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Comment by pumpkinprog | Hacker News Reader

Read sources with different points of view and take the average. Pretty easy with the Russia-Ukraine situation, just take 2 western or Ukrainian news sources, 2 Russian and 2 relatively unrelated (China, Africa, etc.) Same with elections (2 Dems, 2 Reps, 2-3 unrelated international). Much more difficult with COVID since nearly everybody has the same point of view, and the remaining ones are marginal. IMO, in such a situation the best option to get the truth is to wait for 2-5 years after it is finished.

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If one side is serving chocolate cake, and the other shit, then what you end up with is a half-shit, half-chocolate confection. Some people apparently like that, but I personally don't.

Another way of saying this is historian John M. Barry's quote, "when you mix politics and science, you get politics," also famously cited by Peter Daszak.

I think the idea is to apply some "mental kalman filter" for all of the more or less unreliable news sources and ending up with a better approximation of what the real situation is. And at least that should be equal or better than any single source alone.

If your goal is to get a feel for all of the different spin/propaganda that are out there, then this maybe is a good strategy.

If your goal is to get an accurate picture of events, I think focusing on reputable news sources is a much better strategy.

The mean is a statistical measure which is very sensitive to outliers. Your weighting function should be more like an M-estimator.

The more extreme the source, the less weight it gets.

Also it means little to combine multiple sources of similar persuasion. Both Russia and China saying something is not worth 2x, since they are correlated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-estimator

The idea that Russian state-controlled media are useful to find the truth in the middle seems a bit far-fetched. Reputable media in most countries call this a war, Russian news says it is a special operation to rid a country that doesn't really have any claim to sovereignty of its Nazi-leader. Chinese media is pretending nothing is going on at all.

So applying your method leaves us with: a conflict (but not really a war) where Russia is not quite invading a not quite country to protect Russians and get rid of Zelenski, who is a bit of a Nazi?

There may be nuances and opinions, but the facts presented by non Russian/Chinese media seem rather uncontested.

Exactly. It's pretty obvious countries are hedging their bets for WW3.

Chinese social media is cheering on russian soldiers.

Chinese state media calls for "peace and justice"... and blames war on U.S aggression.

Chinese state media talks about Chinese Air Power and Shanghai Communique, one china policy.

Russia banned twitter and calling it an "invasion" or "war". Russians are getting arrested for protesting a war.

U.S intelligence has known about the planning for this war for a while and even informed China.

Thanks, I think I'll pick western media bias instead.

Hell Russia knew about the planning of this war and informed everyone many months ago. The u.s. president went on national news and informed the people that it would happen more than a month ago (and that Russia would win) . Many people simply reject information they don't want to hear

> Read sources with different points of view and take the average.

This is a horrible algorithm. Someone claims the Holocaust claimed millions of lives, but someone else claims it never happened or at most killed a few thousands. Is the truth "somewhere in the middle"? Of course not. You cant just average sources of information of different quality.

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