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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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