Live data from Hacker News

ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

knowherenews.com

1–10 of 35 posts

Re: ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

#3
Interesting idea - though I feel like I’d need to know more about the algorithm, ml inputs, limitations etc, etc before I could trust what I was seeing was well rounded news.

I think the more transparent, even talking about current limitations, will gain you more trust with users

Re: ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

#5

lol “perspective of the ML developer” maybe Something like this can be great, but feel a hand curation would probably be better served. Here’s a quick one, read Vox and then Breitbart. It’s an intellectual rollercoaster ride.

This is a trope I see commonly repeated but have a difficult time understanding. In what way does (in this case, for instance) an algorithm predicting political bias come to reflect the political biases of the person implementing the mathematical operations behind some gradient descent scheme more so than whoever provided the labels of whatever data it's ultimately trained on?

Re: ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

#7
post #4

The "Give our impartial story your own bias score" slider should be explicit on whether it's just "far left for unbiased, far right for very biased", or if the two ends of the slider represent some implied political positions.

It was originally meant to reflect a left-right political axis for controversial political stories. We publish spins with a few other types of stances now (e.g. Hawk vs. Dove, Environment vs. Free Market) and the explainer could use an update. Thanks for the feedback on it.

Re: ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

#9

lol “perspective of the ML developer” maybe Something like this can be great, but feel a hand curation would probably be better served. Here’s a quick one, read Vox and then Breitbart. It’s an intellectual rollercoaster ride.

I agree, this is the best approach by far. You should read fox news and cnn to get a balanced perspective. Though few minds can handle the cognitive dissonance, sadly.

Re: ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives

#10
post #3

Interesting idea - though I feel like I’d need to know more about the algorithm, ml inputs, limitations etc, etc before I could trust what I was seeing was well rounded news. I think the more transparent, even talking about current limitations, will gain you more trust with users

We've had plans to write some blog posts about it, but there are ultimately only so many hours in the day. There is a very high level explainer at https://knowherenews.com/how but in broad strokes, our backend incorporates many discrete pieces which: monitor for breaking world events, structure metadata from news reports, search for corroboration, identify spin-relevant information, and ultimately, draft reports for a human editor to proof and possibly publish. We focus on American politics for now rather than a larger slice of world events.
Post reply on HN