Chris F. Masse January 27th, 2008
—
- In February 2001, Fortune magazine named ENRON the “most innovative company”.
- In October 2007, Robin Hanson, on the Overcoming Bias blog, re-published the falsehood that James Surowiecki (and 3 other book authors in their respective book) made a mistake about Francis Galton in his book, The Wisdom Of Crowds.
- In January 2008, the “BetFair Prof” (Leighton Vaughan-Williams) claimed, on the BetFair blog, that the “betting markets” foresaw the Republican race in the Michigan primary.
- In January 2008, Risk magazine named SOCIETE GENERALE (recently busted by one of its traders, which lead to a loss of 7.2 billion dollars) the “equity derivatives house of the year”.
—
TAKEAWAY: Either by complete incompetence or by lack of investigation means, journalism is not up to its lofty goal —telling the truth to people.
—
(Via Marc Andreessen.)
—
Jerome Kerviel, soon to be named “person of the year” by Risk magazine? 
—
Tags: Blogs, errors, failures, Jerome Kerviel, journalim, mistakes, risk, Risk magazine, Societe Generale
Chris, you identify as a journalist, right? You’re not going to list all the inaccuracies you’ve printed over the years that have required correction?
1. Just a remark. Journalism is something we do when we blog for our audience. So, “we are all journalists, now”, when we blog. All bloggers practice journalism —you, me, Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, etc. As opposed to thinking of journalism only in terms of professional journalists, who carry the card.
.
2. Yes, the “inaccuracies” that I’ve printed “over the years” should be re-published and appended with corrections. We all progress by making mistakes and learning from them. I’m not above the crowd. Many times, I have published posts correcting old ones. If you think that a post should be written, assembling all the crap I have printed “over the years”, feel fee to do so. That’s the difference between new media and old media: with blogs, the authors can receive contradictions on the same medium they wrote on, for all to see.
French Bank Offers Details of Big Loss
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/p.....05gb-1.pdf
“- In October 2007, Robin Hanson, on the Overcoming Bias blog, re-published the falsehood that James Surowiecki (and 3 other book authors in their respective book) made a mistake about Francis Bacon in his book, The Wisdom Of Crowds.”
Francis Bacon? hahaha
Funny enough. I have corrected.
Well, you’ve reported inaccurate info about my job title, family members and the question of whether I am a spy for Yahoo! or not, all of which had to be corrected. Hey, I only remember the ones that involve me (well, I remember your Hillary Clinton thing, too), but that seems to have been a lot for someone pointing out other people’s journalistic shortcomings.
1. Your job title. I used a non-updated version (*by you*) of your LinkedIn profile, and thus published inaccurate information about your job title —that was quickly corrected.
My mistake, probably, was to confuse business intelligence and competitive intelligence. Sorry for that.
.
Just a remark. You changed your LinkedIn profile 3 times last year, if I’m correct. It’s up to you to update your LinkedIn profile, as soon as your job definition has changed. I was not the only one who saw the obsolete information on that profile, by the way.
.
2. Sorry to have associated yourself with a mister “Cowgill” who was a “connection” on your LinkedIn profile. Many other people who saw your LinkedIn profile also made that family connection, I bet.
.
3. A spy *on* Yahoo”, not a spy “for” Yahoo!.
.
4. Tim Harford’s take can be discussed. In his first cite of me, I’m “translating” what Justin Wolfers wrote, who himself was just describing what the prediction markets revealed. In his second cite of my, I’m describing what the prediction markets revealed. To get a sense of the probabilities associated with these market-generated predictions, readers should look at the charts, which were published very prominently in both cases.
.
5. I have published more charts (which show the probabilities generated by the markets) than Bo Cowgill, Tim Harford, Justin Wolfers, and Tyler Cowen all together.
.
6. As for Tim Harford’s “inaccuracies”, take that:
Adam Smith: an apology
http://blogs.ft.com/undercover.....-an-a.html
.
7. Finally, I don’t get your whole point. The fact that I have published (and quickly corrected) some minor inaccuracies in the past should not prevent me from pointing to other people’s published inaccuracies. Same for you.
.
You, too, can go and get yourself a gravatar (a face picture published near your comments on every blog enabled with this capability):
http://www.gravatar.com/
[...] many Internet jokes (associating me with a “Grandizer” I’ve never met); numerous inaccuracies have been published over the years on blogs about my person and my work at Google; my EXCELLENT [...]