Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by ihinsdale » Fri, Nov 18, 2016, 8:52 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #160

ihinsdale wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Here's another idea - have a index from news-source article to a page that breaks down it's assertions, then links each one to a discussion of it :-)

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. What I'm imagining along those lines is an interface for marking up a source text--basically, for easily turning a highlighted portion of the text into a proposition.

I'm currently working on giving every proposition its own page that contains links to all the arguments where the proposition is used as a premise and all the arguments where the proposition is used as a conclusion. Once that's in place, I can work on the functionality for actually highlighting source text and creating propositions from it. The data model behind Sequiturs already features a notion of 'source text', in the form of a Prompt, which consists of a url or some actual text.

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

#162

Post by veddox » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 11:29 PM UTC

return0 wrote: post #9

I think the tool you need is "skepticism". Teach people to not rush to ascribe labels to everything they don't like, and to stop ignoring anything that has been labeled as X-ist by their bubble. Teach people to not think with slogans and hashtags or listen to celebrities.

In some ways, it's a matter of education - people need to be taught to think, and to think through other peoples' positions. "Sapere aude!", Kant told his listeners, "Dare to use your mind!" We need more of that, on both sides of the political spectrum.

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

#163

Post by veddox » Sat, Nov 19, 2016, 11:37 PM UTC

alistproducer2 wrote: post #27

> I think it is rare to see some news that is not biased one way or another I would posit that part of the problem is the implicit assumption that biased != factual. This assumption is true on both sides of the political spectrum, but it takes on a different character for those on the right. I understand the sentiment that prompted you to post this, I'm just not sure what you propose is any kind of a solution. If any…

> but it takes on a different character for those on the right.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? Because in my experience, the right has no monopoly on disregarding out of hand anything written by the other side...

Nonetheless, I agree with you that biased news is not bad per se. In fact, in a healthy democracy, one would expect news to be biased - after all, the media are among the most important channels of national discussion. The problems come when bias exceeds fairness and truthfulness.