whybroke

A bonus to post truth politics is that you get to execute people for things they didn't do.

And given the cozy relationship between the president elect and Putin, I would say Snowden's Russian residence is on shaky ground.

What was the impact of facebook and the nature and intensity of fake news four years ago vs now? If the difference is even slightly significant, it could well explain part of the phenomenon.

And one does need to explain why such large percentage of Trump's supporters believe things like Obama being foreign a born muslim, and why they voted so conclusively against their own self interests

Evil ideas need to be analyzed and refuted absolutely. Their adherents should write them up in depth and place them on the web so that they can be discussed widely and in depth and, if erroneous, be refuted.

It's hard to see how 140 character snipes, provocations and occasional calls to hostility fall into that category. But maybe.

Is it censorship to remove random stickers from telephone poles? To erase graffiti?

Yes this is the challenge.

And worsening that challenge is the fact that knowledgeable people tend to be utterly un-interested in endlessly discussing discredited, unsubstantiated or nonsensical theories, only to find the listener is simply not listening anyway. An understandable preference.

But the result is surprise at the number and influence of climate change deniers when they suddenly emerge in force.

I suppose those candidates are either simple minded or have cynically spotted a 'previously ignored voting group'.

Heaven forbid one of them end up in the white house.

> ...Anti vaxers...

Well actually that too is a right-wing thing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2015/09/20/donald...

I think you have the backwards: the right's instance that there is no evidence is the unreasonable position.

Of course one might insist it's a conspiracy by the Director of National intelligence but that just makes the claim even less reasonable.

https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/215-pr...

Including three tweets in a hour just yesterday strongly condemning the NYT for simply repeating his goal of nuclearizing Japan and S Korea eg [1]

[1]https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/79783222980005068...

Here is an example of the exact reason Trump voters are so mysterious:

Nonsensical beliefs and faulty reasoning are deprecated (and ideally not represented at all) in any well informed clear thinking venue. Here that manifests, quite sensibly, by the downvote.

And any meritocracy would eventually eliminate nonsensical views entirely.

So the problem comes when a political movement harnesses nonsense while clear thinking people have systematical eliminated it entirely from their discourse. And after that movement's unexpected triumph, the clear thinkers try to understand what happened.

A hard problem I would say.

If you run the hospital poorly enough, that's exactly what happens.

Such caution to avoid misdiagnosing death is probably good.

Too bad we put up with a worse than 4% error rate when applying the death penalty.

Stands for: ambitious. Against: crystal clear.

> damned if they do, damned if they don't

The level of damnation differs significantly.

Having a human team being accused of bias (possible falsely) and pressured by politicians to change puts them in the same category as the NYT, the Wall Street Journal and every serious print and broadcast service on earth.

Algorithmically spreading exciting and blatantly false claims puts them in the category of the National Enquirer, and 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'

One category is significantly less damned than the other.

Do reasonable people argue that Clinton is a satanist who enjoys spirit cooking?

But they should not censor posts under any circumstances, even that one. The problem is the way stories trend and the order in which the feed is presented. The current algorithms and 'like' counting maximize shocking statements that confirm world views exactly because that will maximize user retention. Accuracy is completely deprecated.

Facebook knows this and is well aware that nudity (let alone porn) would overwhelm their site because it would be overwhelmingly favored by their systemic selection process. So rather than fix the process they censor that. This leaves things like accusing people of satanism or other false inciting statements to bubble up instead.

Unfortunately, facebook has no fiscal incentive to fix this. And it may not be a coincidence that UKIP, Trump, AfD, Le Pen expanded greatly after the emergence of facebook.

Particularly intersting is the 'inactive voter status' band along the cotton belt (a region of African Americans in the southern sates where the voting rights act was recently repealed). Yet no such searches in KS, CO, NE, WY etc.

Along with a sign-up form on his web site for 'volunteers' to drive over into 'suspicious' neighborhoods in blue counties.

And the mere threat of intimidation will be enough to keep people home googling instead of voting.

At any rate, Oregon provides the perfect control for any theoretical 'googling out of idle curiosity' crowd.

>the last thing I'd like to see in Hacker News.

I can't imagine how HN is ever going to beat back the flood of Trump cranks that Thiel's donation opened up.

Sanity had be nicely increasing for a good year there. But as I post this, there is exactly one technically interesting article out of the top 30. I'd been nice if the smart people who used to come here aren't permanently chased away or drowned out but if it happens, it happens.

>Remember the server sending out emails

Interesting 'fact' to cite. How many emails did that server send again?

Too bad housing prices are viewed as a completely uncontrollable force of nature beyond any human ability to tame. Too bad a supossedly endless stream off ideas and innovation apparently can't possible solve it.

Otherwise the chief driving force of the economy might not be increasingly constrained by literal rent seeking.

But rent-seeking is apparently a sacrosanct property right that trumps all other issues of well being and so we must comfort ourselves with myths that innovation is so independent of culture that it can appear anywhere and, if it does, won't be choked to death in infancy in exactly the same way every time.

>Sounds like 're-opening' to me.

Why are we now shoehorning the real world in to TV speak?

>I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes

They are the large number of libertarians who believe all regulation is bad under all circumstances. Mental contortions follow to justify it in this case.

Consider also how much of payroll goes directly through you or your employee to rent or mortgage in the areas where software talent lives and you can see why the bootstrapping startups that caused the the tech revolution in the first place are infidelity harder now.

You must either bear the productivity hit of a pure virtual workplace or you must comply to the nearly arbitrary success formulas of VCs.

You have just described the mortgage deduction.

>people are now going around downvoting my other comments

The group who back the archetype of incivility are smashing a system that was meant to facilitate reasoned discourse? What a surprise.

Perhaps the recent flood of such behavior is related to funding a reversal of diversity and calling that act of reversal "tolerating diversity".

So pointing out unambiguously[1] bad behavior is wrong because communists murdered people. wow.

[1] unambiguous = something you would not want done to your mother

A conspicuous and large campaign contribution by a key figure associated with this site sure won't encourage women or minorities in tech either.

But it sure seems to have attracted a flurry of disturbing posts (eg my grandparent and sibling post's)

Ironically, an implication of your words is that a state owned video sharing site would not only adhere to the 1st amendment much better but would also serve consumer interest in a more balanced way.

Prediction: There will come a time in the not so distant future when even 140 characters will be beyond the alt-right's attention span.

I did not say Ma Bell was good for the economy. And certainly not that it should have remained intact. I point out that had it been an unregulated monopoly, it have been worse.

Your point is completely accurate and critical to follow up on in a considered way. In the real world anyway.

But unfortunately, since Thiel has invited HN to go full /pol/ the answer you're gonna get is that it's a 400lb guy on a couch saving us from the devil.