"Rent an Expert" agencies, and Jourrnalists' Quotes

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    I've often wondered how some journalists found their "experts" to quote on particular topics. I didn't realise that there are agencies that they can go to in order to find a relevant "expert", and that it has become a normal chargeable service. But it looks like some of these agencies have been rumbled, as they have been supplying non-existent experts, giving (mostly) AI sourced information. Even mainstream news outlets have been quoting these experts without verifying the sources - as the agencies are supposed to be doing that as part of their fee.


    Read this article, and weep.


    Virtual reality: The widely-quoted media experts who are not what they seem
    Press Gazette investigation into the widely-quoted national media experts who either do not exist, or whose credentials have not been checked.
    pressgazette.co.uk


    I've been noticing, recently, that some live human "expert interviewees", that have popped up on the BBC Radio 4 PM Programme, seemed to have less knowledge on their supposed specialist topic than the interviewer. I wondered how the programme producers found them. So are these interviewees posing as experts, having quickly read an AI summary of the topic?

    "The most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making" - Douglas Adams

    Edited 2 times, last by Frogfall ().

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  • Frogfall

    Changed the title of the thread from “"Rent an Expert" agencies, and Jourrnalist's Quotes” to “"Rent an Expert" agencies, and Jourrnalists' Quotes”.
    • New

    Expert networks are ubiquitous in the finance world.


    Many business folks have a side hustle talking about their experiences working inside large companies with institutional investors.


    For example: do you want to know how US operations at Pernod Ricard are managed? How a particular change in management in a regional subsidiary is impacting operations? How is the culture of regional management in a particular locale vis a vis the use of data in driving operational decisions?


    For all of these kinds of questions, institutional investors go to an expert network like Tegus rather than trying to source the insight the old fashioned way (picking up the phone and cultivating relationships directly).

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    How was the quote about asking as question to an expert about something he knows about, versus asking about something he doesn’t know about?

    I certainly Hope to see LENR helping humans to blossom, and I'm here to help it happen.

    • New
    Quote from Zephir_AWT

    All experts today are idiots, corrupted - or both.

    Oh come now. Most of them are harmless drudges, as Samuel Johnson put it. That was his definition of "Lexographer."


    The last paragraph of his introduction makes me think of the cold fusion researchers we have lost. He sounds a little like Ed Storms:


    "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied criticks of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

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