Zach Helfand’s “The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department” (archived) is an excellent read and scratches an itch I’ve had for years (“how does that work, anyhow?”); it begins:
I turned in this piece with seventy-nine errors. Anna, the fact checker who fixed them, has been a member of The New Yorker’s checking department for six years. I enjoy working with Anna, which is good, because being checked by Anna involves maybe a dozen hours on the phone. We talk mainly about facts, and occasionally about foraging for chanterelles, which is her passion. People sometimes ask Anna if she finds many errors. In the eighties, one checker found that an unedited issue of the magazine contained a thousand of them. (This figure itself wouldn’t survive a fact-check, but never mind.) My contribution to the trash heap, in this piece alone, included misspelling several proper nouns (Colombia, alas, is not Columbia), inventing, it seems, a long-ago interaction between a fact checker and the deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and writing about a bird’s kidney when I should have been writing about its liver. I’m sure no errors remain, but I won’t declare it categorically. That kind of thing makes a checker squirm.
I’ve never encountered a complete description of what the magazine wants its checkers to check. A managing editor took a stab in 1936: “Points which in the judgment of the head checker need verification.” New checkers, upon receiving their first assignment, are instructed to print out the galleys of the piece and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word. Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art—full of facts. Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts. Recently, a short story by Clare Sestanovich made a passing reference to yellow bird poop. The checker consulted ornithological sources. Would a bird poop yellow? Maybe, if it had a liver problem.
Fiction is full of facts—sometimes too many. Dates are facts, clothes are facts, actions are facts. Quotes are facts, and they contain them; facts can be nesting, like a Russian doll. A decade ago, Calvin Tomkins wrote about an artist who said he was getting married on June 21st, the summer solstice. The checker, David Kortava, called the artist, congratulated him, and alerted him that the solstice would be on the twentieth that year. The artist moved the wedding date.
Actually, however, he turned in the piece with at least eighty errors. Here’s a letter I sent to the magazine (since I’m sure they won’t print it, I might as well share it myself):
As a copyeditor (ret’d), I tend to notice errors, and of course I’ve been aware of the increasing flood in recent years, even in such formerly impeccable publications as, yes, the New Yorker. When I saw the blatant typo “connecwts” on p. 17 of the Sept. 1 & 8 centenary issue, I groaned and told my wife Harold Ross was spinning in his grave, but I did not bestir myself to write and complain. Now, however, I have reached p. 26 and seen Brendan Gill quoted as follows: “The impression conveyed by these words was, and was intended to be, that a sorely tired man of superior skills was consenting to improve the work of someone who was at best lazy and at worst an imbecile.” I knew at once something was wrong, and when I checked Here at the New Yorker I found that, sure enough, Gill had written “sorely tried.” And this in an article on fact checking — the system’s fallen down! Perhaps your checkers need more breaks or more coffee; you surely do not have the ambition of becoming the American Grauniad. (Note to editor: do not correct the spelling; if necessary, have a fact checker explain the reference.)
I sent that off in the heat of the moment; had I read further, I would have gotten to this passage:
Some people greet a New Yorker correction as they would an eclipse. In 1994, several errors appeared in a Talk of the Town piece. The magazine issued a correction, which several publications reported as if it were a seminal event. Hendrik Hertzberg went to the library to investigate. “This was not the first correction in the magazine’s history, it was roughly the three hundredth,” he reported. He added, “Every great journalistic enterprise occasionally makes errors.” I can confirm. Since that first correction, I let through some more. I will not name the figure, to avoid startling Anna.
People like finding errors in the magazine, probably because the magazine is so smug about its fact checking. Checking does contain an element of theatre—a performance of over-the-top diligence that burnishes a myth but doesn’t always correlate with accuracy. Checking isn’t a marketing ploy, exactly, but it is good marketing. […]
The other thing you get a lot is “William Shawn would be turning over in his grave.” As a literal fact, this is uncheckable, though the implication that the magazine reached peak truth under Shawn, its second editor, transcends credulence. Shawn was a perfectionist, but, given the choice between prose and accuracy, he didn’t always side with accuracy. The writer Ben Yagoda dug up the checking proofs of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and found that, beside a section that narrated the actions of a person who was alone and immediately thereafter murdered, Shawn scribbled, “How know?” Yagoda explained, “There was in fact no way to know, but the passage stayed.”
At least I name-checked Ross rather than Shawn; still, it’s embarrassing to be so predictable. (N.b.: Both my “the system’s fallen down!” and Helfand’s “transcends credulence” are quotes from the excitable and oddly-Englished Ross.)
Sarah Harrison Smiths’ *The Fact Checker Bible* is also a nice book on this, a classic (and by classic I mean slightly dated)
… and underline all the facts. Lines go under almost every word. Names and figures are facts; commas can be, too. Cartoons, poems, photographs, cover art—full of facts. Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts.
Die Welt ist die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.
I am less impressed by fact checking as a concept than I was in my youth. Partly we see why in the New Yorker’s willingness to print utter nonsense about language. I doubt that there is a formal editorial decision to eschew checking linguistic facts. I expect rather that it never occurred to the editors that such as thing as linguistic facts even exist. But beyond this, I have in my advanced years come to appreciate the importance of how facts are used: give lavish attention to Hillary Clinton’s failure to follow best practices on email security, then give only fleeting attention to far worse examples in the Trump administration. Whether or not each discrete statement of fact is true is at best to miss the point, and at worse part of a concerted campaign of disinformation.
So you’re saying since it can’t be perfect it shouldn’t be done at all? Strongly disagree. Zelfand says what is perfectly obvious — that it can’t be perfect — but in this age of lies and fakery it’s more important than ever to at least try to make sure that what you print is as accurate as you can make it.
RH has a good point, though. Even when what you are being told really is a fact, it’s as well to be alert to the question, “Why are you telling me this, exactly? What it it that you don’t want me to be paying attention to?”
Opinions aren’t facts, but they rely on many. Colors are facts.
Colors may be facts, but the name assigned to a color is subjective. Even so-called standards such as PMS (No, the one graphic designers and printers use.) may depend on the computer hardware used to select the “right” number.
Have I just fact-checked a statement, or simply disagreed with an author?
Case in point: the private email server, while clearly illegal, was most likely safer than the legal alternative was at the time.
That would be a bad business decision anyway, because the Garundia is already doing that itself!
Colors are facts
How soon we forget.
From that link:
Daniel Hardiman-McCartney of the College of Optometrists stated that the picture was ambiguous, suggesting that the illusion was caused by a strong yellow light shining onto the dress, and human perception of the colours of the dress and light source by comparing them with other colours and objects in the picture.[43] The philosopher Barry C. Smith compared the phenomenon with Ludwig Wittgenstein
So some people see Ludwig as blue with black lace, others as white with gold lace ?
Huh. The philosopher’s sentence I quoted ends: “… compared the phenomenon with Ludwig Wittgenstein and the rabbit–duck illusion”. I didn’t know that Wittgenstein and that elusive illusion were a thing.
It is clear from the two illustrations there (by L and Jastrow) that Ludwig couldn’t draw for shit, or couldn’t be arsed to, at least in a “draft addendum”. I’m guessing that that is meant to say that it was never actually added.
Oh, stop, as Voltaire wrote, making “the perfect the enemy of the good”!
If he did.
Raising fact-checking to the dignity of a job is lamentable. Editorial work in general is a detestable exercise in tyranny and what Graeber would have called a ‘bullshit job’. What’s the point of it? Let journalists and authors be 100% responsible for what they choose to publish and for the form they choose to publish it in. And let’s encourage people to fact-check for themselves instead of taking up this enlightened role for them.
No editing? But, as some Schlesinger or other may or not have coined, you may have your own opinions but not your own facts.
Far-right persons interpret fact-checking as censorship, for some reason. I’ll Do My Own Research® to find out why …
RH has a good point, though. Even when what you are being told really is a fact, it’s as well to be alert to the question, “Why are you telling me this, exactly? What it it that you don’t want me to be paying attention to?”
That’s not RH’s point, but yes, it’s always good to be aware of such things. It’s entirely separate from the issue of fact-checking. It’s like saying “Having safety checks of restaurant kitchens is pointless, because some people have food allergies.”
Raising fact-checking to the dignity of a job is lamentable. Editorial work in general is a detestable exercise in tyranny and what Graeber would have called a ‘bullshit job’.
So my profession is bullshit? You’re a real charmer.
Shawn scribbled, “How know?”
I’d like to think he’d meant “How now?”
Perhaps in an ideal world someone involved in the editing/publishing enterprise would figure out what additional facts missing from the current draft ought to be included to minimize the chances of the facts that are included giving a misleading overall impression. I suspect, however, that that might involve a different skill set and mindset than the New Yorker style of allegedly rigorous one-at-a-time checking of the facts that are included in the current draft. So whoever is doing that latter task is likely not the right person to blame for not doing the other thing.
But the journalistic profession has long been hopeless on the “include extra facts to make the facts you’ve got not misleading” front. Simple example. Whenever Mr. X is charged with a crime, the odds are good that the story will report that Mr. X has been previously arrested let’s say 34 times, often with at least some summary of the range of prior charges. That’s generally a figure given the journalist by the cops or the prosecutors office and not actually fact-checked by the journalist but let’s assume it’s accurate. What the story generally doesn’t tell you is how many of those 34 prior arrests resulted in convictions rather than acquittals or dismissal of charges or perhaps a plea-bargain to something less serious than what the arrest purported to be for. That’s harder to figure out even though with enough time and resources you could do it from public records. But the journalists don’t, nor do they tell the cops/prosecutors who are spoonfeeding them the info that they’re not going to use it unless provided with that additional info that provides appropriate context for the (let us assume) true fact of the number of prior arrests.
a) doing your own research–so Robert F. Kennedy Jr-ish.
b) Kissinger, his own self, or someone else, instructed:
the reason university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.
So, move along people, out of the way.
Pay no attention to trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
A Kissinger‘s judgment on what is truly valuable or important does not seem to me to be normative.
However, he did not originate the meme.
Editorial work in general is a detestable exercise in tyranny and what Graeber would have called a ‘bullshit job’. What’s the point of it?
Having been on both sides of the author/editor collaboration, I think of editing as quality control and enhancement. Most authors welcome the assistance of editors in catching inadvertent errors, challenging dicey conclusions, and generally acting as beta test close readers.
If, however, whoever “Graeber” may be and his presumed acolytes prefer to publish authentic, unreviewed slop, and absorb the well earned mockery that ensues, I wouldn’t presume to interfere.
Graeber is an innocent bystander here, name-dropped merely in an attempt to add plausibility to a specious argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
I recommend The Lifespan of a Fact, by D’Agata and Fingal, respectively a journalist and a fact-checker. It is the (edited) dialog which occurred between the two, about an article the former was preparing for publication. I learn from the above that the book was even adapted into a Broadway play, and that “As part of his research for the role, [actor Daniel] Radcliffe spent a day working in the fact checking department of The New Yorker.”
Yes, Graeber is one of my few heroes (see my reviews of Debt and The Dawn of Everything).
Nobody should be allowed to presume that his role in society is to drive home the facts of life to the ignorant masses. We forget as a culture the importance of adhering to that liberal principle and that’s why so many have come to feel comfortable in their role as society’s teachers: journalists, academics, intellectuals, moralists, you name it. The moment we do that we sow the seeds of tyranny.
A lot of cultural problems in our democracies have to do with the fact that while we’ve liberalized plenty of aspects in our societies, we never really got rid of our penchant for caesarism in a most crucial aspect: the realm of ideas. Ideas (and vices) flow like a river and in trying to dam them we ensure more catastrophic floods in the future, floods that can drown us. Extremist elements in society, the workshops of future tyranny, are fed and sustained and trained by our own authoritarian tendencies. The COVID pandemic made that clear. When stupid people feel the world is out to correct them, they become even crazier. Don’t appoint regulators and policemen for ideas. Let it go.
I wish you would find somewhere else to blather. Nobody’s buying what you’re selling.
Journalists and authors who want to be 100% responsible (w/o anyone else sharing responsibility) for what they publish can self-publish, which has become increasingly easy as a technological matter. Those who do want someone else, with their own brand name and reputation and ethos-or-vibe as to what they’re trying to do, to publish their words necessarily need to cater to the whims and preferences of that publisher or some rival publisher they are also pitching their work to. Especially if they are asking that publisher for, you know, monetary compensation in return for their deathless prose.
It might be interesting to know how much editing Simon & Schuster did to the initially-submitted manuscript of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs and whether the late Professor Graeber thought that the editing added any value.
ETA: I do expect that Graeber would have thought the book-publishing biz full of holders of what he would consider bullshit jobs, but am agnostic about whether he would have included some/all editorial type jobs in that diagnosis.
Whether or not each discrete statement of fact is true is at best to miss the point, and at worse part of a concerted campaign of disinformation.
Good fact checking has never stopped liars from trying to fool the rest of us, but at least it makes their job that little bit harder. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who’s had the experience of receiving obvious lies forwarded many times on WhatsApp from relatives who took them perfectly seriously. Without fact checkers, that’s what newspapers would look like. (Some of them come pretty close as it is.)
One source on quote attribution, maybe occasionally even better than the pretty-good New Yorker, is
quoteinvestigator.com.
(Though the author prefers a fake name.)
The yellow bird poop example opens up the rather philosophically terrifying question of what it means to “fact-check” a work of fiction. It’s one thing to say that (in a fictional work not apparently intended to be taken as fantastical) that the made-up events should be “plausible” but there’s some very difficult to discern line between what needs to be literally true and what needs merely to be plausible. One simple example might be that if the fictional character is taking a train trip and leaving from a metropolis with lots of different stations the character ought to leave from the “correct” station that in the literal real world is the right one to catch a train to that destination from. But the character is free to catch a train scheduled to leave at 10:30 a.m. even if the objectively-knowable timetable for the date on which the train trip is fictionally set had no departure to that destination at that time. But perhaps not everyone would draw a line between those two things and others might draw yet different lines. And sometimes there’s a motivation to make details *obviously* fictional, as when TV programs set in Manhattan give an obviously* fictional street address for the building where the fictional murder took place. You could also I guess have a sort of “reverse” fact-checker who is supposed to ensure that the fictional business or foreign country or what have you described in a novel or short story does not so closely resemble any specific real-world one that the narrative will be at risk of being interpreted as a roman a clef.
*Obviously in the sense that everyone who knows the formula for Manhattan street addresses understands that the number given for the building would not be in Manhattan but somewhere under the East River.
I believe that there is (or was) a list of guaranteed-bogus yet plausible telephone numbers for the use of flmwriters, television scriptwriters etc.
The truest poetry is the most feigning.
https://prg1southampton.wordpress.com/2020/06/30/lynns-poem-for-july/
In the U.S./Canada the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number) approach to generating “safe” fictitious phone numbers meant, once it became widely known, that for a significant portion of the audience they no longer actually look plausible.
or poop of a yellow bird?
I felt the poop of a yellow bird,
I felt it on my head.
I aimed my gun at that yellow bird
And now the bird is dead.
–Wretched Rhymes for Tedious Toddlers
Thread convergence alert! I opened this thread and found a natural progression from Badly Invented Names to Badly Invented Addresses and Phone Numbers.
Earlier on the names thread seemed to be deliberately avoiding converging back to Ivor Cutler.
Readability, for starters. It’s entertaining to read a 15th- or 16th-century work where the same word is never spelled the same way if it occurs twice (or five times) on a page, but it does take a while. It may also be entertaining if the content is random bullshit or if you have to go on exciting side quests to find out if any of it is actually true, but if the editorial process has done that work for you, life becomes a lot easier.
That’s what the German word vorbestraft “having prior convictions” is for.
Educate them in the first place, so they don’t end up stupid when they grow up.
A population that’s too stupid for democracy is a national failure of the education system. If you think that’s what you have, go into politics and fix that.
That’s a (minor) plot point in Last Action Hero.
Earlier on the names thread seemed to be deliberately avoiding converging back to Ivor Cutler.
(Né Isidore.)
Today I read the following in a New Yorker article*:
“the camera zooming in on the odometer as it approached a hundred and twenty miles per hour”
So it seems the famous fact-checking department doesn’t know the difference between a speedometer and an odometer.
* “Growing Pains”, July 1, 2024
They were probably thrown off by the unfortunate fact that the only truly correct form, “tachymeter”, has got hijacked for a quite different instrument. There is no satisfactory solution in such sad cases.
@maidhc: Obviously the correct interpretation is that “it” refers to the camera, which was apparently zooming in on the odometer at a speed approaching 120 mph.
the New Yorker’s willingness to print utter nonsense about language. I doubt that there is a formal editorial decision to eschew checking linguistic facts. I expect rather that it never occurred to the editors that such as thing as linguistic facts even exist.
I’m not sure about the NYer, but in general journalism printing utter nonsense about language specifically is reliably clickbait. This myth (from my local paper today) has been debunked umpteen times, but still keeps coming:
I’m not surprised quailing 4-year-olds react with “lowering of a head and no answer” when grilled by an overbearing and conspicuously white retired teacher.
Doubtless Monday’s letter’s column will be full of indignant horror and/or (anecdotal) confirmation of this ‘fact’.
I was at our local readers-and-writers festival yesterday for a round table discussion ‘State of the Nation’s Media’, which included the editor of my local rag.
Allegedly ‘magazine’ style so-called journalism is wildly popular. I didn’t get the chance to ask whether that meant popular with readers, or popular with the press-barons, because they could get more-or-less free copy from some non-staff so-called writer to just make shit up, no costly fact checking necessary.
Speaking for myself, the rag’s magazine goes straight into the bin unread, pausing only to tear out the crossword page.
“Why are you telling me this, exactly?”
@DE, there is one more problem. Apart of your
“What it it that you don’t want me to be paying attention to?””
In Russia, from 2014 to 2022 I heard lots of angered remarks about various bad things done by some Ukrainians.
You don’t need to know anything to guess that some of those bad things are real, some are not.
Whatever you think about the two sides of a conflict between two states (or peoples), whether you like Ukraine or Putin, you will have serious problems with your notion of ethics if you keep silence about evil done by one of the two sides, and you won’t be trustworthy (which mean, most people do have these problems and aren’t trustworthy).
But is it good that many people (in Russia) say that evil done in Ukraine is “evil” and are angered by that (will the two sides make each other better by their anger and criticism)?
And, if I don’t want to keep silence about evil done by either side, should I personally support those Russians when they criticise actual evil done in Ukraine?
And what I thought is: it is very important for me personally, why such thigns are said.
Is it care about, say, people in Donbass that makes them so? Fuck, no!!! They want war.
Same for most Muslims who “stand for Palestine”. This all all can be formulated in a “religious” way: these people (a) do not act out of love (d) do act out of hatred. And if so, they will use whover they think they stand for, and they will ruin her home, sincerely believing that they’re on her side. But I heard, love is obscene, when serious people talk about serious things:)
@LH, Lameen, I think you believe that (a) we need journalists (b) you personally need to read what they say.
Not because you are you, because most people think so. I don’t even know anyone with an ideology similar to mine (I do have serious doubts about (b)).
So for you what we’re talking about is impoving a useful tool. Of course that sounds like a good idea.
What the story generally doesn’t tell you is how many of those 34 prior arrests resulted in convictions rather than acquittals or dismissal of charges…
I guess, the supposition is that police arrests only guilty people, but sometimes charges don’t “stick”.
@drasvi: 30/08:12.05
Der Krieg, wo er nicht erzwungene Selbstverteidigung, sondern ein toller Angriff auf eine ruhige, benachbarte Nation ist, ist ein unmenschliches, ärger als tierisches Beginnen, indem er nicht nur die Nation, die er angreift, sondern auch die Nation, die ihn führet, ebenso unverdient als schrecklich hinopfert.
J. G. Herder
My translation:
War which is not involuntary self defence, but a brazen attack on a peaceful neighbouring nation, is an inhuman, worse than bestial undertaking, in that this type of war sacrifices, terribly and undeservedly, not only the nation which is attacked but also the attacking nation.
@Brewer Most publishers have no particular whims and preferences. They are businessmen and like proper businessmen they just care about one thing: making money. The best way to make money is to allow a large diversity of authors to contribute, even fringe or stupid people.
When you entrust editors with responsibilities over what gets published you ensure that first, they will hand pick contributors they like and reject everybody else and second, that the texts will be less entertaining to read for the masses. Both factors harm profitability.
The root of the problem however is not the editors themselves, it’s in various illiberal laws and regulations that force the publishers to censor themselves. The editors are just the excrement of the system.
@David M. The author should be responsible for everything, even his typos or spelling mistakes. This responsibility would allow the publisher to see more clearly which authors interest the public and which do not. He would select the more popular ones and oust the boring ones. Profitability would rise.
@PlasticPaddy
This kind of philosophy ignores the fact that many wars that were not done for immediate self-defense were ‘iusta bella’.
We (the West) didn’t fight Saddam in two wars to defend ourselves. We crushed his troops, toppled him and sent him to hell because it was just to do so. The guy was a megalomaniacal tyrant.
@languagehat “So you’re saying since it can’t be perfect it shouldn’t be done at all?”
Not at all. Rather, getting the facts right is necessary but not sufficient for honest journalism, and furthermore that it is the easy part. Analyzing one’s biases in what and how these facts are presented is the hard part.
And yet in your original comment you were taking a swipe at fact checking — which is not, in fact, “the easy part” (read the article). You don’t have to emphasize the importance of one thing by trying to diminish another; two things can both be hard and important at the same time.
If at all, this model could only work for writing that is pure entertainment.
“Excuse me, I’m not convinced!”
They are businessmen and like proper businessmen they just care about one thing: making money.
Alfred A. Knopf published many works by foreign authors in translation to English. For most readers, the authors were previously unknown. The press runs were short, the profits meager or nil. Mr. Knopf was certainly a proper businessman.
The best way to make money is to allow a large diversity of authors to contribute, even fringe or stupid people.
That statement, in addition to being ignorant, is contrary to the way profitable publishers operate.
Herr Jaeger is completely uninterested in anything outside his own head, so there is no point arguing with him. Remember what
Shawsomebody said about wrestling with a pig.@cuchuflete Yeah because the Knopfs published stuff that interested only a few educated or upwardly mobile people. Still, they did manage to profit. Small profits are still profits and they add up. Besides, the book industry had better per-unit profit-margins in their time. In today’s more democratized world you have to publish blockbusters for lonely housewives like the fifty shades of Grey to make good money. The steep decline in the social status and incomes of bookish people in general is why they have gotten so radicalized in recent decades, peddling socialist nonsense upon socialist nonsense.
There is a good reason why lurid tabloids are more profitable per unit sold. They actually interest people. Traditional papers like the New York Times rely on subscription schemes and cultural inertia to stay profitable today. Clearly, newer generations are turning away from them.
A population that’s too stupid for democracy is a national failure of the education system. If you think that’s what you have, go into politics and fix that.
David, I’m sure you know that the US doesn’t have an education system. It has at best fifty; in practice, one for every county (with the inimitable exception of Texas).
Whenever Mr. X is charged with a crime, the odds are good that the story will report that Mr. X has been previously arrested let’s say 34 times, often with at least some summary of the range of prior charges.
Many jurisdictions restrict what can be revealed about suspects after arrest and before being found guilty. Google “it can now be reported”
Fact checking! The acknowledgements of Bullshit Jobs includes the following:
@mollymooly:
Yeah, this is not permitted in the UK, on the (reasonable) grounds that it could prejudice a fair trial.
It’s not unusual for it to come out after the conviction that the guilty person had committed a string of similar crimes previously.
While on Bayesian grounds you might think that such data perhaps ought to be available to juries, in cases where serious miscarriages of justice have subsequently come to light it is often clear that this was also the heuristic favoured by the police: arrest someone who’s previously done something similar, whether you’ve got compelling evidence against them or not. Or even simpler, just arrest a random bad ‘un on principle. Round up the usual suspects …
I haven’t read Bullshit Jobs, but his examples seem to be more along the lines of jobs that wouldn’t exist if society were better organised, such as security goons to protect billionnaires’ compounds, corporate intellectual property lawyers, and whatever it is that Elon Musk does.
The evidence for job dissatisfaction seems rather to point, not so much to the putative necessity of your job sub specie aeternitatis, but whether your boss treats you like crap or not and how soul-destroying, or not, your work is on a daily basis. Marxist “alienation”, in fact. Being a well-paid and valued security goon is probably quite fulfilling. Whereas being a social worker can drive you to existential despair, no matter how many people’s lives you change for the better.
Whether being Elon Musk is fulfilling is hard to say. Still, as Juvenal reminds us, Nemo malus felix.
A society built on division of labor generally means that you do work not because you like it or because you need its immediate results, but because someone else needs it to be done and you have been apportioned that work. In a free and open job market and with educational opportunities available you may find work that suits your interests better than other work, and there are ways to organize work that make work less soul-crushing, but this basic alienation cannot be removed until we abandon division of labor. As division of labor is what makes our standard of living possible, I rather suck it up and do work that I have to for a certain amount of time in my life, than going back to subsistence farming. But that’s just my preference.
A society built on division of labor generally means …. In a free and open job market …
On a point of information, in the Economists’ idealised free job market, you work where you can earn the most — over the long term of your career. So it depends on your aptitudes and education/training. Being enthusiastic about/interested in the work contributes to aptitudes.
abandon division of labor
Huh? You want to plant your own spuds and slaughter your own meat?
Huh? You want to plant your own spuds and slaughter your own meat?
Have you read the last two sentences in my post?
Being enthusiastic about/interested in the work contributes to aptitudes.
Sure. But that doesn’t mean I would do that specific work if I didn’t have to to earn a living. If I had absolute freedom to decide what I do, I would spend my days reading, watching interesting TV shows and movies, doing IE linguistics and participating in stimulating discussions on the internet. I decided against doing IE Linguistics for a living ca. 40 years ago looking at the slim chances of getting a decently paid job in that field. I currently hold a job that isn’t boring, stimulates my mind, pays well, and where people tell me I do it well enough, so don’t mistake this for complaining; I’m just trying to make the point that doing work you wouldn’t do if you wouldn’t have to earn a living and where the results are not for your own use is not a bug, it’s a feature of any system based on division of labor.
Most jobs are by definition not interesting. How could any worker find packing meat or stocking shelves or changing bed sheets interesting? Besides, there’s the routine factor. No matter how good a job is, at some point it gets wearisome doing the same thing over and over again. But there’s one thing that never gets boring: accumulating wealth. And that’s what motivates the economy, any economy to work efficiently. If people aren’t motivated to accumulate wealth, you have a society mired in material and moral destitution. Material destitution is called poverty and moral destitution is called crime. That’s how society is going to look like if socialist lunatics have their way. In fact, we’re already seeing the broad outlines of it.
PS I don’t endorse Graeber. Just like all anarchists he was economically and politically illiterate. And I stand by my belief that the best authors don’t require editors at all.
I wasn’t specifying the federal level, or indeed the US… though the US did use to have a Department of Education 🙂
Being Elon Musk while on ketamine probably is, most of the time.
Isn’t the point of most crime to be a shortcut to the accumulation of wealth?
You seem to believe that good writers are automatically good spellers, and that brilliant minds are automatically good at explaining. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.
Personally infallible authors who write aesthetically magnificent inerrant works would be the best authors.
If they actually existed.
(It’s the ontological argument! — an author than which no greater can be conceived! And they cannot be the greatest unless they actually exist, therefore, they must exist. Thank you, Anselm.)
@David M Crime is usually meant as a way to finance a parasitical and unproductive mode of life, not as a shortcut to wealth. Mountainous people, nomads, savages etc. used crime (raiding) to sustain the unproductive economy of their clan societies. Entrepreneurs that choose to branch out into illegal activities (mafia organizations usually happen when legally earned money is invested in illegal ventures) do so because of a cultural inability to defer gratification. The intense status-insecurities of typical mobsters (reflecting backward social relations) instill in them a strong demand for luxuries and to satisfy this demand they are willing to sacrifice their long-term security. Not surprisingly, mafia organizations are common in cultures that feature backward social relations and people with a weak impulse control like Russia, Italy or Albania. I wouldn’t call this strategy a shortcut. It’s actually a gamble.
Crime doesn’t work as a shortcut because there are no shortcuts to greatness. To be prosperous and secure is greatness and this kind of greatness – unavailable to even the most talented of criminals –, requires the humble dignity of hard work, a dignity that is too humble for criminals to stomach, and a dignity that many young people, corrupted by socialist airheadedness, think is beneath them. The fact is, hard work works.
Korean immigrants to the United States, worked an average of 63 hours per week as storekeepers, with one-fifth of them working 80 hours or more. In New York, Korean greengrocers went out to pick up their fruits and vegetables from wholesalers at 4:00 AM, enabling them to select the best of these fruits and vegetables and to save on delivery charges that other greengrocers had to pay. Those marvelous people, the kind of immigrants Europe needs, proved that industriousness is the best shortcut.
@Owlmirror Apparently, ‘best authors’ and ‘infallible authors’ mean the same to you. They don’t mean the same to me or to most anybody.
If you believe that even the best authors are in fact fallible, they can make mistakes that need correction. So now you agree that they need fact checkers and copy-editors to correct their errors?
Or do you want their mistakes to simply go uncorrected, and you don’t care about errors of fact and language?
Pick a lane.
@Owlmirror
They can go uncorrected anyway. Editors are obviously not always doing a perfect job. I often come across typos and factual errors in the books I read. Sometimes they even make bad decisions that corrupt the text.
I was reading a book today where a chambermaid of Eva Braun at the Berghof says how she used to correspond with a certain Ruprecht who was with the Gebirgsjäger in the Caucasus. She then says that Ruprecht fell in the winter of 1941. The problem is that there were no Gebirgsjäger in the Caucasus in 1941. Should the editor change 1941 to 1942 or just stick with what the woman said? There is no footnote commenting on this, the inconsistency eluded the editors.
Here’s an example of editors doing a major gaffe. It concerns a deep foray into Germany by 3rd century baracks emperor Maximinus Thrax. The Historia Augusta reported on this but since historians mistrusted this source they thought the raid was fake news until archaeology proved that HA was actually right on this. Some editors of the text followed bad advice and even ‘corrected’ the number of miles that the original source claims Maximinus had advanced.
Bedeutsam ist in diesem Zusammenhang die Nachricht der spätantiken Historia Augusta, dass Kaiser Maximinus Thrax unverzüglich nach seiner Machtübernahme im Jahr 235 von Mogontiacum aus mit seinen Truppen zwischen 300 (trecenta) und 400 (quadringenta) Meilen tief in germanisches Gebiet vorgestoßen sei, was in der Tat dem nördlichen Niedersachsen entspräche.[48] Da man aber nicht für möglich hielt, dass während der sogenannten Reichskrise des 3. Jahrhunderts noch eine solche militärische Aktion stattgefunden habe, wurde diese Angabe der Handschriften, einem Vorschlag des französischen Altphilologen Claude de Saumaise folgend, in den neuzeitlichen Editionen des Textes stets zu triginta und quadraginta (30 oder 40 Meilen) „korrigiert“. Erst seit der Auffindung des Schlachtfeldes bei Kalefeld existiert ein klarer Beleg dafür, dass die Angaben der Historia Augusta in diesem Punkt verlässlich sind und um 235 tatsächlich ein Vorstoß ins Innere Germaniens stattfand.
Military historian David Glantz provides a lot of data that is not wrong per se but is nevertheless carefully massaged and presented in a way that is highly misleading. No typical editor has the competence to deal with this issue.
cultures that feature backward social relations and people with a weak impulse control like Russia, Italy or Albania
There are people who read here regularly who are from at least two of these places and who, I suppose, are doing quite well controlling some impulses resulting from the above.
(Not me. I’m a “savage”. And a stickler for the Oxford comma.)
Lacking an editor, I failed to clarify what I mean by “most crime”: not the greatest number of criminals, but the greatest number of crimes. I’m sure most crimes aren’t petty theft and such, but large-scale tax fraud, conspiracies to commit greedflation and the like – things committed multiple times per second by pretty rich people.
That seems like one of those typical lazy explanations of yours. The ruling class of China engages in long-term planning and thoroughgoing corruption at the same time.
Isn’t it the opposite? Mafia bosses must constantly establish they’re still the boss, because as soon as there’s any doubt about that, somebody might try to replace them (as in “reposition them 6 feet under”). Therefore, they feel forced to constantly display their status: heavy gold bling perhaps closer to the bottom of the hierarchy, ridiculously expensive watches in the middle, palace complexes higher up? (Speaking of which, Orbán’s was just discovered.) In other words, the luxuries are a necessity for staying alive.
…if you’re lucky.
Ask the author back and point out that 1941 seems like a typo the author made, obviously. Why is that even a question?
Ah, the joys of autocorrupt.
That’s what peer review is for.
tamariki
I wonder if any LH readers from NZ can inform us about the details of the sociolinguistics of this term in NZ English. Is the singular tamaiti also encountered with similar frequency in NZ English? Is tamariki only used to refer to children of Maori heritage?
@AntC:
Pure income maximization might still be The Economist‘s view of labor markets, but it has not been academic economists’ understanding of labor supply for the past fifty years at least (Rosen 1974, 1986). I have myself, over several years, taught a better model to undergraduates in Intermediate Microeconomics courses. A recent survey article (Lavetti 2023, p. 189) provides a reasonably accurate and concise summary of economists’ actual perspective on job choice.
To be fair, I’m not a labor economist and I cannot accurately gauge how often research in labor economics abstracts away from non-pecuniary job amenities. On the one hand, I’m sure it sometimes does. On the other, I see no reason to doubt the statement that open’s Lavetti’s (2023) absract:
In economic geography, a field of economics I do practice, I can report quite confidently that economists have pretty much stopped writing models without non-pecuniary amenities at least a decade ago. It’s just too hard to get a reasonable quantitative fit to real-world data without including them, and making them partly idiosyncratic to each worker too.
I studied economics 40 years ago and all that wasn’t news even back then. I guess two things are going on here – one, that the pure wage / price based models, which are often taught as an introduction to build more realistic modrls on, are all people not close to economics have ever heard of and think that they are all economics have to offer, and that it’s hard to quantify the non-monetary parts, so there’s no widespread more complicated model that could take the place of the simple models in teaching.
@MallChick Is tamariki only used to refer to children of Maori heritage?
No. In that article, and generally in NZ English it refers to all kids. It’d be fair to say it’s used only in ‘politically correct’ educational, governmental and social-work oriented contexts.
There’s a large number of Māori words used in those contexts, perhaps most often whānau = (extended) ‘family’ — which appears four times in that article. The daily press briefings during the Covid lockdowns (which everybody watched, because we were confined to barracks) popularised motu [sense 5] — particularly because of the “anything separated or isolated” connotation.
Is the singular tamaiti also encountered with similar frequency in NZ English?
No, I’d say that’s rare in NZ English.
I might add wrt the claims in that article that “lowering of a head” in the presence of a kaumātua (elder/senior) is a cultural convention for Māori/Pacifica peoples generally. And tamariki should speak only when invited. Even then, looking direct into someone’s face is seen as confrontational. Unacculturated pākehā — which this bloody woman seems to be, despite a career as a Primary teacher/Speech Language Therapist — take this to be evasiveness or embarrassment.
OTOH, given the parlous state of NZ’s journalism, the article might not be her quotes-as-fact, but rather the reporter feeding the readership what they’ll get aerated about.
@David M. The greatest number of crimes happen in oligarchies i.e. places where de facto only the wealthy are allowed to participate in politics, Russia being the textbook example. Many other countries in Eastern Europe are following suit, Orban’s Hungary for instance, and it seems Poland is likewise heading in that direction.
Crimes involve injustices against someone else’s body or property. In the democracies the wealthy usually employ various legal loopholes and other strategies to avoid them to the extent they can. And they are only motivated to pursue this option when left-leaning administrations harass them. In more politically corrupt and inefficiently governed countries the wealthy tend to rely on bribes to politicians.
But in any case tax evasion is not a crime in the moral sense because it doesn’t involve harming someone else’s body or property. It is a morally ambiguous practice. If a state is inefficient in collecting taxes the problem lies with the state and its policies, not the wealthy.
Regardless of why criminals are so obsessed with luxuries the fact is that money invested in such items is money that is not spent productively. Incomes that are based on criminal activities also put one in a fundamentally insecure position in regards to their body and wealth. Even the most well-regarded people of the underworld are not safe from their enemies or the law. A cursory look in the daily newspapers of various Balkan countries or Mexico makes the point. Illegal activities are not a reliable path to wealth, so seeing crime as a shortcut to wealth is wrong. This applies to mobsters as well as to entire countries. Regimes whose leaders think that committing crimes (as Russia does in Ukraine) is a sure path to glory and wealth are wrong and will achieve the opposite results. Crime is a path that people choose for the simple reason that they are evil. The reason that they’re evil is both the low cultural standards of the societal and familial environment they were brought up in (Russia is one such environment) as well as inborn tendencies associated with low empathy. Putin likely has Asperger’s syndrome, Hitler definitely had autistic tendencies. These conditions are correlated with low empathy.
The concept of greedflation is populistically successful but it is not real.
https://businesspostbd.com/opinion-todays-paper/2022-11-17/why-greedflation-isnt-real-2022-11-17
So the duck says to the bartender…
loooooool
No. He’s a sociopath (no sympathy; plenty of empathy) who doesn’t show the least social awkwardness.
Of course it’s real (and I think I have a reference for this that I’ll try to look for later). It’s just hard to prove in any particular instance – same as conspiracy to keep prices synchronized across all supermarket chains.
Edit: I clicked through and found the opinion piece to be much worse than I expected. First it acts as if people had a choice in whether to buy, y’know, food or not, and then it acts as if the whole bout of inflation triggered by COVID had been limited to the US!
while i hesitate to suggest a departure from our noble host’s generous practice, personally, i’d block the nazi (preferably a la shvartsbard, but the banhammer is a good start). trolls* are, sadly, the only known lifeform (i think we’re obligated to give them the benefit of the doubt on that) able to subsist without taking in anything to sustain them. not feeding them only goes so far, especially with the fashy ones, unless you have them physically present, and i don’t think any of us is up for that catfishing job**.
Whenever Mr. X is charged with a crime, the odds are good
i haven’t yet read alex karakatsanis’ book Copaganda, but from the writing he’s been doing in shorter forms over the past while, i think it’ll be a very solidly researched and fact-checked account of how what JWB describes comes to happen, both systemically and in individual cases.
.
i strongly suspect david graeber was very well aware of himself as part of the last cohort of academics to have been able to benefit from any significant editorial oversight of his published books, and understood that as a resource being stripped from intellectual labor, and an attack on his and others’ working conditions.
by contrast: i’ve just finished reading a 2025 book i’m reviewing (from Verso, to assign blame where it’s due), and was stunned at how much worse things have gotten even in the past few years: one chapter’s endnote numbering off by 10 to 12 and at least one other’s by 1; sentences ended with commas; “o]riginal”; and many, many more, just on the technical level. i can’t imagine the author ever saw proofs or galleys (if he did, i can’t imagine he read them; if he did, his notes can’t have been read by anyone at the press).
.
* sadly, we don’t have a term that doesn’t inappropriately implicate innocent mythical creatures – apologies to all of the scandi-balto-finno-ugric quasihumans out there…
** if i’m wrong, please remember: pix or it didn’t happen!
Oh nonononono. He’s a neoreactionary who is… merely… perfectly comfortable with including Nazis when he refers to his favorite
sportsball teamnation as “we”. He’s a Nazi only for practical purposes! 🙂Yes. On another site, I’ve encountered one commenter that keeps failing the Turing test so consistently I’m convinced it’s a chatbot. Not this one.
I find the benefit of the doubt unnecessary. Trolls, whether they waste carbohydrates or hydrocarbons, are both boring and best ignored.
(Or deflected with duck jokes.)
while i hesitate to suggest a departure from our noble host’s generous practice, personally, i’d block the nazi (preferably a la shvartsbard, but the banhammer is a good start).
Believe me, I’m considering it, though it goes against the grain.
Look, CJ, this is not any kind of echo chamber; we’ve had enjoyable discussions with all sorts, even Chomskyites. But you are straining my patience. If you want to keep commenting here, keep your comments short and civilized (insofar as that’s within your capabilities). Long rants that reek of Aryan supremacy will not be tolerated and I give you fair warning that I will delete them from now on.
rozelle: I thought internet trolls’ name derived from the practice of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_(fishing)? At least at web fora in the late ’90s (remember Delphi?), it was associated with the fishing metaphor, pictures of fishermen and all.
@V: Yes, that’s the origin—”trolling for newbies.” However, the similarity to the name of a usually malign class of creature has pretty much taken over the metaphor. I first encountered in on UseNet, in the groups rec.games.frp.dnd and similar places, which actually affected how they were handled. I did not encounter, “Do not feed the troll,” for about a decade, and it initially struck me as extremely odd. Having first encountered trolls in a newsgroup about Dungeons & Dragons, the natural response to them I had learned was to apply as much flame as possible.
yeah, i think there was a flip from one to the other, especially after the “…for newbies” stopped being core to the definition (or even generally known as the source) – which i think must be an Eternal September effect.
but once a troll can be fed, it’s the woodland critter, not the fisher of men. (and i imagine the vowel changed a bit, too)
“Don’t follow the troller”?
“Don’t fall for the troller”?
@Daniel M.
The main source of this idea was a 2015 US Department of Defense commissioned report (from a think tank that worked with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment). The authors suggested, based on video analysis of his body language and movement patterns, that Putin might show traits consistent with Asperger’s. However, the report itself stressed that this was a hypothesis, not a diagnosis.
@languagehat It sounds like you think there’s something wrong with Chomskyites. May I ask why? Honestly, I am curious.
Short answer, he wrecked linguistics for decades. I’ve posted about it many times, e.g. 2003, 2022.
I LOLed.
I thought trolling and trawling were two different fishing techniques?
It’s amazing how people don’t even need to know he exists to confuse me with my brother. 🙂 I guess my parents must have subconsciously thought that’s just the logical next name…
Interesting. Lack of body language would indeed be an autism-spectrum symptom. I’m afraid, though, that any such evidence is buried under layers of KGB training (for example, the asymmetric way he walks is how KGB agents were taught to, so they’d be faster at the draw) and more recently Parkinson’s or whatever.
Parkinson’s? IIIRC, Hitler was diagnosed with that as well. The dictators’ disease?
trolling and trawling
yes, those too! for me, the vowel in the critter is a bit more front, taut, and round than the vowel in the line-fishing technique, and the net-fishing vowel is much further back and down, and a dipthong, too.
my mary/marry/merry are unmerged, too.
rozele wrote:
A la shvartsbard
And my curiosity led me to wiki:
Schvartsbard had assassinated Petliura on the orders of an emissary of the Union of Ukrainian Citizens, an intermediary for Christian Rakovsky, an ethnic Bulgarian, a Soviet ambassador to France (1925–27), a former revolutionary leader from Romania, and a former prime minister of the Ukrainian SSR.
That’s one of the most remarkable strings of noun phrases I’ve ever run across. Is the allegation that Shvartsbard was incited by one, two or six people? I lean towards two.
“So an ethnic Bulgarian, a Soviet ambassador to France, a former revolutionary leader from Romania, and a former prime minister of the Ukrainian SSR walk into a bar…”
I read it as, there was one alleged inciter, the emissary of the UUC. He was an intermediary for Rakovsky, who was everything else.
The French WP article on Schvartsbard says “Au cours du procès, les services spéciaux allemands informent leurs confrères français que Sholem Schwartzbard aurait assassiné Petlioura sur ordre de Galip, un émissaire de l’Union des citoyens ukrainiens, Galip ayant lui-même reçu ses ordres de Christian Rakovsky, un ancien Premier ministre de la RSS d’Ukraine.” I don’t know who Galip was.
“…where they meet the strippers, JFK and stalin.”
—
wow! that’s some of the best conspiranoid batshittery i’ve ever seen from wikipedia!
(for those who don’t know: it’s not exactly a secret that shvartsbard assassinated petliura basically on his own initative, but with support from fellow anarchists – and i think it’s safe to assume some inspiration from the success of Operation Nemesis*.)
(and rakovsky is presumptively the undying comte de saint-germain.)
.
* i’m still kinda stunned that eric bogosian’s midlife side project was a well-regarded history of that campaign. all my younger internet friends currently have massive crushes on him from the current anne rice adaptation.
Czech word of the day: Rakousko “Austria”.
I’m guessing it’s this guy: https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D1%80%D1%8A%D1%81%D1%82%D1%8C%D0%BE_%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8
He was apparently the grand-nephew of Georgi Rakovski.
rozele: His supposed great-uncle (Georgi) died five years before he was supposedly born, and Georgi Rakovski was supposedly born in 1821, while the !Comte de Saint Germain! supposedly died in 1784. 84+21=105-5=100! Wake up, sheeple!
NOTE: am I doing this right?
If only I could make sense of that name.
Looks like “the people of the Rathaus”
@dm
https://werkstatt.formulae.uni-hamburg.de/texts/urn:cts:formulae:fulda_stengel.stengel0265.lat001/passage/all
A lot of these names have no modern descendants in common use (I can see why no one is called Ferting in English). The “goz” bit is echt, you can see also gozp(e)raht in the list.
Fair enough.
The best part is the southern -trud immediately followed by a northern -drut.
Um………..
> How do you confirm a fact? You ask, over and over, “How do we know?” Years ago, John McPhee wrote about a Japanese incendiary balloon that, during the Second World War, floated across the Pacific and struck an electrical cable serving a top-secret nuclear site; a reactor that enriched plutonium for the atomic bomb bound for Nagasaki was temporarily disabled. How did McPhee know? Someone had told him. How did that person know? He’d heard about it—secondhand. The checker, Sara Lippincott, spent weeks trying to track down an original source. Just before the magazine went to the printer, she got a lead. She called the source at home, in Florida. He was at the mall. How to locate him in time? She called the police. They found him and put him in a phone booth. Did he know about the incident? He did. How? He was the reactor’s site manager; he saw it happen. The detail made it in.
But… Plutonium doesn’t undergo enrichment! Who dropped the ball on this one?
Uh-oh — make that eighty-one errors!
To make fissile fuel, you start with natural uranium. You can, from there, either enrich* the uranium or breed plutonium, which is what they were doing at Hanford, where that incident happened.
* Of course, the enrichment process really involves removing the isotopes you don’t want, not increasing the amount of fissile U-235.
How to locate him in time? She called the police.
I presume “police” means Paul Blart, Mall Cop rather than 9-1-1, who keep lists of frivolous emergencies for shaming and/or prosecution
The McPhee piece was published in 1973 (archived); for the curious, here’s the passage in question:
The conversation has moved on, but I had a thought brought on by the claim that work was tedious but “accumulating wealth” was never tedious, and was presumably an absolute good. This thought was no doubt a mere random association of ideas, and probably — probably — not a reflection on the commentator who wrote those words.
Adam Had Three Brothers
The story was first published in the New Mexico Quarterly, which, as can be seen, has made the story, along with the rest of their archive, available freely online.
While searching for the story, I found that someone wondered at Lafferty’s use of “recension”, and found that he actually used the word quite a bit
I seem to recall seeing somewhere that Lafferty was something of a self-taught philologist, and language-related erudition is sprinkled throughout his many works.
here is a piece that offers something of a reality check on the role of the New Yorker fact-checker.
some selections:
Thanks, rozele.
A powerful piece, but it’s certainly not “a reality check on the role of the New Yorker fact-checker” — it’s an effective attack on the complacency and complaisance of the liberal New Yorker New Yorker type, the kind of hand-wringing intelligentsia Chekhov skewered so frequently. It happens to be written by a New Yorker fact-checker, but it could have been written from almost any position in the commentariat industry.
Today’s Irish Times has Irish writers on their New Yorker experience, including Roddy Doyle:
A nice tribute (I presume he wasn’t complaining).