longer-form posts. Probably not daily. But hopefully at least two days a week.
If any story elicits enough interest or questions, I can invest into a fuller version after. So please do be vocal — about this and the format in general.
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I.
I always chuckle when people use their Twitter bio character count to say “views are my own”. Of course they are! It’s an odd caveat when you think about it. It has no legal force, and the only time it really aids clarity is when you work as a spokesperson.
Like say you worked for Team Biden and you clarified “personal account, tweets are my own and not reflective of anything official”, yes, sure, that would be useful.
Except when tweets from that account go on to say:
So the unofficial account isn’t speaking for the government except when it is, and when it is then those tweets can be reprinted uncritically by the New York Times.
Sure, right, makes sense.
But all that aside, I want to talk about two of those tweets:
So the context here is that India was (and is) having the worst COVID crisis of any country to date, and had asked the US for help in the form of allowing the export of certain vaccine production elements, where the debate around that request became whether the US greenlighting said exports was akin to lifting a ban. Manning’s argument is that there is/was no ban — only the ramifications of the Defense Production Act which instructs US-located suppliers to fill domestic orders first.
Of course this is a trifling distinction. If I tell a widget producer “you can’t prioritize foreign orders no matter what they offer you or how severe their need is until you fill our capacity-draining domestic orders first”, you’ve issued a “de facto ban” on that company’s exports, else those words don’t mean anything.
(The steelman version of Manning’s take is that the US is only monopolizing most of the supply, and that said producers are free to export the remainders wherever and however they want. But this quickly becomes a semantics game. If I want to send 10 widgets and you restrict me to just 2, those other 8 are subject to a ban.)
Political folks love to spin. This is why journalists need to stand firm on “we’ll print your quote if you insist, but we’re also gonna contextualize it and show how thin it is”. The NYT didn’t, while The Economist did (on Twitter too).
Even worse though, the NYT somehow let themselves get bullied into making a sad correction where they replaced “lifted a ban” with “removed impediments” as if that was somehow a distinction that made a difference here.
(Also note that said correction, meaningless as it was, was slotted after the further reading recommendation carousel. That’s a bad place for corrections!)
II.
But lest we fear that the NYT is wholly deferential to the Biden administration, The Gray Lady “balances” itself with headlines/ledes like:
“Short fuse”! “To a fault”! “Demands”! Sounds spicy!
But then you read the article and the actual charges are stuff like…
Quick decision-making is not Mr. Biden’s style. His reputation as a plain-speaking politician hides a more complicated truth. Before making up his mind, the president demands hours of detail-laden debate from scores of policy experts, taking everyone around him on what some in the West Wing refer to as his Socratic “journey” before arriving at a conclusion.
Those trips are often difficult for his advisers, who are peppered with sometimes obscure questions. Avoiding Mr. Biden’s ire during one of his decision-making seminars means not only going beyond the vague talking points that he will reject, but also steering clear of responses laced with acronyms or too much policy minutiae, which will prompt an outburst of frustration, often laced with profanity.
(As an aside, Orwell once wrote about how writers can become “almost indifferent as to whether [their] words mean anything”, and how this afflicts political writers most of all. How is “plain-speaking” diametrical to an interest in detail? And how is it that he’s demanding “detail-laden debate” around “sometimes obscure questions” yet also scolding advisers for “minutiae”? Did anyone read this copy before it went out?)
Anyway, it continues:
But several people familiar with the president’s decision-making style said Mr. Biden was quick to cut off conversations. Three people who work closely with him said he even occasionally hangs up the phone on someone who he thinks is wasting his time. Most described Mr. Biden as having little patience for advisers who cannot field his many questions.
“You become so hyperprepared,” said Dylan Loewe, a former speechwriter for Mr. Biden. “‘I’ve got to answer every conceivable question he can come up with.’”
Setting aside yet another unexplained inconsistency (is he forcing conversations to be too long or cutting them off too short?), how are any of these actual criticisms???
If someone is coming to the President of the United States with half-considered jargon-y nonsense and he says “quit your bullshit Steve and just answer my fucking question”, not only is this acceptable, it’s winsome (and both managerially and morally correct).
The seat of global executive power should not be a place where grandpa has to be relentlessly available and folksy to every caller independent of how much they’re wasting his time. To suggest otherwise is civically insane. While I don’t have the strongest possible feelings about Biden, this article makes him sound great!
The NYT is a strange place. The closer I read their content, the more chaotic it seems. It’s like they contain multitudes, but those various personalities are all off breaking journalistic rules in competing directions and hoping it all averages out.
III.
I’ll be posting part two of my “gold standards under the microscope” series tomorrow [1, 2]. The impulse behind that series was my sense that lots of people naively assume that the shortcomings of modern journalism are narrow to some problemed set of newspapers and not just the entire industry based on universal dynamics.
That said, I don’t want to overstate that case to the point where I collapse the difference between Fox News and the NYT, or between the NYT and ProPublica. Even if the best isn’t great, there’s still a hierarchy of quality that’s meaningful.
One outlet that I think deserves a place on the top rung is The Economist. Indeed they’re the one paper I’d never caught making a major mistake (which is both true and a bit cheating as I don’t read their coverage super often).
Well, I regret to say that run is over. I happened to read this on Monday:
…in the week ending May 13th bitcoin mining used electricity at a rate equivalent to 150 terawatt-hours per year, more than the entire annual energy consumption of the Netherlands.
This is wrong in a very sad way, where the sadness is that virtually every outlet makes this same mistake because all are making the same stock comparison so memetically that none ever stop to really ponder how outrageous a claim it is. (Even the pro-Bitcoin crowd makes it, as in this Harvard Business Review piece on the subject.)
The mistake is confusing two very different things: energy consumption and electricity consumption. The latter is just a subset of the former, and not a very big one. The Netherlands consumed 112 TWh of electricity in 2018, but 1,122 TWh of energy. (Globally the ratio is roughly 7.5-to-1, but it’s higher in some countries.)
While my series on Bitcoin’s energy consumption has sprawled so widely that I’m still struggling to figure out how to dice it for publication here, this tidbit gives a sense of the quality of discussion out there. Bitcoin is energy-inefficient, true, and too much of that energy comes from dirty sources. But it’s impossible to have a sane conversation about whether its consumption makes sense on the balance without making sure we’re getting the basic terms of the discussion right.
IV.
We’ll close with a brief note re: my Sunday piece about stabbing fatality rates.
I got an email and a few DMs/comments on Twitter about it. After some reflection, I added this (marked) edit to the piece a few hours ago:
One thing I should have clearer about here is that trauma centers are not synonymous with ERs. While they’re often co-located, patients are generally only triaged into a trauma center when there’s a danger to life or limb. So that 2% total fatality figure isn’t being watered down by scrapes or non-serious wounds.
A few readers thought the 0.5% fatality per stab estimate was wildly implausible as surely the denominator in those studies was being diluted by excessively minor wounds. But it wasn’t really, and I should have made that distinction in the original piece. While not all trauma admissions are equal, almost none are trivial.
(That being said, I want to stress that this estimate is very likely incorrect for all the reasons I got into in the original text and comments. My main point was that we should commission studies to confirm/narrow so that communities can discuss around better data. But 0.5% is likely not very wrong. Stabbings just aren’t all that fatal, and modern medical care really is that amazing.)
PS - I want to resurrect the practice of donating the first two months of revenue for all paid signups so that readers can feel good about their investment even if they decide this newsletter isn’t for them. For this edition that charity is an oxygen distribution group in India. A local friend I trust commends them strongly as far as value-per-dollar.
Indeed. I must say, I vastly prefer a president who is obsessed with details. The devil is in them.