This can't be fixed at Facebook scales by building a platform that so highly incentivizes low-quality content of all kinds, then trying to stop the content so late in the cycle. The entire incentive structure has to be rethought. Unfortunately, that's probably a problem that Facebook is literally incapable of solving without going out of business, because Facebook the corporate entity is that incentive structure. To fix Facebook requires Facebook to become not-Facebook.
Remember that evolution favors individuals who survive & gain status, not those whose representation of the world is true. Someone who is right but killed for it (eg. Copernicus) is still dead.
The fix is for people to be aware of these cognitive biases in themselves, to actively seek out information that differs from their preconceptions, and to challenge inaccurate information (with evidence!) when presented with it. You can't outsource this to a communication platform, because it's inherently less comfortable and more effort for the reader, and the reader will just go to a competing communication platform that makes them feel better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
He died of natural causes at 70. According to viral stories at the time, moments after having seen the first print of his book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
People may also confuse Bruno with Galileo Galilei, who was punished by the Inquisition for his defense of Copernican theory, but not executed.
You are right, but I hope you are aware that this would require a giant leap to an essentially superhuman state of rationality and clear thinking for a vast majority of people.
Just stop for a moment and look around you. Is that how most people actually function in this world?
For large majorities of voters, dropping that ballot in the box is over 90% an identity game.
On an individual level, being active in (non-political) hobbies and volunteer groups can help, especially ones that attract both people from the cities and the countryside.
Fail to recognize that, and you've failed before you've started.
How is this different from stereotyping then?
What we need, fundamentally, is a media environment that can harness the collective capacity of humans to vet and debate new information in an organized fashion that can be trusted. This site is a good example where a knowledgeable community, and the simple mechanism of votes does some automatic, crowd-based content curation. But the Reddit-like model is very basic - so much more could possibly be done to allow individual users to contribute to a collective process of knowledge-building.
I think we need more development and discussion devoted to what kind of systems could be designed to encourage transparency, quality, and critical analysis in our news-making.
As a kid I learnt this and tried to be as rational and aware of my fallibalities as possible.
That makes you an alien to normal human beings. Conversation becomes impossible, processing fast enough becomes impossible, and the penalties for acting weird and communicating weird are huge.
Instead you need to find a way to act in a manner that allows you to blend in with people.
I'm not saying that one smart game is going to fix the entire problem, but adding the development of logic skills into the types of activities that people enjoy doing on Facebook is definitely possible.
Other humans are taking advantage of those gaps to mobilize votes or advertisements.
There's no way out and I've been wondering when people would realize the depth and intricacy of the mess we're in. Hopefully people pay more attention to the way cognitive cheat code are being abused.
Hopefully a protocol to deal with it can be made.
Exactly right. This should be strongly emphasized in our educational curriculum.
It's almost as if the way we understand and use money has hardened into a giant screwball of lies, base instincts, and perverse incentives.
Almost.
- The earth is flat
- 9/11 conspiracy theories
- Barack Obama was born in Kenya
- Anti-vax
- Climate change denial
- Anti-GMO
- Denial of underlying quantum randomness in the universe
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
- The minimum wage decreases employment
- Donald Trump has sexually assaulted a number of women
- Monetary policy impacts the real economy
- The sun will, on balance, probably rise tomorrow
I've sorted this in a (rough, personal) order of increasing plausibility / conformance with facts. Where is the line between misinformation and alternative information? As a human, it's pretty unclear to me.
If this correct I assume that there are also problem that are classified as AI-hard?
Some people can multiply ten digit numbers in their head. Some can't even tell you what a number is. There's a very wide bell-curve here.
Are there some confusing, emotionally laden, difficult questions of fact in there? Yes. Are some things ultimately unknowable (like what people want, which involves scrying into their minds)? Yes.
These, as it turns out, are not the things I can't help but be side-tracked on. I'm diverted by you claiming monetary policy has an effect with nearly the certainty of the sun rising.
I think perhaps we disagree more about the probability of these two:
- The Clinton Foundation has been or is involved in some shady dealings
- Muslims want to implement Sharia law in Europe
Than the other two. I think both of those are, in some sense, almost certainly true. There are Muslims who want to implement Sharia law in Europe. The Clinton Foundation has been involved in transactions that at least have the appearance of moral uncertainty. The headlines that I listed are just overly strong statements/generalizations of those (IMO undeniable) facts.
"undeniable" does not mean what you think it means. Example: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/hillary-clinton-defends-founda...
There, Clinton denies the foundation has been engaged in anything shady. Boom, definitely not undeniable #hackernewsdrama, hahaha.
If you want a disagreement, though, I prefer many-worlds over pilot wave theories, largely because I'm not entirely sure _what_ the propagation speed of the pilot waves would be. 'Greater than the speed of light' either (1) doesn't really narrow it down at all or (2) narrows it down to having no options at all. But they should have _a_ speed, because I'm not sure you can even have standing waves if the disturbances propagate instantly.
It didn't cause the hyperinflation that a lot of people thought would come, but the Great Depression is Bernanke's area of expertise, and he had sound theoretical reasons to believe QE wouldn't spark serious inflation.
This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles.
It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.
I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem.
Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here:
def source_is_trustworthy(source):
return False
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_endorsements_in_the_...
[0] http://observer.com/2016/08/wikileaks-reveals-mainstream-med...
I used to try to apply a correctional factor, but I've found it not even worthwhile anymore. I honestly don't know entirely why. I don't know if the news has gotten that much more biased to the point where it almost swamps the signal entirely, or if the combined financial pressures away from expensive real reporting and towards click-bait headlines has removed the signal, or what, but beyond very bare facts they just aren't worth much anymore. It is also possible this has always been the case and I wasn't aware enough to realize it; there's some classic history stories that back that possibility up.
I do know primary sources are getting easier and easier to consult directly. Which could itself also be a reason my opinion of them has plummeted so much in the past 10 years; it was a lot harder to see through media spin and simplification (deliberately for their audience, and accidentally when they in fact don't understand what's going on themselves, see especially science journalism for that) when they were the only source of information.
What is the correct balance of endorsements? Is anything other than 50:50 incorrect?
It won't be reached in practice, but if you make it the policy, you have an argument to take down any bullshit. With 50:50 it's going to be an endless quarrel over who has had enough so far, who is underrepresented and why everything is dominated by two polar opposites with no voice given to people who don't want to belong to either camp.
Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls".
Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.
Here's a pagerank like reputation system i've built.
Consistency is simply majority wins, which completely stifles new ideas or minority opinions.
No isn't.
You don't need to have a "non objective view of the truth" - i..e you don't need the ability to ask the system "Is this statement true?"
You just need the ability to ask the system "Will I think this is true, given the other things I have claimed to be true?"
Maintaining internal complexity of your own claim graph gets really tricky unless you keep it as accurate as possible.
For example, consensus view was that trump would not win the election. Trump did win the election. Thus, those two claims:
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won
These two are inconsistent. It's possible to rectify that inconsistency by marking the earlier statment cancelled. So now we have three statements
* (before) Trump will not win * (later) Trump won * (now) I was wrong to say, "Trump will not win."
The gap between "now" and "Before" can be used to compute "probability of a statement being retracted." The smaller those gaps, the more likely it is what whatever you say comes with an asterisk next to it, saying "the expected time to retraction of this statement is: x days"
I was speaking of consistency with the general body of knowledge in the system, (correspondence?).
In the specific case of evaluating major news sources for trust, I think the vast majority of their statements are never retracted/changed, and therefore they would rate highly on an overall "constancy" scale as well. Their many statements about Trump's likelihood of winning were very constant as well - for months they said he'd lose, then they changed, and forever after they will say he won.
Sounds very temporally consistent, with just a single change.
Not sure if the adjudicator could narrow it just to "trust of the source's future predictions about politics", but basically the whole country just got a negative feedback on the trust weighting for major media in that domain.
Sum (from: 0, to: PosInf, Enumerable: Source - Bias)
converges asymptotically to Truth
Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.
Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.
I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.
1. Editors/writers/management changes, since quite a few media publications have gone from being fairly reliable to biased as all hell based purely on who's taken over there. Or in some (rarer cases), the opposite has happened.
So you'd have to make sure older less biased pieces weren't being punished for the actions of the publication in the present.
2. A lot of sources are correct about some things but not about others. It's very possible to have a publication that's terrible at writing about politics in an accurate and unbiased way, but fantastic at writing about technology or sports. So ideally your system would have to detect the subject of the article as well as the publication.
However, I guess you could at least add known 'satire' and fake information sites to a 'non credible' list. Like the ones listed here:
On the one hand, they seem more interested in fact-checking. On the other, they propagate concepts like: on-balance the US is a force for good and should lead the world. This is highly contentious and non-obvious for many (most?) people outside the US.
It's actually at its best when it is truly social, in all senses of the word. When it facilitates real communication on real issues across a broad spectrum of people. When it spreads information, not misinformation.
I agree with others that detecting misinformation in the general case likely requires a theory of mind, and so something approaching "real" AI. I also agree that FB has a serious problem on their hands. And I'm so very glad I don't use it.
[1] I advance no comment here about the correctness of that; just a comparison to illustrate what seems like an overlooked point.
The solution to not becoming a battleground which is inherantly destabilizing to the platform is to not grow, or only grow in a single direction. State up front what your targeted user base is and keep to them. NeoGAF as a "gamers only" forum will survive a very long time, for instance.
Facebook has sidestepped it by becoming a personal community for each user, but whenever they try to connect that personal community to the wider world through "shared" news, "shared" trends etc that are not personalized it causes a big ruckus.
It's not the cat pic sharing that is paid for by entities with motive and interest in spreading misleading messages.
In Poland, for good half year before our presidential election, then a year after I was getting obviously paid for posts from dozens upon dozens of right wing extremists.
I am left-centrist (although my dad jokes at me that im a bolshevik). I don't have many friends who skew righ-wing either. Yet, there was my wall, chock full of sensationalist bs, for over A YEAR
Wonder how much money Facebook earned in that time just from sad little Poland
I love idealists, but it's time to take an honest accounting of the differences between the promises of the internet and the actuality.
The fact is that large and increasing quantities of our social communication now occur online.
I'm not claiming this is salutary or calling it a good thing. I'm just stating the fact.
Not trying to be pedantic here. It's just important to sort out the terms used if any analysis is going to be useful. What's happening on facebook is not social. It's bits of data around being social. Different thing entirely. Perhaps we need a new term for whatever it is, but whatever we call it, it's not the same as face-to-face real socializing with real people.
We assume positive intent online because otherwise we get flame wars, but there's a helluva lot of body language and inflection that can take the comment you made and make it mean a dozen things. All of that is lost. And all of it is important.
In addition to the nuance, would I know severine if I saw them on the street? Miss them if they died? Remember the nice way they did X everytime we met?
We are exchanging written opinions and statements, yes. These exchanges also occur in social interactions. But we are not socializing. There's no bond here that's become stronger, no subtle nuance or interplay that we're managing at a subconscious level. For all either of us knows, the other one is a bot. Or an alien. There's no humanity here.
Let's take our relationship, for example. I've been cohabiting some of the same online spaces as you for at least the last decade. For me, you are a valued part of that ecosystem, more so than most of my physical neighbors who I chat with in person a couple times a year.
No, I wouldn't recognize you on the street, but I struggle with face blindness, so it's a weak criterion. Would I "miss you" if you died? No, but I'd certainly reflect sadly on your death if I learned about it. "Remember the nice way you did X"? No, but I have trouble coming up with such an X most people I interact with locally.
There's no humanity here.
I'm surprised you would say this. Is this a recent change in your view of online interactions or have you always felt this way? Quantitively I find about the same amount of humanity here as I do elsewhere, and qualitatively I prefer many things about what I find here to what I see when I go out in person. Are you OK?
(ps. I notice that many of the links in the sidebar of your site are broken.)
It would absolutely have to be automatically generated, but it doesn't seem impossible (just much harder NLP that Watson playing Jeopardy).
You mean government regulation a la China because some memes really are dangerous? If you increase the velocity of transmission, then even in a free system there are some dangerously infectious falsehoods that it might be in the public good to slow. Think War of the World on Facebook.
It basically needs to be serious enough to overwhelm the internal incentives of maximizing key performance indicators.
I would say they don't do so because of micro-optimized KPI targeting: they do so because they feel time on Facebook is valuable and makes them happy. If Facebook can't deliver increases in that, then optimizations only take them so far.
I can't imagine an unprecedented breaking news story that has no basis in any factual information. I'm not talking about an upvoter here, but primarily a downvoter (incongruence with accepted facts being easier to prove than vice versus).
There's no fundamentally creative step in deciding "How well does this new piece of information match pieces I previously had"?
From an untrustworthy collection of input relationships, how do I produce the most reliably correct output?
Nevertheless, I agree that if anyone can do it algorithmically, it would probably be Google.
I'd like it if it was, but I've never witnessed popularity that embodies that statement.
Popular opinion is usually informed by the most often repeated narrative.
The Allen AI group has been working on solving year 4 multiple choice science tests for about 3 years. They now score a bit over 60% correct, and that is a much easier task.
Everything has to be right for an answer option to be correct. Only one thing has to be wrong for it to be incorrect.
Choosing a random story from politifact: http://www.politifact.com/missouri/statements/2016/nov/06/ro...
Like most false stories, there is a hint of truth to this but that doesn't make it true. Politfact spends 3 pages discussing it, and concludes:
Courts did object in three cases to decisions Kander made as secretary of state. But the specifics of those cases are much more nuanced than Blunt lets on. And the claim that Kander tried to manipulate the election is, at best, unproven.
A SOTA computer system could probably parse that last paragraph I posted, but couldn't get anywhere near getting close to doing the research needed to get to that conclusion. We are years off that (I work on research in this area)
A lot of claims that were made this cycle are rooted in measured quantities where the measurements we have disagree with the claims.
If there is at least one rape or at least one illegal immigrant then it becomes subjective or contextual.
Is 3 rapes a flood? What if it is in a week in one town? What if one was by a former illegal immigrant? What if it is over the course of a year, but all 3 occurred in one day?
Is 20 illegal immigrants a flood? What if they all arrive in a town with a population of 100?
Who is "we"? Is a story about millions of illegal immigrants in Greece relevant? What if it about thousands of illegal immigrants working in Athens? What if Athens is in Georgia?
A real example:
"Broken Families: Raids Hit Athens' Immigrant Community Hard" vs "Athens crackdown shows no hospitality for illegal migrants"
One is a real headline from Georgia, the other from Greece. Can you tell which is which?
The Jews say they are waiting for the Messiah.
The Christians say the Messiah came once and will come again.
The Muslims say there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet.
Which of these groups is correct?
I would love to see the AI algorithm that can finally settle this issue! Seriously, mad props to the programmer who writes that code!
float IsStatementAboutFacts(string statement); // Returns confidence estimateSome of their statements pass the first filter, far fewer pass the second.
I'm however doubtful that a "successful" social network would learn from struggling one. Well C'est la vie.
Accusations of bias? I think you mean to say that actual Facebook employees stated this as a fact. And the story was covered by ALL news outlets, starting with Gizmodo.
If sites are spreading factually provable lies through Facebook as fact, and people are acting on it, should Facebook have any say in telling people "Hey, this is garbage"?
It's an open question.
That's like saying "the truth of this information is at least 0"
What if they simply change the algorithm to perform some graph clustering/principal component analysis on the stories that are shared organically among groups and then inject let's say 10% stories that are disproportionally shared by other clusters, but not this one?
The granularity could be tweaked to chunk everything into let's say ~5 clusters per nationality and language.
The machines do not have to assess facts, they just have to allow people to see beyond their friend-horizon. So call it the bubble-burster.
The recent presidential poll fiasco is prime example. All the large media houses like CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT complete failed to detect and acknowledge the silent righ-wing voters claiming Clinton would win hands down. This is not just about political bias of the media but more importantly their complete failure to judge the pulse of the nation. In my opinion the main stream media was just insane here.
On the contrary the media engaged in an active social bullying of conservative voters by calling them bigots,racists,misogynist and what not. Had this media been lot more sensitive and sane in understanding both liberal and conservative voters, had they focused on what issues really mattered to conservative voter-base instead of ridicule and bullying I am pretty sure it would have changed things.
I blame the social bullying by main stream media as the prime reason why country seems divided.
The fake news on Facebook is a whole different thing, it's easy to spot and literally news stories made specifically to game Facebook. It's insane that it has gotten this far.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
The problem we need to solve is the sharing of hysterical, blatantly false information, presented as facts, from specific, intentionally propagandistic sites. And I wouldn't hide or disallow it, I would flag it with a warning message.
(I agree, though.)
(I couldn't resist)
Would they really boot CNN?
CNN told us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X16_KzX1vE
They were laughably wrong: https://popehat.com/2016/10/17/no-it-is-not-illegal-to-read-...
Maybe one can claim it wasn't an intentional lie, but this guy is someone who really should have known better. So if it wasn't an intentional lie, they were negligent. Not sure where that leaves us.
It would be great if an algorithm could fight this type of content, but it probably can't.
But we can probably start with sites that publish stories like "Rudy Giuliani SLAPPED A REPORTER WITH HIS DICK last Tuesday" and that might solve enough of this problem to call it a decent win.
Yes, you can completely filter them out figuring it's not worth the effort, but the problem is that's how you form bubbles to begin with.
Might have more luck boiling them down to verifiable facts and stripping all opinions (especially every explanation of "why X did Y" or "what X means").
I'm not really going for the whole slippery slope aspect, more I feel like I'm miscategorizing the problem.
Maybe the metadata on misinformation looks different from the real deal. How quickly does it spread, and through which people? No need to actually judge the content.
If there's no consensus on the "truthiness" then the default is benefit of the doubt that it's true.
I know we are all in IT, but not all problems are best solved by algorithms.
Ian Hislop likely has the distinction of being the most-sued person in English legal history - almost entirely by people seeking libel writs in attempts to bury the truth.
There is a podcast and selected content online. Funnily enough, it's the only periodical in the UK that has seen a rise in readership.
Content providers who abide by journalistic guidelines could be prioritized. Providers who actually have an editor could even associate the editor of each article with the post so that the editor's individual track record could be checked alongside the site itself, which would work better for large organizations who have multiple departments and don't deserve to be globally penalized for a single bad editor.
I guess it works as long as you agree with their choices, prioritization, and opinions but as we saw this cycle, there was a collusion between "journalists" and the Clinton campaign. Even if you see no problem with that, would you see a problem if the Trump campaign had done it?
I'd honestly envision something closer to the BBB to manage this type of thing and track membership, ratings, disputes and resolution that all browsers and search engines could tap into. The key would be that freelance journalists would need to be able to gain membership in the same way that journalists get officially credentialed to cover different types of events.
No machine learning will save you from botters as the lion share of commercial botters live in a country from which most of the math research behind machine learning is coming from.
In Russia, few people will start an advertising network startup in their sane mind, commercial scale clickfraud, farming, and botting give an order of magnitude higher returns.
The term "Internet marketing business" is used mostly as an euphemerism for all of the aforesaid here.
A lot could be solved by just adding people to that department, located across the country in states where they already have offices anyway, or hire editors to work from home. That way, the editorial content wouldn't have to be so biased by region.
Another problem is the type of people who would take this job. They must be literate, but not able to find a better job. This will be people with degrees in English, journalism, and similar -- giving a pretty obvious political bias. You won't be getting mechanical engineers, coal miners, patent lawyers, and stock traders.
That really seems like "abridging the freedom of speech" to me. Constitutional conservatives sure love pushing the limits of the constitution when it inconveniences them.
But, you know, the election is over so now that the right has total control we must all put aside our differences and work together.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279498-some-conservativ...
They may lose credibility doing that, and would be a worse place to discuss things, but that is up them unless you have some kind of contract with them that makes you entitled to something else.
That for me is the main problem, people just want to trust stuff blindly and get all jived up when that doesn't work. You're mad at your own stupidity folks.
If you follow that line of reasoning, the companies who run the pipes and control the flow of information aren't just companies playing favorites. They're potentially influencing - if not outright regulating - human rights worldwide.. which means they should have a much higher level of scrutiny.
And they walked right into that one.
nowadays you get all that suggested content which is driven by your past behavior, acting as a giant amplifier.
to go back to something idlewords is harping about - all of that is possible because of the persistent storage of user data. kill the deep profiles, kill the tracking, only use what the user directly, willingly entered.
in SV speak: utter heresy.
On the topic of "don't," an unspoken option is that Facebook simply not try to do news.
But the entire system is fundamentally broken...
Why would they persist in the face of this? Hamartia?
"If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."
See https://despair.com/products/consulting for the poster that I stole that from.
You are making an assumption that algorithms can not be biased. Earlier, humans were biased. Now, algorithms are biased.
You know what? Even if you do not give race as a parameter; an algorithm could be biased. It can easily learn race from secondary or tertiary parameters.
If an ML algorithm notices a disparity along e.g. racial lines, it's because it's actually there, not because a human imagined it.
The level of damnation differs significantly.
Having a human team being accused of bias (possible falsely) and pressured by politicians to change puts them in the same category as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and every serious print and broadcast service on earth.
Algorithmically spreading exciting and blatantly false claims puts them in the category of the National Enquirer, and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'
One category is significantly less damned than the other.
This would also give a platform to new and grassroot politicians to rise up over time. Right now, grassroot enthousiasm seems to flow towards senators (ron paul, bernie sanders,..) because they didn't vote for something most of the other senators voted for.
Meanwhile having access to capital and connections to even become a senator is very constraint and unlikely to come without strings attached.
Anyway, having users elect moderators solves the problem of "trusting the moderator" and since I assume they would be a salaried position facebook can apply and enforce fairness guidelines.
If people prefer seeing outrageous stuff then let them have it.
The reason why governments and institutions want to control this is in order to control its people, all the other reasons given are just an attempt to mask this.
1) It doesn't work. It leads to the lowest common-denominator winning.
2) Humans aren't rational.
3) The world is complicated enough that the median person simply doesn't know much about anything outside of their silo.
4) There are powerful forces conspiring to profit off of people's ignorance, rather than to turn them into less ignorant, more rational, more empathetic people, more curious people.
5) There are many people who simply aren't that curious. Left to their own devices, they will be overly susceptible to trickery and populism.
This might be a nice idea in a socially homogeneous group of a small number of like-minded farmers. It fails surely and predictably in a large group trying to make good decisions in a complex and technical world.
Read: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes And How To Correct Them: Lessons From The New Science Of Behavioral Economics
It's also irrelevant how you would like people to be (more rational, empathetic and so on), actually no one on this planet even cares about your opinion on that matter enough to actually change themselves. (and no one ever will, trust me)
What matters is that people are free to choose to be whatever kind of person they want to be.
Some of them choose to be persons that you don't like, well then don't be around them, issue solved.
You seem to believe that we exist to follow some great plan devised by other people who believe they are smarter and know what we should actually be instead of what we choose to be. This is not the case.
We've all seen the results of ideology that seeks to reach utopia by changing man into something elevated. (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Rouge Khmer, Venezuela) It always failed in a catastrophic manner and caused often unimaginable suffering because of the authoritarianism inherent in this ideology.
This has real effects that harm other people. Do what you want to yourself. The problem is when you harm others due to your own ignorance or avoidable biases.
None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
That's why we have courts where you can claim damages.
> None of the big bad movements you mention were genuinely trying to make humans into better thinkers. In fact, they all relied on humans not being such great thinkers.
Oh really? The Soviet man, the Übermensch as understood by the Nazis and all similar Socialist concepts are then completely new to you? Some of these concepts are pretty close to what you described a person should be like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man
So it seems to me that you basically share many of the views of a Hitler or a Stalin on questions like these.
How can conscientious teachers or coaches exist in your worldview?
Surely educators are all evil because they dare to seek to improve people. Education has been used as a pretext to imprison people in oppressive regimes therefore education is evil. Absurd!
This is the real issue here. You are arguing in favour of using force (the basis of Socialism) while I'm arguing for freedom. (the basis of Capitalism)
And please don't tell me that censorship or regulating media isn't really using force. You go break censorship laws in countries that have them and lets see what they will do to you.
Facebook has it's own bias, most people do. Some professional reviewers and political commentators try to be as unbiased as humanly possible, but why blindly trust them, even if that's their intention, there is nothing that say they cannot just be factually wrong.
"Bullshit flies halfway around the world before the truth has even gotten its pants on."
The response is to tell them to fuck off, and that the professional editors in your private company will continue to do their job however they see fit.
Period, paragraph.
Take The Guardian. They employ people like Jessica Valenti and Laurie Penny who publish feminist clickbait. Then they aggressively moderate comments which explain why those two are ill-informed at best and dishonest manipulators at worst. Then they do a "study" where they demonstrate how much harassment their female writers receive, by considering every deleted comment to be an instance of harassment.
Alternative hypotheses are not welcome, and there is no accountability. Actual studies like Pew's about the magnitude and nature of real harassment are ignored, or spun by cherry picking. The dogma remains: women have it worse, and it's because they are women. This system gets them more traffic and attention, so they are encouraged to continue, even as they insist it's terrible and someone should stop it.
So it's okay for you to infer what other people mean, but not okay for me to do it? Where did I say "women in general"? Why would my post imply what he said, when everyone can read exactly what he said and interpret it for themselves, just like you did?
He's grinding an axe (completely out of nowhere) about "feminist clickbait", "female writers", the "dogma" that "women have it worse", and singling out two women (and "people like" them) as examples. What am I supposed to do, pretend he's talking about men?
Likewise, why should I pretend that he said "some women" when he didn't? I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with.
None of this is relevant to my point though, which was that his rant about women (however many it may be) had absolutely nothing to do with what he was replying to, and was simply an attempt to inject this particular hobby horse of his into a thread where it doesn't belong.
How do you know he has a problem with (just) two women? Did he say that? No. Even now he hasn't said that. On the contrary, he specifically said "people like" the two examples he named.
Are you genuinely telling me you don't know what "people like" means in this context?
> It's you that made it ambiguous by claiming he had a problem "with women".
The words "with women" don't even appear in any of my comments, in any context at all, so I don't know where you're quoting that from. I actually said "I have no idea what proportion of women he has a problem with".
And if my understanding of another person's comment (which is still there, in his own words) somehow made that comment "ambiguous", why are you not finding it ambiguous?
I keep feeling like the whole alt-right anti-PC movement seems to be born of things people said online or corner case behavior in insulated Universities. Like, who cares? Most men I know who love the anti-PC movement would, in the moment, gladly intervene if a woman is getting verbally harassed and is visibly shaken up. Mention Valenti to the same person and they fly into a rage. Like wut?!
Most feminist and LGBT activists groups aren't talked about by Jezebel and are doing great work.
tl;dr: Message to alt-right activists everywhere: Talk to minority rights activists in person outside of emotionally charged protests. You'll find you don't disagree by much.
I'm a man, I dislike men who are asses to women and women who are asses to men. I'm finding it consistent and deeply un-wut-worthy. Heck, it seems I sometimes even care about men vs men and women vs women too.
NOT the general population.
I am so sick of this argument that Trump's victory is somehow the fault of bubble-trapped city-dwelling liberals for not understanding how the rest of the country thinks. Trump supporters are the ones who have either been manipulated to vote against their own interests; implicitly elected a Republican administration no different from the ones that they now claim to have rejected; ignored the obvious signs that Trump is of the same "elite" ilk that seeks to exploit them; been duped to amplify social hatred and reinforce the worst bigotry and sexism of the right-wing; benefited from many of the federal supports they claim to hate; or neglected the existential peril of their belief that the economy is more important than the planet's ability to sustain life; if not all of the above. Should the left have picked a candidate that is more aligned with the issues of the working class? Absolutely. Does that mean it's entirely on them? Hell no.
The thing with Trump is that liberals everywhere still can't get over what an asshole he is and what a disaster this is, but that fact that an asshole like him gets elected is very telling. We need to observe and understand this. Saying that people were duped and are idiots is not an interesting story, it doesn't help us make a better future, and quite frankly Trump supporters are not all idiots and bigots. What the intelligent Trump supporter would say is that establishment politicians have duped everyone too, and that Hillary was not going to further your interests. Granted Hillary was definitely the lesser of evils, but I don't think there's a cut and dried case that her policy was going to help the low to middle classes. Plenty of blame to go around here.
And that is why your "intelligent" Trump supporter is still clueless in this case, because he just voted in a white house full of career politicians (Newt Gingrich? Are you kidding me?). It's clear that Trump was mostly a protest vote against the establishment, but it was an incredibly hollow one and made literally no sense if the supporters looked beyond catchy slogans and strongman signaling. And every Trump voter, no matter how intelligent or decent or caring, still cast a vote for a racist and sexist candidate and that is something I find to be unconscionable.
There was little protest vote. This was about corruption, job loss in the heartland, and some very non-racial issues with immigration.
Give me a break. The right lost the culture wars (for good reason as their regressive social policies trampled all over civic rights) and this is them sending our country into a suicide because they'd rather die than face the reality that America is no longer a white monoculture.
Your reasoning is basically "maybe if you weren't so mean to the white supremacists Trump wouldn't have happened". Are we supposed to appease neo-Nazis and ignorance now? There were racially motivated attacks across the country last night, all done in the name of Trump. It does not look good.
Talk about reality checks.
You guys wanted to have it too fast and too easy. You though you can change things by passing laws and silencing criticism with media hysteria. You celebrated your superficial legal victories while completely ignoring the fact that sentiments against "affirmative actions", "LGBT rights", feminists, Muslims, Blacks and whatnot had been steadily growing for ten years all over the West.
You gave voice to the most bitter representatives of minorities to sell them as victims to the general population and didn't mind that the venom they spill enrages everybody else. As if you completely didn't expect that one day somebody may give voice to the most bitter of your opponents.
If an unemployed factory worker votes for a protectionist who promises to bring back factories, how is he voting against his own interests?
Why would one believe a so-called "protectionist" who has actually off-shored jobs?
Why would one believe a billionaire who claims to not be part of the establishment? A billionaire who was a celebrated part of the establishment during the '80s, in New York. That den of conservative values?
Why would one trust a candidate who was essentially a left-leaning Democrat until he decided to run for President?
Why would one believe a candidate who contradicts himself, is difficult to pin down on any policy details, and who says different things to different groups to a degree that's unprecedented, even for a politician?
Anybody can say anything. If you believe someone this erratic, you almost have to be wilfully ignorant of human nature.
I'm always fascinated that people don't realize that what one side says today the other side said yesterday.
> Most people are reasonable
Is blatantly false. People are tribal.
Second if you tell them to "Fuck off" you risk losing a significant chunk of your user base who believes their content and information is being manipulated against them. Facebook isn't in the politics business, they are in the social networking business. If Facebook is seen as political at all then a competing business will set up a service to sell to the other side. Look at what happened to mainstream media channels. Claims of liberal bias in the media giants directly led to the success of Fox News.
And Facebook is already seen as political; that ship has sailed.
I don't think that's true. Certainly the extremes on each side will say that. But I think everyone in the middle doesn't. I don't. Certainly not in the same way as I see Fox News/CNN/MSNBC as political.
Right now they have false-equivalency bias that drives fake stories.
Because, like it or not, Facebook has become a trusted news source. Because of that, they have a duty to accurately report the news.
Their human editors fell down by vanishing stories they found politically uncomfortable.
Their algorithmic editor fell down by promoting stories that were false.
What other trusted news source has this "duty?" What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?
All of them.
> What other trusted news source does not have biased editors?
None of them, of course. Man is a fallible creature.
But other news sources try, most of the time, to be objective and accurate.
See, for example, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/279361-top-republican-d....
Now they are in a situation where they are damned if they do, damned if they don't. And people immersed in echo chambers will accuse them of bias no matter what.
But the entire system is fundamentally broken. Pay per ad incentives lead to rewarding viral content. And content that induces outrage is far more likely to go viral than pretty much anything else. Plus it goes viral before people do pesky things like fact checks. And the more of this that you have been exposed to, the more reasonable you find outrageous claims. Even if you know that the ones that you have seen were all wrong.
For an in depth treatment of the underlying issues, I highly recommend Trust Me, I'm Lying.