201–210 of 225 posts
We're all definitely in an echo chamber. Hacker News is an echo chamber. So is Reddit, FB, Twitter, etc. This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorre…
Stop writing narratives out of this. Many of us who are incredulous about this election not because a Republican won but because Donald Trump won. We're shocked that you can mock a war hero, a person with a disability, a sexual assault victim in the public sphere and still get elected. It's not our politics that are shocked it's our sensibilities. Edit: sorry about the original swear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what you're talking about? Free speech is about legality of speech; nobody's talked about locking anyone up for supporting a candidate.
Locking up isn't the only way to punish people. There's actually some talk about e.g. firing someone from his/her job for supporting a candidate. Recently, there was a long discussion chain in HN about how Y Combinator should sever any ties to Peter Thiel because he supported Trump. That Thiel "should be fired". Discrimination at work may also be about free speech. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12733024
Most organizations have a very understandable right to not want to be associated with that. It's called a PR disaster. Somehow Trump is immune, and I will never know how.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is an echo chamber when it comes to tech choices, but it's absolutely not when it comes to politics. I've seen many pro-Trump supporters in the ranks here, which is very surprising given the demographic.
Really? When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't wanna hear it!" But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.
We're all definitely in an echo chamber. Hacker News is an echo chamber. So is Reddit, FB, Twitter, etc. This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorre…
HN is an echo chamber when it comes to tech choices, but it's absolutely not when it comes to politics. I've seen many pro-Trump supporters in the ranks here, which is very surprising given the demographic.
Pro Trump articles (and anti Clinton) would appear on in the sea of other articles, but they were always black or grey within a minute or two of their appearance. Pro Clinton articles were about 50/50 throughout the day, some staying, some being voted off.
I attribute a lot of the lost articles to the feeling of "keep HN clear of politics", and a lot more to fringe/fanatical news sites making being flagged, but the overall trend of preferring Clinton to Trump was definitely visible. Bernie Sanders articles were ones which stayed up even longer than the others combined.
So, long story short, yeah, HN is still quite the political echo chamber. It's understandable: many of us share both general job descriptions and life goals; I'd hazard a guess that most even share an age group and fall within a handful of ethnicities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone who actually spends any amount of time in the political sphere where SJW run rampant is aware of this. I have been reading up on politics or engaged in political discussion online for maybe ~4 hours daily for the past two years. I have never seen "SJW" used non-pejoratively, and I've never seen anyone own the term and apply it to themselves. Not saying you're wrong, but it's not nearly as common as you're pr…
When I have access to my bookmarks later today, I have no problem providing countless prominent individuals in the "SJW Sphere" to prove my point that they use it positively and someone less engaged could easily see it as a positive term. >I have been reading up on politics or engaged in political discussion online for maybe ~4 hours daily for the past two years. The exact opposite of not being politically engaged an…
Not sure what you're trying to say here.
I honestly don't care that much about any of this. I know that there are people like you who hate "SJWs", but really what a weird thing to get riled up over. My political engagement has been entirely contrary to the war-profiteering, plundering, pro-corporate elites that run the world, but by all means you keep going after those evil college kids and feminists!
A popular uprising against Silicon Valley is coming. Already I hear it from people in my life, all over the country. They blame social media for allowing the Trump memes to warp people's opinion. They're starting to put the pieces together on unemployment and blame tech automation for taking jobs and not offering a replacement, especially in the heartland. They're angry with Silicon Valley execs for not putting up an…
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media crowd like they're a bunch of weapons dealers. I saw a surprisingly self-aware look at this the other day: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-me... In short, former cool-kid…
The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically underestimates the power of viral manipulation. People believe that they have the power to make their own choices, that they have their own thoughts. But the truth is, they really don't. At all. Manipulating a tribe of humans to your cause is all just a matter of effort and patience. My worldview is shaped by the information I have. I just happen to spend a lot of time consuming complex information. Most people don't have that luxury. So they're completely vulnerable. Social media is powerful beyond the capabilities that I think anyone ever envisioned. And it's begun to take on a new life of it's own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nassim Taleb has rigorously shown that FiveThirtyEight did not accurately account for uncertainty in their models.
How does one accurately account for uncertainty? If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account. If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the…
At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment in time, their implication is that she would win the election in two out of three times. Taleb is saying that is nonsense, that there is more variability than that.
Of course, Taleb's model wouldn't drive page views or get people excited. FiveThirtyEight gives voters a reason to check-in daily on how their candidate is doing in polls, but it is misleading as a forecasting tool.
> On Facebook, a Trump victory was likely, or a Clinton win was all but assured. And if you were watching the election coverage the night of you could very discernibly see the change in the commentators narrative from "yay! Clinton!" to the shock of "Wait, Trump?" to "Those dirty rednecks! (er ... uneducated white folk)" as their reality was changing before them. It wasn't JUST Facebook.
I watched CNN and it was so painful to watch them try to keep it exciting. They didn't want to call Florida for so long even after it became statically impossible for Clinton to make up the difference. The sense I got is the sooner the conclusion is reached, the sooner people stop watching.
I take this behavior as an example of motivated reasoning in action.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media crowd like they're a bunch of weapons dealers. I saw a surprisingly self-aware look at this the other day: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-me... In short, former cool-kid…
So true too. A long long time ago I was actually involved with Adbusters.. later on, in between stints of automating knowledge workers out of existence, I worked to help engineer some of the viral marketing techniques that were weaponized in this election. After Brexit, I went completely insane from knowing what would happen this week. There was no way to stop it. The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically u…