Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explained.

Then each participant can "agree" or "disagree" with each claim in an argument chain. And every time they disagree they need to dive deeper to refine their argument.

Eventually all arguments reach a point of "because I say so" and ultimately it becomes a popularity contest. E.g. We should maximise happiness for all, etc.

But...the good news is argument reasoning can be objectively validated to some extent. Soundness and validity.

And definitions are arbitrary. People have to agree on definitions or there is no point in debating something. I would say that most arguments are about the parties not agreeing on definitions, and wasting time stringing together argument chains where both sides have different conceptions of the words being used.

I believe lawyers/politicians should be programmers and instead of arguing and making laws in English prose, they should use a structured programming language.

People hear what they want to hear. If they are intentionally seeking out (or actively trying to create) echo chambers, you can't really stop that.

Additionally, studies consistently show that most people are pro choice. They also consistently show that most people are anti abortion.

In other words, no one is pro abortion. No one is "for killing unborn babies." But some people frame the political policies in terms of rights of the mother to choose and some frame it in terms of rights of the unborn to live.

There is no easy answer here. Pretty much everyone thinks that abortion should be a last resort, not some kind of primary method of birth control. But there is enormous fighting about exactly where and how to draw the line on who, what, when, where and how.

So one of the problems you will find is that when you try to get "both sides" of any argument (abortion is merely one example here):

A) Either they are talking about very different foundational ideas such that it is kind of disingenuous to frame them as "opposing arguments" or

B) You have a set of people with such narrow views that they can only conceive of two possible options here and the real answer is to be looking for "a third way."

I think a better answer is to write about a broader point of view that helps promote a non-binary conversation and thought process and that helps promote that "third way" that has some hope of addressing real concerns for "both sides."

It's extremely problematic to try to divide more than 300 million people into two camps and pretend that the millions of individuals making up each "camp" all uniformly agree with each other. Yes, people choose sides in order to try to exercise power. But that doesn't mean the camps really authentically represent the full views and sets of positions of any of their members, much less all (of their members).

I think your desire to create this is rooted in good intentions, but I suspect that something like this will just help entrench the "war" by further promoting the idea that there are, in fact, two camps and only two camps and every American needs to choose one. I realize that is not what you desire to do, but that may well be the result.

I find that trying to have meaningful and nuanced discussion with almost anyone at all (other than my sons) is incredibly hard because most people want to peg me as either "for" what they are for or "against" them. This leaves no room for positing a third way at all, much less a potential fourth, fifth or Nth way.

I choose to blog as my small pebble of contribution towards trying to combat the either/or thinking and trying to posit new mental models for old problems.

If you do start something, I would be happy to give feedback or have some kind of limited (probably short term/one time) role in its development. I am not looking for an on-going time commitment. Furthermore, although I support your position that it "will be" open source, I see zero reason why this must be non-profit. I think this is just another example of common thought patterns that somehow being non-profit means it will be done for the right reasons, in the right way, etc and this is absolutely not in any way guaranteed.

Lots of us are libertarians or conservatives who've lost faith in those, and are pursuing and defining a new Right that's by definition an alternative to the existing Right. Me, I was a paleoconservative.

As far as a strict definition, the best I've seen so far is former libertarian Vox Day's initial attempt, 16 points which you can find at http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/08/what-alt-right-is.html

Note that as a matter of taxonomy, he divides it into the Alt White, such as the Daily Stormer types and a group he can't belong to, and a much larger Alt West, I can dig that up for you if you want, but obviously the Alt West isn't obsessed with the Joooos, is therefore unabashedly Christian or at least believing, well, here's his 4th point:

The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

The total antisemite types, I gather they don't much like Christianity because of its Jewish origins, from Jesus to the Old Testament, they're certainly fond of a lot of pagan icons.

The combativeness of point 3 is a personal characteristic of his, but is pretty essential, and you can see how Trump is aligned with it (although, frankly, if implicitly telling the press to FU is what you need to enjoy a steak dinner with your family in peace...).

Point 12 is particularly important: "The Alt Right doesn't care what you think of it.", or more simply put, "We Don't Care." Note Trump's war on Political Correctness, which alone won him more than a few votes, lots of people are utterly sick of it.

Obviously many of the points will send anyone on the left screaming, and certainly there's no universal agreement on any of this---forget it being inchoate, humans being humans there never will be!---but you can take it as being at least somewhat representative of the Alt Right.

>> There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.

Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Really I think a lot of the negative coverage Trump got could have been beneficial to him. For instance, if you are looking for somebody who is going to "shake up Washington", then denunciations from Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan add to his credibility.