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Comment by strebler | Hacker News Reader

Let me flip this around / play devil's advocate (haha).

I remember that "election dial" showing 80% chance of Hillary on (I believe) the NYT website. Was that grounded in reality? There was an uproar about the legality of Trump's travel bans, but followed by a 7-0 supreme court victory on the subject. Was the assessment he overstepped his bounds grounded in reality? Wasn't Brian Ross suspended for creating fake news?

So, based on this study, only people with lower cognitive ability would to believe the CNN / NYT / etc assessments/articles of Trump?

Oh, wait, no, they're saying Trump supporters are the ones with cognitive ability issues.

The dialogue here has turned to: "you're fake news" vs "your supporters are dumb". Really, both sides have serious problems with bias and accuracy, and at this point they're just calling each other names.

Either way, I really do yearn for a news organization where I could trust what's being written.

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This article is about fake news generally, not Trump supporters specifically. None of the research itself seems to target any political leaning.

That said, you seem to misunderstand probability. The 18% probably of a Trump victory is greater than one in six. You are less likely to die playing a single round of Russian Roulette than for Trump to have won the election. Something can be 82% like and still not happen, and something can be 18% likely and happen. That's how probability works.

As for the USSC and the travel ban... what? I remember the USSC allowing the third revision of the ban to take effect while under appeal, but I'm drawing a blank on a unanimous victory. There were at least two justices who stated they were against even that temporary decision, as I recall it. I'm very interested in a source for "a 7-0 supreme court victory."

> I remember that "election dial" showing 80% chance of Hillary on (I believe) the NYT website. Was that grounded in reality?

Yes, it was. The implication that predictions were not grounded in reality because they didn't come to pass is false.

An 80% chance of Hillary winning is a 20% chance of Trump winning. 20% is a big number. You wouldn't play Russian roulette, even though the probability that you die is less than that.

Please stop spreading fake news. There was no 7-0 victory for the travel ban, because an actual review hasn't happened yet. Even for the latest revision there was no vote because, although 2 members said they would vote against it, a stay was lifted until they could. They announced that they would hear it (but I haven't seen a date) in Jan 19th.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/us/politics/supreme-court...

I'm actually not surprised that journalists overestimated Hillary's chance of winning. As a group, they are predominantly coastal and almost uniformly college educated. Both of those groups broke disproportionately toward Hillary.

Non-college educated Americans broke disproportionately toward Trump. It would seem given the relationship between college graduation and cognitive ability (the bottom 20% in cognitive ability rarely graduates from college) that this is reasonable support for the correlation of fake news belief with Trump support.

> Oh, wait, no, they're saying Trump supporters are the ones with cognitive ability issues

Please quote the part of the article where "they" say this, otherwise don't post this kind of nonsense. You're not flipping anything around; you're the one poisoning the well.

Flagged.

> There was an uproar about the legality of Trump's travel bans, but followed by a 7-0 supreme court victory on the subject.

Weren't there multiple versions that went through the courts?

Yeah, the comment you're replying to reeks of partisan bias and very conveniently ignores reality in favor of the type of headlines that would show up on Fox News.

I don't think they're arguing in good faith, regardless of whether they're """playing""" devil's advocate.

I think calling Trump supporters dumb is a different problem from a poll being wrong. Rather are polls wrong if they X has a high chance of happening but then x did not happen?

The polls weren't even that far off, on a national level they were basically spot on, the organizations reporting on them just threw out the data that made it look like Trump had a pretty good chance. 538 did a slightly better job but the editorial bias in the presentation of the data was distinct across most of the media.

I don't think it's the polls on their own that are the problem. I think it's the media-driven furore around them that feeds into the public's pre-existing confirmation bias ("see, the polls prove he's an idiot with no chance at the presidency!").

It seems like most people on both ends of the political spectrum create a media-fed bubble of bias, and when the outcomes disagree with that bias (as in the case of Trump) it can create pretty damaging cognitive dissonance.

Fake news was barely even mentioned until about two days after the election and the Dem spin machine whirred into action coming up with plausible sounding reasons why the loss wasn't their fault.

A Google search based on date (pre-election) will quickly disprove your claim.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Fake%20n...

Google trends closely follows the usage of the word in the media.

There were many articles about it before that. It was a constant topic of conversation in some circles.

The reason the Trends chart jumps after the election is because that's when the larger public learned about what is going on, and people were trying to figure out how it happened.

Pre-election examples from a quick search:

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/30074...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-...

http://meta.mk/en/macedonians-from-veles-open-propaganda-web...

http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/30/media/facebook-fake-news-pla...

http://fortune.com/2016/10/12/facebook-fake-news/

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/296211-facebook-steps-u...

and countless more...

There were some articles before november. Very few. There was a deluge after.

Probably for the reason I mentioned.

No, the larger public learned about it in November because that's when the Democratic party aligned media (e.g. CNN, CNBC) suddenly considered it headline news. Look at that google trends spike. Did that look natural?

They picked two stories for explaining the loss and pushed them extremely hard - this and the Russian conspiracy stuff.

Both stories share one salient characteristic - if both were reason for the election loss, neither the Democratic party nor Hillary could be blamed for it.

It is unlikely that news media that aligns with and donates money to the Democratic party are going to run stories about how Hillary was a terrible candidate who shouldn't have been allowed to run in the first place any more than Fox News might suddenly start supporting Democrats one day.

There is no reply link on your comment, so I'll reply here.

Fake news was a huge issue before the election. People I know were discussing it daily.

Of course the Democratic Party talked about it after the election. What else would be expected? Many people who were paying attention were talking about it before that as well. You should read those articles I posted.

The Democratic Party and its candidate had problems, but that doesn't diminish the role of fake news.

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