In the context of Education, the goal is self-reflexive when employed properly - as in, discussion and growth and learning for their own sake, not because some asshole in the Federal Government wants every kid from Baton Rouge and Seattle and San Diego to be able to pass a highly sterile, multiple-choice "NCLB" type test. There's a lot of stuff to un-screw up.

A person like Betsy DeVos is akin to Emperor Nero's Horse.

Since economic elites are usually also leaders of establishment, it is easy for ire for one camp, to bleed over to the other. Especially since talk of economic inequality rarely finds its way into (American) public discourse.

Once you adopt that mindset, it is easy to become jaded. At that point, anything elitist or intellectual starts sounding suspect and untrustworthy.

I swear, 99% of the issues in this country (us) boil back to wealth inequality one way or another.

1 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

I think this is an essential question, and one that people often dismiss as having no solution. IMHO it's an excellent, highly valuable problem for someone to solve. In my very humble thinking, I've come up with or collected these ideas:

1) You are entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts. Facts are can be common ground on which all good faith people can stand, and in which they all share an interest - whatever your opinion, you want it to be true and consistent with the facts. Of course, that's trickier in practice than in theory; see the note on propaganda.

2) Some fields have methods for separating fact from fiction, such as science and law. Some parts of those methods can be applied here, though of course people in Internet forums don't have the resources (especially time) to utilize those methods completely.

3) We must decide to trust some people and sources to a greater degree than others. As someone said, there is no art, no judgment, in trusting nobody. I trust the NY Times more than (some random conspiracy site), for example.

4) Propagandists try to disrupt all of the above; keep an eye out for their tactics. A/the fundamental tactic of professional propaganda (and seemingly adopted by amateurs, maybe unwittingly) is not to persuade but to create uncertainty: Portray all fact as equivalent opinions and discredit any trust in anything, from science to government to news media. Consider climate change, where false uncertainty has brought U.S. federal government action to a standstill; that is exactly the means and outcome of propaganda (as I understand it). Another tactic is to drown signal with noise using a barrage of baseless allegations.

5) As a way to both filter out propagandists and greatly improve the content of forums, focus on input that are based on sound factual foundations and which contributes value - which significantly adds to the reader's knowledge. The propagandists generally reduce knowledge or create uncertainty; they raise endless questions without basis. (Other people do this too; they aren't all intentional propagandists, but it has a similar effect.)

How open-minded of you.

You can spot them easily because they use labels like "trolls", "conspiracist", "tin foil hat", etc to label their enemies.

I've seen this idea brought up a few times here in our community, and have been accused of it at least once for expressing an unpopular opinion.

I have such a hard time believing there's state sponsored posters who troll hacker news. It seems extremely tinfoil hat to me. Honestly folks we're not that important.

Establishing any particular account as a paid troll is almost impossible, although the moderators might be able to infer things from the login IP addresses if their opsec is bad.

Generally I agree, but in this case it's very easily found.

https://xkcd.com/386/

pm24601 to shitgoose: why!?

shitgoose to pm24601: go google it yourself!

pm24601 to shitgoose: why should i google why i suck?

shitgoose to pm24601: if you choose to silently disbelieve that is fine. Expecting anyone else to spend their time and energy on "proving" some thing to someone else, should only happen if there is a pay off.

Occam's razor doesn't really apply to determining an individual account, as there's no model difference in a particular account being either, given many accounts and each being some.

You should respond based on considering it a superposition of both (and more exotic states, like a non-shill blindly repeating shill points), based on the distribution of likelihood given their speech patterns, background prevalence, etc.

That's really the simplest model which lets you incorporate all the information you know in crafting a response -- not a false dichotomy of making assumptions you know will sometimes be erroneous. (...Which is not what Occam's Razor is about.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_brigades

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3186639/security/senator-russ...

Attempts to simplify it run into the exact issues you've noticed above. You're bias comes into play which conflicts with various other peoples PoV, and it all devolves into a shouting match.

Also the pipeline/Syke-Picot people will interject themselves into any conversation about the middle east because "this one simple event explains everything" is appealing to a ton of folks.

Do the "Sykes-Picot people" attribute everything to that agreement or just view it as a logical starting point for many of the current political problems seen in the Middle East that can not be attributed to other factors (geography, sectarian conflict, control of natural resources, migrant populations that defy modern borders, a history of historical conflicts/slavery, and/or pressure from environmental, political, and cultural changes)?

Sykes-Picot isn't exactly a fringe internet theory.... any textbook on the modern Middle East is going to devote substantial time to it.

The map of the modern day middle east has more in common with Ottoman Provinces then it does with the Lines of Control that Sykes-Picot proposed. Now I am not trying to absolve the west of all it's guilt, it did a number of shitty and horrific things, but I think the narrative that the West screwed up the Middle East ignores both a significant history of conflict in the area over land and resources, as well as the political situation on the ground being influenced more by locals then outsiders. I am also not saying that colonialism is not a horrific thing, I think that efforts elsewhere(Africa, Asia) started earlier and were more heavy handed.

The reason why Sykes-Picot appeals to so many people is that it provides a simplistic political narrative for why the region is so messed up, and allows blame to be shifted on a politically convenient scapegoat. Hopefully as we shift away from the "Great Man"(and I think Westerners trying to impose their will on the Middle East were bad folks) theory of history we will come to view these simple theories as useless and try to understand the nuance of how the modern Middle East came to be as not something that two Westerners in 1917 could ever hope to dictate.

What's the anti-humanitarian cause? Throwing enough resources at the fight to keep it going for years instead of weeks/months, but not enough to actually end it, for what I hope are callous realpolitik reasons and not simple incompetence?

The alternative is that we've been too dumb, for years on end, to just stop, or else that we've done it because we made a (huge) mistake initially and are trying to save face, both of which I judge to be somewhat worse.

Iraq may have been more expensive but this is shaping up to be a much bigger strategic blunder, if there's not some really smart hidden agenda driving it. It's certainly a massive humanitarian disaster. I've found it utterly bizarre that in all the partisan bickering this didn't take central stage in the "Obama (and Hillary) aren't fit leaders" narrative, since on the surface the whole thing looks like a gigantic policy disaster on the part of the US—and I feel that way as someone who almost always supports Democrats over Republicans, and protested Iraq II. I don't get how more blame for the situation isn't publicly falling on the US and the Obama administration.

I agree with you that people are far too quick to cry 'troll' and that it's not a legit move unless there's evidence. But that doesn't mean you can personally attack people and expect not to get banned here.

So the question I have for the parent is as follows: how far do things have to deteriorate before military intervention is the only viable and recommended solution?

It is 100% within the means of the United States to end this situation.

Maybe US (and other powerful nations) can stealthily fund the locals and arm them to face the radicals, so that the change comes from within rather than outside. Again the problem lies in identifying the innocent locals from the radicals.

At this stage, I'm not even sure if there is a solution for syrian crisis.

That sort of activity usually ends with local radicals having externally find arms. Also, it hardly counts as change from inside when you armed one fraction of the conflict giving it advantage.

Innocent locals tend to be the ones who don't want guns, sadly. Or are not experienced with them.

Sadly, those institutions aren't "failing" - its just that those tools are working for people that want to stay in power.

edit: I'm not advocating doing nothing. But just that thinking getting boots on the ground will easily solve this.