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Comment by SeptiumMMX | Hacker News Reader

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.

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Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation.

But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with the interests of that group, and won't be necessary beneficial to the public.

Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence? How being depressed and outraged is normal, and is all but encouraged. This is all coming from the media actively shaping what gets into one's attention span and it will only be causing more and more misery with no end in sight.

And this comes down to a very simple formula. Media likes people who will create content for free. People who are willing to do are often unhappy and have a mindset that causes unhappiness. Media broadcasting their content (to their own profit, of course) is popularizing that mindset and making more people miserable. Bingo!

> Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence?

No.

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, at what age do you plan to retire, what funds to you plan to use to cover the living expenses, and what skill set are you trying to pass to your kids so they will be able to afford moving out and staring their own families?

I'm asking because things things are getting harder every year and the media has a permanent blind eye on them.

"Things" are not getting harder every year; if you only see negative things in the world, this is a sign you have depression more than anything.

Hmm.

If things are not getting harder then either they stay the same or get better. I would find it hard to argue for either of those positions, but I would welcome you to try to defend that "things are not getting harder". In just about every possible metric outside of maybe "few really, really wealthy individuals make more money" things are not getting better or are stable.

Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?

Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014 and is sharply decreased since 2019. Lower income people are making more money than ever. There was a period of no income growth for upper-middle class people, however, which probably made them unhappy.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...

What did happen in the last two years was there was a "vibecession" where everyone decided to pretend the economy was bad even though everything about it was objectively good. You can see this in surveys, because everyone answered them with "I'm personally doing well, but I know everyone else is doing badly because I heard it on the news".

First described here:

https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfill...

Note, this was written at the tail end of the inflation period and none of the predictions of bad things quoted in the article actually happened.

Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.

Ok. First, the 1st paper is interesting, but I can't digest it now. Added to the list for later.

That said, temporarily ignoring the paper, income in absolute terms may have well increased, but from 2014 to 2024 we also had ~33% official CPI inflation ( edit: which is well above FED's goal ), which effectively eroded any gains average person may have managed to eke out. In other words, it is not a vibe whem that 100k+ is getting you ~33% less. It is simply what things are.

<< Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.

I am not hopeful, but I am willing to accept it as a possible outcome.

Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.

<< Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.

Apologies. Let me look at the link provided.

I am going through the paper now and the things that did jump at me that while you state that your post was inflation adjusted and I will admit that I am not sure it says what you claim to think it says. Lets go over relevant passages.

From quoted paper[1]:

"Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression."

In other words, higher absolute values were considered to be good predictors for wage-phillips curve ( which shows a relationship between the unemployment rate and wage growth ). I worry that you saw word real wage and made an assumption that it measures real wage. It doesn't. We can argue whether it is a good proxy, but from get go it is tougher sell. In other words, if methodology for attempting to derive real wage is off, the whole premise falls apart from where I sit.

"Moreover, despite substantial post-pandemic inflation–measured with the benchmark Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U)–real hourly earnings at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution rose by 7.8% between January 2020 and June 2023."

Ok. This is where it does get messy, because I genuinely do not want to get into the weeds here, but lets... for the sake of the argument assume all that including methodology is fine.

"Real US hourly wages rose by approximately 10 percentage points at all percentiles during the first quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March through June of 2020. (As we show below, much of this spike reflected a change in composition of the workforce as low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs.) Thereafter, these quantiles diverged. The 10th wage percentile held its real value over the next three years, while the 50th and 90th real wage percentiles fell by around 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In net, the 90/10 ratio declined by about 8 percentage points over these three years "

In other words, for the period of time listed, assuming we accept the premise, methodology and so on, wages rose above inflation. And then, those same real wages fell on average of 8% between July 2000 and 2024. I don't know man, it sounds me, again if we accept premise, methodology and so, as if things got briefly better and got worse again. So my example of 100k became 92K..

FWIW, I am really curious of how you will defend it.

[1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...

> Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?

I don't read any such suggestion into the person's post; to me, it seems to mean what it says. As to whether individual needs and societal needs always align, I would guess you probably know the answer is "no" -- but also far from "never"

Really? Maybe its my bias showing through, but my memory of the last couple decades is largely an exercise in most people looking to outside authorities (governments, corporations, titled experts, etc) to fix problems rather than dealing with it individually.

Yes, it's your bias.

Well in an attempt to at least show where the bias, if that's what it is, comes from:

- Affordable Care Act - the entire Covid response - GDPR - the "TikTok Ban" act

To name a few, those are all examples of us having granted larger powers to the government in hopes that they will fix problems for us that we won't fix ourselves.

Let’s take the ACA. That was designed to fix the problem “healthcare in the US is insanely expensive and insurance companies can deny coverage if you have a pre-existing condition.” How could you fix that problem individually?

My argument there wasn't actually that all of those could have done bottom up, only that they are examples of us granting the government more power and asking for a collectivist solution. That isn't always a bad thing, but it does point to the trend that I recognize (potentially due to my bias as pointed out above).

Personally I think the US going from extremely hyper-individualistic to the point of self-destruction to slightly less hyper-individualistic is not a sign of a shift, but rather a return to normalcy.

We forget that the US has been far, far more collectivist in the past, particularly from the 20's - last 70's. The shift towards hyper-individualism is, in my opinion, a wealth extraction mechanism masquerading as a strength. It is highly beneficial to every wealthy person to have low regulations and low requirements for care. The ACA is just common sense - the reason we didn't have it isn't because of individualism, but rather because by not having it you can make a lot more evil and consequently make a lot more money as an insurer.

Okay, but… if there’s no feasible individual solution, it really undercuts your argument here.

> if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases [then good stuff]

Is that an assumption, or based on research?

Based on the last couple years of elections, I'd guess that exposing the public to every opinion ever makes people vote for the most catchy sound-bite. I don't follow american news enough to echo whatever people echo over there (perhaps "pro life"? Not sure that I have enough context on that one), but in the Netherlands one might recognize rhetorical statements like "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" from what is now the biggest party. We even have an organization that works out different parties' plans into expected economic impact per income group, but the resulting spreadsheet isn't very clickbaity and so I never heard anyone even be aware it exists. For a lot people it's simple: the foreigners use up all the benefits, jobs, and cause the high rent; if they would read reliable sources, however, they would see that the parties that don't try to stop immigration or leave the EU collaboration ("increase our independence" and fuck our tiny country's trade economy for decades) are the ones that yield the highest expected welfare across all income brackets

Of course, this (unfiltered opinions drowning out actual information) is also just my guess, I could very well be wrong. After all, I can't explain why we don't already live in a world where everything burns because such statements are the ones that get disproportionately echoed around. I'm just not sure that releasing the opinion floodgates further will make things better without indications thereof

Hmm, I'm not sure the "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" question is as rethorical as you say.

Also, I don't think the main real reasons for such a question are the economical ones, even if that DOES matter to some.

It appears that the main concern for the populist right is that the people (ethnicity + culture) they identify with will become a minority or even disappear at some point.

One can always discuss if this is a realistic threat or if it is, if it's really such a bad thing.

But I think it's pretty obvious that for as long as Northern Europe has the kind of generous welfare states they currently have, there will be a LOT of people in the "Global South" that really would like to come, easily enough to overwhelm some of these countries, if there are no restrictions on immigration.

Which is what makes "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" a valid question to ask, as far as I can tell. Either that, or "What is the maximum number of <insert minority group> we want to have in our country?"

If even asking this question is a taboo, well then that's almost like deleting datasets that your political group doesn't like.

> if there are no restrictions on immigration

But there are. I'm not aware that even the most pro-"share the love" party thinks we can unilaterally make the decision to let just anybody into Schengen (the EU-related freedom of movement area), or that it would be a good thing if they could. The problem is that the fascist parties want to deny people entry, and evict people who built lives here, who can prove that they fear for their life in the country of origin (such as war refugees), which seems inhumane to me and the european convention on human rights iirc aligns with that as well. It's not something you can just stop doing under national or european law, but by framing it in the right way they create a boogeyman where it's not mainly war refugees but religious terrorists and gold diggers coming into the country

> "What is the maximum number of <insert minority group> we want to have in our country?" If even asking this question is a taboo

That is not taboo. This topic is discussed by every party, of course, and a topic of negotiations between European countries ("will you take this many then we will do this other thing"). The taboo is discrimination, verbal in this case. It harms minorities for no benefit and that's why that is illegal per (what I think is in English called) the constitution ("grondwet")

---

To me it feels like you're approaching this from a forced neural point of view. That feels very odd to say, because of course neutrality and objectivity is good; not sure I'm expressing this right. Maybe it's like... feels like searching for a way to frame it as neutral no matter how extreme (inhumane, uncommon) it really is to say that you would close the door on someone who shows up at your doorstep in mortal peril. No human would do that if personally faced with that choice. The inflammatory statement I gave as example is meant to rile people up against a minority group and gain votes, it's not aimed at starting a rational discussion because that has already been ongoing since time immemorial

That's a whole lot of conjecture.

There is some honesty with this argument. You can admit that your own bias overrides your ability to be impartial. The dishonest bit is that by attempting to refute a premise of impartiality, you're really making a case for the dominance of your personal bias against impartially. It's a posture that seeks a win condition in the form of a society that has abandoned impartiality, and with it ideas of justice, democracy, self rule, scientific progress (basically everything that depends on the pursuit of impartiality).

Your siren's song to a new and better dark age, isn't as appealing as you think it is. Get psychological help.

> let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset

Is there any evidence that most people are capable of this?

>Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

No, but it's close. It's similar to a courtroom where you have a plaintiff and a defendant. Each party plays a roll on each issue that is up to debate. They plead their side and ultimately the citizenry is the jury. Unfortunately, in the political arena there aren't any rules for speech like in a courtroom; perjury for example.

It's imperfect, but you won't ever find an impartial person or group, nor should you blindly take their word for it. It's an appeal to authority fallacy.

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

Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".

If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.

> Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".

Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two plus two equals four. And we know that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing that exists and is likely to have a large impact on our world.

There are some things that we're less confident about, such as different projections for exactly how large an impact we're likely to experience, what the most efficient way to limit that impact is, who bears the responsibility for implementing those changes, and so on. Reasonable people can quibble over some of those details, and there are multiple valid ways of interpreting those facts. But we can very definitely - and completely objectively - fact check statements like "anthropogenic climate change does not exist" and "fossil fuels do not have an impact on our climate and environment".

A lot of those are technically not true - the sky is frequently not blue, the sun doesn't actually rise and there are number systems where 2+2 does not equal 4 (eg, 2+2 = 1 in a mod 3 arithmetic).

That sounds pedantic until people start disagreeing or implementing legal requirements that result in people needing to use the definitions. Eg, if there is a legal requirement to recognise that 2+2=4, is it ok to teach modular arithmetic? Especially if someone has a grudge against the teacher. Lawyers are more than happy to punish someone over a technicality.

We are fucking doomed.

We cannot even agree on the basics any more.

if it's any consolation, when the sky isn't blue, it's mostly because the ground is on fire. a situation which is exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change.

so i mean, it's hard to agree on the basics when the basics are changing, I guess.

As you will see if you ask DeepSeek about notable events which happened in Tiananmen Square, AI systems are perfectly capable of failing to provide impartiality or facts. Any model that claims to do so simply is failing to state the biases of the person who trained it, and the biases of the data upon which it was trained.

AI just regurgitates what it learned from non experts.

One will have a strong tendency to leave the easily challanged out.

> Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

IIRC, This is mostly what Facebook did after the 2016 election; put together a non affiliated board and made sure it was populated by all sides - Facebook itself had no/minimal control over what said board did/decided; but all decisions were public.

Zuck just gave in to 'community moderation' instead because "actual solutions" are considered a negative in today's political climate.

The Trumpian opposition to fact checkers is not based on some principled disagreement of substance. Trump, and by extension Republicans, oppose fact checking because the facts are in contradiction to their goals. Trump himself exists in some post-modern environment where "facts" aren't real and all that matters is spin. He wants what he says to go unquestioned. That's why instead of having a debate about facts, supported by evidence, he simply seeks to remove facts from the discussion entirely.

I don't believe that is a one party issue. Life is messy and politicians attempt to smooth that over with grandiose, but hollow, visions for the future and data points taken out of context to paint a picture.

It's a fundamental problem of scale, you either become so bogged down in details and nuance that you get nothing done or you lose so much context that your statements are false without a massive list of caveats.

> Life is messy and politicians attempt to smooth that over with grandiose, but hollow, visions for the future and data points taken out of context to paint a picture.

Your point is: politicians lie. Of course they do. They always have.

What's new in our era is not the lying, but the utter contempt for facts. A study in contrasts:

* A "traditional politician" will lie. If they are caught, with plain evidence that contradicts their claim, they will evade, or reframe, or apologize, or blame someone else.

* A "Trumpian politician" will lie. If he is caught, with plan evidence that contradicts their claim, he will flatly oppose the facts. He'll invoke a vague conspiracy of evildoers who concocted the alleged facts. People believe him because he is charismatic and he talks like a regular person. He gaslights: believe me, he says, not your common sense and lyin' eyes.

So we're in a conundrum where many people have lost their ability to believe in facts, and instead believe a con-man. The problem is not just dishonesty, it is demoralization (in the psychological warfare sense of the word[1]).

EDIT: I read somewhere that Trump's superpower is lack of shame. A weaker politician concedes to facts out of respect for his audience: to deny a plain truth would be embarrassing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)

> People believe him because he is charismatic and he talks like a regular person.

I'm not so sure many people really believe him very often. I live in a part of the country that heavily supported Trump, even diehard fans of his that I talk to consider him a shit talker and support him only because he throws a wrench in the system.

Even those I know who do seem to believe him cave pretty quickly when asked any slightly substantive question. They know tariffs raise prices for example, that we aren't going to buy Canada or take over Greenland, and that Trump in fact had no plan to end Russia's war on day one.

> support him only because he throws a wrench in the system.

Interesting insight, thanks.

Well, if that's what they want, that's what they get. I guess I can't understand an attitude that leads you to want to destroy your own country.

I guess I can't understand an attitude that leads you to want to destroy your own country.

The voters that call themselves "conservatives" these days will saw off their feet at the ankles, if it means that a member of a class they hate loses their legs.

Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse this would just result in endless objections in any debate deliberately used to add noise and misdirect conversation.

I don't know what the solution is in today's climate, but I suspect it no longer matters. America is post-truth and he who controls the data and pathways to information (Murdoch, Meta, Google) directly influences a large percentage of the people.

> Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse

Politicians and the media have always lied about big and small details. The difference is that social media has made it easier to dispute, and now we started noticing it more. Now that they can't gatekeep the information anymore they adopted the word "misinformation" to deal with the problem. "It may be true, but it's misinformation, trust us, we have your best interests in mind".

Remember the trusted news initiative from covid? That was an attempt to continue gatekeeping, anything from any other sources was considered false and unverified, and the global media all had the same talking points at the same time. It was terrifying to see how easy everyone conformed.

I like it, the legal system might be more suitable for putting the "truth" on trial than its current application.

It will cost a bunch of money but we get something out of it.

The fact checkers’ own employer said that the fact checkers didn’t work because they were so heavily biased that the audience noticed it.

Translation: the audience is so biased that they automatically reject facts in conflict with their biases.

No amount of showing you the mistakes in your papers works. “Women earn 52 cents on the dollar!” Same job? “Yes” No, look here.

“But there is still this argument” — No, there isn’t, it’s been studied in that other study.

You guys just always come back and cast doubt, but it’s only this: Doubt and finally, falsehoods.

> You guys just always come back and cast doubt

If that's your attitude, maybe you're the one with the preconvieved biases.

Let's first work on eliminating political parties altogether, then let's work on eliminating bias.

I like this idea, but doubt it works. People naturally coalesce around ideas. That cohesion is then call a political party. The only way to get rid of parties is to get rid of freedom of organization.

The Republican Party has been eliminated, it’s been replaced by a dictator cult.

Interestingly increasing numbers of young people want this.

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