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The Facebook bubble just popped

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Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#141

Post by Declanomous »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #68
Declanomous wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 5 years living in Wisconsin, and I've been telling everyone that Trump would definitely win there. The week before the election, I actually went so far as to say that I expected Hillary to win the popular vote, and Trump to win the electoral college. I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confid…

I agree with your analysis, but it's sort of an orthogonal point to the issue at hand. The issue is that the personalized media bubble effect prevented more people from attaining your insight, because we were simply not exposed to the same media as those who were galvanized by Trump, and on the other side of the coin, it allowed Trump supporters to avoid exposure to valid critiques of their candidate and instead be h…

That's fair. I also go out of my way to seek out people's thoughts on divisive but relatively popular topics, because people have some reason for believing what they believe. It probably helps that I don't spend much time on Facebook because I think most people who share my ideology are at least as closed-minded as people whose ideology conflicts with mine.

That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.

I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#142

Post by mattzito »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #130
gdulli wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Trump won in large part due to disproportionate support from voters without a college degree is a plain fact worth being reported. Reading insult into it is discretionary.

I think the issue is more with the false equivalency presented by some journalists. A college degree or lack there of, does not automatically denote greater or lesser intelligence.

It's not designated as a measure of intelligence, instead as a level of education, which comes along with correlations to profession, income level, religious identification (non-college educated folks are more likely to identify as evangelical), etc. etc.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#143

Post by xapata »

jtsnow wrote: post #89
woodchuck64 wrote: post #15

Not just the left and right's echo-chambers, but those who attempt to actually listen to reality got it wrong, too: FiveThirtyEight for example has been using proven, reality-based statistics for a while and should have predicted this result. (As it was, Silver was lambasted for being too generous on Trump's chances.) At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publica…

> proven, reality-based statistics Nassim Taleb has been calling BS on FiveThirtyEight's methods and models for months: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/762032883414556674 He's now gone as far as calling FiveThirtyEight "clueless" and posted further comparisons of his model with theirs: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/binary%20foreca...

Did you glance at his charts? He's saying a "rigorous updater" would have estimated Trump's chances at almost nothing all year long, until dramatically changing the estimate just before the conclusion. In contrast, 538 estimated Trump's chances as much higher all year.

He has a point that the chances of winning shouldn't shift so rapidly, but a rapidly moving gauge is a decent indicator of uncertainty.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#144

Post by logfromblammo »

pmoriarty wrote: post #84
woodchuck64 wrote: post #15

Not just the left and right's echo-chambers, but those who attempt to actually listen to reality got it wrong, too: FiveThirtyEight for example has been using proven, reality-based statistics for a while and should have predicted this result. (As it was, Silver was lambasted for being too generous on Trump's chances.) At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publica…

"people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters" Alternate theory: People did not lie to the pollsters -- but there was voting fraud, and Trump didn't win.

Of course there was fraud. We know better than most how easily a box can get pwned when the attacker has unsupervised physical access for a few minutes, and the manufacturer gives short shrift to security and practices security through obscurity--such as by keeping the source tightly closed.

The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.

My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.

It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.

Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#145

Post by 551199 »

zzalpha wrote: post #91
551199 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver's predictions have been hilariously wrong about Trump in every way possible. Reading this honestly makes me question why I read HN.

Well, for me, it was usually because of the high quality commentary, wherein folks had rational discussions about the content of a piece rather than resorting to Reddit-style content-free snark that neither educates nor illuminates. Funny how times change, eh?

All the dissident views about polls being outright wrong were met with disbelief when it was clear to anyone who looked that they were blatantly off. Mainly to create social proof to vote Clinton.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#146

Post by pmoriarty »

pluma wrote: post #125
pmoriarty wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters" Alternate theory: People did not lie to the pollsters -- but there was voting fraud, and Trump didn't win.

After HRC supporters have gone to such great lengths to explain how Trump's warnings about fraud were delusional and unrealistic, I would really love to hear a justification why Trump could have pulled this off when supposed Clinton couldn't have.

You know, after the debacle that was the Bush vs Kerry election, there were widespread allegations by Democrats of voting fraud on the part of the Republicans -- especially in respect to electronic voting machines. For some months after the election, the Democrats made a lot of noise about those electronic voting machines, trying to get them removed. After a few months, they apparently seemed to forget all about it.

When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.

Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#147

Post by ptaipale »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #33

Why is this hard for people to get. "I can't believe it," is a figure of speech not a statement of fact. Most of us are shocked that this could happen not that it did happen.

Do you mean that even if Clinton would have won the election, you would still have been shocked? Because even if she did win, Trump could have won, as many pollsters predicted he has a double-digit chance of winning?

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#148

Post by muad »

gdulli wrote: post #115
downandout wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom Brokaw was especially insulting to the half of the country that voted for Trump. After several comments about uneducated rednecks causing the downfall of our nation, he summed it up this way: "This election was much more about ‘Duck Dynasty’ than ‘Saturday Night Live’." Hell hath no fury like an elite liberal scorned.

That Trump won in large part due to disproportionate support from voters without a college degree is a plain fact worth being reported. Reading insult into it is discretionary.

Trump won because democrats didn't vote. Look at the voter turnout for 2008 and 2012 and tell me nominating Hillary wasn't a huge mistake.

The DNC has no one to blame but themselves.

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#149

Post by vsgxvhdxh »

herbst wrote: post #86
renaudg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i never heard anyone using Facebook as news source Well, that's one hell of a bubble you're living in.

I am sorry if this does not fit with your world view. In my environment facebook is some social media platform, with a few uplifting news but mostly irrelevant personal stuff. As anyone i am "friends" with way to many people without a specific genre, so i dont think my feed is special in that regard. There is barely political or relevant stuff on my feed, and as said i never heard anyone say "did you read _that_ on f…

When you see a political post do you tend to interact with it? Do you interact more with personal uplifting stories? Your feed tends to contain the sort of things you interact with to the exclusion of the sort of things you don't.

You are probably in a Facebook bubble without even realising it...

Re: The Facebook bubble just popped

#150

Post by muad »

misterbowfinger wrote: post #36

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…

SV is an echo chamber too.

Part of the reason SV is so shocked right now is because you have spent decades isolating yourself from the rest of America.

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