The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes • Hacker News Board

Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

#201

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #189

KaliYugaz wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Really? The majority of academic philosophers disagree with you, and they have very good arguments for moral realism. One thing to think about: it's not possible to affirm objective standards of rationality and deny objective standards of morality at the same time without being inconsistent, since both epistemology and ethics deal with normative statements (wh…

Really? I wasn't aware that morality was a solved problem! Now that we have the one true moral code, why aren't copies being distributed everywhere?

Asserting the existence of moral realism without proving a specific moral reality is acceptable.

The closest thing I can think of in computing theory would be that the statement "A perfect player playing Go will never lose when going first" is obviously accepted as true, despite the fact that creating a perfect Go player is an open problem.

Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

#202

Post by qu4z-2 » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 5:04 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #181

HNerInChina wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jerks, bozos and assholes Looks like incivility to me. In my humble opinion, more often than not, when a techie refers to another commenter as an "asshole" they simply mean that they dislike the other commenter's politics or lack of left-leaning political correctness. You see, most techies espouse leftist views, which are rarely challenged in public because most media lean left. When they come across real-world opi…

> real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of intolerant things about women and nonwhite people. That doesn't make it right. > most media lean left Hahaha no.

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of things about all sorts of things, prejudiced beliefs about "others" being fairly high up on the list.

> Hahaha no.

I know "That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof" and you're totally in the clear here, but it does make me wonder how you'd go about testing that claim (both yours and the GP's)? I mean, from my point of view many media outlets do lean somewhat left but partly because "reality has a left bias" or however the saying goes (although I lean somewhat left, so it may just be my filter bubble).

How do you determine it for even one media outlet? You could maybe do it by vocabulary choice. There are definitely some terms that are used primarily by one side or the other. Or the metric of what issues they try to get their readers outraged about? I've noticed sometimes there's bias not in how stories are covered, but in which stories are covered.

Perhaps it's not possible to do in isolation, but some sort of clustering technique (percentage of readers in common with another outlet as a similarity measure?) would reveal obvious groupings.

Regarding "most", would one weight different media outlets based on their viewership? Or does my local town paper count equally to Fox/whatever in adding "most"?

I guess really I'm just trying to have a more useful discussion than "media are biased left!"->"lol no", but it is actually an interesting question I think, and if anyone has resources about this (this question has definitely been asked before) I'd be interested in links.

Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

#203

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Aug 03, 2016, 9:34 AM UTC

qu4z-2 wrote: post #202

pjc50 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of intolerant things about women and nonwhite people. That doesn't make it right. > most media lean left Hahaha no.

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of things about all sorts of things, prejudiced beliefs about "others" being fairly high up on the list. > Hahaha no. I know "That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof" and you're totally in the clear here, but it does make me wonder how you'd go about testing that claim (both yours and the GP's)? I mean, from my point of view many media outlet…

It's a problem. There are various "anti-media-bias" organisations, most of which are themselves pushing some extreme view and denouncing opposition as bias. Even defining 'left' and 'right' is country-specific. Then you have the Overton Window problem that lobbying intends to actually move what is considered the 'centre' around.

Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly bad problem in two-party systems. Something will get labelled as 'left' because it's supported by the Democrats or 'right' because it's supported by the Republicans, not the other way round. Widespread overuse of "socialist" and "liberal" as terms of abuse rather than descriptors makes this worse.

Then there's the question of whether newspapers should simply report what people say, or make their own efforts to determine whether it bears any relation to reality. Sometimes this is impossible: the greatest piece of anti-libel hedging I've ever seen was an article calling Leon Brittan a paedophile, which was comprised entirely of reported speech.

For clustering, see http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country... : an attempt at reduced-preconception data-driven partitioning of viewpoints. It seems to have held up rather well over the past decade: people attempting to look for common factors driving the Brexit vote have found that the strongest correlate is being pro-capital-punishment. The old left/right axis seems to be subordinate to the modern pro-/anti-internationalist one.

Re: The vanishing civility: The game of jerks, bozos and assholes

#204

Post by qu4z-2 » Thu, Aug 04, 2016, 5:03 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #203

qu4z-2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of things about all sorts of things, prejudiced beliefs about "others" being fairly high up on the list. > Hahaha no. I know "That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof" and you're totally in the clear here, but it does make me wonder how you'd go about testing that claim (both yours and the GP's)? I mean, from my point of view many media outlet…

It's a problem. There are various "anti-media-bias" organisations, most of which are themselves pushing some extreme view and denouncing opposition as bias. Even defining 'left' and 'right' is country-specific. Then you have the Overton Window problem that lobbying intends to actually move what is considered the 'centre' around. Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly…

That clustering link is really interesting, thanks!