The Majority Illusion in Social Networks
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of the most X-dedicated people in the entire world.
When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and most of all, self-identification.
The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.
It seems like there are so many fundamental ways in which the most popular social networks and discussion forums are flawed.
http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/community_blog/103
Indeed by 2006 the mature Slashdot moderation system - after a deluge of invasions by trolls and agenda-pushers - already had a lot of the tools that Reddit is still missing or eventually reinvented badly - limited number of upvote points, meta-moderation etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
The problem with such a project (which I think could succeed without solving it) is that it is not merely the case that people disagree on the facts.
They also disagree on the frame of reference. That may not be solvable.
Just as there exists P space and NP space it ought to be possible to categorize questions for which there exist right and wrong answers (universal absolutes), and then a separate space for 'spectrum' questions whose answers are a matter of degree contingent on the feedback from the environment.
Confusing these two types of questions when the answers are unknown is easy and can make you very wrong. I'll give a practical example that may be biased. Personally I believe moderate climatic change to be in the 2nd category* while biodiversity in the 1st category because a temperature can be ratcheted up or down (even if it took centuries or was expensive) whereas once a species is extinguished it is gone forever while the side affects are permanent. They are both serious problems but getting a category 1 question wrong makes the error baked in for the future.
You'll remember numerous occasions when the government tried to defy the laws of biology or physics and this never ends well. Something I believe most politicians do not comprehend is that not every 'policy question' belongs to category 2. Something I believe most scientists do not comprehend is that not every political question belongs to category 1.
> aside from the old idea that public reason leads to truth in political questions which by now seems rather silly).
A public debate could be seen as a method to factor in information from the world and limit the framing of the question so something can objectively be done.
Not so much leading to truth as increasing the likelihood of survival for the participants.
* Yes I'm aware temp change can cause extinction events, this is a toy example to illustrate the point.
All human subcultures carry with them a large baggage of "facts" which the group accepts in order to promote social cohesion, avoid conflict or sometimes simply to advertise membership of the group. Try convincing a highly religious person that their religion is entirely fact-free, or that God doesn't exist using logic, and you will get nowhere: they prefer to believe things that other people don't because believing these things grants membership to a group and the benefits of that membership are perceived to outweigh the benefits of being a person of pure rationality.
Indeed, a genuine belief that you are entirely rational is simply another form of group membership signalling: probably that you want to be seen as a member of the group "intellectuals" or "scientists" or possibly "educated people". Being unable to recognise the difficulty people have in being entirely rational is itself a form of irrationality.
So to get back to your proposed social network, here's what would happen: it would very quickly become dominated by a particular pre-existing social subculture, probably "male internet geeks who believe themselves to be supremely rational" and their baggage of pseudo-facts would come along for the ride.
This is NOT an argument against doing what you want to do. Even if the goal is unattainable, creating better discussion forums with better tools for raising the level of discussion is never a bad thing. Just don't think it'd solve the 'friendship paradox' discussed in the paper.
Lets keep religion out of HN, shall we?
A lot of us actually seems to believe in some kind of deity/ies, we just dont mention it because we value HN as a common ground for technical and business discussions.
If not I could tell you some stories about stupid, stubborn evil ateists as well :-P
I think youre being a bit defensive. That statement might not apply to your religion, especially if it's one based on facts.
I don't expect anyone who is religious to see it that way though, even though I've met many devout Christians who happily admit there is no factual proof of God and that is why they place their energies in faith instead.
For me it was very easy to interpret as a general attack.
There are factual cases for God, some attempting to be proofs even. For example, many consider objective morality (race based slavery is bad, say) to be a case for absolute good, which is hard to explain by pure randomness.
Faith, to a Christian, is making choices in the face of this problem. A Christian knows that everyone has to decide whether to follow God or not, and in that way, everyone has faith in some set of axioms. Many people (intelligent, kind, smart ones!) have immense faith that only matter and energy exist despite basically no proof in that metaphysical axiom.
Despite how hard it is to explain this, it's actually a clear thought to a reasonably educated Christian. It's just hard to communicate since words like 'rational', 'proof', and 'facts' are overloaded and cause confusion in these sorts of conversations. In this way, the balkanization of our culture is a negative feedback loop as misunderstanding promotes division which promotes more misunderstanding.
> strongly believing in them anyway can make sense if membership of organised religion is attractive enough
The point of Christianity isn't being part of an organization. People who go to worship services because it's their favorite social club are actually criticized pretty heavily by Jesus in the Bible. To be fair, I think most churchgoers don't understand the implications of this.
There is no evidence of the Christian god, the Hindu god's, or the Greek gods doing what their holy texts claimed, so I'm of in the camp where I assume none of them are correct. It's senseless to be sure one is because it happened to be the one you were raised with.
And you wouldn't think that if you were born in other circumstances.
> I'm of in the camp where I assume none of them are correct
Fair enough. My point was that everyone assumes some things and that there will be more peace and understanding when we acknowledge that instead of establishing outgroups.
On a side note, physicalist assumptions can and do lead to harsh utilitarianism and eventually the devaluing and ending of human life.
Finally, the "don't kill" part of the Bible is very clear. You don't have to be a theologian to know that people killing in the name of Christ aren't Christians. Just like you don't have to be a mathematician to know that 2+2=4.
The existence of God is not a fact, not even remotely close to being one. If it was then basically everyone would believe in God because any unbeliever would be seen as crazy as someone who doesn't believe in gravity. But lots of people don't believe in God. The existence of God is an article of faith, and that is simply not something you can blow off as "words like 'fact' are overloaded".
Really, this whole sub-thread is strong evidence for why edraferi's proposal would be very difficult. Such a website or tool could not even handle a debating-101 discussion on religion because people would have no way to agree on what the facts were.
But I agree with you on the tool. Even if we can assume a healthy community (a huge assumption) the tool would have to pick some first principles and scientific standards that would inevitably be controversial. We could maybe have different sections based on different first principles, but then we're back to a fragmented, insular culture.
The word "faith", for example, probably means something completely different to a scientist who has "faith" (confidence) in a particular experimental method, versus a religious person who has "faith" (belief/hope) in God, versus a parent who has "faith" (trust) in a child.
A tool for discussion could help elucidate these differences in usage and bridge the linguistic gap that can form between groups.
Probably the most famous words of Jesus, from John 3, say that "whoever believes in [Jesus] will not perish". The word 'belief' here is from the Koine Greek root 'pistis' (1), which is also translated as 'faith' in its noun form. It absolutely carries connotations of trust, relationship, and fidelity. To the point where it is nonsense to have faith without personal consequences such as changed behavior (see James 1). So I believe your last definition fits the ideas of the Bible better.
Anyway, both Christians and non-Christians in the English speaking world tend to use the word 'faith' to fit your second definition, something more like wish/hope/belief/feeling. So I can understand atheist's offense when Christians say atheism and science are each expressions of faith, but I think a lot of it comes from the sort of 'linguistic gap' you talk about.
Anyway, it's a shame we don't more words to distinguish between these overloaded ideas: faith, facts, love, etc.
(1) https://www.blueletterbible.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?str...
Is it? I really hope you're merely lying in order to socially signal religiousness, because the general form of this argument allows that technically, you don't know that this SMBC is false [0]. I believe that densely-packed Hitlers exist all around you. The inexistence of the densely packed Hitlers crowding just outside the cone of your vision is an article of faith. It's typically faith in the truth of a universe whose boundary conditions are subject to Popperian falsifiability.
I just want to clarify some incredibly common misconceptions here. There are lots of claims on these issues, so it can be difficult to get a clear picture of which claims are actually supported by evidence.
First, from an empirical perspective, all signs point to morality being an evolved phenomenon. This is studied scientifically by surveying different cultures, conducting game-like experiments, and testing for moral behavior in other species. You can find videos of monkeys who appear to have a sense of fairness, for example, and lots of other species (dogs, crows, other primates, etc.) all display varying levels of behaviors we call moral. This is what we would expect to find if these behaviors evolved as adaptations.
Second, "randomness" is not an accurate word to use to describe evolution by natural selection. Mutations are mostly random, but those rare mutations that survive DNA repair mechanisms and produce a reproductive and survival advantage persist and spread. Something similar occurs with cultural memes, including those layers of morality which do not come from instinct.
Finally, though you didn't mention this specifically, it's important to point out that scientists did not decide there was no God and then set out to prove it (a common misconception with some people I know). Most historical scientists were religious, but over time as more and more evidence was collected, scientists in aggregate found that what they had been taught about God was unnecessary for and often contradictory to their scientific discoveries. Thus, despite some scientists remaining religious, science itself is an atheistic process, as that is what has been proven to work.
It's this track record of epistemological success that leads people to accept metaphysical materialism, not an a priori assumption.
If you want more detailed summaries of the empirical support for these arguments, I recommend the book Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne.
Should this be non-religious instead of atheistic? When we say atheistic we mist often assume someone who is opposed to the idea of all religions, not just somebody who doesn't let it interfere with his work.
As a religious person, I find keeping religion out of normal discourse has been very counterproductive for both religious and non-religious people. I understand that the discussions are more prone to conflict and uncomfortable feelings, but they're nonetheless key to understanding other people and diversity of thought.
Keeping religion (and agnosticism and atheism) out of things produces the same problems we see with the 'Majority Illusion'.
I have nothing against discussing religion online but I think it is mostly offtopic on HN.
Edit: see also my reply to GPs answer to me
I understand that's surely not intended, but it's nonetheless the consequence of making religion off topic.
Would it be better if I said something like "keep attacks on religion out of HN"?
It's the stereotyping that really sticks out to me. It would be flagged or downvoted (justifiably!) if someone called women irrational or told homosexuals that their lifestyles should be kept private.
I'm convinced that the double standard here just doesn't register for most of the HN community, and almost all the English speaking world besides. I said something to raise awareness of the problem.
I think the difference here is that in one case one would be inferring a belief system from membership in a non-belief-related group, while the other would be inferring a belief system from membership in a belief system.
I don't think it's a double standard to treat those things differently (though there are corners of HN that get wildly out of control in either of the aforementioned cases).
This is related to a current problem in the US left, where tolerance of belief has to compete with intolerance of abuse, and sadly, belief often wins at the expense of the abused.
For context: did you read the comment that started this thread? I and others originally read it as a fairly broad patronising attack against all religions before the author came back and explained the intention. (and I still think it could have been written a lot clearer to begin with. )
So back to the point of creating tools for productive discussion, is there some solution to the problem that will allow us to communicate ideas without the offense and without the verbosity?
I'm not sure we can get there in one HN thread, but consciously addressing linguistic gaps would be worthwhile. When particular words have enough overloaded meaning to cause confusion and conflict, we need to find new words.
For the record, I'm for healthy (respectful) dissent. A lack of dissent is poisonous for all parties. But outgrouping is also poisonous.
Isn't HN supposed to be a place for civil discussion between people who disagree?
If you write off arguments you disagree with as "tiresome" and "beating a dead horse", especially on something as basic as "what is evidence", then you're providing a strong negative counterpoint to the original proposal - do people even want a place where people can agree on facts and then disagree on the results of interpretations of those facts? Or do they want, as you seem to want, to retreat into their comfortable social network of people who all agree on the same unwritten body of pseudo-facts?
As a semi-religious person [0], I would purely love to see religious tenets discussed dispassionately on HN, for a couple of reasons:
1. I've long thought that a corollary of the Summary of the Law [1] is "face the facts," that is, base your beliefs on evidence to the extent possible; as a group, the HN crowd is quite good at examining evidence from various perspectives.
2. Much and even most of the HN crowd is quite interested in knowing "what's going on," which ultimately extends to why is there something rather than nothing? [2]. I would greatly value the insights of others in that area.
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[0] I describe myself as semi-religious because I do try to base my beliefs on evidence; this is reflected in the title of my religion blog (largely inactive in recent years), "The Questioning Christian," at http://www.QuestioningChristian.org . The right-hand column there lists some of my favorite essays.
[1] See http://www.questioningchristian.com/2004/11/facing_facts.htm...
[2] For my "naïve conjecture" about what's going on (to borrow a phrase from the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne FRS, an English particle physicist turned Anglican priest), see http://www.questioningchristian.com/2007/02/another_way_to_....
Similarly, 'yoga' (by which I do not mean physical exercise) is etymologically related to connotations of union (from 'yuj'). Again, the implication is separation and a process of union.
If you take a serious look at your own experience (the evidence), you will arrive at a similar conclusion to Descartes; roughly, that the evidence of one's senses cannot be taken at face value because they provide similar evidences in a dream which is understood to be entirely illusory upon waking up.
Alas, most of 'Western' (I do apologise in advance to anyone who thinks I'm being too liberal with that word) thought takes the waking state to be absolute, and dream and deep sleep to be subsets of this state. This is an assumption but it runs so deep that it will be difficult for most to see what I'm trying to point out.
First consider that the three states of consciousness experienced (waking, dream and deep sleep) are completely different modes; that is, the dreamer can neither conceive the existence of a waking world which is more 'real' than his current experience, nor will he readily admit that his experience is illusory...until he wakes up and becomes the waker. At this point the illusory nature of the dream cannot be doubted. The money in the dream cannot service debts of the waking state.
Consider, then, that questions as to the origin of the world, the purpose of existence and the nature of God may arise only during dream and waking, because in these states there exists thought and thus by implication a mind -- the conclusion is then drawn that in the absence of a mind, there is also absence of a world (as in deep sleep).
Thus one may conclude that the 3 states of waking, dream and deep sleep have relative and not absolute reality. It will, however, be noticed that there is a substratum integrating these varying experiences and arrogating them.
These are all evidences available to any human being and perhaps could lead one to believe that there might be something to religion after all, beyond the paraphernalia of clothing, places of worship and specific texts.
"The kingdom of heaven is within you; he that findeth his Self shall know it"
On the contrary, it is possible to dream that one is engaging in neuroscience, even hook up (dream) friends and family to some kind of brain monitor and prove that they are themselves asleep/dreaming. That doesn't change the fact that the entire dream is illusory. One can never see one's own brain while dreaming or sleeping, it is upon waking that we rely on the testimony of others and thus, again, on the existence of a mind. In this way, thought precedes the brain, whose very appearance occurs in the medium of thought. This is inverted as compared to the Western view that brains produce thoughts. Thoughts produce brains!
I'm not sure (and happy to be corrected) if lucid dreaming is well defined enough that we can say it is awareness of the illusory nature of the dream, while dreaming. Dream money, earned lucidly or not, cannot service debts of the waking state. And vice versa! Hence different modes of experience.
I looked at your site and a few things I didn't see are a discussion about how identifying as Christian affects your daily life, how you came to consider Christianity as an option, how "cosmic coincidences" are evidence of any god, or even if so how those cosmic coincidences translate into your particular religious actions such as quoting the bible.
My perspective is that most religions have been spread primarily by violence and these violent interactions explain the overall picture of religion in the world today independent of the truth of the deistic claims of any particular religion (but potentially related to effectiveness of particular religions as a psychological hack to enable optimal violence for spreading that religion).
2) Why do you consider "a creator" as helping with that question? I am not particularly interested in "why something rather than nothing?" because I can't even imagine what a satisfying answer could possibly be.
Please note that originally Christianity spread in a peer-to-peer way until the Roman empire picked it up.
Even after then a lot of people have spread Christianity not by forcing people but by presenting it as a better option.
Personally I try to avoid forcing my views unto people ("many people who try to become fishers of men end up like scarecrows"). Instead I try to make an example and if anyone like what they see they are free to ask.
Charitably, it could be confusion over what the word 'rational' means.
At any rate, your points about group membership signalling are well taken. I'd like to point out other forms of social signalling, outgrouping for instance, can be just as powerful and even more counterproductive.
I'm not sure how to let people have honest, helpful, and enjoyable conversations while still policing for things like extraneous signaling. Historically, creating 'safe spaces' for frank and productive dialog hasn't been very successful.
I am an athiest, but if sievebrain tried to convince me "that God doesn't exist using logic"; then he would get nowhere. Logic alone is too impartial such debates.
If you mean there's no proof for whether physicalism is true or false, then I completely agree.
Your mention of axioms is very similar to how I used to reason about my own former belief. When empirical reality contradicted those axioms and I spent some time away from the continuous reindoctrination to examine what I believed was real, I found it far more reasonable to disbelieve than to replace one belief with another.
Ultimately empirical reality has to be the arbiter; no amount of soul searching alone, without evidence, can reveal facts about reality. So maybe there is no concrete logical "proof" that physicalism is real, but empiricism isn't about absolutes, and empirically, physicalism has a much, much better track record of supplying new, true knowledge about reality than any other supposed way of knowing.
To reiterate, I believe strongly in empirical evidence. I'm mostly arguing against it being the sole source of knowledge.
And thanks for sharing the rest of your thoughts. I would call what you believe about physicalism a form of faith since you are aligning your expectations to a system that has a good track record in your experience. And I think that's understandable.
At any rate, if we can have a little humility in admitting the limitations to our own certainty, I believe we'll have more charity when dealing with people from other perspectives.
In that sense, the belief in (say) biblical literalism would not itself be a rational belief, but the overall behaviour that surrounds it can be a rational choice.
Now, you seem to be arguing that I don't understand the meaning of rational, and then go on to claim that literally anything can be considered rational because you can just pick your own axioms. That's not how rationality works! You can go ahead and create an argument that seems perfectly reasonable in your own frame of reference but nobody else will care if your axioms aren't shared or are clearly nonsense!
I find it optimistic, to say the least, that each individual can reasonably start from first principles, discover whether there is a Creator, discover if God wants anything from us, and then comply with the requirements of God before the afterlife (if there is one). Atheism is a much more defensible position than a personal deism of any specificity.
Regarding group membership, some organizations are absolutely about that, but the Jesus of the Bible was clearly opposed to people using religion for personal ends. So there are religions that are open to hanging around for the friendship, but biblical Christianity isn't one of them.
> Now, you seem to be arguing that I don't understand the meaning of rational...
I didn't mean any offense. It seemed likely that we didn't have the same definition of 'rational' and it seems even more likely now.
> ...nobody else will care if your axioms aren't shared...
Except people clearly do care. And their response is to establish ingroups, outgroups, promote ignorance, and that's not a good road to go down. I would rather people come to an understanding that everyone is mostly rational, mostly logical, and mostly trying to live a good life. They're normal people that made other choices, in other words.
Regarding nonsensical axioms, axioms can be nonsense if they are inherently contradictory. The axioms we're talking about here pass that hurdle.
I am willing to bet that there is less people in this world who do this "search on their own and discover god" than there are atheists. In fact, if you hang around atheist circles (The Atheist Experience for example), you'll hear enough people say they lost friends/family after deconverting or even that they still fear Hell even after they stopped believing.
> but the Jesus of the Bible was clearly opposed to people using religion for personal ends
How would you know? You realize that, assuming that Jesus did exist as a single person and all, we only have accounts compiled by a single authority that had interest in not having any negative portrayal of the guy?
It's like saying that Steve Jobs was not a bad person because his authorized biography didn't mention any terrible things (and even then, Jobs' probably mentions his daughter in passing at least).
> Regarding nonsensical axioms, axioms can be nonsense if they are inherently contradictory.
If you believe in truth-coherence, which seems to be a belief that religiosity-inclined people have.
Monists/materialists seem to tend more towards the truth-correspondence view. Under the latter, axioms don't need to be contradictory to be nonsense. They just need to be contradictory with reality.
I said "Jesus of the Bible" to avoid getting into that here.
> [Nonsensical axioms] just need to be contradictory with reality.
Sure, but there's no objective observation that can prove God does or does not exist. If He is omniscient and omnipotent, He cannot be a dependent variable in any experiment.
> I am willing to bet that there is less people in this world who do this "search on their own and discover god" than there are atheists.
Any self-professed Christian who deviates from the teachings of the Bible either intentionally or out of disinterest is doing this to some degree. And everyone who considers themselves theist without affirming some more established canon is doing this.
I would wager there are more of those than atheist or orthodox (in the broad sense) Christians.
If she's omniscient, then free will doesn't exist. If she's omnipotent, then she can create a rock so heavy she can't lift it… but probably can lift it.
I also notice that you didn't mention omnibenevolent.
> Any self-professed Christian who deviates from the teachings of the Bible either intentionally or out of disinterest is doing this to some degree.
Really? Any Christian who works on Sunday is "reasonably start[ing] from first principles [and] discover[ing] whether there is a Creator"?
I agree with you: we don't use the same definition of "rational".
God can't create a rock too heavy for God to lift because that's nonsense, not because deist philosophy contradicts itself. The question of predestination vs. free will is interesting, and there is plenty of literature on the subject. If nothing else, the Lutheran position might be dissatisfying to some, but it's hard to refute.
I didn't mention omnibenevolence, no, though we have no way of proving whether individual people are 'good', so I don't know why we think we can judge God fairly.
> Any Christian who works on Sunday is "reasonably start[ing] from first principles [and] discover[ing] whether there is a Creator"?
Allowing for exceptions, Christians who work seven days a week or do not belong to a local church (broadly defined) are ignoring clear instructions in scripture. When this happens, it's typically for one of two reasons. One, people know they should be doing things and are simply bad at doing them. Christian theology actually makes amazing amounts of room for people who genuinely struggle with obedience.
The second category is who I was mainly referring to earlier. These people don't obey the scripture because they believe the scriptures are not really authoritative in all cases. That opens up a whole can of worms about which scriptures count, why, and who decides. Regarding the issues addressed by those scriptures, what is really true, why, and who decides? The whole thing becomes very open-ended very fast. I'm not necessarily opposed to that exercise on an intellectual level, but it seems like a lot of work to expect each individual person to take that faith journey alone. When groups of people do it together, well, you end up with a new belief systems like Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, or even Christian Universalism.
Circling back to the particulars of observing the Sabbath, the Jesus of the Bible clearly said that the Sabbath was is for people, not God, and that the spirit of the law was much more important than the rule. In the epistles, it's specifically pointed out as an example of a rule that can be observed in different ways in good faith.
So Christians don't generally beat each other up about Sabbath issues, but it's widely (and casually) accepted that many Americans overwork, which causes personal and family issues, and that there's a lot of wisdom about being disciplined in observing a day of rest.
Yes. Just like the omni concepts to begin with.
> These people don't obey the scripture because they believe the scriptures are not really authoritative in all cases.
If I tell you that I believe you don't really exist and yet I'm still talking to you, does that make me a fine rationalist? No. It makes me a total idiot.
People do stuff that makes no sense all the time. The fact that they do, does not suddenly make their actions exquisitely well intellectually justified or what not.
Actually, I think you are confusing 'rationalization' and 'rationalism' together.
I think they're also more likely to turn a blind eye to cases where the buildout of their model doesn't hold true. They could, for example, start out with the belief that the bible is the literal word of God, but hand wave away the fundamental contradictions you can find between different parts of it. (How many angels visited Jesus, exactly who did Cain think would kill him for being a vagabond, etc.) That's not just doing math from different first principles, it's changing the arithmetic rules as you go to fit the answer you want to produce.
almost nobody disagrees on actual provable,
scientific facts. The toughest disagreements
usually arise around things which are not facts,
but are presented as if they were.
It sounds like a non-starter.
Facts have the nasty habit of changing.
Much of my activism devolved down to persuading people that their assumptions need to be updated based on the latest, best available science.
as would be this one.
True reason based system would require claims based on science - and nothing more.
There would be no discussion.
If these issues could be resolved by the scientific method, they likely would have already.
http://www.davidbrin.com/disputation.html
The Economist will host something like this, where an issue is presented in an online forum and thoroughly debated until a consensus is established.
Unfortunately, you will find only a small minority of the population would be interested this, and therefore the network would have a strong self selection bias.
You might find that people who are interested skew heavily liberal, for example, which would strongly reduce the diversity of political opinion.
There's plenty of recent psychological research that suggests that people in general, and conservatives in particular, find uncertainty and disagreement to be actually threatening:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-poli...
"Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. "
Let me guess you identify as a liberal? :-)
People who will be interested in a scholarly sort of social net will be university educated, richer than most, and use computers a lot. So we will have a skew there.
Ask yourself this though -- do you consider openness to new ideas and willingness to challenge orthodoxy a more stereotypically conservative or liberal trait, given that those traits have both upsides and downsides.
"Liberal" as defined with characteristics in your question is orthogonal to whatever "liberal" is in US politics. And if you ignore children, I think it would be a rather small percentage of human.
Psychology as a field is effectively garbage. Until they fix their reproducibility problems I wouldnt draw any conclusions from what could very easily be cherry picked data.
http://retractionwatch.com/2016/06/07/conservative-political...
Is their motivation to prove that they're right, or to have a discussion and risk being swayed?
edit: [1]
Eventually I imagine we might see popular moderators who are seen as fair, and they would take their "job" quite seriously, and we would see some good discussions. Maybe. Or maybe it would be a total shit-show. :)
And of course, the more you associate and interact with groups that fit your opinions and interests, the more Facebook and other ad-supported services will try to prioritize showing you those posts, so the echo chamber effect is amplified.
And when you step out into the real world, you'll be inclined to think of others that don't share your "informed" opinion as uninformed or naive, after all you have seen all this evidence to back you your opinions and theories. [Edit:spelling]
In general, in these situations, it seems that the greater tyrant always seems to win, to the detriment of the community.
A society with free speech is supposed to tolerate the expression of really bad ideas partly because nothing other than the consent of human minds lets society distnguish good ideas from bad.
But no particular organisation has a duty to be a forum for all ideas. And that's why it's OK to kick a racist out of your dinner party, and OK for reddit to try and censor its worst users. But when such organisations are main forum for conversion, then the censorship starts to look total.
I think there are worse sources of missinformation, like Redit.
It's an interesting statement, but not terribly insightful. I hope more research follows.
I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in).
This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research?
I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that have survived peer review. Is this feasible?
Also, by conflating a forum full of lay people with experts in a specific field is a bit absurd. Simply put, not everyone's opinion should be given equal weight.
2) Of those commenters, most are not actual researchers, who are, IMO, much, much busier with real work (you know... research) than your average HN commenter.
300k * 0.02 = 6000 people who may be qualified. How many people are typically asked to peer review a paper? A handful? The odds are still good.