Why have I never heard of this?
How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?
One that is not "maximise engagement" but "maximise understanding of important shit"
Thank you for posting
How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?
One that is not "maximise engagement" but "maximise understanding of important shit"
Thank you for posting
How do we define "real journalist" in a way other than "curates news in a way that I personally approve of"?
Ironically, this is not a real no true Scotsman.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
So that eliminates cable news entirely and most of the work done by NYT, WAPO etc. who basically act as a mouthpiece for government and repeat the same stories ad infinitum.
The problem was people as a whole didn’t care. I think it’s only very recently that more than a small minority of Americans became aware of the reality that the police and justice system aren’t always people out there doing good—they’re normal people, for better or worse. Up until we got daily police videos of cops killing innocent people, it was assumed that arrested=guilty, throw them away. Even in the face of video evidence lots of people won’t budge from the idea that the justice system had a good reason for doing heinous things.
But for some reason they think that corruption in the justice system is impossible. Usually they think the same about assosiated organisations like FBI
That's during a conflict with Russia, a country where all power was seized by internal security services
IMHO, this is a kind of pathological extension of "internal locus of control"[2]. Internal locus of control is good for mental health and achievement, but once you start to project it onto other people without sufficient consideration of their circumstances things quickly get problematic.
People dont care about the economics of free messaging apps or "tech monopolies", but plaster it enough across enough articles across many years of publication and suddenly it becomes an issue.
I'd argue that the NY Times and other media are the ones who dont care. They get to decide what people care about.
The gp isn't asking for automated journalism, just algorithmic promotion. You would still need real people to investigate and write; the proposed algorithm would simply sort.
I actually think this type of thing is very conceivable, but the problem is that it's not a technical challenge - it's an incentivisation one. Current algorithm creation is profit-incentive, and trivial, consumer-oriented & generally useless/inaction-driving "news" are all significantly more profitable than what the gp describes as "important".
In fact, currently many journalistic platforms & publications actively promote themselves on the basis that they already offer what the gp has asked for (which by-and-large they don't of course).
[0] https://www.projectcensored.org/ [1] https://www.projectcensored.org/category/the-top-25-most-cen...
My hunch is because of some combo of
a) The attention economy. We're all overwhelmed. Filtering signal from noise is exhausting.
b) Manufacturing Consent's five filters of mass media. The economics of daily "news" determines what is covered. Yet another attention economy; and it's not clear to me that any other arrangement would be better.
c) Professional courtesy. Billionaire media moguls generally aren't going to narc on their billionaire hedge fund buddies.
--
Don't feel too bad about missing this outrage, or any other particular story. There's no shortage of outrageous stories. It's unending.
As a news junkie, from long before doom scrolling, I binge on this stuff. It's unhealthy.
Talking about it makes you sound like a lunatic to most people. Even worse, this stuff distracts you from living your best life and doing your own awesome thing.
The more effective policy people I know manage to somehow compartmentalize. Fighting the good fight is their day job, left at work. Off the clock, they do normal people stuff. The activists I know that don't do the work / life balance burn out. (Like I did.)
--
FWIW, outlets like Democracy Now!, Thom Hartmann, and Project Censored try to day light these memory hole stories.
Justice for Sale – Part 3: Greed Breeds Corruption [2015] https://www.projectcensored.org/justice-for-sale-part-3-gree...
Project Censored's Yearly Top 25 Most Censored Stories is a treasure. Allows me to binge less and periodically catch up on stuff I've missed.
https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...
I've tried to figure that out myself. The best I've come up with is Wikipedia's current events page. It's not ideal, but as a bone dry, non-sensationalized summary of things going on worldwide, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it would be nice to have more context, but the linked articles usually help with that. It's biggest problem for me is it's a bit overwhelming realizing how often ferries sink and buses crash.
PBS NewsHour is the other source I've used because it tends to be less rage-baiting, but this fact-based presentation is great.
Maybe historians would be better stewards of meaningful “news”.
anyway look at it this way - if the algorithms were working at giving you this important stuff in a way you were aware of it, you might have chosen a different username.
on edit: sometimes we are unaware of things just by happenstance and no algorithm tweaking will fix it, consider it a version of the XKCD 10000, I was aware of this as it passed in my feed at some point, but really if I was unaware of it I would assume it as a likely consequence of for profit prisons anyway - if asked to consider the possibility that is.
You’re wanting to optimize for something intangible, philosophical and something most people would just prefer to ignore.
Technology can still help though… look, you learned about it from HN!
However, you cannot automate this process entirely because caring, compassion and looking into the dark corners of our socioeconomic system require human judgement at every step. This human decision making, consensus forming and problem solving process is also known as ‘politics’
You'll get familiar with a lot of broken aspects of society, much of which could take a lot of time and adjustment to understand why its not as productive as seemed. And some might seem like farfetched things to change, but you'll be familiar, especially after its old news and has been changed.
How about, you know, philosophers and other learned people who's life job is to study it?
I have mistakenly written "argument" instead of "algorithm" in my original post (edited now), which may have lead to a misunderstanding. Otherwise, could you please elaborate?
Another signal source might be based on the assumption that the important bits would be subject of suppression efforts, like topics that disappeared from school curriculum, internet censorship filter rules (for example [2]), takedown notices, banned books, topics journalists wrote about that were fired/defenestrated, wikipedia articles that were removed/renamed or heavily edited, unusual court cases with abnormal patterns might be recoverable from public records (like the Steven Donziger case [3]), websites on the internet archive that were taken down by infrastructure companies, there might be topics that are ignored by modern historians etc.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstre... [2] https://lumendatabase.org/faceted_search?sender_name=Europea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger