The reporters would not read

From Chris Bray is Stupid and Evil: Don't listen to that ignorant piece of shit by Chris Bray.  Interesting history and interesting commentary by a journalist about the bulk of practitioners in journalism.  

The piece goes to the issue I have been wrestling with in the past few years.  In a world of effectively limitless connection and content, how do you remain open to many points of view while simultaneously filtering out bad faith actors and noise?

You can't read everything and there are a plethora of bad-faith actors and ignorant natterers.  You have to filter but how do you filter without accidentally introducing systemic epistemic biases.

A couple of standout lines.

Without wading back into the exceptionally complicated details of that long controversy, I learned two things from the experience that have never left me.

First, as I traveled to Boston to go to court, and as I wracked up PACER charges downloading legal briefs and judicial orders, I would have email exchanges with newspaper reporters who wanted me to tell them what had happened. I would shoot back an email message that said, “Judge’s ruling attached,” and they would reply, “Yeah, saw the attachment, what does it say?”

Over two years, through events in a trial court and in an appellate court, with multiple parties pursuing complicated and divergent courses, reporters would not read. They wouldn’t read the 40-page legal briefs filed by the lawyers for all the competing sides, but they also wouldn’t read a three-page order from a judge. They would not read, period. They wanted the tl;dr, in a sentence or two. “Yeah, what’s it say?”

[snip]

You’ll dig, you’ll discuss, you’ll think and re-think, you’ll evaluate evidence and look for more, you’ll work to make an argument and to invite engagement with it, and you will — always — be angrily dismissed by people who repeat something they saw on the Huffington Post and never thought to question.

There is no point to caring about the things people like this say to you, or about you. Be who you are. Do your work.