Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

99 pointsharigov156 comments

We all know how the election turned out. I believe the internet is contributing to echo chambers because of filter bubbles. I think it is rare to see some news that is not biased one way or another, and I believe it is hard to expect it not to be so, because of our own individual biases. I think there is a need for tools that can help us see the other side.

What if we had a tool that is delivered as a browser extension, that can show links to alternate views (think URL links) of the exact same topic that you are reading? It can use information like how biased the current article is towards different people/events/ideas and find an alternate article that can help you understand other-side. It may not solve all the problems but it would be a good start. Would you find it useful? Do you have a better idea?

This requires skills (NLP/ML) that I don't have but I am willing to spend time/effort (I am a programmer/big-data-engineer) to make it a reality. Would anyone be interested in working on it? It will be open source and any organization that runs this will be non-profit.

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I'm concerned that your frame for this might be off as I don't think the "filter bubble" is rational opposing viewpoints around a particular topic so much as there just being so much misinformation and plain weirdness out there.

There's a saying about it being 10x harder to refute bullshit than it is to spew it. How do we in the information and technology wing of society build tools to deal with that?

Alex Jones had a rant about how Obama and Hillary Clinton both smell like sulfur because they're demons.

I'd assert it's a "real story" and exactly the kind of filter bubble issue we're talking about as Alex Jones was personally thanked post election by Trump [1] and when it happened the sitting president of the United States made remarks about it [2].

I had a real conversation with an elderly relative of mine who told me quite straight faced that they read all about this and how it was true - this isn't bubbles it's different realities.

1 - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-alex-jones_...

2 - http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/obama-sulfur-smell-al...

The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation.

If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explained.

Then each participant can "agree" or "disagree" with each claim in an argument chain. And every time they disagree they need to dive deeper to refine their argument.

Eventually all arguments reach a point of "because I say so" and ultimately it becomes a popularity contest. E.g. We should maximise happiness for all, etc.

But...the good news is argument reasoning can be objectively validated to some extent. Soundness and validity.

And definitions are arbitrary. People have to agree on definitions or there is no point in debating something. I would say that most arguments are about the parties not agreeing on definitions, and wasting time stringing together argument chains where both sides have different conceptions of the words being used.

I believe lawyers/politicians should be programmers and instead of arguing and making laws in English prose, they should use a structured programming language.

You've described a lot of my vision for Sequiturs (https://sequiturs.com). Check it out! I'd be very interested to get your feedback.

Now we just need to go through HN an incorporate comment-knowledge into this format :-)

Is there good search across questions?

That's an idea! Motivating people to use the argument format has proven a challenge, since it often takes more time to break an argument down into this format than to string sentences together into a paragraph, but I'm confident that is a solvable problem.

You can search argument content at https://sequiturs.com/search?q=&page=0&limit=10.

The search indexing is pretty decent considering how easy it was to implement--I'm using Postgres's full text search capability. It's high on my to-do list to make comment content searchable as well, and at some point I'd like to switch over to ElasticSearch.

Here's another idea - have a index from news-source article to a page that breaks down it's assertions, then links each one to a discussion of it :-)

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. What I'm imagining along those lines is an interface for marking up a source text--basically, for easily turning a highlighted portion of the text into a proposition.

I'm currently working on giving every proposition its own page that contains links to all the arguments where the proposition is used as a premise and all the arguments where the proposition is used as a conclusion. Once that's in place, I can work on the functionality for actually highlighting source text and creating propositions from it. The data model behind Sequiturs already features a notion of 'source text', in the form of a Prompt, which consists of a url or some actual text.

Indeed, if we do not agree to a common set of facts and a shared reality, how then do we proceed with any kind of meaningful debate? To paint a basic picture, how do you debate the feasibility and merits of sending humans to Mars with a person who denies the moon landings? You might say these are extreme cases, but with the rise and "normalization" of Alex Jones-type media outlets, this will only get worse.

I think the key to solving this is to "branch" off the arguments that depend on a contentious topic such as "denying moon landings".

So instead of having to prove moon landings don't exist, there would be one branch that denies moon landings, and the other that accepts moon landings.

This modularises/encapsulates different reasoning chains allowing each to be debating on their own. So whether moon landings occurred could be argued on its own.

The problem today is the "common set of facts and shared reality" that the two sides of politics share are very separated.

Exactly, when it comes to reality not everybody gets a trophy. Critical thinking and science are waaaay undervalued in our culture.

Reality is lot of the science is wrong as well. Intentionally paid by special interest or the end result is defined before any science is done.

You don't want to look science religiously either.

IIRC one of the main tenants of science, when I was learning it in middle school in the early '90s, was that it's fact until it's disproven. We don't know everything about it which is what makes it different than religion. There's no faith involved.

I know a lot of it is corrupt and aiming for a target but good scientists will tell you that they're basing their findings on studies which may have flaws and they'd want you to try and reproduce their studies to tell them if they've gotten something wrong.

This is what falsifiability is all about in science.

Mathematics relies upon proofs, but there is no such thing as a scientific proof.. You can find sufficient conditions for a phenomenon and have a wholly water-tight argument as to why it occurs, but you can't use use observation to find necessary condition.

This is because observations are evidence, and if a future observation shows problems with your theory, you should not discard your evidence (unless of course your secondary theory is that your evidence exhibits a model for some reason why it doesn't explain what it seems to explain on the surface, e.g. experimental error), yada yada..

I'm not sure this is True, as you can use probabilistic arguments.

Probabilistic models are what I was referring to; all probabilistic models should produce a prediction, and also a measure of confidence. That measure of confidence can never be 100%. Similarly, you can never have an incontrovertible belief that is not a mathematically/logically-constructed fact 'outside' of the messy real world in some abstract chamber walled off from anything that is like a real life observation, no matter how certain. Basically, you can't have P(A) = 0 or 1 as your prior probability, because then you break Bayes' rule in the sense that new evidence is meaningless - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell%27s_rule

Sure but what if it was never a fact. 'Fat makes you fat' or similar falsification that have real impact to society[0]

We shouldn't attribute everything to malice, but there are clear issues in science:

'Too many of the findings that fill the academic either are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis

Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000-10 roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.

Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page.

Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.'[1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Sugar-Fat-Giants-Hooked/dp/08129... [1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...

[2] Alan Sokal - Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hoax-Science-Philosophy-Cultur... [3] How to Lie with Statistics - https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/03... [4] Nassim Taleb 'Incerto', twitter.com/nntaleb

Despite all of your examples, science is still the best way we have for understanding the universe. If you have a better way then by all means enlighten us.

OP posts about the current state of science, A better way of doing science is needed.

Exactly, we could do some much better. Religious attitude is really hurting science.

Sure, there will always be room for improvement. However, I disagree with your latter point, putting ignorant, anti-science, religious, magical thinking people into power is really hurting science. Unlike religion, philosophically, Science is always open for improvement.

Edit: I had a comma party.

Repeat of study should be the bare minimum. We are in a situation where lot of underlining assumptions are false. It's hard for common people to experiment science but lets examine something that everybody can experiment daily. Nutritional science. It turns out most of the findings are complete bs or paid by special interests. Probably its not as bad elsewhere but faces similar issues presented in The Economist article.

I agree. It looks like this problem is multi-faceted. Maybe the problem that you mentioned is 60% prevalent and what I mentioned maybe 30% (random numbers). We should still try to solve these problems. What do you propose? I am genuinely interested because this is getting out of control.

There is a recent trend in the higher quality side of long-form articles to including primary source materials (videos, documents from trials, etc) in articles, but it's a lot of work.

"it's a lot of work"....of course it is, as it should be! Throwing wordpress postings at the wall to see if a headline will stick is trash journalism...from all sides.

Yeah, agreed

As an Alt Right Trump supporter, I can state without question that the worst thing about 2016 politics so far is that Alex Jones and his InfoWars no longer earns automatic dismissal, i.e. he's been publishing some good stuff, therefore people I follow have been linking more to him, etc.

What that says is not specifically clear to me, but it's nothing good, unless he's become significantly more sane as of late.

What makes someone Alt Right, if I might ask? I've only heard about it via Facebook and it's being painted as fringe extremist stuff there, but absolutely everyone is crazy on Facebook right now. I'd rather hear it from someone who considers themselves part of it.

The alt right is the popular front of the NRX.

Scott Alexander has a good overview here:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...

This quote is priceless

"The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell. We medieval Spaniards are way too smart to fall for the balance fallacy!"

The tldr is that neoreactionaries believe that many beliefs about modern society are not just wrong, but not even wrong.

The follow on header might be more relevant to this particular thread though:

"Wait, You Mean The Invisible Multi-Tentacled Monster That Has Taken Over All Our Information Sources Might Be Trying To Mislead Us?"

I don't think I can be a member of the NRx without a possessing a thousand times more patience than I have to slog through Moldbug's writings, but you make a great point in your tl;dr, "many beliefs about modern society are not just wrong, but not even wrong.", thanks for noticing that connection/formulation.

Listen, the important thing is that when Peter lit the Beacons of Gondor, the Men (+Elves/Dwarfs/Hobbits) of the West answered the call.

But only if they managed to slog thought the books that far!

As far as I know, one of the things Tolkien created was what I call the "long slog" genre of fantasy, which involves the hero(es) traveling great distances, often getting the story bogged down in their travels (yeah, I know it's been done before).

I did manage to finish the trilogy, mostly because I had little better to read that I hadn't or wouldn't, back in those days in my small city prior to the Internet, but I see more than a little commonality between the two authors, except Tolkien had a lot more respect for his audience, i.e. was willing to take the extra effort to keep it focused and on track.

(And compare to Robert Jordan, who just stopped the plot for long enough I gave up on the series, life's just too short for it. I also didn't pick up an early and important, extremely plot significant clue about the taint.)

Gene Wolfe is better than Robert Jordan and could surpass Tolkien.

He is a currently unrecognized Giant, on the level of our new Shakespeare. Literally every famous author you've heard of says it. Gene Wolfe is what the journeymen read to improve their craft but he is little known outside rarefied circles.

I wrote a piece 10 days ago (so before the election) explaining why a reading of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun explains Peter Thiel's motivations in backing Trump. He was following a thread nobody else saw. So many smart people, yes on the alt right also, are missing a much bigger picture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413

It is not an exaggeration that this book changed my life. You don't have to be a neoreactionary to read it but reading it alongside Joeseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies is a wonderful and enriching life experience that will definitely change how you view the world.

In addition I strongly recommend you watch Peter Thiel's videos on Youtube such as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY

Tainter, Thiel, Wolfe, Moldbug. If you wish to scry deeply into the world, that's how I'd start. Many people reading this will be liberals or progressives. To them I say, this is a rabbit hole nobody else is going to recommend, if you sincerely are interested in the order of the right's thought, here it is.

One way of viewing it is that it's akin to the original neo-conservatives, who were Communists who lost faith in it. If you remember William Kristol trying to be the anti-Trump leader, his father Irving was one of its founders (note that this is decades before "neo-con" got its current meaning).

Lots of us are libertarians or conservatives who've lost faith in those, and are pursuing and defining a new Right that's by definition an alternative to the existing Right. Me, I was a paleoconservative.

As far as a strict definition, the best I've seen so far is former libertarian Vox Day's initial attempt, 16 points which you can find at http://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/08/what-alt-right-is.html

Note that as a matter of taxonomy, he divides it into the Alt White, such as the Daily Stormer types and a group he can't belong to, and a much larger Alt West, I can dig that up for you if you want, but obviously the Alt West isn't obsessed with the Joooos, is therefore unabashedly Christian or at least believing, well, here's his 4th point:

The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

The total antisemite types, I gather they don't much like Christianity because of its Jewish origins, from Jesus to the Old Testament, they're certainly fond of a lot of pagan icons.

The combativeness of point 3 is a personal characteristic of his, but is pretty essential, and you can see how Trump is aligned with it (although, frankly, if implicitly telling the press to FU is what you need to enjoy a steak dinner with your family in peace...).

Point 12 is particularly important: "The Alt Right doesn't care what you think of it.", or more simply put, "We Don't Care." Note Trump's war on Political Correctness, which alone won him more than a few votes, lots of people are utterly sick of it.

Obviously many of the points will send anyone on the left screaming, and certainly there's no universal agreement on any of this---forget it being inchoate, humans being humans there never will be!---but you can take it as being at least somewhat representative of the Alt Right.

Wow, as a Trump supporter, I find this really scary ("what the alt right is").

I honestly did not know this is what the Alt Right was purporting to be.

But, this is not what Trump is about. Trump's policies do not reflect your manifesto here.

If you visit The_Donald Reddit, this is what most young Trump supporters are. They are opposed to SJWs, BLM, and third-wave feminists, because they do not think that their actions are helping them achieve their goals, and others just want to make fun of this fact.

The Alt Right certainly does lurk there, and I would say it is a good recruiting ground.

If you click on the Discord button in the sidebar, you will find a default chat room for The_Donald crew where it says "no racist/Nazi shit", but then there are recommendations for places to go for "free-er speech".

This makes me nauseas to think about. I get the feeling very dark places lie beyond here.

Sure, on the other side of the spectrum is the The New Black Panthers, and Communists, but I do feel like the right has scarier extremities.

If Bannon is for the Alt-Right as written in that article, then I am scared as fuck about him in the White House.

Vox Day's "philosophy", it's not really mine, that's still inchoate. And not much of a manifesto "a public declaration of policy and aims", it's more principles than policies to achieve those, except the essential ones like no "noble and principled defeat". One of the reasons we're so dangerous, sort of like Reagan, the first US president who decided to end instead of "contain" the Soviet Union. Or in some of my recent readings, why Washington was considered to be so dangerous a general by the British.

As for Trump's policies/philosophy, well, I've outlined how some of them do align, and he's certainly kryptonite to movement conservatives and the GOPe that pretends to be conservative. On the other hand, he's pro-legal immigrant, and that's very much not of the Alt Right, we think that'll lead to Enoch Powells' "Rivers of Blood" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Riv...) and we'd very much like to avoid that for obvious reasons (and note I'm not just talking about white vs. other identity group conflicts, Latin Americans, Asians, blacks, they don't exactly get along very well, do they?)

As for Trump's younger supporters, well, they're young, you need certain conditions, like "being mugged by reality" or just being old enough to collect enough data on all this, to come to these sorts of conclusions. I think having a family also helps, if you're responsible, you start thinking a lot more of what's down the road, and realize there's a whole bunch of cans which will eventually not be amenable to being kicked down it any further.

I read the article.

Most people acknowledge the benefits of multiculturalism and enjoy it. Art, music, food, festivals, etc. People enjoy relationships with immigrants because they bring a different perspective. NYC is the best case of this. A true melting pot.

Economies need immigrants for GDP growth.

Its a win-win.

Integration is key though. And because we enjoy the benefits, it is our responsibility.

Controlled immigration is a core part of every country although maybe not so much in Europe at the moment.

We live in a democracy, and everyone gets to vote for what makes them happy.

If people don't enjoy immigrants's culture then that's fine, but they have to respect (via democracy) that most people do.

The article uses a single anecdote of a pensioner who is robbed of her lively-hood by immigrants.

But are the circumstances of this kind of situation exclusively caused by immigrants? Or could the same thing occur with a recession? Or with gentrification?

When you look at one example, it certainly seems bad. But the generalised situation of "feeling like an alien in the town you live in", is not exclusively caused by immigrants. If this is a problem, we should address this problem universally. Anti-immigration is a hammer looking for nails.

I read the article.

It wasn't an article, it was a political speech, per the title and the single introductory paragraph that wasn't his words, and therefore subject to constraints that make some of your complaints irrelevant, like the single anecdote.

Integration is key though.

You mean like the famed US "melting pot"? That concept is stone cold dead, your "integration" is most assuredly not happening.

Yes I know it was a speech.

There is always a clash amongst cultures. But the alt-right's thesis is that it is related to immigrants.

Instead of making a case against immigrants by taking one example after the next of integration problems, you need to generalise your claims to ensure that they are consistent. Without requiring consistency of argument, you can basically claim anything you like.

There is always a clash amongst cultures. But the alt-right's thesis is that it is related to immigrants.

Is that it includes immigrants; we certainly don't exclude the other obvious clashes (Syria is the current awful example), but it's the immigrants in the US and Europe that are among the most important right now.

As for your latter point, I'm only here to explain what I've gathered about what the Alt Right is about, not necessarily to explain it beyond that, and while I don't claim its views immigration are inconsistent, a high level of consistency is certainly a bit much to ask this early in the formation of its philosophy, that's very much a work in progress.

Except that many generations of immigrants have successfully integrated. Besides European immigrants, Asian immigrants on the West Coast have integrated amazingly well. Latinos have also integrated nicely, although it's harder to tell because we have so many fresh immigrants.

Cultural integration is a multigenerational process, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

Agree.

I think the issue is that people have different perspectives on integration.

Some people see it, others don't.

Except that many generations of immigrants have successfully integrated.

Echoing masondixon's reply, we on the Alt Right disagree, starting possibly as far back as the Irish immigrants who played a variety of significant roles in the Civil War, e.g. the NYC draft riots. For a stark example of that quite a bit later, in the 20th Century, see the Curley effect: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+curley+effect It's anything but integration, or good for the Republic, society at large, etc. especially as its paradigm of identity politics was followed by other groups.

I think a lot of the Left's freak out over the election of Trump as well as the rise of the Alt Right is that, having first opened the bottle of identity politics and used it to great effect, they're genuinely and legitimately frightened that the genie they've unleashed is not under their control, and that "whites" are starting to enter the game.

Especially since, per Vox Day, identity trumps culture, which the Left has captured, which trumps politics, where the Left has been in fact winning (forget the labels and much of the rhetoric, look at actions) due to the establishment right/GOPe accepting its definitions of reality, rules of the game, and all that.

Trump very noticeably does not accept the Left's rules on how the game of politics are to be played, as we're seeing in now ludicrous examples like that family steak dinner.

But where are those Irish who lived under Curley now? Have they not integrated?

In America, manifestations of the Curley Effect are far more likely to come from class warfare or political ideology (such as abortion, LBGTQ rights, etc) than from ethnic diversity.

I agree that white use of identity politics does concern the Left... because identity politics developed to promote minorities and underrepresented communities. That whites feel the need to act like a minority group is disturbing considering the economic and political power that we obviously weld.

Identity politics, by its very nature, promotes a "my group first" mentality. The Left justifies its use by underrepresented minorities as a way to promote their interests and improve their quality of life. It's why blacks in the 1960 were demanding the right to vote, rather than protesting for or against the Vietnam War. The idea is that this will eventually lead to a more level economic and political playing field. However, if even the most privileged demographic groups engage in identity politics, then economic and political inequality will likely either be maintained or be exacerbated through tyranny of the majority.

> That whites feel the need to act like a minority group is disturbing considering the economic and political power that we obviously weld.

I don't see it being about whites though. I think its everyone except-the-activist-element-of-the-minority-group. People think Trump's victory is a victory for whites, but then cannot understand why some blacks, latinos, muslims, women, gays would vote for him.

> However, if even the most privileged demographic groups engage in identity politics, then economic and political inequality will likely either be maintained or be exacerbated through tyranny of the majority.

The minority always needs the support of the people wielding the power to make changes. The prominence of these movements comes from the whites joining their cause and campaigning for them. So it is in these movements best interests for the privileged demographic to engage in identity politics....or so you would think.

But what is happening now is that the privileged are peer pressured to go along with everything, but are told not to engage or criticise.

Naively, you would think that this social justice machine that has been created is a positive force.

But the backlash from the election of Trump shows that it is moving to fast and is actually counter-productive to the objectives of these movements.

But where are those Irish who lived under Curley now? Have they not integrated?

Well, apparently they voted for Trump, so maybe?

It's why blacks in the 1960 were demanding the right to vote, rather than protesting for or against the Vietnam War.

I have an (even :-) older friend who grew up in the D.C. area, and was an eyewitness to an huge protest that I think was at the Mall, at which MLK denounced the Vietnam War, you don't have to take Wikipedia's word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#Opposit...

That's one of the problems with identity politics, it's part of the Left's problem with having no limiting principles, i.e. X is never enough.

Anyway, we disagree about our (white) degree of "privilege", and that's not counting the Left's crowing about how soon we'll become a true minority (see also Bertolt Brecht), some even go so far as to say we live under a Minority Occupation Government, making a play on the white supremacists ZOG. As I commented in another HN topic, today the career of scientist would be closed to me.

As this election demonstrated, and as the Left's freak out way beyond any in my lifetime over a Presidential election confirms (I wonder if you'd have to go back to Lincoln), here's no "if" here, as this article I just stumbled upon and am about to read puts it, "This Election Marks The End Of America’s Racial Détente" (http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/14/election-marks-end-ameri...).

(ADDED: And, yeah, the idea there ever was any more of a racial détente than there was between the US and USSR is bogus, as anyone who's been around for a few decades with their eyes open can attest, it didn't survive the '80s.

And the author is dead wrong about how this is going to proceed, now that the Left has broken faith and demonstrated they can't be trusted. Like the Evil Empire, another transition from a détente is to fight to victory by one side, in this case, all it took was one President who was determined to end, rather than "contain", the USSR.)

If you're on the Left, if you're an Official Minority, if your livelihood depend on the NFL, etc. etc. etc. it sucks to be you, but perhaps you shouldn't have opened that genie's bottle. Except, of course, that conflicts with the no limiting principle issue, the Left is congenitally unable to resist the temptation.

Wow, those draft riots are interesting, look at this: "The mob was turned back at the Times office by staff manning Gatling guns, including Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond"

:-O

There isn't really alt-right not at least in the sense its portrait. People who lean right and don't agree with old republican base seem to be portrait as such.

It's just word thinking.

I think the tool you need is "skepticism". Teach people to not rush to ascribe labels to everything they don't like, and to stop ignoring anything that has been labeled as X-ist by their bubble. Teach people to not think with slogans and hashtags or listen to celebrities.

Well, that may work but you also need to have intellectual resources to be able to process all the information and see something for what it really is. Also, people serving news are upping the game by using the latest in psychology research to influence us. We need _somebody_ on our side.

Hmm, i think its a very difficult task. I think perhaps a useful thing would be to intentionally break the bubbles. Something like an inverse-recommendation engine. E.g. instead of "people who read article X also read Y", you say "people who read X did not read Z". Or if you had access to people's facebook likes (does facebook provide an API?) you could find the most anti-correlated users and recommend each other's liked stuff etc.

Isn't what I mentioned sort of similar? It is difficult for sure which is why I am asking for help.

I think people in general avoid the other side, and they don't have enough time for that. Thats why i suggest a mix up of sides. That way you read each story once, but as a whole you get exposed to both contexts.

Interesting. I'll keep this in mind.

As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding"

For a whole bunch of people, letting letting your peers know you hold right of center beliefs is career ending.

Those intellectual resources, well, are we rational beings, or rationalizing beings? Long experience suggests to me the bulk of people are the latter, and higher intelligence often just means being better at those rationalizations.

Also, people serving news are upping the game by using the latest in psychology research to influence us.

You're referring to that field of "science" that's going through a grave confirmation crisis right now? You might say the latest research in the field is that their body of research is suspect....

You turn on the TV. It tells you something. You turn on the radio. It tells you something. You turn on the internet. It tells you something. Should you be skeptical of it when all your sources of information agree that this is a real fact?

What if the fact is "there will be an eclipse next week"? What if the fact is "Hillary killed Vince Foster"?

The difference between the two facts above is that many more media outlets will report about the second one; there's lots more confirmation available for that one.

In some ways, it's a matter of education - people need to be taught to think, and to think through other peoples' positions. "Sapere aude!", Kant told his listeners, "Dare to use your mind!" We need more of that, on both sides of the political spectrum.

The stated problem resembles Snopes, but the key feature is building trust.

> I think it is rare to see some news that is not biased one way or another

I would posit that part of the problem is the implicit assumption that biased != factual. This assumption is true on both sides of the political spectrum, but it takes on a different character for those on the right.

I understand the sentiment that prompted you to post this, I'm just not sure what you propose is any kind of a solution. If anything I believe it may make things worse by affirming the bias != factual assumption.

I would also add that the "bias argument" is trotted out so much that it appears to be turning into a cliche in its own right. For instance, I may link to a cogent, factual article published by Politifact only to have it quickly dismissed as a "biased" source by those too lazy to consider its content.

That's an interesting way to look at things. That's what makes HN comments worth reading. What if we show distribution data about bias [as in positive/negative attitude towards a thing or a person] along with article? It's not like I have a solution but I see that there is a need.

> but it takes on a different character for those on the right.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? Because in my experience, the right has no monopoly on disregarding out of hand anything written by the other side...

Nonetheless, I agree with you that biased news is not bad per se. In fact, in a healthy democracy, one would expect news to be biased - after all, the media are among the most important channels of national discussion. The problems come when bias exceeds fairness and truthfulness.

This is a pretty good website and they also have a proprietary algorithm to determine the political spectrum of the source: http://www.allsides.com/

NYTimes is ranked moderately liberal while Fox News is ranked right (http://www.allsides.com/bias/bias-ratings)

Thanks! It seems interesting. The problem I see is that - it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people. Also, journals shouldn't be the only source. Every side needs to be heard and someone's voice may come from their own blog. I am not sure how it would work but we should at least give it a try.

I'm curious how you think this would work.

First of all, I'm interested in what you think a news publication free of bias would look like. Would it be a straight recitation of factual occurrences? That would be useless, right? How would you decide which story gets a big headline? Which detail gets included?

Second, the USA Right in general has completely broken with the idea that there is any such thing as "fact" that matters. Evidence, etc. is irrelevant. Look at the Right's views on climate change, etc. I'm sure there are people on Hacker News etc. who will be like "now you're just being a Bias Liberal!" if I don't say "the Left has its problems too" but the Left's problems, such as they are, are the traditional problems of political parties: maybe the Left's policy prescriptions won't work, maybe their need to maintain a coalition means they aren't able to address Problem P, etc.

The Right in the USA is unique in having decided that there is no evidentiary standard high enough when Rightist positions conflict with reality. So removing bias from news sources and ensuring everything is quite factual won't affect the ~40% or so of the USA who frankly couldn't give a flying fuck about reality.

> when Rightist positions conflict with reality

This election proved liberal bias in the mainstream media. They did not see this election result coming, and they admit it. This is not just the polls, it is the articles, the choice of front-page stories, when to release feature stories, what headlines to use, etc. They know that all their friends are liberal. All their staff is liberal. The NYT Editorial Board is all liberal, and have pretty much always endorsed a liberal candidate.

This new thing of "fact-checking" is terrible. Fact-checkers rely on making assumptions. There is a ton of judgement calls made in evaluating something. They are just another source of journalism. They are not an arbiter on truth.

They change between the literal meaning and the metaphorical meaning depending on what suits their agenda.

If they stuck to the exact words and dictionary definitions for all, then this would be consistent, and would be better.

But then they also get to choose which "facts" to evaluate. "Trump has lied X more times than Hillary according to fact checkers" was a very common retort from Dems - but is utterly meaningless.

I am not interested in unbiased news sources. I am interested in showing alternately biased news source so that you can develop your own opinion. Even showing snippets of alternate views superposed on the same article can help people a bit.

My aim is not to solve the problem in its entirety. If others cannot understand our opinion, we should at least try to understand theirs. The current situation is horrible in terms of people not even having a clue as to what's going on. If 10% benefit from this, that means there are 10% of people who at least know both/many sides.

Then you have the problem of giving equal weight to inequal ideas just because they happen to be in opposition. You see this a lot on debate shows where they have a climate scientist and a climate change denier, giving the appearance of debate within the scientific community (e.g.) when there is very little.

> it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people.

> I am not interested in unbiased news sources.

So, which is it? I think the focus on bias vs unbiased news sources is a distraction. ALL news is biased. That is something that will never change.

> If others cannot understand our opinion

What if the issue here is that others understand your opinion perfectly, but still disagree with it? This whole conversation is starting to sound a lot like you want a tool that will magically make people agree with you.

Good catch regarding the biased/unbiased. Parent to that post pointed out that there is a news source that tries to show unbiased news. I was implying that we need to take such news sources to people, rather than expecting them to get to that on their own. As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea is not to show unbiased news but rather show other side of the news (in the bias spectrum). I am not entirely clear on what makes the most sense, which is why I posted it here.

I don't have any claims on people not agreeing with me. I have claims on me not understanding what's going on. I think if such a tool as I proposed existed, I would be happy to use it.

The best "tool" available is the No Agenda Podcast.

Hosts Adam and John present national and global issues as portrayed by mass media, and systematically DECONSTRUCT the stories. They not only highlight biases, but explore propagandistic elements and discuss how the media intentionally affects the consumers.

Most importantly, they work to identify the MOTIVATIONS for medias' biases in the first place, and demonstrate for their listeners how to be much more critical, skeptical, and analytical in the way they consume the news.

Listen to a few episodes and you might rethink the need for building a tool at all.

In all aspects, they would be brilliant, but what about spectrum of content coverage. What about readership?

But this dissemination of information by identifying biases of the entities involved is a tactic that can be used by anyone. Objective thinking belongs to everyone, doesn't it?

Hey this is an awesome idea!

Each side could vote for articles they think are biased or not biased.

Then you are shown the ones where there is the strongest disagreement between each side.

Another idea is to allow each sentence or paragraph to be evaluated on how biased it is. So someone could read through hovering over sentences and maybe pressing a keyboard shortcut to indicate whether they think this sentence is biased.

The goal is not to evaluate bias, but to find areas of contention and allow the debate/comments to hone in on a particular phrase/paragraph or something.

I think it's a little disingenuous to claim "~40% or so of the USA [...] frankly couldn't give a flying fuck about reality." Is it possible you're simply dismissing valid viewpoints by claiming this?

> the USA Right in general has completely broken with the idea that there is any such thing as "fact" that matters

This viewpoint is being thrown around lately, and it's bugging me but I still can't quite explain why. The crowning of this theory was Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year being "post-truth".

I mean, is this pair of articles not an example of "post-truth"?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

(Bonus: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/upshot/donald-trump-modera...)

It just feels to me like a situation where the same entities who have been conjecturing wildly on thin grounds for years are now shocked that the masses can conjecture wildly too.

This. A thousand times this.

Bias is an inherent part of language, and we cannot eliminate it, because bias is inherent in both what is said and what isn't said.

Even beyond a simple textual level, you have to arrange content somehow, and that in and of itself is subject to bias. What do you put linked to direct from the home page? Do you entirely forego headlines? If so, what do your links on your home page say? All of that is influential in how someone perceives what you've written.

If we take Bannon's appointment to Trump's administration (and I'll preface this by saying I'm not American, and there's a limit to how much attention I pay), we can easily write headlines like:

To start with, some real ones:

* 2 Trump Picks: an Insider and a Firebrand (NYT, 14 Nov) — the former is either a positive or negative depending on your political leanings, the latter I don't know whether it's connotatively good or bad in en-us

* Trump Draws Criticism for Far-Right Pick (NYT, 14 Nov) — entirely factually accurate (so… not bias?) but omits any negativity in mentioning as to why he's drawing criticism (so… bias?)

* Trump makes controversial pick for senior aide (AP, 14 Nov) — ditto

* Trump Taps Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist (NPR, 14 Nov) — entirely factually accurate (so… not bias?)

Some hypothetical ones:

* Trump names nationalist as senior aide — I think there's consensus across the board that that would be accurate, but whether it's positive or negative depends on the reader, so is arguably bias

* Trump picks fringe right winger as Chief Strategist — disassociates him with most of the right wing, mostly negative connotation, obviously bias

* Trump Choses Racist — this is obviously an extreme example, but it's worth looking at: is it impartial? if not, it's obviously bias. do we have direct evidence that Bannon is racist (v. being on the board of a newspaper publishing such content)? if not, it's likely not entirely factual.

Obviously, we can debate how, and in what way, each of those is bias, but they all lead the reader to view Bannon in a specific way before the article is ever read (except, perhaps, the NPR one).

> 2 Trump Picks: an Insider and a Firebrand (NYT, 14 Nov)

The headline uses the word "Insider" as part of the narrative that Trump is breaking his promise in terms of "draining the swamp," "the system is rigged," etc. The reality is that few expected him to choose only non-politicians in his cabinet and he didn't say he wouldn't have any, but the media has portrayed this as some huge turn of events.

It's biased because it spins a narrative that doesn't actually exist.

> Trump Draws Criticism for Far-Right Pick (NYT, 14 Nov)

How often do you see the New York Times brand anything as "Far-Left"? It may be fair to call a pick "Far-Right," but if you have to be left of Bernie Sanders to be "Far-Left," it's not really fair.

> Trump makes controversial pick for senior aide (AP, 14 Nov)

This is reasonable. He is controversial.

> Trump Taps Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff, Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist (NPR, 14 Nov)

This one is just facts, too.

> Trump names nationalist as senior aide

Why is the label necessary? If he had picked Bernie Sanders, would "Trump names socialist as senior aide" be unbiased?

"Bias is an inherent part of language"

It's stronger than this. Bias is an inherent part of human psychology.

When you say its hard to pull people away, I think its because they have their belief/bias tuned to that source, not only toward the facts in the article. Then you are dealing with a conflicting thought that goes against the cumulative statements that have been asserted by that source and agreed/verified by the listener. Thus further strengthening the belief/bias of the listener to that source.

I also don't have the skills for building such a thing. But if I could help with such a project through testing/QA, or contributing to a website, or gathering resources - whatever, really - I would, and I would use it. I've been thinking a lot about confirmation bias and echo chambers lately, too, and the truth is I don't know exactly where to look for opposing viewpoints all the time, and it's hard to gather the courage to just dive in when I know a good amount of it will make me feel ill.

Maybe just starting with a collection of opposing resources? There could be a call to action to ask people to submit articles or sources for various "stances" on different topics, and a list divided by topics and view points, or links to the few sane and awesome discussions you can occasionally find where people who think differently actually talk to each other about their differences like rational human beings. That might be an approachable place to start, anyway.

I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

Those are interesting ideas. We need to do something at scale and something algorithmic so that we don't end up in "chicken and egg" problem. I'll create a github project and share it with folks who are interested so that we can discuss more and come up with a concrete idea.

One component of this problem that is rarely mentioned is bias-by-omission. Journalists commit this sin frequently and vigorously. With enough elbow grease, you could make some progress towards detecting it.

It is certainly an interesting idea, and I don't want to discourage you, but how would you reach the people who would benefit from it the most? If you are aware of a filter bubble, you can easily seek out alternative information...

Good point. If it works, maybe we can convince browser developers to include this as default similar to how security is done. We are putting more effort to secure our computers than securing our minds. Even if I were aware of being in a filter bubble, it takes time and effort to get out of that. We need to make it easy.

I agree with the comment below about this being a technological solution to a human problem. That said, I'm interested in looking into the NLP/data side of things, and I look forward to how this idea would supplement existing news sources. Keep me posted on the status of this project! :)

I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer - drop me an email at my id @ gmail if you want to join the discussions

I saw two big issues on both right wing and left wing political blogs and news sources over the election: assumption of bad faith (and in the worst case intentionally taking the least favorable interpretation of some news item) and lack of fact checking. Untruths abound.

It happened on both sides, people were routinely taking everything Trump was saying and turning into a joke or making it out worse than it was (some things were very bad and deserved the attention, but lots of things weren't bad but were painted with that same brush). Until people are willing to admit that whatever the result will be of this kind of project will not address the root of the problem.

I think the idea is promising but I'm pessimistic that those who need it most would opt-in.

It sounds like a valuable project: good luck.

Good luck indeed.

But it sounds like a technical solution to a human problem.

I reckon there are two camps - people who are skeptical, analytical and self-moderate the news that they receive, and people who love living inside their bubble, and positively don't want to hear contrasting worldviews.

Not sure why the latter would ever want to install a browser extension that challenged their views.

Facebook on the other hand - if they took the filter problem more seriously - that could make a real difference.

Thanks. It is clear that most organizations don't want to invest effort in doing what is right. If there is some ready-to-use extension/service that is proven to help, maybe we can convince the browser developers to include it in their default installation.

That's a dangerous idea. You seem convinced that you're right and other people are wrong. So much so that you want to force this idea of right and wrong on people by installing it in their browser by default?! This smacks of soviet era re-education.

> maybe we can convince the browser developers to include it in their default installation.

Any browser that decided to do this would quickly find themselves out of business. Free will exists for a reason. Attempt to circumvent it at your own peril.

I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing. I am not talking about right and wrong. I am talking about someone's opinion and alternate opinions.

It's the "let's add it to the browser by default" part I have an issue with. If people want to be able to see alternate opinions easily, they'll install it on their own. If they don't, no amount of forcing it on them will get them to consider alternate opinions. It'll just piss them off.

Another issue is that many biases are structural, technological or driven by commercial pressures.

For instance, I would say CNN is biased toward coverage of school shootings and airplane crashes. CNN has the problem that there is not enough news to fill 24 hours so they run a heavy rotation of the same crap that is cheap to produce. Probably the best footage they show is stuff they downloaded off Youtube.

When you catch the CNN crew on a slow news Sunday they will admit that their problem is engaging an audience, both in the sense that they need to make money and also in the sense that they have some duty to inform the populace, the populace has duty to inform itself, etc. The truth is their content is boring, depressing, and awful but they have varied their formula a lot and they really believe they've found a local maximum of what people will watch.

In some sense CNN was biased towards Trump because he's interesting. I would look for news about Trump every day because it was likely he would say something crazy again and I think this was the case for a lot of other people. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all had great ratings this season.

This 1971 book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...

is about as ahead of it's time as Ted Nelson's work and is very much about what news would be like in the age of the World Wide Web and it contains a damning indictment of the very concept of "news". (i.e. not only is there not enough news to fill a 24 hour tv show, but it's arguable that there is enough news to fill a newspaper every day)

>In some sense CNN was biased towards Trump because he's interesting.

Bias with respect to how much coverage there was of the candidates, however many would say the content of that coverage was biased against him.

Besides this small point I agree. Time spent on a particular subject or topic is a subtle bias in itself which can be driven by many things (including money) and has huge effects on public perception of people and issues.

How does one expose bias in this subtle behaviour in an automated way, even with machine learning?

I think the sheer amount of press coverage that Trump got made him stand out of the pack.

Really I think a lot of the negative coverage Trump got could have been beneficial to him. For instance, if you are looking for somebody who is going to "shake up Washington", then denunciations from Republicans such as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan add to his credibility.

I think it's more probable than not that it ended up helping him, but it significantly polarized opinion of him as a candidate.

But you're leaving out one crucial detail: unlike e.g. Romney, he didn't wilt under such fire.

Denunciations only work when they convince people. White male Republicans who've internalized the supposed guilt they were born with don't even need the convincing bit....

I recently began working on a (somewhat) related NLP project looking at the shift in sentiment in Trump-focused articles published pre- and post- election. The motivation for the project is the observation that many of the left-leaning news media outlets - who consistently lambasted Trump in the lead-up to the US election - have begun to dial back their criticism post election, presumably in an attempt to (re)build bridges and ensure their continued relevance in the ensuing Trump milieu. It seems that the results of such an analysis have the potential to be a concrete and relatively simple example of the deviation from any stable media narrative, and perhaps a nice opportunity to spread this message to a slightly wider audience.

The project is nascent, but it should be straightforward to implement (I have already begun to amass articles from several major news sources). While this may or may not be relevant to your stated goal, I'd be happy to share more info if you're interested!

Hey pinto, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation. I would like to make use of your code for fetching articles from different news sources as a starting point. You are free to contribute to the project as well. Please let me know!

I am definitely interested. I will include you in the project group.

Hallo, any links? I'd be interested.

What I've wanted for a while was a curated news source that allowed me to collapse topics (e.g. only one story about the presidential race per day). The goal would be to present both "perspectives" as well as identify the core shared truths between the two.

The problem is cross-article context comparison is actually a bit harder than news article summarization and the amount of time required to pursue it made it seem a bit too much of a chore.

One extension would fall to politicians and public entities that make statements where it could validate/compare their statements to their historic actions. Beyond the "is this reporting accurate" it would go into "do we think this actor is being truthful based on historic behavior"

Edit: The other nice thing about this is that I could hear about the things that aren't the recent election cycle or terrorist attack. It's like sensationalist news signals were saturated which raised the noise floor drowning out all of the other news.

We have a small team of researcher on that topicm working from Berlin and Paris, come say Hi or get in touch ! :) http://cmb.huma-num.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Algodiv-Ge... A great article of O'Reilly about this topic too : https://medium.com/@timoreilly/media-in-the-age-of-algorithm...

Hey mazr, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation. I think your expertise could be of real help in building this.

I'm already working on my startup which started way before this election. News bias didnt happen and it is not a new problem. It's been there for centuries. Unfortunately, it's my startup idea and I don't want to open source it. The work is in its super early stages but if some one is interested in teaming up on this and working together, shoot me an email at anas.firdousi@gmail.com. I live in Silicon Valley so if your local it will be great but location doesn't really matter if you passionate about the idea!

Instead of making some sort of judgement call (this is biased in X manner), how about a tool along the lines of something I read about in an SF story a long time ago (sorry, don't recall the title or author). I remember the point-of-view character looking at news items on a screen and things like "connotation indices" and "hyperbole metrics" were included. Those sorts of indicators would give each reader a chance to realize to what degree bias exists and leave it to them to decide how important that was.

I was on an Assembly project that tried to do this, think it was called "Flipside". It never went anywhere, IIRC required coders didn't materialize.

Having been inspired by sama's dialogue regarding the downside of unfriending those with opposing views (on the election), I've militantly kept up on opposing Facebook friends' perspectives, giving conscious effort to see their point(s). I see the value in adding opposing news sources to my feed, but the rancor I see (on both sides) is a turn off. Haven't found reliable opposing sources that don't require that I, at least at some level, apply a sort of what I've come to refer to as 'normalizing' their points. So much emotionally charged rhetoric- I guess the 'sizzle' factor sells, but requires additional calories burnt to see through & try not to be disproportionally influenced by.

Maybe a sub-Reddit or sub-Voat -type thing could be built which includes meta-rating elements to allow for rating bias leanings. Dunno what kind of software might already exist that could do this kind of thing for cheap.

tl;dr: A failed Assembly project tried this recently It's hard to create a fair Facebook feed of opposing views A Reddit/Voat -type board with meta-elements to track bias might exist cheap

I'm thinking on the same lines as you! :)

A different or supplementary approach could be removing the bias from a news item.

Instead of trying to determine which biased side an article is skewed towards and then finding other links to what is determined to be the "alternative view". Scrubbing bias or at least highlighting it is already helpful.

For example: at work we get daily emailed briefs with major business news items summarized to ~3-5 bullet points of facts. Journalist opinions/bias and rhetoric language is mostly removed in the bullet point sentences. It's not a perfect system by any means, not even close, and I would love to see something similar offered that's improved and expanded in what it can do.

This type of bias scrubbing/summarizing is easier in business news and sports news which involve more numbers and figures reporting (+nowadays many of the full articles may also be written entirely by bots - see link below). It would be harder to expand this for longer investigative/politics news articles. But a partial imperfect solution here is better than status quo.

I would be a user of a tool that could summarize key "unbiased facts" from articles and I would be interested in helping build it too.

Link to a NYT story about algos writing/summarizing news: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-an-algor...

What if the bias was created by omitting important facts that, for example, contradict the narrative of the item.

Sports are indeed a good domain for what you're talking about, but that's because they're run by well known rules, it's a highly artificial domain, not directly including the messiness of general human affairs (except in that they're played, refereed, managed etc. by humans).

Business ... well, how many stories about Yahoo! have ignored its negative market net worth when its Alibaba stake is removed, when that was relevant? Not necessarily examples of bias, but....

Good point about omission of important facts. It's tough because facts can be absent from a news item intentionally and unintentionally. Journalists have time and size constraints - so even when striving for accuracy and objectivity, facts may just be missed and some other known facts will certainly be left out as determined not relevant enough at the time of writing. This is just the reality of reporting news.

Professional Journalism has ethics and standards - of course w/ ongoing debates in how they are practiced - and they are taken seriously by the industry as a whole. Wikipedia has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...

Ultimately, for news items where a reader wants to get a fuller picture of the story he/she is going to have to go read multiple longer articles about it. Scrubbed bullet points may offer discovery with less bias at this initial stage and from which to choose those stories to go read more about.

I don't want to get off topic, but the Yahoo example mentioned is interesting and I think worth maybe discussing so

TL;DR skip this next part if very wonky Yahoo stock news reporting is not an interest:

Where did you get your Yahoo business news?...Firstly, Yahoo's (YHOO) value is not negative ex Alibaba (BABA). "A company's shares are worth what someone is willing to pay for them" is a relevant quote here and Verizon offered ~$4.8 Billion to buy Yahoo ex Alibaba (also ex Yahoo Japan btw).

Pretty big difference between a negative value and $4.8Billion!

Second, if talking about a stub Yahoo valuation? Like using some shorthand value estimation method based on looking at: (BABA's recent stock prices)x(size of Yahoo's stake) and comparing that amount to where YHOO's market cap is trading at? Then yes you could end up at all kinds of crazy totals, including negative numbers, depending on what shorthand valuation method you chose to use...

But these types of calculations, maybe interesting and fun, are basically meaningless in the real world. The amount Yahoo will receive for its Alibaba stake at some unknown time in the future cannot be calculated accurately from BABA's stock price today. Nor can it derived from whatever $ amount Yahoo has written in its books for the value of their BABA stake (Book value <> market value). (Sum of parts also <> market value)

Yahoo can be trading at a discount (or a premium) to one's hypothetical future value calculations for all kinds of reasons: eg YHOO's potential +$10B tax liability uncertainty should they sell their BABA shares with capital gains (Yahoo still talking to IRS about this and its unclear how it will play out but it's shocking Yahoo has not been given clearer answers by the IRS yet to quite fair questions about the tax code)

Yahoo is also still facing material issues in Verizon deal not yet finalized (YHOO email breach may change terms, this is also unclear), etc.. etc..

Basically, Stock Valuation Is Not News. Though some stock trading websites look like news or are attached to legit news sites (Barron's to WSJ for example). Barron's is not news.

NYTimes DealBook discussed Yahoo stub being negative. DealBook is a blog. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/how-to-v...

An analogy for those not familiar with Yahoo's stock price valuation: This is like guessing how much money you could receive from selling your house if you tore it down and sold it for scrap wood and separately put the plot of land on the market. You also have to calculate this future value without knowing if your local council will approve the idea, or how long it will take, or what prices for scrap wood/plots of land will be, or how much tearing down your house will cost, or the % odds you secretly have been living in a house built over an old unicorn graveyard and can't sell the land at all.

One can imagine all these factors are why a number calculated for future "value" of stock may be very different than what actually is received when a sale happens. Like way off. Like a negative number vs. +$4.8Billion way off.

I had thought about something like this a couple of years ago. My idea wasn't really about tracking bias, but providing reputation for authors and news outlets. Users (via a browser plugin or some other mechanism) could declare an article or statement as biased in a certain direction. That vote would give me information about the article, the news outlet and the reader. I could then present that information back to users. In this way I could learn just how biased I am (and maybe even the areas of my bias) and the bias of authors and organizations. Perhaps you could see how an author's bias changes when they write for different sites.

However I don't think just pointing out bias will really help. People like their bubbles, and moving out of them is painful and potentially with real world consequences for them. I also think if you show a user an articles bias ahead of time, it will just be used as a filter or a way to reinforce their bubble. I thought this article was interesting.

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

Very insightful.

How do separate bias from truth?

If I said more asian people are smarter than white people I am biased and racist.

If I said more asians have black hair than white people I am not biased, I'm stating an objective fact.

The only fundamental difference between the two statements is that there are hard numbers lending support to one statement (asians having black hair) and the other statement does not. Neither statement, from a technical standpoint, can be verified definitively.

To build a machine that identifies whether or not a statement is biased one must first build a machine that identifies whether or not the underlying statement is true or false.

Building such a machine is an impossible endeavor because the means in which we identify whether or not something true or false is through data, a source which in itself can be biased.

I built a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures.com), partly to explore this problem. I think what you're describing would be challenging, but if you do work on this please feel free to contact me if you want to discuss ideas.

My approach has been to obtain collections based on recommendations, filter out low quality material (bad audio, lots of ums, etc) and categorize it so you can explore freely.

Someone has to fund free content, and the missing topics are a form of bias - I can't guarantee that there is a counter-argument to every lecture.

Great idea! I am working on pushing my Facebook colleagues to work on this as well. I think the problem will not be solved unless Facebook makes a serious effort. The issue is that like the filter bubbles that are created in the social network, the company is also in an echo chamber of its own.

So, I think for all the folks that know Facebook employees, break them out of their bubble (if they are already broken, commend them and encourage them to improve Facebook). Show them that Facebook is not so rosy colored as it claims, and that they have a responsibility to build tools that promote truth and inclusion.

I think it would gain much more credibility if this were done in the open in a transparent manner. If there is a perfect fit for open source software, this is it. If folks from facebook would like to invest time/effort that would be great!

Dude... people dont even believe in the scientific method anymore, and definitions and facts are themselves liberal bias. What is some tool gonna do to convince those who have shut down entirely??

i've been interested in something similar for quite a while, although my conception of it was more along the lines of a browser extension which would identify weasel words, unsourced statements, and alert the user about "experts" who are biased.

i'd be interested in being an editor/philsoopher for a project like this, given that someone would need to determine what counts as bias and what doesn't.

i do think that apps to improve critical thinking are direly needed...

People would believe what they want to believe about your assessment of bias just as they already believe what they want to believe in the news.

Caring about truth has to come from within.

What about a tool that allows you to find and start a chat with someone currently reading a differently biased account of the same (or similar) events? I can't count the number of times this election that I wished I could discuss a Times article with a Trump supporter; I am sure there are plenty who wish they could tell me about the contents of a Breitbart article.

I think it would be best to start with a small feature. For example, build a classification tool seeing if perspectives of both sides of an issue are interviewed and quoted. Open source it along with your dataset.

We need to build more composable machine learning based tools, and then we can use machine learning on their results to determine which serve which purposes best.

Another suggestion - a clear description of both author and publisher funding and political links which are likely to lead to bias.

You might want to monitor the progress unfolding on this list of dubious news sites. It seems relevant to your endeavor.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3...

Related to this, have you seen the Wall Street Journals red/blue feeds, straight from the Facebook API?

http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed/

Just seeing articles on the extreme side of each topic right next to each other shocked me.

Unfortunately it often appears that one person's bias is another's fodder. Dailymail.com is incredibly astute and manipulative—that's their business. Bias? Of course, and they know it. They would tell you, I suspect, that they are in the bias business.

Is there a solution? A biasometer?

Not quite the same thing but Rbutr (http://www.rbutr.com/) was features on HN a while back.

In their own words:

"rbutr tells you when the webpage you are viewing has been disputed, rebutted or contradicted elsewhere on the internet."

A while ago I wrote this about the subject. Maybe you would like to read it “The New Editors” @arisAlexis https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/the-new-editors-122eeb57880d

Why is everyone suddenly convinced we can do this now? How do you guarantee your algorithm is without bias?

We go with the assumption that everything is biased. The idea is only to surface the biases so you can make your own informed opinions.

Sorry for the offtopic, but I have to post this evergreen text:

>> There is voting, of course, but to become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.

Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

This just passes the buck to the voters guide. You still have issues of bias and misinformation. You may save a bit by being able to wait to see more information come in, but for some issues, you do want to know what's going on right now so you can act.

Did you read the post I linked in? It's says that the incoming information aka. news are irrelevant to our life and we should just ignore them. There are no real issues you have to act on. If a hurricane is coming, you will know it without reading the news.

Therefore bias and misinformation are also irrelevant to our life.

Just to have a counterpoint to this news obsessed discussion.

Yes, I did read the post you linked to. I am also responding to the quote you provided. I should think that you quoted it because you thought it was particularly relevant or representative, did you not?

Edited to add: I also found it frustrating that a post arguing against reading the news includes a "You should follow me on twitter here" link at the bottom.

Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>> I should think that you quoted it because you thought it was particularly relevant or representative, did you not?

And that's why I started it with "sorry for the offtopic". You do not always read what you want to but what you have to.

I just try to correct the bias I am concerned about. Lessons learned:

- bias is subjective

- there are people who like to stay in their own biased world

Am I relevant enough now?

Cheers!

I understood your "Sorry for the offtopic" to refer to your entire comment. I expected the quote to be relevant or representative with respect to the post you linked to.

> What if we had a tool that is delivered as a browser extension, that can show links to alternate views (think URL links) of the exact same topic that you are reading?

The Pocket Browser Extension already does that.

http://www.newstrust.net/ when it was around was pretty good. It never really got traction though.

Don't look for bias, just look for right or wrong.

Easier said then done. If this election cycle didn't showcase a post-truth condition I don't know what will.

SAAS to Facebook, etc. They can filter for low-bias news and help the zucc's PR.

I would be interested (I was pondering on the same idea), how should we proceed?

Hey huevosabio, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

Thanks! I sent you an email.

I'll keep track of all the people who respond to this thread and contact them through PM. Expect a message from me with more details.

contact me plz

Please check the comment above for more details on how to contact.

I don't know how much time I have but I would love to contribute somehow.

Hey quantumhobbit, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

harigov: very interested. you should setup a Discord channel to discuss further.

Hey blipblop, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

I believe the internet is contributing to echo chambers because of filter bubbles.

People hear what they want to hear. If they are intentionally seeking out (or actively trying to create) echo chambers, you can't really stop that.

Additionally, studies consistently show that most people are pro choice. They also consistently show that most people are anti abortion.

In other words, no one is pro abortion. No one is "for killing unborn babies." But some people frame the political policies in terms of rights of the mother to choose and some frame it in terms of rights of the unborn to live.

There is no easy answer here. Pretty much everyone thinks that abortion should be a last resort, not some kind of primary method of birth control. But there is enormous fighting about exactly where and how to draw the line on who, what, when, where and how.

So one of the problems you will find is that when you try to get "both sides" of any argument (abortion is merely one example here):

A) Either they are talking about very different foundational ideas such that it is kind of disingenuous to frame them as "opposing arguments" or

B) You have a set of people with such narrow views that they can only conceive of two possible options here and the real answer is to be looking for "a third way."

I think a better answer is to write about a broader point of view that helps promote a non-binary conversation and thought process and that helps promote that "third way" that has some hope of addressing real concerns for "both sides."

It's extremely problematic to try to divide more than 300 million people into two camps and pretend that the millions of individuals making up each "camp" all uniformly agree with each other. Yes, people choose sides in order to try to exercise power. But that doesn't mean the camps really authentically represent the full views and sets of positions of any of their members, much less all (of their members).

I think your desire to create this is rooted in good intentions, but I suspect that something like this will just help entrench the "war" by further promoting the idea that there are, in fact, two camps and only two camps and every American needs to choose one. I realize that is not what you desire to do, but that may well be the result.

I find that trying to have meaningful and nuanced discussion with almost anyone at all (other than my sons) is incredibly hard because most people want to peg me as either "for" what they are for or "against" them. This leaves no room for positing a third way at all, much less a potential fourth, fifth or Nth way.

I choose to blog as my small pebble of contribution towards trying to combat the either/or thinking and trying to posit new mental models for old problems.

If you do start something, I would be happy to give feedback or have some kind of limited (probably short term/one time) role in its development. I am not looking for an on-going time commitment. Furthermore, although I support your position that it "will be" open source, I see zero reason why this must be non-profit. I think this is just another example of common thought patterns that somehow being non-profit means it will be done for the right reasons, in the right way, etc and this is absolutely not in any way guaranteed.

How do you actually do this without being biased yourself? One person's reality is another person's bias.

Similar to how science works. Build it with the fact that you have bias in mind, and keep your mind open to criticism, keep testing the system as best you can to test whether it's susceptible to any kind of bias you can think of, and remember it's always going to be an open question. Healthy skepticism. Keeping the work in the open is pretty important, too.

The supposed filter bubble theory is that I (and others) didn't vote for HRC because we are not exposed to the liberal point of view?

FALSE. LAUGHABLY FALSE. FALSE FALSE FALSE.

Let's make up a term called liberal privilege, the privilege to have your views reflected on all major US channels (CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, BBC, NYT, WaPo... etc.) ALL OF THE TIME.

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