Chris Allbritton, a blogging journalist who in March blogged so well readers donated enough money to send him to Iraq as an independent journalist, is still writing about Iraq, and planning to go back. I’m interested in why I enjoy his writing so much. It’s a matter of building up trust in an individual writer or reporter, which you get in traditional media too, sometimes, but I also just love the honesty of his writing. No, of course, I don’t know that he’s always completely honest, and it’s quite clear that he’s not objective (but he’s explicit about what his opinions are) but it’s the links. When he makes a statement he links to something backing it up. Mainstream newspapers online are starting to do that, but this is so much more. It’s the accountability we learn in academia (cite your sources! cite counterarguments! show people how you came to think this!) instead of the teaspooned “this is true, we promise” of professionally edited tabloids.
Previous Post
necklace of mp3s Next Post
for future reference 1 Comment
Leave A Comment Cancel reply
Recommended Posts
Last night I attended the OpenAI Forum Welcome Reception at OpenAI’s new offices in San Francisco. The Forum is a recently launched initiative from OpenAI that is meant to be “a community designed to unite thoughtful contributors from a diverse array of […]
I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive. […]
Whenever I give talks about ChatGPT and LLMs, whether to ninth graders, businesses or journalists, I meet people who are hungry for information, who really want to understand this new technology. I’ve interpreted this as interest and a need to understand – […]
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
chuck
I think that what I like best about his writing is the clarity with which he expresses his opinions. While other reporters hide behind a mask of objectivity, his honesty in interpreting is something I appreciate (of course it helps that I *generally* share his interpretation of the world).