Facebook Has Repeatedly Trended Fake News Since Firing Its Human Editors

https://arxiv.org/archive/math

If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist.

We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.

Where the hell did I say that conservative media was unbiased?

That is not the standard for bias, and the fact you make your standard "Well if it doesn't have info that conservatives have". What about libertarians? Anarchists? Socialists? Fascists? Communists?

Everyone is bias, some places do a great job of separating out their biases from reporting but its fantasy land to think that there are motivated journalists out there that just don't have an opinion one way or the other.

No, information may have been made available by biased media, but it may have been presented in such a way to adjust the perceived significance of it.

Take the email scandal for example. Every news outlet provided the information, but there are vastly different conclusions about the importance of it that a reader will be led to draw based on how the information was presented.

Even the headline you were upset about was a logical conclusion given a viewpoint based on the information available about the recent shooting of the police officers.

Information: Two policeman killed by a man who was in the country illegally

Conservative news interpretation: Illegal immigrant a result of poor border control policies by current administration. Therefore, "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people."

Liberal news interpretation: Immigration is a touchy subject right now, exclude anything related to it. Therefore, "Two policeman were killed by a person who happened to be a human."

Are you aware of the cathedral? What about the stagnation?

That's a bold claim.

I love the way you put it; this goes straight into my quotes file.

> Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me.

In a way, it's what some people do without realizing the idea. It's obvious that once a topic becomes a political issue, the general population loses the ability to discuss it in any reasonable way, so it's best to ignore that topic altogether until at least it falls off the news cycle. But maybe we need a more social-wide tools to "cordon off" topics that were exposed to the disease politics is.

I am, it is..

> As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.

This is true for more than just politics. Our language, culture, habits, facial expressions etc. are all learned from society. You can find evidence of ideologies in all of these.

> We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.

I think both can be true. Best, to me, is if we can foster environments that both provide different views and also allow new ideas to grow without being persecuted. I don't think this happens by building walls around everything. There is a balance to strike.

What are the two scenarios you're referring to? That Trump does or does not contribute to a nuclear war?

Trump trashes everyone who disagrees with him. He will likely increase tensions on the world stage.

No, he's never served as a politician and so has no platform record. He's never demonstrated an ability to serve his country so I don't understand why we should entrust him with our most powerful station.

> Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios?

I don't believe there's any evidence of that.

> What evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary?

To me it's his lack of temperament. I'm confident he means what he says that he doesn't want to use nuclear weapons. But in dire situations which may arise, I personally do not trust his temperament or judgement in dealing with foreign powers. This is because he's shown many times that he only cares for the most short-term benefits. His tax plans demonstrate this, his inability to explain many of his plans demonstrates this, and his history in business demonstrates this.

Trump reportedly asked three times why we could not use nuclear weapons in a private briefing.

More importantly, he threatens to change the landscape of our deployed military so drastically that the moves would create opportunities for non-allies to take more aggressive positions against our allies.

If we failed to protect our allies, the US economy would tank, due to all the outstanding treasuries.

> Did he vote for the Iraq war?

Obviously Trump could not have voted on the Iraq war. That's an invalid question.

More pedantically, they are surely not Americans either, since citizenship is conferred at birth?

I just don't understand how someone invests themselves into a conversation like this without having the first clue about the territory.

Too much cognitive dissonance for people who are probably already completely overwhelmed at this point in the cycle, given the turmoil on that side of the aisle.

That's why I won't get a reply from any of the small downvoters.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw The Economist devoting a full page to Trump's badly-fitting suits and overly-long ties, but musing over Clinton's numerous corruption scandals, because she is the preferred globalist candidate.

I am sad that even The Economist has fallen - I have been a subscriber for 25 years. Perhaps not much longer.

Why even mention the far-right at all, if nobody is suggesting they have something to do with these crimes?

Yet other women have consistently claimed over decades that Clinton sexually assaulted them. And today women are coming forward accusing Trump of sexual assault.

There seems to be very little difference; both men have probably assaulted women in the past and abused their power to get away with it. I don't think arbitrarily slanting the narrative to defend one and condemn the other serves anybody. In fact, sweeping sexual assault under the rug when it doesn't serve your political agenda is a pretty horrible thing to do.

I have to say I agree with you on both counts. It would have been more accurate and neutral to write the headline as you suggest. (It would also have been longer and more boring.) Regarding your second point, a quick google search reveals that sex-related crimes encompass:

- Sexual Assault: Describes the catch-all crime that encompasses unwanted sexual touching of many kinds, with links to state penal code and federal law on related crimes. - Solicitation: It's illegal to entice someone else to commit a crime (such as prostitution). ... - Statutory Rape

I have no idea how the figures break down in these categories, so it's hard to the degree of unfairness being applied. If all of the 70K cases were rape, then Breitbart may actually be overly nice :) (Not saying it's likely!)

So thanks for that clarification. I would say, however, that this kind of headline is pretty typical for all news agencies. For example, during the Brexit "debate" in Britain, news outlets like BBC also quoted figures that were aggregated over a number of years to highlight the potential losses to the UK economy. Ditto the Daily Mail on the other side of the aisle. If this is the evidence that Breitbart is a shoddy news outlet, then I contend that the evidence is fairly weak.

Also, your numbers seem to demonstrate the exact dishonesty that you accuse Breitbart of doing.

The number cited for illegal aliens is the number of arrests.

The number you cite for the general population is a victimization survey which includes a lot of alleged rapes that were never reported to the police. (In fact, I can't even figure out if all of them meet the legal definition for rape.)

According to your report [1], 12% of rapes were reported to the police. If every single rape report results in an arrest (hint: they don't), that eliminates your 10x factor right there.

When reading Breitbart, you seem to draw incorrect inferences from cited statistics. And when digging up your own data, you also seem to draw incorrect inferences. Consider the possibility that the problem here isn't Breitbart.

(Note: I hate Trump. I favor open borders and think we should let Mexicans in even if they are more rapey than Americans. In fact I have nothing but positive feelings towards Mexicans - their food is tasty and their women are beautiful. I'm just pointing out bad reasoning.)

[0]http://blog.dilbert.com/post/146605145036/persuasion-update-...

It is also well known that Hillary Clinton has sort-of kind-of changed her position in response to the Bernie Sanders left pull.

Yes, in my personal opinion it's probably not a strong pull, and Sanders voters who feel strongly against free trade / TPP / etc. are justified in feeling suspicious. But a speech from 2013 when she was openly promoting it doesn't exactly tell too much.

> If Bach had not been born, one of his brothers would be the composer?... Same for Einstein?

What if we had aborted Hitler? Or Stalin? Or John Wayne Gacy?

Actions have to be judged based on the information available at the time, not on what might be learned decades later.

The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong.

The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned. There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."

Of course, another option is to replace one mythical system with another....

The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care. On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic.... On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.

Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.

People's interests are frequently rivalrous. Government helps balance those interests.

Mind all that, getting some sense of what is or isn't in the ultimate common interest is a really good thing to have, and I don't think we've got that. A tremendous number of my questions come down to "what's good, what's bad", which then requires some basis for determining what is good or bad. In AI there's concern over numerous aspects, one of which is the Paperclip Maximiser scenario: even an otherwise benign AI whose only directive is to maximise creation of paperclips is ultimately an existential threat. Our social goal measures -- GDP, profit, etc., seem problematic. There are other measures of net function, White's Law (total energy throughput) comes to mind. Balancing present and future flows is another.

Complexity of legislation and legal matters is yet another element, though of course, that complexity feeds on itself as it keeps the lawyers in pay.

Assessing narratives: It's not enough to have internal consistency, you also need to have accurate anchors to reality. What drives me most nuts is conspiracy theory crud that's got some foundational basis. There's an example, "It's all a Rich Man's Game", a ~3h 40m YouTube video which connects the 2007/8 financial crisis, 9/11, the Bushes, JFK, WWII, Hitler, etc., etc., into one continuous narrative. There are parts that are actually quite unambiguously true (corporate America's involvement and collaboration with Nazi Germany: IBM, GM, Ford, AT&T, Coca-Cola, and more) for example. But there are also parts that are utterly fabricated (or at least for which I could find no documentation) and others for which either false connections were drawn or very selective quotation was used (JFK's "Secret Society" speech -- about the USSR, not some dark Skull and Bones society plot). I didn't find any known-to-me contradictions until about 20 minutes in, but then they started popping up all over, and there may well be earlier ones. I'll look up vargas's posts....

There's also a reason I feel reputation has to be part of any widespread assessment system. If you've got a source who's known to propogate bullshit, then you do not trust them by default. If someone you do trust says "actually, this looks like it has merits", you might change your mind. The question of who you do trust is an interesting one, as trust can be (and will be) betrayed. But in general it's food for a while. Admissions of error are another crucial element (a chief reason I refuse to engage at length with those who cannot do so).

There's also the question of story relevance. To pluck from current headlines, I turned away from the BBC a day or so back when they insisted on spending 10+ minutes discussing the "clown scare". I don't find that to be worth however many millions of global ears the BBC might claim, and there are other stories worth covering.

On Matrix & cross-validation: I actually think diving in to minutiae is the wrong approach. It's attractive, and sometimes yields benefits, but also seems to be a common trait of the crackpot. Instead, get multiple accounts from multiple witnesses and compare them. To take a Biblical instance, there's the story of Susanna from the Book of Daniel: a bathing wife is accused by lecherous voyeurs of adultry after refusing sex with them. She is about to be put to death when Daniel insists on questioning the accusers, separately. They proceed to identify different (and very-different sized) trees under which she met her supposed lover. Susanna is set free and the accusers executed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_(Book_of_Daniel)

I've had my own similar experiences in examining stories from others, sometimes multiple people, sometimes the same.

Podesta emails: Another interesting situation. Here you've got the subtle conspiracist's dream: a vast trove of documents from which either slight alteration or selective quotation can prove highly destructive. It's a primary reason why I'm leary of having an extensive online trove of billions of people's mundane activities. The size of the trove itself makes ready assessment difficult (the Panama Papers and other similar leaks have much the same problem), unless you can find a specific narrative thread OR a specific critical moment or element within the documents to make your case.

Some years ago I found myself part to a legal proceeding in which the opposing party was accusing my side of specific actions, though with little other than testimonial evidence. What the other side didn't realise was that my team had access (and evidentiary claim) to a large document archive which established motive and lack of credibility. From a set of many thousands of documents, defending counsel presented three documents. Witness for the plaintif first established that the documents were theirs (credibility). The next two presented the crucial evidence necessary to utterly demolish the case. The key I took from this was that if you can get to the very heart of the matter, that's often all you need.

In the Podesta case, I've seen one instance where a published opinion piece (not written by Podesta) was claimed by Wikileaks and Trump supporters to have been Podesta's own words. They quite manifestly weren't (fully independent verification trivially possible), which impugns the credibility of Trump's team (hardly necessary) and Wikileaks (a massive blunder and mis-step on their part) tremendously.

A particular risk of mass document dumps is the Gish Gallop. In my courtroom case, courtroom discipline itself imposed harsh limits on testimony: you've only a few brief hours in many instances, and going beyond this with exhaustive documentation frequently isn't possible. There are exceptions to this rule, but those are very well-funded trials (and quite expensive). The ability of a disinterested third party to impose that discipline is crucial.

Good thoughts again.