Hacker News Reader

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event.

Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?

Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...

Creepy

> "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid?

And I actually appreciate you all being here : )

But please distinguish between

- "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and

- secretly pushing an agenda.

And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb:

in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.

> A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.

Certainly such a tool might be useful to someone analyzing disinformation campaigns, but it only goes so far.

If the intent with such plugins and other forms of human/AI moderation is merely identify the source of what looks like disinformation, you're going to disappointed to hear that those who are influenced by disinformation don't care what "the source" is. It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.

Dealing with this problem with "plugins", at best, is entering an infinite game of wack-a-mole. It's fundamentally not a technological problem.

This kind of stuff has always existed, and yes, now it's hopped-up on internet speed and naive countermeasures now need AI to keep up. But it's still qualitatively the same thing as it was in the 1930's. It requires a long game to battle it involving leadership, an educated populace and a government that isn't grossly polarized and dysfunctional.

Sadly, I don't think we're up to the challenge at least in the USA.

Agreed about the whack-a-mole. Would be hard. Only a few people have the ability to lead projects that require so much mole whacking. I'm thinking of gorhill and ublock origin, for example.

> It's why meatheads on Fox News can blabber non-stop garbage and get the highest news media ratings in history.

Interesting how you had to throw a right wing site in there with your underhanded attack. So you think the left is immune to this? Can you actually get through a CNN article without wanting to vomit?

With that one statement you lost me entirely.

To be honest, I do feel that CNN and MSNBC have fallen off a cliff as far as quality is concerned in the last 10+ years. All cable news is pretty much a wasteland.

But there's a special place in hell reserved for Fox News.

As bad as CNN can get with its cloying reductive stories, they at least try. Fox News is end-to-end garbage. Sorry.

The site https://www.churnalism.com/ tried to do something like this before ML was accessible, but it seems to have died on the vine just a year later.

>Which is a big problem.

Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?

I think they're saying that feeling the event instead of thinking about it is a problem.

A lot of times the news is all on about something as an emergency that will do something terrible if you don't pay attention to it. There may be some seed of importance in there to lend it credibility, but a large portion of the time it's simple manipulation and I ignore it on principle for that reason.

In other words, I usually tune it out because of that and instead go look for primary sources on whatever is making the news, instead, and even when I read the articles, I care only about the sources and whether I can verify them. I simply skip all the sections that are opinion.

This 1000 times. Any news org trying to invoke an emotional response should be treated as toxic. Get what important details you can from the article and move on. I don’t want AI to tell me what’s true, I want AI to remove the author’s bias.

If people agreed on what was the right and wrong way to interpret the world we wouldn't need democracy.

>In the intelligence community

What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

The US "intelligence community" is the CIA, NSA, etc.[1] Intelligence analysis is the business of trying to extract useful info from of noisy and deceptive data. Here's an introduction to the field.[2] See especially section 4.

4-11. Analyst have found the following rules helpful in dealing with deception:

- Avoid over-reliance on a single source of information.

- Seek and heed the opinions of those closest to the reporting.

- Be suspicious of human sources or sub-sources who have not been met with personally or for whom it is unclear how or from whom they obtained the information.

- Be suspicious of information that appears to be too easy to collect and is too perfect of a picture.

- Always look for material evidence (documents, reports, imagery) rather than relying exclusively upon what someone says.

- Look for a pattern where a source’s information has seemed correct and accurate initially, but then proven to be false.

- Generate and evaluate a full set of hypotheses at the outset of a task.

- Know the limitations as well as the capabilities of collection assets, sources, and potential deceivers.

This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...

[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf

> Now this should probably be taught in schools.

It should. Under the name "media literacy".

So anything anonymously sourced from US govt. Officials should be considered "too easy to collect... etc "...seemed correct and accurate initially, then proven to be false." "Material evidence..."

Yeah if we did this the CIA would have a much harder time spreading bullshit. But yeah they'll still try with the "OMG you love Putin" To those in the media who actually exercise these recommendations. Maybe it's not even a totally baseless and disgusting slur every single time but it has happened so often now it's safe to assume anyone any good has been accused of being a Putin stooge at least once. Hilary accusing Bernie is my personal favourite. You may have others. Greenwald, Mate, Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Assange, Snowden. Zero evidence for any of it, sure, but it's still possible one or more of them is. No reason at all not to treat that with total contempt given that each has presented evidence opposing in the interests of national security state propaganda and there's none at all for these Putin stooge smears.

Feel free to keep loathing Putin, I do, I just don't see him under the bed and switch my brain off the instant he's invoked. If you haven't seen that the CIA, NSA have real issues of criminality that is in need of serious reform, and many inside will eagerly break the law to avoid it consider what would get you to change your mind on that?

The corruption inside is a far, far greater threat to the USA than Putin (or Osama bin L. or Saddam or.. the next objectively evil bogeyman) could be in their wildest fantasies. Failure to reform is incredibly dangerous and weakens defenses massively.

>> This kind of analysis used to be needed only by intelligence specialists. Now this should probably be taught in schools.

Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

One wonders how propaganda would react if this were to happen. Right now it is mostly non-physical information.

But when you have a critical mass of people & environment which is not conducive to standard propaganda, perhaps it will resort to creating a physical reality as a base to anchor upon. Not that this hasn't happened earlier, but it will become pervasive.

Would we be able to believe what we see then ?

> Not just schools, this should be taught to everybody.

Doesn’t everybody, at least in the US, go to school. By law?

I wasnt't familiar with the term, thank you!

If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.

> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources

Where on earth do you get this from?

In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.

Complete and utter lap dogs.

>Where on earth do you get this from?

From local cops to the CIA comparing the same information from multiple sources is SOP for everyone who deals with unreliable information.

You reminded me of this piece by Glenn Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.

> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.

> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.

> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking

Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...

This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.

The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims.

So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.

There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".

I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so.

I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.

I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.

That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.

Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?

It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.

On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.

From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."

I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.

> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.

That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.

> fake consensus that can become very misleading

It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.

I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.

Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.

You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.

Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.

Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.

It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....

Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.

Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.

That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.

Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.

Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.

Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life.

I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.

See also: the stereotype that physicists think they know everything because they know physics

>Is HN any better?

On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.

A to the men

Woah woah woah who says the earth isn’t flat?

> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it

I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.

Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.

Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war.

The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.

As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.

You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.

The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.

But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.

Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.

The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab.

And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.

> And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency.

except his CDC head claimed after the new administration took over that Trump's administration did have additional classified evidence that made it more likely. It is extremely likely that the intelligence community knew of the chinese researchers who had gone to the hospital (and maybe more) way before it was released to the public. By the time these facts are made public, they have been researched and assigned a high level of confidence.

You're not actually refuting any argument the parent made.

First, pointing out that other pandemics have happened absent lab accidents doesn't negate all the evidence pointing in that direction this time. As far as evidence and probability goes (with regard to the potential evolutionary paths the virus would have had to have taken in the wild), the lab leak hypothesis is very strong. The simplest answer is that it leaked from the lab a few miles away studying this exact family of viruses.

Second, the parent wasn't saying anything about whether or not Trump was twisting the truth or being dramatic. His whole point is that the discussion was able to be hijacked by the simple act of a divisive figure talking about it. It's fine if people dismiss Trump (the smart thing to do honestly), but allowing that to bias you in the opposite direction without any evidence is making the exact same mistake he did.

Its only recently that research labs could engineer these viruses. Only recently have you been able to engineer mice with human ACE2 receptors, and breed viruses in them. History is not what you base your conclusions on in 2020’s biochemistry.

It has been strongly asserted by the scientific community that Covid-19 bears no hallmarks of an engineered virus. In fact, no one in this thread is even suggested it was engineered. That's the whole point of the article. The "accidental leak" theory is being conflated with "engineered weapon theory". The only options on the table are "animal -> human" or "animal -> lab -> human". Both are plausible and we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.

Engineering a virus, in the sense that you're talking about, is not what was meant. Allowing the virus to naturally mutate in an animal host, over thousands of generations, will get you to the same endpoint. This is gain of function research, the whole point is to find out if the virus could naturally evolve some feature you are interested in. Engineering it to do so would defeat the point.

This is not exactly accurate. But it’s easier to get to the full story if people accept the lab leak of an unmodified virus as a possibility. However, the “assertions” are misleading and have been debunked. The virus does appear to be chimeric. There is a missing link in both hypotheses, but the lab leak hypotheses offers a few possible explanations. The zoonotic hypothesis still doesn’t have an explanation for that part.

The fact that you aren't aware of the 1970s flu in the Soviet Union which was caused by a lab leak is telling. Again confident absolute statements from someone who doesn't really understand the topic they are commenting on.

There have been numerous lab leaks that are recorded in history and they happen every year.

After SARS it only took 4 months to identify the intermediate host which was a civet. After MERS, it took nine months to identify a camel as an intermediate host.

18 months later with vastly more scientific resources at their disposal and also technology that didn't exist for the other two like smartphones, no intermediate mammal host has been found yet.

The Occam's razor suggestion for this is the reason for this is the only intermediate mammal host that exists is a humanized mouse with human ACE2 receptors lining its lungs.

You know, the humanized mice that were specifically mentioned as being present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by multiple sources including grants applied for and received directly stating this.

https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

This entire comment is the personification of a person who has taken their political identity and with no self-awareness applied it to science. You have no basis for your confidence other than the hatred of your political enemies.

I watched brainwashed GOP folks cling to the WMD in Iraq myth for years after it was proven false. You might not be do different from them.

How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.

There is no source for these claims. Just like with Trump, people get angry and upset with what they think he said based on the impression from the media, not what was actually said. Just look at the 'fine people on both sides' comment that was taken ridiculously out of context.

This same thing happened to Sarah Palin with the 'I can see Russia from my house' phrase, which she never said. It was part of a comedy sketch, yet it was used to attack her. It is absolutely ridiculous. No one is interested anymore in what is said, just what they think someone 'like that' would say.

Here is Sarah Palin actually making that claim on CBS. Not in those hilarious words but really and in fact. It's like 2 minutes long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg

The fine people on both sides was truly as horrific as it was made out to be. They had a torchlight nazi parade where they chanted jews will not replace us and they murdered people.

Here is a pic of people flying as they were hit by a car.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/2017_Charlott...

On February 20th 2020 Tom Cotton speculated that it was possible that China deliberately released the virus or that it could be a bioweapon that had been released.

https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

This isn't a hypothesis a US senator should throw out on twitter because the right wing completely ignored the speculative nature or any qualifications and completely ran with Tom says they Chinese attacked us.

The grandparent didn't say nothing bad happened at the protest, they said that Trump's comments were taken out of context, which is completely true. Read the thing in context (here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...) and it's clear that he's not defending white supremacists or anything of that sort.

The context was reported at the time and it still means exactly what people think it means. Here's his attempt to clarify

"I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. "

Trump knows full well that this is a lie. No one was there because Lee was so great of a general and they love military tactics. They were there because he fought to protect slavery. There was absolutely no "both sides" about anything. In context he's still saying protestors were as much to blame as the counter protest and the counter protest had as much validity to their complaint as the protestors. These is exactly what everyone took his meaning and all the context and clarification make it very clear that he meant murdering racists are the same as peaceful protestors against violence.

I'm sorry but you personify the issue stated in this article.

The guys holding tiki torches were definitely white supremacists.

Most protesters who are in favor of preserving Confederate monuments aren't doing so because of slavery. I don't agree with them but I grew up around them in Virginia and it's much more complicated than "derp they love slavery derp".

The confidence you possess in your ability to read people's minds is likely unfounded since I've never met any human being who can successfully read others minds.

I hate to ad hominem but this statement is so disgustingly naïve it's difficult to fathom. The Confederacy existed to preserve slavery. It is theoretically possible for someone just be really into that 3.5 year span of history so, so much that they can't bear the thought of fewer statues or else they'll forget about it but I think that is far-fetched. I also don't believe they literally want to reinstitute slavery in 2021, but they are absolutely fighting to lionize people who fought to protect it. It is 100% equivalent to defending a statue of a Nazi general. And it is 100% racist whether they consciously accept it or not. There is absolutely no plausible explanation. And none of the explanations put forward by apologists are remotely convincing. The same people who think taking down statues is "erasing our history" are passing emergency laws to ban the 1619 Project from being taught.

https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866

He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.

I guess I'm not seeing the problem with those tweets?

I mean, he lists four options, and identifies natural release as the most likely and intentional release as very unlikely. And it's expressed clearly, in full sentences.

By the standards of republican politicians on twitter, that's actually pretty good.

"By the standards of republican politicians" is a low bar and also a relevant topic. Cotton was more careful with his words than a lot of his comrades but he was very tightly allied with people (like Trump himself) who were well known for spouting complete horseshit. Cotton also did himself no favors when he was one of 6 senators to vote against protection for Asian-American victims of hate crimes.