whybroke

It's really a cultural (judicial?) shift that is immensely reluctant to apply the traditional standards of public interest (of which privacy is a sub set) to new technology.

The continued expansion of IP rights and copyright extension is part of the same shift.

There was also a 'Night Gallery' episode centered sin eaters this with a typical Rod Serling (or who ever he copied in this case) twist ending.

It's not just about survival economics and technologies.

We need to establish societies independent of an earth which might become dominated by unshakable planet wide tyranny at some point. Physical distances and gravity well energy requirements inside the solar system may be as adequate a protection for independent cultural survival as oceans were in the past centuries.

While this is obviously a long term result, it really should not be delayed unnecessarily.

Actually the discrepancy stems from underestimating voter turnout for Trump and over estimating it for Clinton and is not caused by the mythical timid Trump voter.

>Perhaps allowing interpersonal communications to be dominated by a handful of companies was not the best idea.

Absolutely. Especially since tabloid like self confirming facile nonsense has broader user retention and thus profitability than difficult or subtle factual information.

>What is naive is to solve this problem by putting the determination of truth and falsehood in the hands of a centralized authority.

Indeed that would be catastrophic. But the ordering of the facebook timeline is intentionally emphasizing self confirming propagandistic nonsense: We already live in a highly propagandized facebook steam. Just remove that (highly profitable) bias from the algorithm.

>Disagreements on basic facts are not new.

Now however it is far worse, indeed essentially nonexistent. As a result the width of the division has grown enormously in the last 10 years. In the, US for example, the vast majority of counties are now either landslide red or landslide blue. The most polarized since the civil war. And there has never been this level of overt hostility to science at the top of the political ladder.

On the larger scale, it is a mistake to think that the experiment of enlightenment democracy that is only present in a minority of countries and in those, only for a fraction of history, is somehow permanent and can somehow endure when the public no longer has access to accurate information. Indeed, nascent democracies are already being snuffed out one by one.

On the contrary.

The discovery that social media, as currently implemented, is in the process of annihilating rational discourse is the single most important discovery of this election cycle. Possibly of the last decade.

Even now, because of this problem, there is no longer agreement on many basic facts. The notion that a people so polarized on basic truths will ever be able to function together democratically is what is utterly naive. Under such circumstances, ultimately one side will have to force its view of reality on the other.

Indeed it may not be a coincidence that the sudden success of extremists parties in the west, driving voters to vote so conspicuously against their own self interest, corresponds almost exactly to the emergence of social media in general and facebook in particular.

What is naive is the belief that truth will somehow win out when the bulk of mankind sees the world predominantly through a facebook feed that explicitly selects for spectacular self confirming nonsense algorithmicly suppressing anything unpleasant to know.

I do not google a term to get a false result that I happen to agree with. Especially not one that is doing so just to sell ads. I am not interested in soothing nonsense on _any_ topic not just political ones.

For some reason it is being argued that google's (and facebook's) algorithms, which obviously must rank their results, should not take accuracy into account at all.

The value of google is exactly proportional to the accuracy of its results, not its random interspersing of fabrications. If I want insane conspiracy theories I can always take 3 seconds to type bullshit.com in the url line.

And ironically, somehow observations like this one are ruthlessly down voted by defenders of free speech.

A real pity because the intercept might be saying something important buried in the over/under emphasis, hyperbole and unnecessarily agitating tone. But it's hard to tell and harder to take seriously.

I hope they think about tweaking their editorial standards.

More damaging would be if it implicitly changes the message from 'audits should always be done' to 'we're doing it because there was monkey business'

An org publicly posted it's inner process for the benefit of the industry and was attacked randomly by a political extremist without regard for truth, damage to that org or damage to the core value of this site.

I'm sure I'll be called oppressing purplecpa's free speech just for pointing this out but no, Basecamp is not oppressive.

There is massive harm done by an intentional lie to a non public figure for no reason.

Would you consider that a good outcome?

What a curious default view of humanity and reality.

um, no. Educated people voted against him.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...

(Unless of course not graduating from college makes someone a college graduate in the post-fact world.)

Annihilating a family owned pizzeria as a satanic pedophile front for Clinton is pretty close to yelling 'fire' isn't it?

>...people who are being churned out by our American colleges, they are useless opinionated, closed minded, biased, paid off stooges...

And that group, as it turns out, was the real hate target this election.

>She shouldn't have a veto.

Absolutely. Regardless of how likely or unlikely manipulation is, an independent group should be able to request an audit.

If for not other reason than she could be silenced by a tacitly threatening to endless prosecute and summon before congress on some unrelated matter if she makes any trouble.

The electoral college favors rural states and rural areas vote Republican. And elections hereafter will tend to be close owing to campaign strategizing and optimized campaign financing. And even then, politicians are only interested in swing states. So now the popular vote has lost in half of all 21st century elections and will continue to do so fairly often and will always be in one direction.

So the question is do we want customs that arbitrarily advantages one party for no clear reason.

I say customs and not actual laws because electors are only bound to vote the party line by a small fine and tradition not by the letter of the law. In the same way the letter of the law does not require a president to divest his assets, only ethics and tradition.

But even so, I imagine there will be an astounding number of highly creative justifications for the ludicrous electoral college remaining exactly as it is.

On what grounds do you assume these statisticians are Democrats?

If the fact that they want to do a statistical study is the sole proof of their political alignment and then any request to do an analysis by someone of that political asking is invalid, I would suggest there is a serious logical problem.

Screaming 'the whole press lies!' and falsely equating it with deliberate fabrications has been done by the far right for 80 years.

Spamming what would be intelligent discussions with such nonsense is a new thing.

>What exactly are you suggesting here?

There is no coherent suggestion.

What he and his cohort is doing is yelling 'Lugenpresse' into every discussion on the topic they can find.

In your opinion.

An opinion has no nothing to do with what a fact is and whether snopes accurately debunks them.

And therefore what he says is true? Like climate change denial and the birther movement?

Apparently logic has a liberal bias to.

A parallel false equivalence: snopes sometimes makes mistakes therefore it's as bad as breitbart.

And the idea that misinformation has no impact is the equivalent of saying advertisement has no impact. Or propaganda.

What is happening is an attempt to cast doubt on the genuine information sources critical to a well informed electorate. The same way doubt has been successfully cast on climate change and natural selection. The word 'Lugenpresse' was used to do this in a previous generation.

That anyone genuinely believes the implication of this, that the entire free press of all democracies world wide is conspiring against the American people while Putin's press and tabloid websites are their sole champion, could not possibly be more absurd.

If he knows in advance that he's not going to believe it anyway, why would he bother?

>...then democracy, as an effective tool of government, is largely over.

That is the goal they seek isn't it?

Sorry, I had written and removed something a bit snide like 'the fetishization of...' the edit left a bit of incoherence.

And, if my opinion maters, I don't deprecate gun ownership automatically. But I do think the only path to an optimal outcome is an honest discussion about its true purpose and consequences.

It's a curious argument that says un-nuanced insults should be permitted but pointing them out as such should not.

Or that in the past insults differed therefore we should ignore today's.

Or that hypothetically something hilarious might happen so don't call out trolling harassment.

>gun owners were driven by decades of stark atrocities committed by government agents

This is a revisionist narrative only recently adopted.

Gun ownership and lobbying for same began immediately after the civil rights movement and all language around it until recently was about protecting the white race (with an occasional sprinkling of 'self defense' rhetoric sprinkled in)

A real conversation is only going to happen when we admit the only reason for owning a gun is because it's entertaining. The 'single gun man defending democracy' narrative just makes the proponent look as ridiculous as his words.

Unless the point of forcing a physical signature is to terrorize that group as much as to collect names.

For example, lynchings were not intended as genocide but to keep blacks in fear as much as being a source of psychological indulgence for the murders.

How is it remotely blocking someone's free speech or access to information when you politely and automatically tell them that the blatant racial slur they just used might offend someone?