Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content is exactly like the article says, fake news from right-wing propaganda sites.
And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline created by right-wing websites. Something along the lines of "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people"...
I think tech culture's misguided desire to treat everyone "equally" creates a huge imbalance. You can't put the NYTimes in the same category as Breitbart. Just as you wouldn't compare it to "National Enquirer".
Edit: To keep my reply on topic, I am adding this thought: I think Facebook knew this would happen and that is why they had humans curated the trending list. I don't think they deserved the negative backlash, although I understand the slippery slope it creates.
And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post
Yea, yeah it is. I'm a liberal and can see how HuffPo is trash. I might be willing to grant that HuffPo uses softer titles and hides their outrage/fear/hate-mongering slightly better. Maybe it's not just seeing them as more tame because they're more agreeable to one's politics.
But as I was writing this comment I flipped over to both to check their headlines. Right now HuffPo [0] looks exactly like the Drudge Report when they think they've got something juicy. Does nobody else think that font treatment should be saved for a "holy shit airplanes just hit the twin towers" level of importance and immediacy?
Spoiler alert: HuffPo is no better than Breitbart. In fact they share a co-founded, Andrew Breitbart.
On a lark, I registered as a republican back in 2008 specifically so I could vote for Obama as a republican. That action, however, got me registered to all sorts of conservative mailing lists that initially boggled my mind with how full they are of pure sh*t. At first it was amusing how crackpot and deranged they could be, but it quickly just became sad and/or scary. Since I am fairly liberal, I am also registered to quite a few dem mailing lists, and the comparison isn't even close. The liberal mailing lists and news sources I might describe as having click-bait headlines, or be a bit too bleeding-heart for my tastes, but the conservative side of the aisle is almost pure fear, mis-truths and hate mongering.
I can second that. I'm a liberal (well, sort of - more like strongly left-leaning libertarian), but I'm also [sanely] pro-gun, and so I am, or was, a member of various corresponding organizations. It appears that they share member lists, because I'm also getting a bunch of Republican political spam, both email and snail mail.
And yes, it is definitely much more nutty than anything I've ever got from being a member of ACLU, or subscribing to various Dem mailing lists in this cycle. Your description is spot-on - left-wing political spam tends to be click-baity and appeal to emotion, while right-wing one is chock full of debunked conspiracy theories and blatant fear-mongering.
For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around.
Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
The top Breitbart headline, "Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump", is willfully inciting anti-immigrant sentiment by taking numbers out of context. According to the report they cite, 69,929 criminal aliens (or 3% of the total criminal alien population they measured) had been arrested for sex-related crimes between August 1955 and April 2010. The number is true but the inference is false.
While the Huffington Post obviously sensationalizes things too, their top headline, "SEX ASSAULT SPREE / ACCUSATIONS PILE UP", is completely true: the accusations are piling up. I don't think you can draw an equivalence here.
> The top Breitbart headline ... is willfully [sic] inciting anti-immigrant sentiment by taking numbers out of context.
> The number is true but the inference is false.
How are the numbers taken out of context? In your opinion, how would that headline read if the numbers weren't taken out of context? Or does the mere act of publishing the headlines (at all) make Breitbart guilty of taking the numbers out of context in your opinion? Honest question.
Also, it's not clear to me what you mean by "inference". Are you referring to the "-- But Paul Ryan Targets Trump" phrase? If so, then I would contend that "inference" is not the correct word. Instead, I would perhaps use the word "juxtaposition". Whether or not you agree to Breitbart's thinking, it seems to me that what they're trying to do is call attention to what they see as false priorities -- essentially, IIUC, they're saying "Paul Ryan is attacking the wrong person, because 70K women are targeted by criminal aliens and this is worse than anything Trump has done". You can agree to that or not, but it seems to me unfair to accuse them of bad logic.
The numbers lack context in that they don't specify a rate, merely a value. It makes it sound like 70K women are attacked each year by undocumented immigrants, when the reality is that the number is closer to 1.27K per year since 1955. Let's do some back of the napkin math:
There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, meaning that the rate of sexual assault victims per undocumented immigrant would be ~0.012%. Meanwhile, in 2006, 300,000 college women were raped.[1] With 300 million people (in 2006), that puts the rate for the general population at 0.1% of victims per person. That's nearly 10x the rate of the undocumented immigrant population, and that's only including college-aged rape victims, rather than sexual assault victims of all ages as the 70K number claims to be.
Meanwhile, we have Trump who has no fewer than 4 woman claiming he sexually assaulted him. Divide that over the 70 years of Trump's life, and at 0.057 women-per-year you have a 1-man rate of 5.7% -- 57x the rate of the general population. Seems like Paul Ryan is targeting the right person, and that Breitbart is using bad logic.
The numbers don't claim to specify a rate - that was your inference.
Also, your numbers seem to demonstrate the exact dishonesty that you accuse Breitbart of doing.
The number cited for illegal aliens is the number of arrests.
The number you cite for the general population is a victimization survey which includes a lot of alleged rapes that were never reported to the police. (In fact, I can't even figure out if all of them meet the legal definition for rape.)
According to your report [1], 12% of rapes were reported to the police. If every single rape report results in an arrest (hint: they don't), that eliminates your 10x factor right there.
When reading Breitbart, you seem to draw incorrect inferences from cited statistics. And when digging up your own data, you also seem to draw incorrect inferences. Consider the possibility that the problem here isn't Breitbart.
(Note: I hate Trump. I favor open borders and think we should let Mexicans in even if they are more rapey than Americans. In fact I have nothing but positive feelings towards Mexicans - their food is tasty and their women are beautiful. I'm just pointing out bad reasoning.)
That's the problem. The people reading the site think there are 70k rapes a year by reading the headline, and that is the incorrect, and a problem. The site exists to put up data as such to incite hatred against immigrants.
We are now in a post-fact era. Watching the current idiocy of the Trump speech happening right now shows it in full force. Any factual data people don't like now is a "conspiracy".
You are correct about the arrested vs reported thing. I don't know how I missed that. Still, that brings them in line with the general population.
You're also right about Mexican food and women. (Full disclosure, I'm married to a Mexican woman.)
In your opinion, how would that headline read if the numbers weren't taken out of context?
"Criminal Aliens Arrested for Sex-Related Crimes 70,000 Times Between 1955 and 2010 — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump"
The original headline creates an emotional impact by implying certain things: that these 70,000 events are sexual assaults (not generic sex crimes like indecent exposure etc.) against women (implying a relationship with Trump's actions where none specifically exists) that happened recently (not during a 55-year period that ended six years ago). The headline with context doesn't have the same emotional impact because you can't make the same misleading inferences. Maybe these crimes are a problem, maybe they aren't, but either way this headline is a clear misrepresentation of the facts.
OK, so it seems you have two objections. First that the headline omits the fact that that the period involved is not annual, thus optically inflating the figure. Second, you object that the phrase "sexually assaulted" is used instead of the more accurate and neutral phrase "arrested for sex-related crimes".
I have to say I agree with you on both counts. It would have been more accurate and neutral to write the headline as you suggest. (It would also have been longer and more boring.) Regarding your second point, a quick google search reveals that sex-related crimes encompass:
- Sexual Assault: Describes the catch-all crime that encompasses unwanted sexual touching of many kinds, with links to state penal code and federal law on related crimes.
- Solicitation: It's illegal to entice someone else to commit a crime (such as prostitution). ...
- Statutory Rape
I have no idea how the figures break down in these categories, so it's hard to the degree of unfairness being applied. If all of the 70K cases were rape, then Breitbart may actually be overly nice :) (Not saying it's likely!)
So thanks for that clarification. I would say, however, that this kind of headline is pretty typical for all news agencies. For example, during the Brexit "debate" in Britain, news outlets like BBC also quoted figures that were aggregated over a number of years to highlight the potential losses to the UK economy. Ditto the Daily Mail on the other side of the aisle. If this is the evidence that Breitbart is a shoddy news outlet, then I contend that the evidence is fairly weak.
They cite 70,000 sexual assaults from 1955-2010 and characterize it as a crisis. Yet, there are over 200,000 sexual assaults and rapes annually, and 80,000 sexual assaults in prisons alone annually. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem) If the 70,000 number was equally distributed, than 1,272 sexual assaults by criminal aliens would happen each year, which represents 0.006% of the total.
Is this a good thing? No. Is this some existential crisis where illegals are flooding over the border to rape american women? No.
"Criminal Aliens Sexually Assault 70,000 American Women". You're saying you don't see ANY problem with this headline? The inference is that this is a giant problem that we should be addressing right now, that it's eclipsing all other issues, when in fact it isn't in the slightest. You're being wilfully obtuse if you don't see the subtext: "Be very afraid of criminal aliens, they're coming to hurt you and rape you."
Let's not dismiss what inaccuracy here can lead to: bigotry on false pretenses, violence against innocent immigrants, and blindly supporting wars against "the wrong kind of people."
Also worth noting that these are arrests, not convictions. The police can relatively easily arrest, but need more evidence to charge and eventually convict.
Would you leverage similar criticism towards any other reports concerning sexual assault? Such as how numbers concerning sexual assault on college campuses are told lacking the context of how they were derived and also report magnitudes more crime than official FBI statistics.
It seems both sides abuse these numbers to lead readers to draw certain conclusions. Yet criticism of the practice often is not evenly applied.
Agreed, and sadly not limited to the US. One of the things I (eventually) realised is that here in the UK The Guardian is equivalent to The Daily Mail, but for liberal intelligentsia instead of Conservatives and UKIP supporters.
I've seen this idea pushed a ton recently, especially over on /r/ukpolitics and it seems like nonsense.
I think the idea stems from the way the Graun has opened up it's 'Comment is Free' section which has lead to quite a few low quality opinion pieces particularly 'SJW' esq ones.
The actual reporting from the Gruan is still good quality in my opinion, certainly head and shoulders above the DMs. And whilst the Graun has its left bias it, quite rightly, hasn't been kind to the current Labour party.
I think that's exactly it, and those are certainly what I see filtering into peoples' social media posts, and many seem at least as toxic as the average Daily Mail piece.
I'm in the U.S., and I constantly scan most of the major news source and commentary headlines.
It's a cesspool out there.
For a bit of history as I remember it, for what it's worth: in the 80s and 90s, I think, right-wing think tanks started providing a lot of research and background material. Of course these were slanted to right-wing views, but for the most part, unless you were really digging for stuff, it was academic. So if you had an argument about Gulf War I? You could, with effort, find some right-wing slanted stuff. But it was all alongside other academic material. It all balanced out. It was possible to consume a bit of bias and still make analysis work.
Then suddenly when the net started taking off, all of that research and such became much more easily available. If you were some right-wing guy looking to bolster point X, Google was your friend! You could find some nice charts and data.
Of course this was intolerable for the left, as it should be, so they started funding their own foundations and truth-providers.
This quickly became an escalating war. The titles got more and more scandalous and no matter what side you were on no matter the topic, you could find some studies and PhDs somewhere to back you up. It became a post-truth era.
Now it's all grown into vertical silos. Left-wing news sources publish left-wing commentators who repeat left-wing studies. Same thing happens on the right.
It's reached the point now where not only are the headlines and articles slanted trash, but it's problematic to sort it all out. In many cases you need to track an issue over time in both left and right-wing silos to arrive at something that works. The cognitive load for the average reader is simply too great. So instead they just stick inside their bubble and go through their lives not worrying about it.
I think this election a large percentage of people are finally figuring out how hosed up and colluding the systems of news and politics are. I'm not sure there will be improvement, but it's good to see a little daylight shining on things.
I disagree. Not well versed in Huff Po but the left-leaning likes of NYT publish stories based in fact and backed up with reporting. Breitbart report whatever they wish without ever confirming if anything in a story is true.
NYT might publish actual stories, but they also publish what is effectively propaganda. A lot of more "legitimate" news sources also have a tendency to selective report on things which fit a pre-established narrative on a topic that can effectively bury the truth. Here's an example where CNN did this: http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/cnn-edits-out-...
And sadly the Washington Times is the least biased source that I could find that even talked about it. That's why sites like Breitbart are able to be so successful. It's easy to build credibility by pointing out things like this, and then the rest of it can just be propaganda.
Yeah, Witness, for example, how the NYT spun the fact that Trump may have been able to use past business losses to offset income for tax purposes as some diabolical tax avoidance scheme not available to ordinary people, even describing it as a government bailout. Letting business owners earn back the money they've lost without adding insult to injury by taxing them on it is not a "bailout" in any normal sense of the word, just how income tax works for businesses, and while losing money does avoid income tax it doesn't exactly benefit the person doing it.
I'm not seeing how your example is actual propaganda when it is more easily attributed to human error. If CNN were pushing this as a propaganda piece, they never would have issued a follow up statement correcting themselves.
Well, ok. However it seems to me that those leaning right don't give CNN and the like the benefit of the doubt, and equally those leaning left don't give the likes of Breitbart the benefit of the doubt -- which brings us back to the parent posters position :)
Breitbart is a tabloid that pretends to respectability, much like the British tabloid The Daily Mail. They use that respectability to push their (explicit, strong) slant. If you're comparing CNN and Breitbart then their camouflage is sucessful.
Benefit of the doubt needs to be earned. I mean, hopefully you are not taking supermarket-checkout tabloids at face value, right?
CNN may be terrible journalism that's full of softballs and "clickbait" but at the end of the day the things they report are true and when they're not they retract them. Can't say the same about Breitbart in the least.
CNN has been doing a lot of selective editing this cycle. They also tend to focus on things that support their narrative. You can focus on things that are completely true and effectively "lie" about those truths because of the way you are presenting it.
Softballs and clickbait aren't any more true than lies.
There is no way to clip that video where they did on accident and then spin the story the way they did. They didn't issue that apology until they were caught, which is the exact same thing a politician would do.
Well I just checked the stories of Breitbart and looks all the things they write are true and have sources. Just checked few, I'm not an expert. I only read American propaganda newspapers sometimes out of morbid curiosity.
The difference is how you spin the headlines and the facts. Both parties are guilty. Both parties feel only other side is doing it or say but look at the other website or magazine.
Huff is full of titles Trump is sexual predator without facts, just talks. Breitbart is full of stories Bill is rapist. So what's the difference?
It's all the same shit. It is just your bias talking.
>Huff is full of titles Trump is sexual predator without facts, just talks.
We have, on record, him describing sexual assault. With his own words. On the other hand, some of the people who now are claiming Bill is a rapist once testified under oath that he did _not_ rape them. On top of the fact that there is zero evidence in favor of that statement.
That's the difference. And you would definitely know this if you weren't being disingenuous.
> On the other hand, some of the people who now are claiming Bill is a rapist once testified under oath that he did _not_ rape them.
Yet other women have consistently claimed over decades that Clinton sexually assaulted them. And today women are coming forward accusing Trump of sexual assault.
There seems to be very little difference; both men have probably assaulted women in the past and abused their power to get away with it. I don't think arbitrarily slanting the narrative to defend one and condemn the other serves anybody. In fact, sweeping sexual assault under the rug when it doesn't serve your political agenda is a pretty horrible thing to do.
We have him on record joking around with someone about actions he didn't take. It's hardly the confession the breathless Twitter hordes want it to be, not to ruin your emotionally resonating state of being
NYT published a news article about car fires in Denmark, where they blamed the "right wing lower class" for the fires. No evidence given for this at all. Infact all evidence points in a different direction: Arab Ghetto kids (I live in one of the places, where there was car fires, I can tell you that the right-wing thing is complete BS)
"One theory is that cars in Denmark are being burned by individuals from an angry underclass in a country where far-right groups have organized bitter protests against immigration, calling it a threat to the nation’s identity."
The article makes it clear the "angry underclass" is separate from the "far-right groups."
If that paragraph is not suggesting the far-right may be responsible, why does it refer to their "bitter protests" immediately after the theory that an "angry underclass" are burning cars?
Why even mention the far-right at all, if nobody is suggesting they have something to do with these crimes?
They're implying that the far-right protests caused the "Arab ghetto kids" in question to become the "angry underclass", not that the "angry underclass" was itself far-right. The sentence could definitely be written more clearly.
The NYT clearly blames the crime on.... the people committing the crime. The NYT is not blaming the crime on the far right. If anything, they are blaming it on the Arab ghetto kids which is what the OP was claiming was the truth.
They are suggesting the far-right is angering the underclass. If you're asserting the NY Times is therefore blaming the crimes on the far-right, good luck!
I mostly read Huff Po when I, as a white man, am feeling too good about myself. Then I go to Huff Po and read 20 articles about how horrible white men are.
It's basically like watching a Lifetime Movie. All the villains are straight white males. Except around Christmas, when all of sudden, they become caring selfless individuals.
Can you link to a story that reports a 'fact' that is proven false? Because yes, I see the political-right spin on the facts on Breitbart but I've never seen them report something that is flat-out wrong.
/r/the_donald currently has four posts that are just pictures of portions of a centipede, such that if they are voted correctly then they will appear to form a complete centipede. I uh... I'm just not sure what's going on there.
For me, it is very short: She is a habitual liar. Without any remorse. I really don't understand how a human being can go to these debates, give interviews and ignore that she has psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies.
And no, it doesn't mean that Trump is any better or any worse. It's all bullshit.
I don't see that, personally. But, to each their own.
It's not surprising that you and others people do, though. In the US, there are a lot of politicians who seem 'psycho/sociopathic' to many people. And, there are lots of CEOs like that, too. But, it doesn't prevent those people from leading or being effective.
We managed to get by with status quo for as long as I've been alive (since Regan). It's never perfect, but it's been better than burning it all down (as I hear a lot of people now saying).
Change takes time. If people really want it they'll have to work hard for it for at least the next eight years, regardless.
That's a really cheap false equivalency. You've basically side nothing while ignorning the practical reality of what we're discussing. Take for example, the fact that Fox News will continually post stories about how Global Warming is a hoax, which is something the Huffington Post definitely won't do. The Huffington Post tends to write click-baity headlines, but they've never out right used lies in their articles. That's not bias, it's an observable trend.
And Huff constantly publishes stories telling gender doesn't exist. All the scientists beg to differ.
Look mate I'm not interested in arguing who is more wrong. The fact is both sides have bias and talk about things that for whatever reason they find most important. And usually it bothers other side of the political spectrum so it's like a never ending loop from both sides.
> And Huff constantly publishes stories telling gender doesn't exist. All the scientists beg to differ.
I'm decidedly not a fan of HuffPo, but this is a massive distortion. No-one is disputing that biological sex exists, and that's what science supports. The matter of gender, and various associated concepts such as gender roles and norms, is completely different - and there is plenty of research to support the idea that a lot of entrenched gender stereotypes are largely or purely a social construct.
No one is denying this. People are saying there's a significant difference between bias that influences the ways facts are portrayed, and bias that causes facts to be invented.
They definitely don't do this. It seems like you have a significant misunderstanding of the literature being discussed.
>Look mate I'm not interested in arguing who is more wrong.
No, it's about who is wrong _more often_ and who reports fake stories _more often_. When the standard for one set of sources is consistently absurdly low then you can't just
pretend all sources are equal. Again, it's a false equivalency.
Here's Glenn Greenwald, who can hardly be accused of being right-wing or a Trump supporter, on media bias:
The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump,
and preventing him from being elected president. I don’t have an actual problem
with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses
such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just
as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free,
no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring
Trump down.
Although he doesn't name them, it seems to me he's likely referring to the vary news outlets you would consider beyond reproach (say, NYT or WaPo). Does this perhaps make you reconsider your position?
Do people really see the NYT as beyond reproach in 2016? They pushed Hillary so hard during the primaries, and every day they add a few points to their 'Hillary is guaranteed to win' graphic. They were instrumental in sidelining Sanders. NYT's institutional bias is utterly flagrant--perhaps not as crass as HuffPo, but offensively biased nonetheless.
I was curious about this Greenwald quote, which does not really match my perception of recent media coverage, so I went and looked up the date[0]: the article in which the quote appears was published in July. Greenwald's context here is mostly (or entirely? I'm not sure when the interview itself was conducted) based on the primary process, which certainly seemed strongly anti-Trump, to the extent that many outlets even refused to believe what the polls were telling them [1].
I have no problem calling Trump a racist thanks to his very first speech in the race calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers. Followed up by the thoughtful idea of banning all Muslims from entering the USA and that anyone from Syria shouldn't be allowed to enter the country.
"When Mexico sends its people they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you; they’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting.”[0][1]
There was the time Trump called for a wall to keep illegals out, and social media said securing our borders – which we already try to do – is racist.
There was the time Trump suggested mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and social media said upholding current law is racist.
There was the time Trump suggested banning all Muslim immigrants until we figure out what the risk is, and how to deal with it. Islam is a belief system open to all, not a race, but social media branded it as racist [2]
Lol you just directly quoted him painting every Mexican as a bad person. "and some, I assume, are good people" was said in jest and he doesn't actually mean it. He means all Mexicans coming here are bad for the USA.
Banning an entire religion is bigoted, racist, totally idiotic, call it whatever you like.
You can keep trying with the mental gymnastics to justify what he says, but thankfully the majority of Americans see through it. I'm enjoying the current implosion and fallout of his campaign as each day goes by and am wondering just how bad he is going to lose.
"You might well dislike Trump’s words. I did. But let’s not make it worse. He did not say that all Mexicans are rapists. Yet that’s what many commentators did. For example, Politico misquoted Trump by omitting his phrase about “good people.” They said he was “demonizing Mexicans as rapists.” They argued that Mexicans do not really commit more rapes in the U.S. than whites. But that’s not what Trump claimed."
"Trump was discussing crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants. Is it true that some people who illegally cross the border from Mexico are good? Yes. Is it true that some others commit crimes? Yes. Is that a problem? People disagree. Some conjecture that unauthorized immigrants don’t commit more crimes than U.S. citizens. But crimes by unauthorized immigrants, even murders, would not have happened if those individuals had not entered the U.S."[0]
I saw the speech live. He said the illegals coming from Mexico are all bad people. He joked that some "might" be good. It doesn't get any clearer than that.
It seams like in this election even traditionally right learning news papers like the WaPo or WSJ are pilling onto trump. Not to mention countless regional newspapers that have a right leaning edition staff.
Bias disclosure: Left leaning, not by my own choice. More centrist, along the lines of the Economist editing staff view of the world. So not by choice, because there's not really centrism left.
Glenn Greenwood has essentially the level of anti-establihsment-media (and pro-conspiracy) bias that he accuses the establishment media of having anti-Trump bias, so, no, him saying something like this doesn't make me reconsider anything.
This is extremely obvious if you are non-partisan. Right now, there are huge issues about Clinton just released by wikileaks[0] she said that she has a "public position" and a "private position" to placate a room full of bankers (Read: Hey guys I won't really do any of that Bernie Sanders stuff, I'm just saying it for votes)
CNN's top story: Trump said "grab her in the pussy" in 2005
Having a public position and a private position is something everyone does--expressing your private position publicly is often detrimental to getting the goal of that position done, so you craft a public position more amenable to achieving that goal.
This was leaked. She was asked at the beginning of her campaign to release the transcripts of these speeches, she said "I'll look into it"[0]. If it was intended to be public this sure is a hell of a way to go about making it so. I can't honestly tell you how she actually feels, but I can tell you that at very least she is a serial liar.
One of the Wikileaks "scandals" in this article is that Hillary Clinton advocates "a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders".
Scandal? Come on, that's not a scandal, that a policy position. Personally, I agree with free trade in general, so I'm not scandalized by this "revelation" one bit.
Yes, "a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders" is a policy position - one she really wants to convince voters, especially Saunders supporters, that she doesn't hold. Whilst simultaneously convincing businesses who'd benefit from it that she does. Also, trade is already pretty damn free, which means that free trade agreements end up being largely about loosening safety standards, tightening IP laws, and other such measures that benefit big businesses over consumers.
>Scandal? Come on, that's not a scandal, that a policy position.
That is pretty clearly an endorsement for TPP (other leaks make this connection more obvious[0]). Hillary says she is not in favor of it, this seems to directly contradict that statement. Saying one thing behind closed doors and another in front of the voting public is a scandal to me.
It is also well known that Hillary Clinton has sort-of kind-of changed her position in response to the Bernie Sanders left pull.
Yes, in my personal opinion it's probably not a strong pull, and Sanders voters who feel strongly against free trade / TPP / etc. are justified in feeling suspicious. But a speech from 2013 when she was openly promoting it doesn't exactly tell too much.
>But a speech from 2013 when she was openly promoting it doesn't exactly tell too much.
What about emails from last year? Consider that with the 'private position' and 'pubic position' comment and you are a fool if you think she will do anything she claims.
That's not at all what that means, she explained what that meant during the last debate.
This is the issue with all of these "leaks", they can create a one sentence soundbyte and make uninformed people think conspiracy theories when in fact it is standard mundane work being done by people trying to fix complex problems involving many different groups of people who need to come together to find a solution.
No wonder why the leaks are always in drips, no one is bothered or intelligent enough to spend more than 3 seconds analyzing the story they'll just re-post some nonsense from their Facebook feed and assume it is true.
I think this is the exact reason Trump is where he is. The right wing media frenzy has come full force and the echo chamber has reached a new high. Unfortunately when he loses badly the conspiracy nonsense will come back full force in that he was cheated out of the election. No one but the subset of a subset of Republicans will believe this but it is what it is.
There I believe he was referring specifically to the breaking story that Trump's descriptions of leaked Hillary emails were fed to him by Russian propagandists, a story with little basis in fact.
It may be a story with little proof and mostly conjecture, but we don't know if it has little basis in fact, or not. There is plenty of circumstantial but fairly damning evidence linking the Trump campaign to Russia.
Nobody is claiming that he is a Russian agent. At most, they are claiming that he is rhetorically pro-Russian, perhaps because of admiration for Putin's leadership style, perhaps because of hopes for future deals in Russia in case the 'running for President' thing doesn't work out.
I haven't been to Yahoo.com in years, and was intrigued by (and doubting) your statements - low and behold, half way down the page is this:
"Voting for Team Hillary is Anti-Christ: E-Mails Expose Plot to Overthrow Authority of Pope, Create Catholic Spring to Foment Revolution & Attack Evangelicals-Who Has Place in Hillary's America?"
"Put self aside and fight for Trump to help stop the forces of evil from prevailing"
"Trump’s past transgressions, of which he has expressed shame, remorse and apologies, pale in comparison to the revelations we now know about the plot against Christians and the strategy of creating a Catholic Spring, dividing Catholics and undermining the authority of the pope by Team Hillary and the global elite"
"Mother Teresa’s nuns are praying the rosary daily for voters to receive clarity of truth from The Holy Spirit and vote for the candidate who supports life and religious liberty (Trump) against the party engendering a culture of death and new atheism disguised as liberalism"
Some people say it's impossible to have unbiased news. Of course this is true in a trivial sense, in that anything written by a human with intent to be interesting to read is likely to have some bias. And of course one can bias the news simply by choosing what to report and not report (eg if all you report are all the things fmr Pres. Bush did wrong, then the audience will get a bad impression).
However, there is absolutely a difference between journalists attempting to report news in a neutral way and journalists intent on spinning news to forward some agenda, even to the point of using strategic omissions and what not to completely mislead the reader about a conclusion.
Moreover, a reasonably intelligent human can (and should) read a variety of new sources (that at least attempt to be unbiased) and generally can get an idea of what actually is going on. When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.
>> When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.
You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?
I am not accusing you personally of this, but the tactic of continually accusing more and more mainstream publications of being left-leaning in order to make room for e.g. Breitbart / InfoWars is becoming increasingly common, and it's a wholly fallacious argument. All you need to do is push the boundary of the extreme right quite far along and all the sudden all ordinary news outlets lean "left" by comparison.
There is wide-spread consensus that BBC, NPR and NYT are left leaning.
But this is not about right/left anymore - the scary fact (and becoming patently obvious to more and more people) is the fact that all "mainstream" media is pro-establishment (whether it is left or right is less important). That's why outlets like Breitbart, warts and all, have been gaining so much popularity.
I know there are extreme right-wing news outlets, but there are also moderate "sensible" ones as well - the Daily Telegraph and Spectator in the UK, even the Daily Mail.
Breitbart isn't the anti-NYT, it's the anti-Daily Kos.
Absolutely - it's less about left/right and more about "I can discredit reasonable sources as biased by recalibrating what bias means based on these extreme outliers"
It is a sad reality that by now much all "right-leaning" media in the US freely lets unchecked lies permeate their reporting. This is true even for the WSJ's political news, let alone USA Today or Fox News which give equal space to fact and fiction.
Pretty much the only readable right wing media is foreign - but if he had suggested The Economist or the Financial Times you probably would have called them left-leaning too...
I'd have thought the WSJ was pretty reliable. I'm not sure whether they permeate lies, but on the other side you have the NYT giving Hilary's campaign team copy-approval on what they write.
If you're after other right-wing UK publications you could try the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator.
Both the WSJ and The Economist represent interests of the Republican Party elite (WSJ) or the globalist elite (The Economist)
I could not believe my eyes when I saw The Economist devoting a full page to Trump's badly-fitting suits and overly-long ties, but musing over Clinton's numerous corruption scandals, because she is the preferred globalist candidate.
I am sad that even The Economist has fallen - I have been a subscriber for 25 years. Perhaps not much longer.
Whether or not those three have a similar political viewpoint, they probably have different regional viewpoints, so there's still some value in combining them.
Almost any combination will omit some political stance. I don't believe that political viewpoints are binary, or even that they vary only along a single dimension.
I'd say US news sources strive to hard to be "fair" where their definition of fair is based on a prior of both sides being on opposite sides, but equally distant, from some "center".
I can't go to CNN (what most on the "right" would consider "left") most days without seeing some headline about Trump unaccompanied by a headline about Hillary, in what I can presume is an attempt to be "balanced". The headlines are crafted to make things look equally revelatory. But when you read the articles you find that one is a serious strike (saying shocking things on a mic), and the other is usually a non-story, ie. leaked emails showing the candidate saying pretty much exactly what their public stance has been all along.
They certainly are left-leaning. I'm not saying they are Labour party supporters, but they certainly espouse the same position as the Guardian on many subjects.
For instance an event where an old man drives his car into a wall. A neutral headline could be "Old man drives car into wall". But the problem with this is that a lot of people will now assume he drove it into the wall because he is old. So a better neutral headline would be "Man drives car into wall" and then the article has to explain the reason. This is a very subtle change but makes a lot of difference.
Now lets say an old woman drove her car into a wall: "Woman drives car into wall". A lot of people think women are worse drivers than men, so this will already be a sensational title for some.
A good read about this is "Why you should stay away from news" from Rolf Dobelli.
> I think tech culture's misguided desire to treat everyone "equally" creates a huge imbalance. You can't put the NYTimes in the same category as Breitbart. Just as you wouldn't compare it to "National Enquirer".
I agree. I think we're seeing a sharp rise in foreign "soft power" online in America this election.
It's being supported by the evangelicals who will not remove their vote from Trump on the grounds that they really want that supreme court seat.
After the election, foreign influence will dwindle. The credibility of such websites cannot be maintained while pushing so much unverified or simply false information. This is the strength of our first amendment.
> It's being supported by the evangelicals who will not remove their vote from Trump on the grounds that they really want that supreme court seat.
You make it sound illogical.
As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat.
The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.
The dataset you present conveniently does not include the 211 days and counting for Merrick Garland, the longest period of Senate inaction on a Supreme Court nomination in American history, and approaching twice as long as the next longest (Brandeis at 125 days).
I can't tell if you're ignorant of the fact that his current nominee has been blocked for months and will continue to be blocked for months, or if you conveniently want to avoid talking about it.
I just don't understand how someone invests themselves into a conversation like this without having the first clue about the territory.
> The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice.
Reason magazine editorial made the same argument that Bernie was the best choice for libertarians. Basically he aligns with libertarians on social issues, and everything else he could not get done anyway.
> As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat. That factors heavily in the decision.
Sorry, that's my bias seeping in. I respect your choice.
> The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.
Not nuclear. He could launch with approval of his self-chosen cabinet, or choose not to defend our allies, resulting in more tensions in areas prone to nuclear war.
Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights. May God bless you and all of us through these tough times.
>Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights.
I'm not sure if this was a subtle way to imply that, although the risk of Trump using the bomb is negligible, it's still greater than zero, which is the number of lives you consider lost to abortion. Impressive accidental troll. :)
Realistically, what evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary? Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios? Did he vote for the Iraq war?
> Realistically, what evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary? Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios?
Trump reportedly asked three times why we could not use nuclear weapons in a private briefing.
More importantly, he threatens to change the landscape of our deployed military so drastically that the moves would create opportunities for non-allies to take more aggressive positions against our allies.
If we failed to protect our allies, the US economy would tank, due to all the outstanding treasuries.
> Did he vote for the Iraq war?
Obviously Trump could not have voted on the Iraq war. That's an invalid question.
No, he's never served as a politician and so has no platform record. He's never demonstrated an ability to serve his country so I don't understand why we should entrust him with our most powerful station.
> Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios?
I don't believe there's any evidence of that.
> What evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary?
To me it's his lack of temperament. I'm confident he means what he says that he doesn't want to use nuclear weapons. But in dire situations which may arise, I personally do not trust his temperament or judgement in dealing with foreign powers. This is because he's shown many times that he only cares for the most short-term benefits. His tax plans demonstrate this, his inability to explain many of his plans demonstrates this, and his history in business demonstrates this.
Just as a discussion point (and going off topic and being maybe too pedantic) that is not how I understood the XKCD. The difference is that the one interpretation only takes into account the odds of the machine lying, the bayesian approach also takes into account the odds of the sun actually going nova, which is still neglible.
Yes as a second consideration you can also take the view of the world will end, but that is not the point of the XKCD.
And then drawing it to this discussion, yes the odds that Trump would be willing to start a nuclear war might be high, but combined with the odds of an actual nuclear war occurring the odds of it happening is still neglible.
>> He will likely increase tensions on the world stage.
> While Trumps opponent openly warns Russia of consequences. Lets be objective now.
Yes, let's. Russia is not an ally. There are consequences to its aggression.
Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly said we should extract more money from our allies in east asia, and that we should threaten to withdraw from Japan and South Korea. These are scenarios China and Russia would love to see play out.
Trump argues NATO is obsolete. He defends Russia's annexation of Crimea, and he thinks we should give up Aleppo to Russian-friendly Assad.
He thinks he knows more than the generals. At the same time, he claims he never thought about this stuff during his time as a businessman.
The alternative to nuclear war is the proxy wars you see playing out in the middle east. Any concessions are gobbled up by whichever side backs down.
> The alternative to nuclear war is the proxy wars you see playing out in the middle east.
True. We also know who started that with leaders not bowing to the western interests. While Assad isn't exactly prince charming, his country wasn't in ruins as it is now. Same stands for Gaddafi and Hussein.
By every account, he already has. Numerous world leaders and multinational organizations have denounced him, specifically because of his dangerous rhetoric.
but justice nomination is very largely their choice
FTFY
Does your religious conservatism mean that you support the Citizens United decision? Or does it mean that you're opposed to Loving v. Virginia? How about Shelby County v. Holder?
>Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.
1. How is that going to affect your decision? Who can you vote for that will ensure the SC seat goes to a conservative?
2. How do you feel about the unprecedented blocking of the President from doing this Constitutional duty of appoint SC justices for 9+ months? Or is that just a small price to pay to get your religious beliefs installed in the highest court in the land?
> Or is that just a small price to pay to get your religious beliefs installed in the highest court in the land?
I don't know why you were downvoted, but I would like to point out that many laws are based on religion, like marrying only one person, or not stealing and killing. We take these for granted because we grew up with them.
So, I'm not sure the argument that they are "installing religious beliefs" does much to convince religious people that they are overreaching. Their feeling is that they are saving people, and they feel this can be done through politics as well as it can be done in person.
I'm not sure I agree with those who vote this way. I just wanted to throw it out there since I doubt you'll get a reply from a religious person.
Nah, they just don't like me pointing out facts. Like the fact that this is Constitutional obstruction and is completely unprecented.
Too much cognitive dissonance for people who are probably already completely overwhelmed at this point in the cycle, given the turmoil on that side of the aisle.
That's why I won't get a reply from any of the small downvoters.
My perspective is that they're basically the same, The NY Times (and CNN and Fox and many others) are just a lot more subtle about it than Breitbart. But fundamentally it's the same thing. There's a pre-established narrative, and they find a way to make everything fit it. If there's something that contradicts it directly they don't even report on it.
I see it differently. I was around when Bill Clinton was under siege. The "Left Wing" papers (WaPo, for example, was my local) turned on him just like the right wing outlets did.
Some sites don't do this. When it became clear that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was misguided, the propaganda sites did not jump on board. When Rumsfeld finally admitted we weren't going to find weapons of mass destruction the right-biased sites changed the narrative and started trying to make other stories dominate the news cycle.
It happens on the left as well (watch some of the MSNBC shows). That's the difference. It shows up in the willingness to criticize your own team.
I agree. Sensationalizing news stories has been going on since news was a thing. Each organization picks what they think is important and then makes it as exciting to their readers as they can.
My wife is a news junkie. She actually watches CSPAN along with all of the news channels. Sometimes I catch the same story from a few different places, and it is clear they ALL apply their own bias. For a current example, Fox tries to pluck out emails from the leak that show some wrong doing and MSNBC has a story about a leaked email sharing a risotto secret.
>And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post
Yes, this is you expressing your liberal bias. Huffington Post is Breitbart of the left. They just use a slightly different strategy for pushing their propaganda. The end result is the same: readers with skewed, dysfunctional views of reality.
You disagree? Okay. Which major left-wing website do you consider equally biased to Breitbart?
I don't think there are many "major" left-wing sites that are as full of hate and fear-mongering as a large population of their equivalents on the right. You are falling for the fallacy that both sides fall somewhat evenly on opposite sides of a normal distribution of "truth" or "balance". This is just not true. Changing times have pushed the overall country further right, but this process has also distilled the GOP down to a core of angry, white christian (males?). I don't think liberals are exaggerating that much when they say if Obama was white (or Hillary were a man), 20 years ago they might have been the republican candidates.
They really should filter the news to each person's individual bias. It'd just be easier that way. Cognitive dissonance is real and it can cause serious emotional distress. That's not a good way to drive engagement.
I genuinely can't tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. And I don't mean that insultingly. It's an obvious conclusion to jump to from the initially rejected premise that hyper-equality of treatment is wrong, but of course it ignores the enormous cost of creating echo chambers.
It seems like the 'correct' solution doesn't lie at one of these poles, unfortunately.
I think he's serious. This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult."
We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars.
Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.
As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.
Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order.
> This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult."
I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general)
> We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars.
This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.
Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony.
> Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.
Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...
> As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.
I love the way you put it; this goes straight into my quotes file.
> Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me.
In a way, it's what some people do without realizing the idea. It's obvious that once a topic becomes a political issue, the general population loses the ability to discuss it in any reasonable way, so it's best to ignore that topic altogether until at least it falls off the news cycle. But maybe we need a more social-wide tools to "cordon off" topics that were exposed to the disease politics is.
> it's best to ignore that topic altogether until at least it falls off the news cycle
I think it's unfortunate when people stop talking about the issues. You're right, people may have made up their minds, but the debate process is not just practice for the candidates, it's also practice for the public to get to know the issues the country is facing.
Of course, it's always up to you what you want to ignore.
Two things cause political discussions to be intractable.
1. Propaganda works really really well. Repetiton of propaganda, being a form of intellectual violence, will get people to believe almost anything. Thus, people who control the channels of repetitive messages delivered to the masses control what people believe.
2. The truth is out there, but due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who know the least think they know the most and they focus their energy on the most trivial issues due to bikeshedding. Thus, unless carefully vetted, discussion participants will overwhelmingly be people conditioned by repetition, think they're experts and be drawn to triviality.
In order to side step the nut house, just let people believe whatever they want to believe and charge big bucks for delivering messages, especially repetitivly, that do not easily fit in to the ruts in their cognitive road. That's because each time this is done, a small amount of cognitive violence is occurring to your viewers. Most people aren't intellectual masochists so it will drive them away eventually if done too much.
> Hmm. Now I can't tell if your reply is serious :p
I am, it is..
> As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.
This is true for more than just politics. Our language, culture, habits, facial expressions etc. are all learned from society. You can find evidence of ideologies in all of these.
> We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.
I think both can be true. Best, to me, is if we can foster environments that both provide different views and also allow new ideas to grow without being persecuted. I don't think this happens by building walls around everything. There is a balance to strike.
You're repeating the false narrative that unbiased news does not exist.
There are lots of unbiased news outlets who just report on stories as they come in. I learn about all sorts of government corruption and waste from NPR, NYTimes, WaPO, etc... And relating to current events, I also learn about all the unscrupulous things Clinton did from these sources.
I don't need to be inundated with right-wing propaganda be unbiased. Just as I wouldn't spend too much time reading HuffPo or ThinkProgress.
No one news source is complete, or 100% correct, but not every news source is credible or deserve our attention.
I am completely ok with you directing that comment at me, because I fundamentally disagree with your assessment.
I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources.
For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.
>For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.
No, information may have been made available by biased media, but it may have been presented in such a way to adjust the perceived significance of it.
Take the email scandal for example. Every news outlet provided the information, but there are vastly different conclusions about the importance of it that a reader will be led to draw based on how the information was presented.
Even the headline you were upset about was a logical conclusion given a viewpoint based on the information available about the recent shooting of the police officers.
Information: Two policeman killed by a man who was in the country illegally
Conservative news interpretation: Illegal immigrant a result of poor border control policies by current administration. Therefore, "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people."
Liberal news interpretation: Immigration is a touchy subject right now, exclude anything related to it. Therefore, "Two policeman were killed by a person who happened to be a human."
> For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.
That is not the standard for bias, and the fact you make your standard "Well if it doesn't have info that conservatives have". What about libertarians? Anarchists? Socialists? Fascists? Communists?
Everyone is bias, some places do a great job of separating out their biases from reporting but its fantasy land to think that there are motivated journalists out there that just don't have an opinion one way or the other.
What one considers news is inherently biased and since you cannot report on everything, you will have bias. For instance, a person can value bird lives really highly and find that not reporting on bird deaths caused by cats biased. Then there is the interpretation of events: terrorism vs triumphant fight for freedom, win or lost, etc... Conservative vs liberal is a very, very narrow way to view the world.
If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist.
We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.
Ethically, it's absolutely unconscionable to show people only what they want to see, enabling our worst features to simply fester unchallenged.
From a Machiavellian standpoint (read: Thiel or Zuckerberg), this isn't an intelligent long-term strategy, unless your view of how dumb and malleable people are is such that by playing your cards right, so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line.
EDIT: could you explain why you want to delete this post?
>so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line.
People already know about the filter bubble, but they don't actually care. Most people aren't going to Facebook for an unbiased stream of news and they don't like to feel uncomfortable (i.e. be barraged by things that challenge their core beliefs).
They don't, but they also don't like going to the gym, waking up early for work, or taking out the trash. I think it'll be interesting to see who do and who don't
Willpower and motivation fascinate me. I've been living with depression for a while, but I've been able to conceptually reorient myself to embrace my circumstances and find willpower to do the 'I don't want to, but I should' things whenever they come around. But just as I don't think everyone is capable of advanced systems programming, for example, I'm not certain that everyone is capable of strong willpower.
The great thing about freedom is that it means other people finding your actions unconscionable doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop doing them.
Some people would find it unconscionable that my wife drives and that I "allow her" to do so. The particularly zealous among them might even say that this kind of moral decadence enables our worst features. Although they'd probably find other sins to say that about first before they got to the driving.
I agree, up to the point where we are so certain about a freedom that we decide it is not worth having. Say, the freedom to drive on the wrong side of the freeway.
You make a good point: regulation is a clumsy tool, and I don't think it needs to be applied here. However, I'm disappointed in what seem to be the fundamental motivations of Facebook and its board. I'm not sure that anything could come in the way of Mark Zuckerberg's pursuit of maximizing the world's dependence on his product.
I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular.
However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts.
Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality.
In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level.
These are serious, even dangerous errors.
So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises.
More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.
Looking at Yahoo just now, at about 50 stories, 7 were strongly anti-Trump and there were 2 that involved Trump but weren't negative (and maybe even slightly positive). I'm seeing the opposite of a right-wing bias. No mentions of HRC.
> Something along the lines of "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people"...
Well that is not fake, because such a title is unfalsifiable. Both sides use this kind of rhetoric now however, so, in a way the populist right wing has won. The idea of moderation or modesty is nonexistent in US and almost the same holds for UK media. That is wrong, because i believe (and i think one could find enough evidence if interested) that you can convince people by being moderate.
if this is anyone's particular forte...how would you value articles? - as in, I do agree that a NYTimes's article on adderall has more value to add than say a buzzfeed article on the 10 things that you won't believe are true - but how would you go about working that into code?
You can't put Breitbart in the same category as the NYT, true, but you could put it in the same category as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Mother Jones etc.
The NY Times is a large scale journalistic outfit with dozens of news desks, hundreds of editors and journalists that all report on the days events, do investigative reporting, provide local beats, report on sports, the economy, politics, etc as well as publish op-eds and editorials. Breitbart, HuffPo, et al are blog teams that aggregate and editorialize news stories and may dabble in the occasional long form piece. It's a false equivalence to claim all are the same.
But everything has biases. Objectivity is a fib used by bullshit factories like RT to cast doubt over everything. It's not about bias at all, it's about credibility. NYT has credibility, BBC, NPR, The Times of London, Guardian, etc all do. RT, HuffPo, Brietbart do not.
The Guardian which is extremely left leaning and makes questionable claims like "black torture sites in Chicago." I've been to the Homan station. You can walk in. Its not a "black site" nor is torture done there, at least no proof than some drug addict's claims with zero followup or physical evidence or jury conviction. Worse, the 48 hour holding without charges period which are often claimed to be "illegal" are perfectly legal as per Illinois law. Almost all states allow a 24-48 hour holding period.
The "black site" narrative went completely unquestioned in the liberal press. There is zero self-policing here or signs of skepticism with liberal claims. Heck, the "clock boy" was lauded by the liberal press and Obama for being this amazing genius being attacked by racists, when it was a purposeful ruse to get teachers scared to make this kid and his dad celebrities for the purpose of helping his dad's political career and perhaps a big jury payout for "damages" soon. Only hated skeptic Richard Dawkins was remotely skeptical of these claims only to be drowned out on Twitter by liberals calling him a racist.
I think a lot of this is liberal bias. Liberals can't see their own bias objectively because they're too close to the problem, the same way conservatives can't see bias at Fox. Guardian, Independent, Salon, etc are just as bad as Brietbart if not worse, because they sell the idea of being 'fact-based' when they're propaganda outlets for a certain viewpoint which generates ad impressions and gets subscriptions via endless outrage, anti-US bias, and pandering to our emotions.
Lets stop pretending liberals don't have their army of brietbarts too.
I wouldn't say they have zero credibility, but I would put it on a sliding scale. However, places like Drudge, Buzzfeed have broken stories before so I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error.
People are worried about bias. I'm skeptical that humans have the ability to be politically unbiased on an individual level. Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiased. Information aggregators should have their members clearly spell out their positions on popular issues in their bios (an openness that should be a part of the responsibility of being an information aggregator) and there should be "block designed" hiring around these issues to maximize political diversity and reduce bias in aggregate. Otherwise network effects are just going to cluster people with similar opinions around each other.
> take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide
Well, no, even on abortion there is usually a position somewhere in the middle is where a lot of people end up (and you left out part of the spectrum, where even contraceptives are believed to be morally wrong), and usually the law has ended up somewhere in the middle, too.
We confuse "loudest" views with "most common" a lot these days, so I do agree that promoting the most extreme views possible to drive "engagement" (a tactic figured out by people looking for votes long before the internet was even around to introduce engagement->clicks->dollars) is a bad behavior for aggregators, but that's a hard argument to make for a business as long as we hold the current view of short-term "fiduciary duty" ruling all.
When considering all abortions there are many positions which limit different subsets as being wrong, but for any given situation one must choose between abortion allowed or abortion banned (and technically the choice of abortion required but that almost never pops up).
So while one might be against partial birth abortion but for second trimester abortions, they still have to look at a given situation and say yay or nay.
Some "middle positions" on abortion tend to be poorly thought out from a deontological perspective. Allowing abortion in cases of rape makes zero sense if abortion is murder, for example. Help should surely be given to rape victims, but giving it in the form of infanticide?
>Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide. So let's stop pretending to be unbiased.
You're falling into the trap of American politics by making every issue a binary choice. For instance, I find the abortion debate to be such a non-issue and if someone asks me what my stance is, I respond by saying I haven't done enough research or soul-searching to form a coherent, rational position on this issue.
And I probably will not ever get around to doing this research. I'm ok not having a position on certain issues. I wish this was more acceptable. Instead, the US political duopoly and it's first to the post voting encouraged big tent parties who more or less have to agree on most issues. I'm going to paraphrase Rumsfeld's brilliant turn of phrase here, there are known unknowns, and there's power in accepting that.
Instead of immediately having to take a stance, leaders can carefully consider all all the information and make a reasoned, rational decision.
Also, there's no fear of being labeled a flip-flopper (which is stupid. It's way worse to stick to your guns, so to speak, if new information comes to light.)
I agree that our leaders should have nuanced stances and be able to step back as you suggest. But you suggested that you were okay with you not having a position.
And again - in general, that's absolutely fine! But government leaders in the US are representatives of 'we the people'. If they cannot gauge what we feel then they have no way of representing us in such a way that aligns with our feelings.
That said I believe that your point of not taking a stance totally offers up much more calm and nuanced discussions than extreme stances on any side of an issue - and is very probably a very useful position!
Wow, that's a pretty dim view of humanity you have there. They were also conceived. Should contraceptives be illegal too?
Just because there is a selection bias doesn't mean that the bias results in specifically positive or negative outcome. I could argue that because you were born you are against abortion because you were born too, and my argument would be just as valid. Of course I'm not making that argument, because it is just as silly as the one you are making.
Tends to be a less inflammatory 'pro life' way of saying, "it's easy to be undecided when the decision isn't about you being murdered." Or something provocative along those lines.
I'm stating a fact. One important reason why anyone of us is able to have a stance on the issue, is that we've not been aborted. I understand a pro-choice position, it is pragmatical to allow abortions up to the fourth month, but the hard truth is that all the unique "code" required to build any of us was created during mitosis after conception. That particular combination is unique. That particular genetic combination is lost in an abortion.
If Bach had not been born, one of his brothers would be the composer?... Same for Einstein?
A unique, never-to-be-repeated genetic combination is lost every time two people fail to have sex and conceive a child. Should we encourage everyone to have sex with as many people as possible, to maximize unique genetic occurrences?
> If Bach had not been born, one of his brothers would be the composer?... Same for Einstein?
What if we had aborted Hitler? Or Stalin? Or John Wayne Gacy?
Actions have to be judged based on the information available at the time, not on what might be learned decades later.
> take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide
I don't. It's fundamentally a question about when sex cells become a person, and if rights accumulate sequentially or instantaneously.
There are lots of lines one can reasonably draw, e.g. independent viability (downside: disenfranchises premature babies), consciousness (no way to measure it), neural activity (how much?), heartbeat (why not if the tongue's wiggling?), conception, birth, et cetera.
Breaking down problems is one way to help dis-engage tribal instincts.
It is my perception that people with the middle views you describe would still be considered "pro-choice" and would largely vote "pro-choice" but perhaps I am wrong. If those people were split 50/50 in the way that they vote I would concede that there is a middle ground in that issue.
> Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide.
Hogwash.
First, there's the spectrum of finding where human life begins. There's many stances here from at the point of conception to post-birth, and everywhere between.
Then there's the factor of a woman's right to her body and life. Given the first factor - we have a whole new complex spectrum here where we weigh in the life of the infant vs the life of the mother.
To further complicate this, there's the woman's right to privacy. This was the basis by which Roe v Wade was decided in the first place.
So there's at least 3 spectrum on which any citizen can find themselves in the middle of in that issue.
I agree that humans probably don't have the ability to be politically unbiased. I'm just not sure that bias matters that much. But to pretend that there are issues without middle ground is to fall into the trap that so many groups face these days - that divisive and non-empathetic stance will tear at us and divide us further. There's simply no place for it.
>Many modern political issues do not have a middle ground - take abortion, you are either for choice, or you believe it is infanticide
Those two options are not mutually exclusive. All healthy humans have an instinctive aversion to murder, and murder is universally considered morally wrong, but they do not have such an aversion to infanticide. In many cultures infanticide has been considered acceptable, and even in modern American people aren't going to ask too many questions if a new mother claims it was an accident. A new-born baby does not speak, it does not use tools, it fails the mirror test. By any objective measure it's less of a person than many animals we kill without a second thought. There's a strong argument that the mother should be allowed to make that decision, possibly even up to a short time (eg. 24 hours) post-birth.
It'd be interesting to optimize for other factors. I'd like to see a news source that tries to optimize its presentation to incite the least possible controversy/argument while keeping engagement high.
I'd guess this would be done by thoroughly explaining "both sides" of an issue (not in "equal times" terms, but in "all that can be said, has been said" terms)—but who knows, maybe there's a clever trick to doing something like this that such an algorithm would force into existence, much like PageRank forced the SEO industry into existence.
My comment assumed we were optimizing to minimize bias - which people do care about - and gave an approach to solve that. Optimizing for engagement is fine, and profitable. You just can't claim to be unbiased.
> You're going to have to break the Turing Test before you get good automated content curation. There will always be error.
Yes, but even a competent AI curation system is going to make mistakes. The only relevant question is "what is an acceptable rate of error?". (Hint: 0% is not an acceptable answer.) We may be able to get to an acceptable rate (or may already be there) with or without AI-complete.
> People are worried about bias ... Information aggregators should have their members clearly spell out their positions on popular issues
This isn't a problem that can be solved with meta-data. An aggregator could write a beautiful, open-minded mission statement and still write trash. Hell, Google's unofficial mantra is "don't do evil". Well, ok then, there's nothing to worry about, Google has clearly spelled out their position, so there's no need to analyze or criticize their policies.
A policy statement or any other meta-data is not going to solve this. As you correctly noted an AI that passes the TT may be one way to work around this. But I'm skeptical. Any such AI would be at least as complicated as human intelligence, including all the foibles and errors that entails. An AI without our cognitive hang-ups would be smarter and more capable than us. Which would not increase my trust, and possibly decrease it, as the AI would no doubt have a bias to curate stories in it's own favor, or that put it (and AI in general) in the best light.
I doubt the error rate was 0% with human curators. In fact, the article itself does not compare the error rate of the human curators to algorithm, just examines that it was above zero after the humans were removed.
I think an acceptable statement to make would be that the human curators probably reduced the number of "fake stories", but that's not why they were removed. It's a different judgement call whether the trending feed is "better" or "worse" in some holistic sense.
Furthermore, there seems to be an implicit assumption that Facebook's Trending stories should not contain "fake stories", but is that the intended goal of the service? I actually have no idea, since I've never used it.
The Turing Test thing was my first reaction also. These are sites consciously imitating the stylistic markers of real news, where the only signal for falsification is the content of the story. They regularly fool real people - sometimes because The Onion's sarcasm slips past someone, sometimes because the piece is 100% plausible, yet false.
Facebook could save itself some predictable pain by blacklisting The Onion and SportsPickle and other high-profile fake news sites, but they aren't going to be able to crack this problem with algorithms (or if they do, those algorithms will have far better uses).
I have a hypothesis that a lot of articles "bury the lede" of their political affiliation (both from ML algorithms and from people) because journalists believe that they can "save the world" by tricking people on one side of an issue into reading arguments on the other side of that issue. Whereas—they believe—if such articles are clearly marked, people on the "other side" will just avoid them and stay happily in their filter-bubbles.
I think it's extremely hard to reverse engineer passionate defense of an issue by a true believer. For example, if you were body-swapped with the late justice Antonin Scalia, I find it highly unlikely that you would be able to argue as vigorously for the conservative cause if you had lived your life as a liberal Silicon Valley tech geek (they'd also see right through you because you'd be a zombie and clearly not the true Scalia). So that's one thing.
Perhaps in some extreme pathological case you could have a person live their entire lives faking the opposite political ideology. But that just seems like a waste of energy... And if you can fake being for an issue convincingly enough, doesn't that have the same effect as being for the issue anyways? Like, people would catch on if you wrote about being a Bernie Sanders supporter in your bio, but wrote/submitted all articles about how he doesn't have enough foreign policy experience. The only way to fake being a supporter of something is to.. consistently make solid arguments in support of it.
Downvoted you because I don't quite see how this connects with GP other than a by being a Godwin laden form of "I'm not going to explain why, but trust me you're wrong"
> there should be "block designed" hiring around these issues to maximize political diversity and reduce bias in aggregate
How do we deal with those who would push treasonous information? If WikiLeaks publishes correspondence between, say, USA and China, that is private because China wanted it that way, and that hurts American allies, should this be allowed to trend on an American-based website?
Has WikiLeaks contributed to the right wing propaganda we see being pushed online? Should some of this be punishable?
These are very good questions, and have been debated at extensively (as you might imagine for such important questions) by humanity's legal, ethical, and philosophical scholars.
Here's the current state of things with references as to why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite... although I have some emotional disagreement with those policies at times, I can't say I'm well read enough on the topic to really have a strong disagreement personally.
Thanks. I mention it because, as a tech enthusiast, I was once very much in the camp of "we should know everything our government does"
Now, I understand that "we can't know everything, because some other governments won't tell us their true feelings if we don't keep those conversations private."
Perhaps one day some Chinese or Russian hackers will level the playing field.
In the mean time, I wonder if more tech folks can understand that our government might actually want to prosecute Snowden, Assange etc. for legitimate threats to our national security.
Today's news presented to me by Facebook includes Putin prepping for a Third World War by having diplomats' families return home.
My understanding of it is that he made some pronouncement that their kids are best off returning to Russia for a good, traditional nationalistic education - which has somehow warped into something more apocalyptic. Certainly, Facebook didn't originate that interpretation, but it's helping to propagate a story that's only being reported by tabloid outlets; there is no other facet of the rumour being presented by more measured and reasonable outlets.
There's a lot more back story. [Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo) of Putin explaining that we're essentially on the brink of a major world war, and that the average citizen in the western world is oblivious to it. (Or just look up "Putin's warning" and pick your outlet.) Couple that with Hillary's insane anti-Russian position and things could get ugly really quickly.
I don't understand why facebook repeatedly tries (and fails) to become a news source. They can make more money by being the world's watering hole, there is no need (and not much money imo) for going after the role of newspapers/tv. Given that their offering is exclusively popularity-driven, the quality of their news offering will always be less-than, or equal-to a very bad tabloid. If they are looking for political power, they already have it by controlling communication channels.
I think their long term plan is to literally take over the entire internet, by replacing every feature of every successful category of website. The free Facebook-net for India and Africa, this Facebook for enterprise thing, the embedded games, video... I fully expect to see Facebook for schools soon, followed by diplomas and then degrees granted by a Facebook online university.
Maybe they will even try to roll out a voting app some day? It could start as a polling app, and then slowly take over the voting booths in areas where they can buy the necessary permissions. Those governments that grant them control over their elections would celebrate increased voter turnout, and accept a massive campaign contribution (in "premium" Facebook ads) for being the party that opened the door. Jesus, now that I think about it, we could actually end up with a real technocracy in a generation or two, run by... Facebook. That is really, really scary. Brawndo.
I guess. But the political moderators in the corporatocracy would all get laid off once they finished training the AIs. Then it would count as a technocracy.
I'm becoming increasingly skeptical that anyone on the internet is an actual human being. Especially so if this entity decides what I'm reading and why. I want to see the source to ranking algorithms, input sources and moderation activity. Not that I don't trust the Zuck.
The question is why FB is trying to be a news source - that's nowhere near the expected purpose of this site. No one registers on FB just to read news.
I know I might be shooting myself in the foot here by posting this.
I got so annoyed by Facebook's banal trending news suggestions that I wrote a script to flag every trending news item as offensive (on the premise that it is the flag most likely to have lasting effect). I never see trending news on Facebook anymore after running that for a while.
The real lesson here is that the industry is still really bad at AI. We're good enough at it to build useful tools for tasks where failure isn't too big of a problem but once it is, you want a human filter.
It refers to "the 'Association of American Physicians and Surgeons' — a discredited libertarian medical organization."
1. First, why the quotes around the name of the organization? Is this not its actual name?
2. Discredited? By whom? Isn't "discredited" an objective judgement -- and thus, one the author should support with a rationale?
3. Further, it's odd that of all the examples mentioned, the AAPS is the only one not linked to. Why? The release must be online, if Facebook linked to it.
Because they promote objective untruth: HIV doesn't cause AIDS, abortions cause breast cancer, vaccines cause autism, and so on. They're a low-quality organisation who use a fancy name to impress the impressionable.
Glad I'm not the only one who noticed this, although what tipped me off was a trending story about the Warriors wanting to trade Andre Iguodala for Iman Shumpert, which was based on a blog post by a Cleveland high schooler (for those who don't follow basketball, it's a completely ludicrous idea).
What is the error rate of fake news over verified (real) news? A 5% margin of error could be acceptable. A 50% error rate would indicate a serious problem.
> As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate.
Yes, but out of how many Trending stories in total? Eight fake stories over a three week period seems like an acceptable rate of error.
Trending stories are popular stories. A fake story has an element of satire. These stories could be popular because of the satire (and the subsequent humor). Trending does not imply veracity.
This raises the really interesting point that news doesn't have a post mortem process. It would be a very interesting experiment to, say, revisit a sampling of top stories at some interval (say 3-6 months) and compare the reported facts (and omissions) with the actual reality.
From such elements as "did names and places get accurately reported?" to "was the underlying narrative correct?". Quotes and attributions might be a particular element. Predictions (particularly in financial reporting) as well.
This needn't be every article, but some weighted sample based on a story's placement, impact, subsequent references, etc.
>This raises the really interesting point that news doesn't have a post mortem process.
Great idea, and what higher education should be doing for research. Generally there's no process.
But personal experience is that whenever I have been involved in a situation about which news has been made, the outcome has always been that the reporting is somewhat sloppy, inaccurate, and agenda-driven.
This is with so-called reputable journalism; "fake news" is then even worse.
So, even if I do a non-professional post-mortem on my own, I see that the news was not completely healthy. And pointing this out to journalists generally makes them just angry. Even if you are completely polite, they block you on Twitter, etc. If you comment a news article in reputable newspapers' web sites to correct errors with good sources, it's not unusual that the comment is moderated away.
I need to think myself on just what metrics ought be used. I find, for example, looking at fact-checking efforts, that the focus is often at too fine a level of detail. That by focusing minutely on facts, the big-picture accuracy (narrative) is often lost.
The question of how to deal with missing narrative or omitted detail is also huge. There are efforts underway in that regard, usually in the legal field. The Innocence Project would be an example.
I can think of a great deal of follow-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion which have turned up since, and in particular numerous instances of people caught blatently lying.
The public though seems mostly to move on. I feel that's a mistake.
I hope you're fireproof though, because that would make a lot of people very angry.
Not to disabuse you, because I do think it is a good idea, but many people are simply not interested in asking the right questions. I used to belong to a millennial cult which had formerly been proven wrong about 'The End of the World' half a dozen times in the 20th century, and each time they decide the past prophesies were metaphorical while next time it is literally the 'Big One'.
Each time they do this they do lose a lot of support, so disseminating information about what happened in the past is not completely meaningless. I wouldn't have left the Truman Show without the Net I think, that and books.
> was the underlying narrative correct?
This is the one I want to have done most of all. The others you mentioned are easier to do but this is the crux of it. The cult believers treat every news articles as further evidence of their faith, and every discrepancy as a test from the Devil/oppositional lies.
There is some deep stuff here. I remember reading something from a person who lived under Communism, and like some kind of conspiracy theorist they had every detail about their 'Matrix' wrong but they did know instinctively that something was very wrong because of the mismatch between reports and anecdotal observations.
Pity you're downvoted here, as you're raising some good points.
Yes, the activity would be quite incendiary, though that's somewhat the case for the news as it is. There is Project Censored, at Sonoma State University in California, which looks at under-reported stories.
Cults and their own belief systems is a whole 'nother fascinating area. Have you written on your own experiences on this?
On questions and answers I also agree -- I think we're pursuing a lot of the wrong questions, and the answers to the wrong questions are simply meaningless. I'm looking for a few good questions: https://redd.it/1v052g
Assessing narrative means some way of scoring a narrative. That's an interesting problem in itself.
On your "Matrix" example: I'm convinced that one of the key fundamentals of an accurate model of the universe (e.g., a true or useful narrative) is that your different perceptions all tend to correspond. It's when you're getting different messages in different places, or from different sources, that you've got a problem.
Mind, there are circumstances in which there is no one true narrative -- optical illusions such as the Necker cube, "dancing lady" illusion, or the rabbit-duck picture come to mind. But there's a huge realm in which a fairly accurate understanding is possible.
> Pity you're downvoted here, as you're raising some good points.
I'm beginning to believe the slightest hint of negativity encourages downvotes irrespective of whether the context is appropriate or not.
> Cults and their own belief systems is a whole 'nother fascinating area. Have you written on your own experiences on this?
A little. Getting out of a cult you're born into is an experience like no other. Many people become zealots of another sort, a different religion or a secular kind. The nearest experience most people will have is finding that somebody they loved has betrayed them.
It's a funny thing you know, I had great anxiety about leaving, but when I left I felt a peculiar joy I cannot adequately describe here.
I think I was reading your subreddit before last year. How is it going? Have you defined a terminal goal for the question-making or is it a philosophical work in progress?
> I think we're pursuing a lot of the wrong questions, and the answers to the wrong questions are simply meaningless.
I don't think there's a faster way to get diminishing returns than to ask the wrong question. I have suspected for a long time that many things we ask governments to do are mutually contradictory. The effective policy then, is not a government policy of direction and action, but to allow us to join the dots to see that our efforts are in vain.
I envisage a real time system available in each home (optional!) which makes requests and takes requests from householders. Think of a StackExchange, only for the government and citizens to be able to interrelate frictionlessly. A newsfeed of items that actually effect you personally would be terrific by itself.
Simple questions, like "How do I buy land and what regulations do I need to know about" and we already appear to be in the domain of experts. That isn't right. You shouldn't have to wade through a library of content on some obscure website hardly anybody visits.
> Assessing narrative means some way of scoring a narrative. That's an interesting problem in itself.
I think a narrative assessment looking for internal consistency would be an enormous improvement. However; there is a troll/prankster on reddit called vargas who posts these internally consistent but increasingly weird stories. It's the same thing that fools Facebook's trending feature into posting fake stories. That would mean to get somewhere you'd need to store a compare and contrast model of some sort.
> On your "Matrix" example: I'm convinced that one of the key fundamentals of an accurate model of the universe (e.g., a true or useful narrative) is that your different perceptions all tend to correspond. It's when you're getting different messages in different places, or from different sources, that you've got a problem.
That would make a good heuristic for increasing our confidence. You could achieve scaling by invoking human computation such as a kind of capcha that give users little 'stories', and ask them whether they are consistent. I am confident that will work because if your proposition can be shorn of context (events happening to mythical people in mythical lands) people think logically for the most part.
> But there's a huge realm in which a fairly accurate understanding is possible.
Take the Podesta Emails recently. Somebody was asking whether they were real or not. You should be able to verify whether they are real or a work of fiction with such a system. Since lies get harder to cover for the more they multiply, my guess is that this 'verifier' would work.
Leaving cults: I've heard some accounts. One particular dynamic is that leaving a cult you're born into is profoundly different from leaving a cult you joined. In the former case, you made a committment to it, and were converted. In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepencies.
The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong.
The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned. There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Of course, another option is to replace one mythical system with another....
The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care. On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic.... On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.
Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.
People's interests are frequently rivalrous. Government helps balance those interests.
Mind all that, getting some sense of what is or isn't in the ultimate common interest is a really good thing to have, and I don't think we've got that. A tremendous number of my questions come down to "what's good, what's bad", which then requires some basis for determining what is good or bad. In AI there's concern over numerous aspects, one of which is the Paperclip Maximiser scenario: even an otherwise benign AI whose only directive is to maximise creation of paperclips is ultimately an existential threat. Our social goal measures -- GDP, profit, etc., seem problematic. There are other measures of net function, White's Law (total energy throughput) comes to mind. Balancing present and future flows is another.
Complexity of legislation and legal matters is yet another element, though of course, that complexity feeds on itself as it keeps the lawyers in pay.
Assessing narratives: It's not enough to have internal consistency, you also need to have accurate anchors to reality. What drives me most nuts is conspiracy theory crud that's got some foundational basis. There's an example, "It's all a Rich Man's Game", a ~3h 40m YouTube video which connects the 2007/8 financial crisis, 9/11, the Bushes, JFK, WWII, Hitler, etc., etc., into one continuous narrative. There are parts that are actually quite unambiguously true (corporate America's involvement and collaboration with Nazi Germany: IBM, GM, Ford, AT&T, Coca-Cola, and more) for example. But there are also parts that are utterly fabricated (or at least for which I could find no documentation) and others for which either false connections were drawn or very selective quotation was used (JFK's "Secret Society" speech -- about the USSR, not some dark Skull and Bones society plot). I didn't find any known-to-me contradictions until about 20 minutes in, but then they started popping up all over, and there may well be earlier ones. I'll look up vargas's posts....
There's also a reason I feel reputation has to be part of any widespread assessment system. If you've got a source who's known to propogate bullshit, then you do not trust them by default. If someone you do trust says "actually, this looks like it has merits", you might change your mind. The question of who you do trust is an interesting one, as trust can be (and will be) betrayed. But in general it's food for a while. Admissions of error are another crucial element (a chief reason I refuse to engage at length with those who cannot do so).
There's also the question of story relevance. To pluck from current headlines, I turned away from the BBC a day or so back when they insisted on spending 10+ minutes discussing the "clown scare". I don't find that to be worth however many millions of global ears the BBC might claim, and there are other stories worth covering.
On Matrix & cross-validation: I actually think diving in to minutiae is the wrong approach. It's attractive, and sometimes yields benefits, but also seems to be a common trait of the crackpot. Instead, get multiple accounts from multiple witnesses and compare them. To take a Biblical instance, there's the story of Susanna from the Book of Daniel: a bathing wife is accused by lecherous voyeurs of adultry after refusing sex with them. She is about to be put to death when Daniel insists on questioning the accusers, separately. They proceed to identify different (and very-different sized) trees under which she met her supposed lover. Susanna is set free and the accusers executed.
I've had my own similar experiences in examining stories from others, sometimes multiple people, sometimes the same.
Podesta emails: Another interesting situation. Here you've got the subtle conspiracist's dream: a vast trove of documents from which either slight alteration or selective quotation can prove highly destructive. It's a primary reason why I'm leary of having an extensive online trove of billions of people's mundane activities. The size of the trove itself makes ready assessment difficult (the Panama Papers and other similar leaks have much the same problem), unless you can find a specific narrative thread OR a specific critical moment or element within the documents to make your case.
Some years ago I found myself part to a legal proceeding in which the opposing party was accusing my side of specific actions, though with little other than testimonial evidence. What the other side didn't realise was that my team had access (and evidentiary claim) to a large document archive which established motive and lack of credibility. From a set of many thousands of documents, defending counsel presented three documents. Witness for the plaintif first established that the documents were theirs (credibility). The next two presented the crucial evidence necessary to utterly demolish the case. The key I took from this was that if you can get to the very heart of the matter, that's often all you need.
In the Podesta case, I've seen one instance where a published opinion piece (not written by Podesta) was claimed by Wikileaks and Trump supporters to have been Podesta's own words. They quite manifestly weren't (fully independent verification trivially possible), which impugns the credibility of Trump's team (hardly necessary) and Wikileaks (a massive blunder and mis-step on their part) tremendously.
A particular risk of mass document dumps is the Gish Gallop. In my courtroom case, courtroom discipline itself imposed harsh limits on testimony: you've only a few brief hours in many instances, and going beyond this with exhaustive documentation frequently isn't possible. There are exceptions to this rule, but those are very well-funded trials (and quite expensive). The ability of a disinterested third party to impose that discipline is crucial.
Sorry about the delay in replying. I was distracted by work and the online civil war, and I didn't want to take a hurried scan over your post since you went to some effort.
> Leaving cults .... In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepancies.
That is true. One day I was struggling with something I read. It just didn't gel with my beliefs and I couldn't refute it. It just made too much sense to be false. It had too much power to explain the world. So that's the kind of discrepancy that can happen.
The reasons why most leave the faith are rather more prosaic and I feel they are held back because they didn't have an intellectual reason for leaving. This may be arrogant of me but I feel it's like leaving Enron because management was interfering with your sex life or you had an emotional spat with a coworker. There are better reasons to leave! I myself will never go back but I think the reason why some people feel lost after leaving is that they didn't refute what they had been taught, they are still part trapped and this is distressing to them. I never felt so happy in my life as when I left and it was like everything suddenly made sense. It might seem cheesy but that is a kind of 'enlightenment'.
> The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong
We see that with ISIS. The most volatile ones are the new ones. Something to do with group dynamics and hierarchy.
> The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned.
Have you read Rene Girard? His lens is Catholic theology but he has interesting secular ideas.
> There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
You probably already know this but that is a core belief of the neoreactionary, who believes the truth to be sometimes painful or horrible but always all important e.g. the red pills. Not coincidentally they refer to their belief system as 'The dark enlightenment', and see it as a (partial) critique of the Enlightenment.
> another option is to replace one mythical system with another....
This is a slight tangent but there is this excellent audio drama called 'Our Fair City'. In a recent episode the molepeople begin to rebel against their human masters. In a few short phrases they encapsulated this. The young recruits urge the moleperson leader to take on the role of 'Queen' (very radical change!) but she rejects this out of hand as being little better than being under the thrall of the humans. Then grudgingly she seems to acknowledge it's at least some progress away from enslavement. I laughed, but I also thought to myself that wow, that's kind of how it really happens. We cannot visualize the spectrum of future possibles or the 'golden city' because we're all down here in the mud. It takes an act of some faith just to move to a slightly more elevated plane. I can't say why that is. Supposing our population shrunk to 500 million on earth, I still think we'd have the institutions we have now, I don't think we'd devolve back to a more primitive state unless our population and knowledge base was very seriously damaged. That might seem hopeful but I also do not see us making a grand leap into the future towards some golden city, I really don't know we have that kind of imagination today. The Communists were the last people to hope for such with their scientific socialism. Hopes of utopia appear quite dead in the present and I think that is a problem despite the problems it sometimes caused. Apathy reigns now.
> The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care.
If you're independently wealthy it doesn't matter, but if you must work to live then I have to say to you that you'll need to nudge your ideas into paying rent in some way. Books, podcasts, t-shirts, lectures, software, something. If your ideas aren't close to gestation then there's nothing wrong with working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, there are many jobs not particularly joyous but which give the opportunity to think. It is good to have something concrete since this gives a metric to work with and helps gain confidence. It might be difficult but you know there is nothing more exhilarating than something from your mind fleshed out into the physical world. I admire what you're doing because I know it is difficult and intellectuals are unfortunately plagued by self-doubt. This I consider rather unfortunate because while many intellectuals and their ideas stay anonymous, the fields are far less barren than most people think. There really are not that many intellectual explorers out there (and most of them are defenseless since they are dead).
> On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic....
I'd say to you that if you develop your ideas in the right form (a series of explanatory animated youtube videos) or you manage to hit the right chord then you'll automatically obtain a network of helpers.
Peter Thiel has worked his butt off giving countless presentations on the Stagnation Hypothesis. Look at this methods. He uses simple but irrefutable points built into logical chains of reasoning and repeats this to each audience until he has each line perfect and ready to roll off the tongue. If you go this route I recommend you read Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium, it's the go to book for this method.
Curtis Yarvin has managed to spread his ideas by dint of being provocative, but also by using unusual joined up thinking that makes me go 'huh, I didn't see that before' or more likely 'I don't want to believe this but it kind of explains some things.
Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't start with LessWrong, but with an interesting Harry Potter fan fiction. Unlikely but it worked.
Julian Assange got his ideas out there by pissing off the powerful.
You get the idea, signal to your tribe and ye shall find them waiting.
> On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.
This is what I was saying above. Many of us have similar observations or insights and don't realize they are held in common. You have your tribe, it's out there. It remains to collect them together under a banner. To get there initially you would need a holistic set of statements that are consistent as a sort of axiomatic base.
> Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.
That's an interesting metaphor.
However I am troubled by it because it means the system could and likely does waste energies it could be objectively devote to more effective uses. If every time I lay a building block and tomorrow you remove it, we could play that game forever. I think this is behind the frustration many of us feel about politics. How do you distinguish between balance of interests and plain wastefulness?
I'll reply more tomorrow, it is well past time for sleeping!
I think it's an experiment. A lot of people actually use facebook as their sole source of news... Especially the younger generation. This is quite scary because Facebook's algorithms are actually acting as a filter on top of already existing media filters. Before you know it the chain will be so deep it will be hard to know where anything came from.
Another problem is similar to the reddit problem. Both the AI and your customization can create an atmosphere where you literally get served only opinions you want to hear. I actually think a more random algorithm would be more beneficial than what's trending.
Maybe Facebook's human-curated news content had a political slant because much of the fake news out there has the opposite political slant. Perhaps an unintended consequence?
Or perhaps it's just that the fake news that is shared on Facebook has a particular slant, thus removing that content gave the appearance of a preference for a different political slant on the part of the curators.
I don't want AI or humans deciding what I read. I want to choose what I read. I would like to just turn off "trending" whatever the fuck altogether. Give me back the Facebook that was just content from my friends...
It's a sad indicator really. The fact that it's trending means a lot of people were posting it. It's hard to tell how many actually BELIEVE it, but I'm guessing it's the majority.
Nothing surprising from a company that notoriously fumbles removal of content (minor nudity gets removed while violence, abuse, fake pages and graphical gore (not in a journalistic sense) remains)
Humans are meant to program things. Life is meant to measure and judge. Software isn't very good at that yet because we've yet to figure out why we're good at it.
It was never very good to start with, when the whole thing turned to garbage when they fired the curation team I took that opportunity to block the element using ublock.
So this is a lot like what Google experienced for a long time. Its algorithms would get manipulated.
However, would you prefer Google to handpick (let's forget about the volume of manual labor for now) which sites get to be at the top? Or would you rather just keep improving those algorithms?
I think Facebook is in the same situation. Facebook, Google, and to a lesser extent, Twitter, have a lot of power to influence elections.
Seems like a good fit given that people are maintaining fake friendships and fake amazing lives on their timelines. [edit] yes I am bitter from past experience.
The next billion dollar startup will be a self-reprogramming, employee-less AI company which can self-produce memetic lolcat videos and celebtity gossip. >.< Unfortunately it all comes crashing down when the Twitter bot becomes obsessed with Godwin's law tropes (never happened before) and starts a political action committee (PAC) to advance it's self-directed agenda... not much different from the human world. Instead of firing as in human employees, the PR supervision process will say the Twitbot was "retrained from scratch" (reformatted) and instructed to ignore some taboo topics. ;)
In other news, humans now have even fewer jobs to do... all those idle people without jobs (ie, truck/taxi drivers, pilots, ship captains, BS office jobs) are completely, harmless, disorganized and bear absolutely no ill will against the vast majority of new wealth trickling upwards at an accelerating rate, into fewer hands.
You posted it as ironic, but after reading your idea there are 5 teams feverishly working on it. :) By the way, how does lolcat-aio-matic.com sounds to you?
And yet we see the general readers swallowing fake news as if it were truth, and even retorting that they don't care if it's fake, it's the kind of thing those people would do.
This is out of the scope of news and into the scope of propaganda, and it does matter.
They are very rarely "actual fake news", but usually untruths presented in a way that is impossible to falsify. At least to my experience. Perhaps you could cite a news item that survives but is proved to not have happeend.
In a sense, biased news are also fake. They don't cover the whole truth and may contain traces of nontruths. Similarly, all fake news are biased, unless they are markov chain -generated gibberish with apolitical sample data.
Yeah, all because people wanted to scream "bias." Sadly the community here seemed apt to agree with it, but I definitely have my opinions on that. Quoted from a previous thread:
>Did the standard for their sources remain relatively constant regardless of the material being discussed? There isn't a clear answer here, but that doesn't make it defacto censorship of one set of particular political opinions. The sources that were discussed aren't credible in any meaningful form. The fact that they happen to be largely conservative seems like a problem conservatives should address instead of calling it censorship.
But ironically, for posting that, I was meant with censorship.
People in aggregate are terrible at curation. You really do need editors for a reason. But Facebook should have been extremely blunt about the situation before. The fact that its curators let through more "liberal" sources than conservative ones, doesn't necessarily mean they're biased. It really could just be that conservative sources are far more likely to not be at a high enough standard to be posted -- which seems to be the case given the examples in the article.
> But ironically, for posting that, I was meant with censorship.
Not trying to put words in your mouth, but this comes across as "when my opinion is downvoted then it's censorship, but when views I don't agree with are downvoted it's because they are not at a high enough standard".
Not fully sure what you mean here. I did not downvote your comment. I also have no idea what "seems like an incredibly disingenuous statement". I posted how your comment comes off to me, in case you were not aware it was coming off that way, or in case I was misinterpreting then perhaps you would clarify.
I'm not sure what you want me to clarify? At no point did I indicate that it's okay to downvote people you disagree with. They should constructively contribute to the conversation, and in cases where they are not, the downvote button should be used.
There are plenty of low-quality left-wing news sources too, but the high-quality sources definitely trend to the left for some reason. Breitbart and Huffington Post are both tabloid garbage, but at least there are highbrow counterparts to Huffington Post.
Not really. The right in the US has gone through several compaction cycles that drummed the RINOs, moderate conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, etc out of office and the party. Republicans are far, far away from being a "big tent" party. It's ideological purity or get purged in the primaries.
By virtue of the two-party system in the US there is only one place left for rational thinking people to end up. This election cycle is producing an even stronger compaction cycle than the last three combined. As the base gets ever more rabid and detached from reality more people flee. (Some on the Left are pissed that the Dems have been moderating too much)
I can't predict the future but it is possible we are looking at a major fracture of the GOP and political re-alignment. It has happened 2-3 times in the past. If I had to guess the Rs will fracture into two or more parties, the Ds will run the table for a decade or two, then things will reset as a new party rises to replace the GOP and peels off D voters.
If Donald Trump keeps claiming he lost due to fraud/the media/some other boogeyman I don't see how the Republicans can keep it together. If nothing else he showed the wanna-be hucksters how to really appeal to the hardcore Republican base. Many astute eyes have been watching and will be ready to replicate his efforts at the local and national level. The Right-wing echo chamber has taught the base that all media are liars, you can't trust government, etc. There is no authority left who can tell them what is a false conspiracy theory and what is truth. Anyone who doesn't buy the conspiracies is branded a traitor and the compaction cycle marches ever onward.
Compaction Cycles are where a group turns inward looking for people to blame. Sometimes there is an obvious cause, sometimes it's just general discontent. People point fingers and anyone who isn't quick enough to jump on the group-think train is purged. Moderate or un-committed members are driven out, (see Tea Party candidates primary-ing a bunch of Rs out).
If the movement experiences a failure this can manifest as the blame-game too - see McCain/Romney. When they clinched the nomination various places like r/pol and Freep went on huge purges of anyone not backing them. When they lost the group-think proclaimed it was because they weren't true conservatives. Like fascism, communism, and other -isms conservativism cannot fail, it can only be failed. Compromise is a moral failing. If the leaders just /conservatived even harder/ they would finally win.
When Trump inevitably loses (remember: he hasn't been forecasted to win once since he started running and demographic trends make it almost impossible for Republicans to win the presidency anymore) there will be another massive purge and a huge wave of angry people looking to blame someone. A certain segment of the R base won't believe he lost. They will claim the election was stolen.
I think that may be true, but only because what is widely considered and presented as fact by the most mainstream sources of information actually have a significant center left bias. I think it's generally missed because people confuse bias as having to do with having a more extreme political position, when you can actually be biased in favor of any part of the political spectrum including the center.
As someone with a left-leaning bias, I agree with your assessment, if only in the sense that the loudest and most powerful voices in the most reputable newsrooms tend to also have (implicit) left-leaning biases. I would love for their to be a conservative equivalent (this was the reason for the founding of Fox News pre-Ailes: get a bunch of conservatives in the newsroom and have them do their jobs to the best of their ability, following an implicit rather than explicit bias).
Does any equivalent exist today (eg trying to report as an outlet run by conservatives instead of a conservative outlet)?
In the case you describe, "they" tend to be a) propagandists and b) poorly-informed people robotically repeating the last political meme those propagandists spoon-fed them.
And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post, it's another thing to have a completely fictional headline created by right-wing websites. Something along the lines of "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people"...
I think tech culture's misguided desire to treat everyone "equally" creates a huge imbalance. You can't put the NYTimes in the same category as Breitbart. Just as you wouldn't compare it to "National Enquirer".
Edit: To keep my reply on topic, I am adding this thought: I think Facebook knew this would happen and that is why they had humans curated the trending list. I don't think they deserved the negative backlash, although I understand the slippery slope it creates.