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

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

#141

Post by Chris2048 »

ihinsdale wrote: post #130
blipblop wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation. 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 p…

You've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs ( https://sequiturs.com ). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.

Now we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-)

Is there good search across questions?

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

#142

Post by Chris2048 »

ihinsdale wrote: post #130
blipblop wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation. 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 p…

You've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs ( https://sequiturs.com ). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.

Now we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-)

Is there good search across questions?

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

#143

Post by hga »

judahmeek wrote: post #138
hga wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that many generations of immigrants have successfully integrated. Echoing masondixon's reply, we on the Alt Right disagree, starting possibly as far back as the Irish immigrants who played a variety of significant roles in the Civil War, e.g. the NYC draft riots. For a stark example of that quite a bit later, in the 20th Century, see the Curley effect: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curley+effect It's any…

But where are those Irish who lived under Curley now? Have they not integrated? In America, manifestations of the Curley Effect are far more likely to come from class warfare or political ideology (such as abortion, LBGTQ rights, etc) than from ethnic diversity. I agree that white use of identity politics does concern the Left... because identity politics developed to promote minorities and underrepresented communiti…

But where are those Irish who lived under Curley now? Have they not integrated?

Well, apparently they voted for Trump, so maybe?

It's why blacks in the 1960 were demanding the right to vote, rather than protesting for or against the Vietnam War.

I have an (even :-) older friend who grew up in the D.C. area, and was an eyewitness to an huge protest that I think was at the Mall, at which MLK denounced the Vietnam War, you don't have to take Wikipedia's word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#Opposit...

That's one of the problems with identity politics, it's part of the Left's problem with having no limiting principles, i.e. X is never enough.

Anyway, we disagree about our (white) degree of "privilege", and that's not counting the Left's crowing about how soon we'll become a true minority (see also Bertolt Brecht), some even go so far as to say we live under a Minority Occupation Government, making a play on the white supremacists ZOG. As I commented in another HN topic, today the career of scientist would be closed to me.

As this election demonstrated, and as the Left's freak out way beyond any in my lifetime over a Presidential election confirms (I wonder if you'd have to go back to Lincoln), here's no "if" here, as this article I just stumbled upon and am about to read puts it, "This Election Marks The End Of America’s Racial Détente" (http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/14/election-marks-end-ameri...).

(ADDED: And, yeah, the idea there ever was any more of a racial détente than there was between the US and USSR is bogus, as anyone who's been around for a few decades with their eyes open can attest, it didn't survive the '80s.

And the author is dead wrong about how this is going to proceed, now that the Left has broken faith and demonstrated they can't be trusted. Like the Evil Empire, another transition from a détente is to fight to victory by one side, in this case, all it took was one President who was determined to end, rather than "contain", the USSR.)

If you're on the Left, if you're an Official Minority, if your livelihood depend on the NFL, etc. etc. etc. it sucks to be you, but perhaps you shouldn't have opened that genie's bottle. Except, of course, that conflicts with the no limiting principle issue, the Left is congenitally unable to resist the temptation.

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

#144

Post by realworldview »

Unfortunately it often appears that one person's bias is another's fodder. Dailymail.com is incredibly astute and manipulative—that's their business. Bias? Of course, and they know it. They would tell you, I suspect, that they are in the bias business.

Is there a solution? A biasometer?

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

#145

Post by Chris2048 »

hga wrote: post #136
judahmeek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that many generations of immigrants have successfully integrated. Besides European immigrants, Asian immigrants on the West Coast have integrated amazingly well. Latinos have also integrated nicely, although it's harder to tell because we have so many fresh immigrants. Cultural integration is a multigenerational process, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

Except that many generations of immigrants have successfully integrated. Echoing masondixon's reply, we on the Alt Right disagree, starting possibly as far back as the Irish immigrants who played a variety of significant roles in the Civil War, e.g. the NYC draft riots. For a stark example of that quite a bit later, in the 20th Century, see the Curley effect: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curley+effect It's any…

Wow, those draft riots are interesting, look at this: "The mob was turned back at the Times office by staff manning Gatling guns, including Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond"

:-O

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

#146

Post by qwrusz »

hga wrote: post #137
qwrusz wrote: post #117

A different or supplementary approach could be removing the bias from a news item. Instead of trying to determine which biased side an article is skewed towards and then finding other links to what is determined to be the "alternative view". Scrubbing bias or at least highlighting it is already helpful. For example: at work we get daily emailed briefs with major business news items summarized to ~3-5 bullet points of…

What if the bias was created by omitting important facts that, for example, contradict the narrative of the item. Sports are indeed a good domain for what you're talking about, but that's because they're run by well known rules, it's a highly artificial domain, not directly including the messiness of general human affairs (except in that they're played, refereed, managed etc. by humans). Business ... well, how many s…

Good point about omission of important facts. It's tough because facts can be absent from a news item intentionally and unintentionally. Journalists have time and size constraints - so even when striving for accuracy and objectivity, facts may just be missed and some other known facts will certainly be left out as determined not relevant enough at the time of writing. This is just the reality of reporting news.

Professional Journalism has ethics and standards - of course w/ ongoing debates in how they are practiced - and they are taken seriously by the industry as a whole. Wikipedia has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...

Ultimately, for news items where a reader wants to get a fuller picture of the story he/she is going to have to go read multiple longer articles about it. Scrubbed bullet points may offer discovery with less bias at this initial stage and from which to choose those stories to go read more about.

I don't want to get off topic, but the Yahoo example mentioned is interesting and I think worth maybe discussing so

TL;DR skip this next part if very wonky Yahoo stock news reporting is not an interest:

Where did you get your Yahoo business news?...Firstly, Yahoo's (YHOO) value is not negative ex Alibaba (BABA). "A company's shares are worth what someone is willing to pay for them" is a relevant quote here and Verizon offered ~$4.8 Billion to buy Yahoo ex Alibaba (also ex Yahoo Japan btw).

Pretty big difference between a negative value and $4.8Billion!

Second, if talking about a stub Yahoo valuation? Like using some shorthand value estimation method based on looking at: (BABA's recent stock prices)x(size of Yahoo's stake) and comparing that amount to where YHOO's market cap is trading at? Then yes you could end up at all kinds of crazy totals, including negative numbers, depending on what shorthand valuation method you chose to use...

But these types of calculations, maybe interesting and fun, are basically meaningless in the real world. The amount Yahoo will receive for its Alibaba stake at some unknown time in the future cannot be calculated accurately from BABA's stock price today. Nor can it derived from whatever $ amount Yahoo has written in its books for the value of their BABA stake (Book value market value). (Sum of parts also market value)

Yahoo can be trading at a discount (or a premium) to one's hypothetical future value calculations for all kinds of reasons: eg YHOO's potential +$10B tax liability uncertainty should they sell their BABA shares with capital gains (Yahoo still talking to IRS about this and its unclear how it will play out but it's shocking Yahoo has not been given clearer answers by the IRS yet to quite fair questions about the tax code)

Yahoo is also still facing material issues in Verizon deal not yet finalized (YHOO email breach may change terms, this is also unclear), etc.. etc..

Basically, Stock Valuation Is Not News. Though some stock trading websites look like news or are attached to legit news sites (Barron's to WSJ for example). Barron's is not news.

NYTimes DealBook discussed Yahoo stub being negative. DealBook is a blog. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-v...

An analogy for those not familiar with Yahoo's stock price valuation: This is like guessing how much money you could receive from selling your house if you tore it down and sold it for scrap wood and separately put the plot of land on the market. You also have to calculate this future value without knowing if your local council will approve the idea, or how long it will take, or what prices for scrap wood/plots of land will be, or how much tearing down your house will cost, or the % odds you secretly have been living in a house built over an old unicorn graveyard and can't sell the land at all.

One can imagine all these factors are why a number calculated for future "value" of stock may be very different than what actually is received when a sale happens. Like way off. Like a negative number vs. +$4.8Billion way off.

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

#147

Post by ihinsdale »

Chris2048 wrote: post #141
ihinsdale wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs ( https://sequiturs.com ). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.

Now we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-) Is there good search across questions?

That's an idea! Motivating people to use the argument format has proven a challenge, since it often takes more time to break an argument down into this format than to string sentences together into a paragraph, but I'm confident that is a solvable problem.

You can search argument content at https://sequiturs.com/search?q=&page=0&limit=10.

The search indexing is pretty decent considering how easy it was to implement--I'm using Postgres's full text search capability. It's high on my to-do list to make comment content searchable as well, and at some point I'd like to switch over to ElasticSearch.

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

#148

Post by 551199 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #140
splawn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite all of your examples, science is still the best way we have for understanding the universe. If you have a better way then by all means enlighten us.

OP posts about the current state of science, A better way of doing science is needed.

Exactly, we could do some much better. Religious attitude is really hurting science.

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

#149

Post by splawn »

551199 wrote: post #148
Chris2048 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP posts about the current state of science, A better way of doing science is needed.

Exactly, we could do some much better. Religious attitude is really hurting science.

Sure, there will always be room for improvement. However, I disagree with your latter point, putting ignorant, anti-science, religious, magical thinking people into power is really hurting science. Unlike religion, philosophically, Science is always open for improvement.

Edit: I had a comma party.

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

#150

Post by huevosabio »

harigov wrote: post #126
huevosabio wrote: post #14

I would be interested (I was pondering on the same idea), how should we proceed?

Hey huevosabio, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer . You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

Thanks! I sent you an email.
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