Do you want to be responsible for every stupid thing your grandfather ever said?

If you want to show the world what kind of bozos they have at the NYT, concentrate on today’s bozos.

I didn’t mean there isn’t such a thing as institutional culture. No, just that the institution in this case is better termed “Journalism” and not the NYT. Particularly when it comes to the discussion of science. The original post and many subsequent comments seem to single out the NYT but it’s not the WSJ that has had a weekly Science section, which has done a commendable job in fostering an interest in things scientific.

Maybe I’m reading too much between the lines but the flavor of the OP seems to me to be that the NYT made a big mistake a long time ago, the NYT is today a liberal paper, therefore, don’t trust liberals cause they can’t get there facts straight (well, at least not 89 years ago). OK, but the further implications seems to be that folks who aren’t the NYT (i.e., non-liberals) really can be trusted. If you want, I can give you pretty a detailed discussion of the horrible scholarship found in one of George Will’s columns a few years ago in which he argued that scientists don’t know what they are doing. He doesn’t have a PhD in geoscience; I do. I can tell you the many ways in which he was wrong about basics and misrepresented the record. Based on the logic of the OP, conservatives can’t be trusted.

Institutional culture is a real thing but the particular manifestation we need to be concerned about here is the culture of folks who decided to be journalism majors in school, and therefore stayed away from really learning about science and technology but now think they are ready to portray the ideas and accomplishments of science to the general public. It happens at least as often at FOX News as it does at the NYT.

Further, the NYT editorial pretty much killed Goddard’s funding. Imagine what he could have done if he had had a team like von Braun’s behind him.

Back circa 1973 a friend of mine related a discussion with a man he met on his summer job.

The guy said that rockets could never exceed the speed of light because they could not get going fast enough while in the atmosphere when they had something for the exhaust to push against without at first burning up due to air friction.

This was in 1973. We landed men on the Moon in 1969.

So the idea put forth by the NYT literally outlasted the Apollo program. And so it will be with Global Warming. The gullible and ignorant will believe it long after it is disproven

That such an attitude poisons objective discussion is immaterial to the self-styled squelcher. It is “known” which topics are worthy of serious discussion and which are irrelevant or crackpot.

Reinforcement of that superior attitude is part of the product that the NYT et al sell.

Normally, arrogance of the kind that typifies the Times, would be highly destructive, but operating in a information monopoly as long as it has, there was simply no way to know whether they were talking out of their asses or not. In Goddard’s case, the very esoteric nature of his work made him vulnerable to the hacks at the Times.

That was then, this is now. The Times is a dinosaur and the only realistic course is to dismember the business and sell off its assets–the most valuable of which, paradoxically, is the name.

None of this is surprising. The New York Times has always been a partisan, tabloid rag. It is just that no one could prove it until the internet came of age. Now everyone wants to get their revenge for being lied to for so many years. That too is human nature.

1)There *is* such a thing as institutional culture. If an organization is extremely arrogant in year N, the odds are pretty good that it will also be extremely arrogant in year N+1.

2)High-prestige organizations that have been around for a long time, such as the NYT, tend to believe that people should show them respect because of their past accomplishments. If past accomplishments should be entered on the positive side of the current ledger, then it is reasonable to enter past failures on the negative side.

3)There are plenty of errors & omission’s in *current* NYT coverage, as regularly pointed out in various blogs.

What an interesting choice.

Seems to me one might have also chose to highlight that people that don’t know what they are talking about have never been shy about talking, despite their manifest ignorance and that this trait of humanity is pervasive and not particular to folks working in a particular building.

But the analysis that was offered, and most of the cheer leading seen in the comments above, made me think of another generality of humans: they tend to see what they want to see.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

— Michael Crichton

See my post respecting other talents.

Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill, and do not recognize their true inadequacy. Thay fail to recognize genuine skill in others.

The unskilled overrate their own ability as above average. The highly-skilled underrate their abilities, often below the self-rating of the unskilled.

Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, because competent individuals wrongly assume that others are also competent. The incompetent misjudges himself, whereas the highly competent misjudges others.
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Bertrand Russell:
The stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Most people would rather die than think. In fact, they do so.

I agree with both onparkstreet and douglas.

I just wonder where we draw the line when we refer to the net and life as separated instances of ourselves. When are living “life”? Why is the net not “life”?