The most recent Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism (Glenn Greenwald) says journalism is an "adversarial" process. However, adversarial is by nature a two way street. Journalists who go digging into the lives of people and businesses need to be prepared for adversarial response.
If I'm a business owner that's being investigated by a journalist, I want to find out the who, what, where, when and why.
I am entitled to investigate the people who are investigating me.
journalism startups are businesses. they make money by investigating businesses like uber. Uber is entitled to investigate in return
To what extent are you "entitled" to "investigate" into the personal lives of journalists and public critics?
If your goal is not to intimidate, what purpose does it serve and accomplish? Freedom of the press is important and is part of the Constitution. Journalists can investigate a business even if you think they shouldn't.
Looking into the financial ties of journalism is game. But the industry and business of journalism is not the same as someone's personal life, their sexual preferences, children, family, etc.
To what extent are you "entitled" to "investigate" into the personal lives of entrepreneurs and people building real value.
If your goal is not to intimidate, attack, or slander, what purpose does it serve and accomplish? Freedom of speech and self publication is important and is part of the Constitution. Entrepreneurs can investigate shady journalists who seem to have a bias and who are crossing ethical lines even if you think they shouldn't.
Looking into the financial ties of companies is game. But the industry and business is not the same as someone's personal life, their sexual preferences, children, family, etc.
I have difficulty seeing how this is a quality contribution to any discussion and not trolling.
You know I didn't advocate probing the personal lives of entrepreneurs, and if you honestly believe I did advocate that then the problem is you are reading something that I didn't say.
If anything, saying something like "investigating the personal lives of entrepreneurs building real value" sounds more like a sound bite a bad politician or PR rep would concoct to shield a business from public scrutiny. Instances of 'entrepreneurs building real value' is also something that is fair to cover by journalists.
Uber is not entitled to investigate by delving into private details of people, though. And just because Uber happens to hold that data doesn't mean they're entitled to grovel through it for whatever purpose they feel like. If a journalist gets into a fight with a hospital, should that hospital be entitled to use the journalists's private health records to fight back? I say, of course not. Uber is in the same position qualitatively. Of course, in the case of the hospital it's actually illegal while for Uber it's probably not, but that's just because the law on privacy is way behind the times.
Journalism is a constitutionally protected activity that is a cornerstone of democracy. Without an informed public, democracy cannot work. Attempting to subvert that by threatening journalists is flat out wrong.
If you are a business owner, sure, you can legally investigate journalists. But that is very different than threatening to leak material about them to influence press coverage.
Also, your "turnabout is fair play" logic is ridiculous. Greenwald got the secrets of the NSA, but that does not mean that the NSA is entitled to steal Greenwald's secrets.
> Greenwald got the secrets of the NSA, but that does not mean that the NSA is entitled to steal Greenwald's secrets.
Isn't the underlying theme behind the secrets that Greenwald got that the NSA feels that it is entitled steal everyone's secrets, whether or not the targets have first gotten the NSA's secrets, because NSA?
In my experience (press volunteer for Wikimedia), just making journalists aware of the "history" tab is revelatory. It's like they don't see it on the page. So this may well be more effective than you think.
this is silly, the comparison to bloodletters was made to undercut the assertion that people's experience is a reasonable way to evaluate ideas, but human beings rely on experience at all times to evaluate. You're trying to justify his analogy by using it in a different way than he intended.
It seems to be a fairly common experience in different professions that certain people are better than others. I guess you'd disagree that Einstein didn't stand head and shoulders above others in physics? Need I insult you by mentioning the big names in computer science? and other fields.
Going back to bloodletting, if you insist on using it in a different way than GB intended in his trollish response, I'm sure you know the whole profession has been discredited, therefore it's not really logical to look for a practitioner from a contemporary point of view who stood head and shoulders above his peers.
Certainly, experience is a reasonable way to evaluate ideas, but that doesn't mean the evaluation is valid. I agree that the bloodletting example was meant to undercut the assertion. I also think the assertion - judging only on experience - is incorrect, and that the example is a valid one. We have many examples where experience lead to incorrect conclusions.
By experience, Aristotle argued that things in motion come to rest. Everyone knew that ... until Galileo, further codified by Newton. One's experience can be wrong. Hence the reason for software usability research. See "Making Software", edited by Greg Wilson, for lay results of some of that research. Here's an example of a more direct, empirical study: http://neverworkintheory.org/2011/10/24/an-empirical-compari... .
You write "human beings rely on experience at all times to evaluate." We also use comparison testing, as with that paper link I gave you. A hope is to minimize preconceptions based on one's experience. We see this in the medical field all the time, where we find that even single blind testing can unduly affect the results.
We also use prediction to evaluate. Einstein predicted a certain bending of light around the sun, which wasn't based on experience.
Therefore, I place a weak meaning to "human beings rely on experience at all times to evaluate." We use it to guide our understanding, but also use other techniques besides experience to verify the correctness of our understanding.
If you read my link you'll see that I disagree with Bernhardt's statement. I believe he is guided by Bossavit's work, which argues that there's only been a single test of the 10x principle. Bossavit's essay has two arguments: 1) modalities in the papers show that this is not an established method, and 2) the citations of McConnell all refer to a single study from the early days of software engineering. If you read McConnell's response, you'll see the complaint that Bossavit, by only focusing on McConnell's citations, ignored other studies from the field that McConnell used to draw his conclusion, but which were not in the essay. As I wrote, I object to the modality analysis, as it must surely have a high false positive rate.
But my disagreement is based on research summarizes which have tested the 10x concept, and not strictly on my own experience.
My own observations is that the great majority of practitioners are disdainful of any sort of empirical testing, and will argue that experience always trumps research. I read this exchange as being yet another example of that. I can see why Bernhardt would want to close off the exchange early - it's pointless to have an exchange about research topic X when the other person doesn't even think it needs to be a research topic, doesn't even understand the basic topic, and hasn't bothered to research it.
For what it's worth, bloodletting is still in use, though only for a couple of diseases; hemochromatosis and polycythemia being the main two. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25175510 . Hence it's not true that "the whole profession has been discredited."
