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Comment by noxToken | Hacker News Reader

> The stuff that goes round on facebook is often both hyper-partisan and low quality, because people are sharing it for group-belonging purposes not for use as facts.

This is only tangentially related.

This is why the pieces lambasting Tomi Lahran saying that views like here don't deserve a platform are, in my opinion, wrong.[0] It was the 2nd second result after searching for that interview, and I've seen it shared around the Internet.

When opposing views that aren't inciting riots, violence, etc. aren't allowed to speak, all you get in an echo chamber of things you want to hear[1]. If everyone agrees, there is no incentive for you to examine your beliefs[2].

[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trevor-noahs-interview-w...

[1]: https://t.co/6lqMSTJNuj

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/#JohStuMil...

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> inciting violence

I don't think there's actually a clear dividing line for this, especially when we consider "dog whistle politics" and things like the notorious "blood libel", Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc; there's definitely a category of material which is both false/misleading and intended to incite prejudice against a particular group - but stops short of mentioning actual violence.

I wrote a reply to this asking about the alternate category of material which is both true/accurate and also intended to incite negative feelings. That comment was flagged to death.

I guess that's the answer - it's not just "fake" news we want suppressed.

I read the post before it was removed. I don't agree with a lot of it (like declaring lists of things true and then qualifying individual items with "probably because"), but I get your point.

You have to tread very carefully. A better example would be a statement made by Trump's recent pick for National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in his book "The Field of Fight":

"I don't believe all cultures are morally equivalent"

Just that statement seems to bother many people, enough to have it included in Trevor Noah's Daily Show recently.

But why? Why is that statement such a big deal? I believe Western culture is better than, say, Saudi Arabian culture. I realize there is no objective standard to base this on, but even if it is the same nationalism/tribalism Saudi Arabians judge Western culture, so be it. If you make the argument that we can't judge other cultures, wouldn't it also be true that you can't say they're equivalent, since that is judging them?

The statement is a problem because it is so general that it is devoid of any useful meaning, but it rather works as a huge dog-whistle.

In the context of Flynn's other rhetoric, he's clearly referring to American Culture vs Islamic and other non European cultures. So why didn't he just state that directly, like you did? Why the "political correctness" around not using concrete examples of the "cultures" he is referring to? Probably because he is trying to maintain the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability of bigotry by avoiding making those references to specific cultures.

However, even if you take his statement in isolation, how do you measure the morality of something as large as a "culture" anyway? Do you take the laws of a country that represses a huge number of it's citizens, like Saudi Arabia? There are huge numbers of individuals who do not subscribe to the "morality" of the culture that the world associates them with.

Over-generalizing about cultures and denying individuals in those cultures moral agency is one step on the path to justification of terrible acts against them.

Flynn does go on in the book and explicitly state Islamic (don't recall if it mentions Islamist) culture is "evil", etc. I specifically mention a country rather than a extremist group. So he's not really hiding behind much.

> how do you measure the morality of something as large as a "culture" anyway?

Well, you can't. At least, not without being in terms of your own culture. That is, culture defines morals, in my opinion.

But I see no problem in pointing out these problems--as long as you don't go as far as pre-emptively accusing individuals or demanding they account for them. Eg., accosting Scientologists over Scientology.

> I read the post before it was removed.

You should be able to see the flagged comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13105342) if you turn on showdead in your HN settings.

It is disappointing that HN isn't able to discuss openly the ways in which true facts are (ab)used to create false beliefs.

The closest I've seen to something like that is when a country's merits or good deeds are being discussed and someone brings up past mistakes/atrocities. An example would be bringing up Unit 731 when discussing Japan giving aid to some country as a reason that Japan is evil.

As an aside, I frequently see your comments flagged to death and have used you as an example of how a community will create its own bubble. I happen to disagree with 99% of every post I have ever seen by you, but I've yet to flag a post just for being infuriating.

I get a little bit of exposure to white nationalist blogs since they are occasionally quoted by neoreactionary blogs. I don't agree with their normative conclusions at all, but their factual claims seem reasonably accurate.

There was a great article on this recently: http://hurryupharry.org/2016/11/27/who-gave-us-post-truth-co...

Some years ago, a friend sent me a shocking article. It said hundreds of British girls were being systematically gang-raped by Muslim gangs. It claimed this was being covered-up. I’ve never had time for conspiracy theories, especially when they look as hateful as those in the article....I wrote a curt reply to my friend: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t send me made-up crap from neo-Nazi websites”.

Some months later, I read the seminal exposé of the (mainly) ethnic-Pakistani grooming gang phenomenon by Andrew Norfolk in The Sunday Times.

Of all the people pushing for Facebook to suppress "fake news", I've not heard a single one that had a plausible mechanism to make sure true stories like this don't also get suppressed.

The whole Rotherham grooming business is one of those things that really ought to have had a national inquiry to establish what happened and punish the guilty and the negligent. Instead it's seemingly vanished from mainstream public discussion. Can we even name any of the victims? Or even any of the perpetrators?

It's going to be like Hillsborough or Orgreave but for the right instead of the left: a historical injustice flag to wave for decades. Ignoring it is a massive disaster for race relations.

I agree with your point that theres not really a solution anyones putting forth that prevents false positives, but I wouldn't agree that its entirely necessary.

You are never going to get a system that is 100% accurate so I feel it would be better to focus on being as accurate as possible. This would involve false positives and negatives to some degree. What degree that should be isn't apparent yet, but I don't think that 100% accuracy is realistic

The solution to imperfect binary true/false decisions is to stop making binary decisions, and instead provide a probability and confidence interval (dressed in non-mathematician-friendly UI), with several references to verifications or refutations.

I think that the costs of giving back control to the mainstream media drastically exceed the benefits of stopping some misinformation. I'd prefer the whole truth mixed with lies to a partial truth that is also mixed with lies (what we had before when the mainstream media controlled everything).

And that's an argument I can understand

>I've yet to flag a post just for being infuriating

On the contrary, these are the posts you need to examine the most carefully. A strong emotional response is sometimes a defense mechanism against cognitive dissonance. Flagging something because it made you angry is just sticking your fingers in your ears. If it's objectionable, you should be able to articulate why.

to me at least, being infuriating means it just makes me angry. Lots of things that happen to be correct or worth discussing can infuriate me. If there's a problem with it that I can articulate, I would give it a different description like misleading, wrong, or fallacious

Well, there's "true" and there's "an accurate summary of events".

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise.

For instance, the immigrant rape issue. Yes, of course many immigrants have committed sexual assaults. But are they more numerous per-capita, or more vicious? I see sources saying they're rape machines, and others saying it's all made up, but I don't see anything believable that says "Yes, and 2% more than ..."

I could sift through arrest records in my city and publish a list of Group X (let's pick an established group, like Italians) and make them look like monsters. But that's just a framing exercise.

This is exactly what the mainstream media does in the US. The relatively small number of police shootings of black men get lots of coverage. The much larger category of black criminals harming white people get very little coverage, as does the biggest category of crime (white on white violence).

Stats quoted here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420565/shameful-libera...

What makes it a less "accurate summary of events" when a non-mainstream source chooses a different small subset of crime to focus on?

As for the "rapefugee crisis" in Europe it's hard to know. Crime statistics tracking these things are usually suppressed and the authorities seem to cover up major incidents. (Even in the US, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stopped publishing it's table of interracial crime stats when Obama took office.) So all we really have are anecdotes and incident reports. Given this level of suppressed information, how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Sometimes unpleasant people are correct about facts. Sometimes their views are just as accurate as anyone else's.

> black criminals harming white people get very little coverage

That makes sense though. It's not a competition between the two groups so the amount of black-on-anything violence is irrelevant to the issue of police shooting people when it can be shown that the people being shot weren't acting violently.

Talking about the black community when discussing police shooting is like blaming the prostitutes dressing badly down the block for your sister getting raped. Not only is it victim blaming, but it misses the point that these aren't meaningful groupings. (All black people, your sister and the prostitutes, etc...)

> how can you claim that the white supremacists are less "accurate" than anyone else?

Well, I don't claim that but I think I could, because I see them grasping at straws and forwarding the same tired stories around as if they prove anything. With no effort to dig into the facts behind the case and its selection as news.

Exactly the same as the anti-racist knee-jerk I see which posts the same set of "Immigrants don't rape" refutation articles with the same lack of critical inspection.

> Given this level of suppressed information,

That is a problem. When our government lies to us it throws all semblance of civilian oversight right out the window and instantly becomes a dictatorship.

I'm making a different point. Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

I.e., why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The answer is the exact same framing exercise you (correctly) accuse white nationalist groups of engaging in. And it's also a framing exercise I find more palatable; I'm just pointing out that you can't distinguish between these based on truth.

Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people. Assume some fraction of crime prevention results in people getting shot, regardless of race. Assume further that blacks disproportionately commit crimes. Given these two assumptions, you will get disproportionate levels of blacks being shot by cops, even though no one is being racist. That directly contradicts the narrative the media is framing.

Scott Alexander has a great blog post where he dives into the empirical literature on this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

> Why discuss a few hundred innocent (and quite a few not so innocent) black people shot by cops when we can instead discuss the tens of thousands of innocent white people harmed by blacks?

Three reasons.

1) I pay officers, and they aren't doing what I pay them to do and they aren't improving the things I want improved.

2) We can discuss both. But it's pretty obvious when this presumed black violence is trotted out as an answer to police violence rather than a conversation that just happened to be going on.

3) "Black" isn't a voluntary or revokable status. You don't choose your skin-color, nor can it be revoked when you misbehave. You literally cannot control people of your color. You also can't control other gamers, other men, other women, etc. Whereas "Police" is both voluntary and revokable. They can choose not to be police officers if they're upset with the behavior of other officers, and can revoke the status of bad officers. Even if we agreed with your assertion, black people cannot fix other blacks, officers can fix other officers.

> why is police shootings of black men the topic at all?

The discussion about police violence was already ongoing, but the police mistreat blacks disproportionally so it's not a bad place to focus. Fix the big leaks before the smaller ones...

Are you having trouble getting attention for your police violence complaints that you think this discussion is blocking, because you aren't black?

> Also, the levels of black crime are directly relevant to the topic of police shootings of black people.

Actually no, blacks suffer even in non-violent areas. The black professor arrested while breaking into his own house...

Also, it's just tactically not how it works. When police apprehend anyone they're actually afraid of they stay well away, call backup, bark orders through a bullhorn, and approach only once the person is laying down on the ground with their hands visible. Anytime you see an ongoing situation with an officer less than three steps from the person that officer is not afraid. That's intimidation, not safety, they're going for.

In many videos of police thuggery and shootings we see police going out of their way to put themselves in a tactical distance where they will be "forced" to respond by any slight movement. If they were really at all scared they'd be on the other side of their car, radioing for backup.

None of your three reasons are remotely related to truth or accuracy. That's my point - the racist blog choosing to focus on blacks killing whites is not publishing fake news. They're just journalists with a different criteria for importance than you prefer.

And again - I don't disagree with your criteria (1). Remember that a few years ago, the only people talking about the issue were Radly Balko and a few of his libertarian readers (e.g. me). But that doesn't mean that every journalist who had different priorities was publishing fake news.

...the police mistreat blacks disproportionally...

This is unclear. Again, read the Scott Alexander blog post I linked to which goes into the gory details.

You asked "Why discuss [...] black people shot by cops".

The reason is because I can fix cop shootings, a little at least. I pay for them, etc. Also, the police are a voluntary grouping and as such, can be fixed. It'd be irrational to try to fix anyone else, even if I agreed that they needed it too, which I don't.

Then you ask "why is police shootings of black men the topic at all", as in versus police violence in general.

As a non-black victim of police violence myself, I heartily second the notion that it's not limited to a racial issue. But I can clearly see in the videos that the blacks involved in these issues are acting more politely than I would and getting treated far worse.

> read the Scott Alexander blog post I linked to which goes into the gory details.

Apples and oranges. I have issues with his statistics as well, such as discounting of entire sets of stats that individually fall below a percentage threshold, etc. Also, being involved one of these incidents that my city minimizes, I'm not entirely happy with a statistical dismissal even if it was correct.

> None of your three reasons are remotely related to truth or accuracy.

No, they are. I'm putting my attention to the topics I can solve, in the areas that are most-in-need of being fixed. I don't care if something worse is happening where I can't see it, I can only prioritize my actions.

At that, I'm happy to ride along with the #BLM group to get the broader issue solved - our employees shooting innocent people.

Hardly - we can fix black people committing violence against whites (or even the much larger problems of white on white and black on black violence) by directing the police to focus their attention on areas where this is a problem.

The right question to ask - assuming you believe that all lives are equally valuable - is to ask the quantitative question of what policies will save more lives. That's a question to be answered with statistics, not values. If you don't believe all lives are equally valuable, that's a difference between your values and mine.

No, they are. I'm putting my attention to the topics I can solve...

The fact that you can't solve a problem doesn't mean it's a lie or inaccurate to say that the problem exists.

And the fact that you continue to pretend it is is exactly why I'm strongly opposed to these attempts to solve "fake news". It's pretty clear that the real goal is just suppressing information that might be politically inconvenient.

It's funny that for as much as you may have seen written about 'truthiness' (false statements that "feel" true to some people), I've yet to see anything about 'falsiness' which would be the inverse. That is, true statements that "feel" false.

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