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Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

thehill.com

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Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#281

Post by dragonwriter »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #280
ams6110 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump is not hard right-wing. I'm not sure what he is, time will tell, but he's not that.

The problem here is that there are two different typical definitions of "far-right", possibly even three. * Minarcho-capitalist, "Snow Crash"-style. Absolutely minimal government, only contracts and property titles being enforced. On everything else, you're free-to-starve. * Religious dominionism, Mike Pence style. "Electrocute the gay away". Scary and weird. Kinda like a Middle Eastern country. * So-called "right-wi…

The last two are essentially the same, differing only in window dressing, and the first isn't far right (while the Republican Party has made some selective rhetorical mods in the direction of minarchism -- particularly at the federal level over issues where they want states to be free to pursue policies more right-wing than there is federal support for at the time of the argument -- minarchism isn't particularly right-wing at all.)

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#282

Post by marklgr »

dnautics wrote: post #259
marklgr wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of arguments can be seen as sensible until one realizes they were pushed by people with a hidden agenda. It's often just the motte part of motte-and-bailey arguments. That's why there are people (eg. in Europe) who aggressively promote secularism, and many agree with that, until you find out they belong to some hateful anti-islam organization. And that's why some people put science into question, like, how can…

does 'being pushed by people with a hidden agenda' automatically invalidate something? I'd say that that the American (and presumably European) political establishment (both the right and the left) have a 'hidden agenda' of pushing science because it creates a higher authority that they can appeal to justify questionable policy choices. That doesn't mean I think all science is wrong.

It does not invalidate anything, but that's beside the point; it's not about valid or invalid arguments (their first one is almost always valid or defensible), it's about getting into what you might think is a honest discussion whose purpose is to find out the truth, whereas your interlocutor's purpose is to unroll their rhetoric and influence you or the audience, according to their hidden agenda. While you're only paying attention to logic and validity, they win points and convince people around.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#283

Post by nylonstrung »

type0 wrote: post #250
cyberferret wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Karma points do you have? (top right). I don't think I could downvote until I got to about 1000 or 1500 points, I believe.

I feel that it should actually be raised to over 9000.

I'd downvote this if I could

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#284

Post by kafkaesq »

true_religion wrote: post #159
kafkaesq wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. So if you met someone on a street corner who pointed at the sky, and told you "Hey look, it's orange with pink polka-dots" -- would you think to yourself, "Hmm, I'm tempted to be skeptical -- but then again, when I asked this guy for the time the other day, he gave a correct enough answer. So m…

If yesterday I thought the sky was going to be blue, everyone else swore the sky would be blue, and this lone fellow told me it'd be a blood red sky---and he was correct right down to the particular shade of crimson it would be, then yes I would take him a little more seriously. No one thought Trump would win. Even in the states he lost in, he lost be lesser margins than was predicted. Hiliary seemed to be inevitable…

I looked at the election results and saw a sea of red from coast to coast, with Hilary doing well in high population areas but losing majority everywhere else.

But you understand the part about the "sea of red" mostly reflecting the (much) lower population density (and hence, greater land area per voter) in pro-Trump states, right? And that if you actually looked at map that expanded or contract each precinct according to population size -- that that map would be nearly evenly split between red and blue, right? Such that'd you'd hardly be able to tell which side (red or blue) had the greater share.

Right?

Then she lost rather dramatically.

Actually in historical terms, she lost the electoral vote rather narrowly (specifically in the bottom quartile of loss margins, throughout U.S. history).

Yet somehow you settled on the belief that she lost "dramatically." How so, exactly?

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#285

Post by kafkaesq »

jquery wrote: post #136
kafkaesq wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is at least one study that support the President's beliefs on millions of people voting illegally. ... There is a Harvard rebuttal to that study... This rebuttal, you mean? "This paper documents how low-level measurement error for survey questions generally agreed to be highly reliable can lead to large prediction errors in large sample surveys, such as the CCES. The example for this analysis is Richman, Chatth…

I'm not an expert enough on the math to decide which study is accurate, the original or the rebuttal (nor did I read the original because it's behind a paywall). Nor, I doubt, is Trump. It's not an official government position that millions of illegal immigrants voted, it's Trump's personal opinion. Much like it was Obama's opinion that Trump would never be President ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FkIJEmOyoA ). O…

It's not an official government position that millions of illegal immigrants voted, it's Trump's personal opinion. Much like it was Obama's opinion that Trump would never be President.

Do you see a difference between someone having...

(1) an "opinion" about something that happened in the recent, knowable past -- but which flies in the face of all available evidence; and which, when challenged, you're unable to offer any evidence for -- like for example claiming that "The Kansas City Royals won the World Series last year", or "The Russians were the first to land on the moon", when everyone knows they didn't); and

(2) an "opinion" (i.e. a hunch) about what might happen in some future event -- who might win a football game, or an election, say?

Or do you think these are basically equivalent?

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#286

Post by jquery »

chmaynard wrote: post #257
skynode wrote: post #245

Why was this even posted here on HN? I don't think it's okay that HN should become a microcosm of the political economy of the United States. Well, for whatever it's worth, I hope California gets serious about secession.

> Why was this even posted here on HN? That's why YC added the Hide button. With one click, you can simply hide posts that don't interest you.

I flagged the post. Hiding the post is good for the user, but not good for the community. Political posts on HN are fine, but should be relatively limited--otherwise they would begin to dominate and ruin HN--and avoid alarmism (which this article did not). In most cases, when politics is encouraged as a topic, it becomes an echo-chamber as the winning partisans downvote the minority until the minority is completely gone (see /r/politics).

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#287

Post by ajkjk »

dnautics wrote: post #147
vmeson wrote: post #83

We went through this sort of censorship of government scientists and departments in Canada with the conservative Harper government: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/faq-the-issues-around-muzz... The US should not put up with any, even a temporary form of such censorship of the parts of the government that are doing scientific research and environmental stewardship. There should be another march in a week or two to s…

Peer review most certainly does not determine scientific truth.

It does a better job than anything else you can come up with.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#288

Post by skynode »

jquery wrote: post #286
chmaynard wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why was this even posted here on HN? That's why YC added the Hide button. With one click, you can simply hide posts that don't interest you.

I flagged the post. Hiding the post is good for the user, but not good for the community. Political posts on HN are fine, but should be relatively limited--otherwise they would begin to dominate and ruin HN--and avoid alarmism (which this article did not). In most cases, when politics is encouraged as a topic, it becomes an echo-chamber as the winning partisans downvote the minority until the minority is completely g…

I've seen so many intellectual forums overrun and finally ruined by political posts (and they usually start with harmless posts) that do nothing but engender the highest levels of divisiveness among members. Would be sad to see HN fall into such a situation.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#289

Post by DrScump »

jakeogh wrote: post #204
gvd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Government can fund media, without you immediately thinking of Russia. Being Dutch originally, I would refer you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_public_broadcasting_syst... Note that this is not a closed system where there is no private news/tv. Also, look at DW (Deutsche Welle) and BBC. Whatever your opinion, these still provide much better information than whatever you can get in the US (well, yo…

Money _is_ influence. How about letting the media stand on it's own legs? Why should NPR be special? Even their name is a dishonest appeal to authority. It's not random that they have show titles like "Talk of the Nation". As far as I know, NYT does not receive public funding, but I think this window is instructive on how the "elite" media views themselves: http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C…

Some context for the latter two photos would be helpful.

Re: Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates

#290

Post by masonic »

mistersquid wrote: post #104
ColanR wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that he's press secretary for the one guy who actually made accurate polling assessments prior to the election. If your source on disproving the "millions of illegal votes" is one of the same sources that thought Hillary was going to win in a landslide, then you have nothing to say. I'm not going to say I agree there were illegal votes, but I am holding out for better evidence.

Predicting election outcomes based on polling (including exit polls) is very different than alleging massive voter fraud. In the case of Clinton losing the election, the predictions which were based on statistical evidence did not match the actual outcome. Even so, an unlikely outcome is understood as a possibility within the domain of predictive statistical modeling and the wholesale dismissal of the utility of stat…

  predictions which were based on statistical evidence
Polls aren't evidence. In this case, they were barely data.

There are polls which are designed to gauge opinion, and there are polls which are designed to steer opinion.

  evidence-based statistical modeling
Given that the model failed, it apparently wasn't evidence-based.
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