Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts".
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...
lol if you watch zuck's take on it his problem is the fact checkers ended up being biased.
Wait, so they waited until yesterday to remove incriminating evidence? Just when Trump’s staff also came in to purge data? What a coincidence!
Certainly this sort of data isn't disappearing because it makes Trump look good.
Anyway, he's pissed about COVID-19 and instead of working to prevent future epidemics he's working to retaliate against those who embarrassed him. Pretty simple stuff. The man does not have the depth that he and his followers believe he has.
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.
It's pretty much as simple as this. Everything he's done so far has been a petty attempt to get revenge on people he perceives as his political enemies. This isn't some vast conspiracy to avoid fact checking. He's got a checklist of the people and institutions who he thinks made him look silly last time, and he's just going down the list. Somehow, none of this vengeance is improving the price of eggs, either.
> Data is the ultimate Fact Check.
This is wrong IMO. Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. Cherry-picked data can be worse than no data.
The ultimate fact check is a scientific process of collecting data, modeling it, scrutinizing it and its methodology and the entities involved, contextualizing it, cross-checking, replicating, etc.
What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.
If you look at people who have been losing in court for lying recently, such as Rudy Giuliani, InfoWars, Fox news Dominion (settled for $787M), they are all conservatives. Maybe that proves that reality indeed has a liberal bias.
> Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong.
All true of course. The solution for that is more data, not less.
Maybe. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly. More of the wrong data isn't particularly helpful.
I think what I'm arguing is that just having data isn't good enough, and it's dangerous to accept data at face value. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly.
It’s not even a bias in that situation. Conservatives have an interest in denying reality because denying reality lets them have more of what they want.
Reality is what it is. Reality isn’t biased. It looks like a bias because of how far conservatives have pulled everyone to the right, by moving further right while demanding that everyone meet in the middle.
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.
Fact checking is things like Republicans claiming that people in a certain town are eating cats and dogs or their are pedophiles in the basement of a certain pizza place. There isn't any need to model and scrutinize data to fact check the majority of nonsense Republicans spout.
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.
Maybe they are. The solution to this is to provide evidence in favor of your argument. That's how we used to resolve conflicting opinions: debates supported by evidence.
Now, instead, we're simply getting rid of any attempt to decide what is factual, and instead let demagogues decide for us what is fact and what is not, without any evidence at all. Since evidence is now superfluous, why waste government money by providing it?
Going out on a bit of a limb here, but I’m guessing the data will find their way to xAI.
My hypothesis is Musk is following a South African playbook. That involves, in part, privatising the commons.
Hope to be proven wrong.
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!
Really? Greenpeace says it's because X platforms conspiracy theorists and climate change skeptics. [1]
“But this tool, initially perceived as a new arena for free speech, has become a serious danger to it and to the respect for personal dignity,” point out organizations such as Cimade, France Nature Environment, Greenpeace France, and APF France Handicap in an op-ed published in Le Monde.
Their primary concerns include “the lack of moderation and the configuration of algorithms” which “encourage the spread of hateful content and the circulation of conspiracy and climate skeptic theories.”
[1] https://glassalmanac.com/87-french-groups-including-emmaus-g...
> Trump and the Republicans are very much in favor of checking facts. It is the opposite of censorship: Expose everything.
You know that you're writing this in a post about how the current Republican administration has been scrubbing massive amounts of scientific data from government websites, right?
I don't see how Greenpeace is at all relevant here.
So one of the most important things to "fact check" in this election for me was the clear elder abuse of someone with advanced dementia.
How do you fact check that?
Because almost everyone has a grandparent and has seen what it looks like. When push comes to shove and you lie about something everyone can see and has such a visceral reaction to, it's hard to move past it.
And even seeing clear as day for months it kept being denied. If you can't solve for that, there's no point.
But surely, the answer to 'data can be twisted' is not to remove the data? We have enough of a problem already with wilful misinformation.
Having the data is the first step towards a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, you have to resort to 'I feel ....' vs 'Based on this interpretation....'
I agree that the first kind of debate is already the dominant form today, however I think we can all agree that it's not been good for society overall.
I'm not saying this is right, but after every party change everything on the government websites change and links/data disappear. This is not limited to this one election, we just happen to notice it now because someone brought it up. Kinda like small chips on your car's windshield.
Notice how things like eg the federal reserve data does not disappear because it is protected by legislation. We should be asking not why is it disappearing, but why didn't we enshrine preservation of data in law?
False equivalence. This is not some cosmetic change. No administration has ever done a bulk removal of scientific data from all government websites solely because it conflicts with their policy goals.
This removal expresses not just a differing policy but a contempt for facts themselves.
When Bush took office all of the data about climate change disappeared from government websites. So this is not a post about false equivalence but a question why the previous party did not protect this specific data like other government agencies. I think the answer to that question is more nuanced than we may like to believe
Translation: the audience is so biased that they automatically reject facts in conflict with their biases.
Now you're just gaslighting. There is no "protection" that can prevent a new presidential administration from modifying government websites as they see fit.
> I think the answer to that question is more nuanced than we may like to believe
What is this, the X Files? Vague allusions like this don't make you look wise, they make you look like you're making stuff up to win internet points.
Ok this is getting a little too...hot for HN so just a heads up I will not reply after this one. You are absolutely right that there is no protection that can prevent administrations from modifying websites, otherwise websites would never get redesigned! However, there is a federal law that requires government agencies to retain records and different agencies have different requirements. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader on what could facilitate a records retention change within different agencies.
Data is not the ultimate fact check. Data can be skewed in infinite ways to represent whatever you want.
It's a big claim that "immigrants are eating the cats and dogs in specific town in Ohio" (note the plural).
What was readily checked is the source of such a claim (where did Trump get that from?) and what evidence was provided?
The trace back on that stupidity was unsubstantiated rumours triggered from a walked back local area posting and a slew of images that didn't come from the place in question, etc.
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.
Generally speaking, the responsibility of proof falls on party making the claim.
If I claim that you beat your wife, you are not expected to prove your innocence by showing that you don't do it. Proving a negative is difficult if not impossible in some cases. I have to show evidence to back up my claim.
As you surely know, the legal requirement to retain records does not extend to a requirement to maintain those records on a public web site. You are not arguing in good faith. Please stop muddying the waters with your buffoonish rhetoric. Thanks.
> 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".
> Data isn’t the ultimate fact check
But it is. Numbers can be twisted, but it they can easily be verified. Bias, bad sources and cherry picking can allow you to tell stories, but the data will allow you to verify those stories are indeed facts. Brain can’t really fact check things that don’t have any data.
I'm not sure I agree.
Even if the numbers are accurate, nearly any situation has a nearly infinite number of potential data points, and deciding which ones are relevant isn't as straightforward as people act like it is.
This is easy to see play out; you can look at the same stories being reported on both Fox News and MSNBC. Usually both sources' raw facts will be basically "correct" in the sense that they're not saying anything explicitly false, but there can be bias in determining which facts are actually useful or how they're categorized.
You can see how the reporting of the January 6th stuff varied between news outlets.
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.
>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.
Can data, or AI, tell me definitively who the MVP of the NFL was this season? Allen, Lamar, Saquon? The numbers certainly help when making comparisons, but they aren't the entire story, different people will come to different conclusions based on the exact same set of facts.
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.
We are fucking doomed.
We cannot even agree on the basics any more.
AI just regurgitates what it learned from non experts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who cares about the NFL? The issue here is that, and mark my words this almost this exact conversation will play out in the very near future:
Scientists: X number of people died of Covid in the US according to CDC data.
US Government: you can't prove that number. That data doesn't exist on government servers, the data in the copies is fake and can't be trusted.
Numbers alone will always lack context. You can absolutely verify where the numbers came from, weren't altered, and the math was done right. What you can't do is verify the numbers alone accurately portray what was happening in the real world, or what has happened in the real world since the snapshot of those numbers was taken.
Numbers are extremely useful, but numbers alone mean absolutely nothing.
This isn't a new problem unfortunately. Data and research during the pandemic response was being horribly mishandled, largely by the Democrats at the time.
This isn't a one party or one person problem. It sure seems like a problem more correlated with our government structure and/or climate, or authority structures themselves.
I think the problem there is the powers granted to government rather than how today's people decide to wield it.
Facts are never really decided, things can always change if we learn something new or just consider what we know from a different angle.
The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
Disagree. Numbers don't exist in a vacuum - they are collected, framed, and interpreted by humans with biases, agendas, and limitations. Verification isn't just about checking numbers; it's about scrutinizing methodologies, sources, and context. Data can affirm falsehoods when selectively presented or measured poorly. Brains aren't secondary to fact-checking; they are the ultimate tool for discerning whether data reflects reality or is merely a well-dressed distortion.
> Who cares about the NFL?
It's a simple example, that's why it's relevant. All the facts are available for anyone to see, to process, to analyze. There is no disputed or hidden data. And yet nobody, including any AI, can produce a "true" answer to the question, because it's reliant on one's personal biases.
Even with Covid, did a 92-year old die because of Covid, or because of a multitude of existing conditions that Covid triggered? Probably impossible to know medically, and AI isn't going to tell you definitively one way or the other.
You are proving my point. The CDC has faced several instances where its data was inaccurate or misrepresented:
- COVID-19 Death Overcount: In 2022, a coding error led the CDC to overcount 72,277 COVID-19 deaths across 26 states. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
- Maternal Mortality Data: Changes in death certificate reporting, particularly the addition of a pregnancy checkbox, resulted in overcounts of maternal deaths due to false positives. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/08/materna...
- Lead Exposure Report: A 2004 CDC report underestimated the impact of lead-contaminated water in Washington, D.C., leading to criticism over its data accuracy. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_Mortality_Weekly...
- Property System Data: An audit revealed that the CDC's property system data was neither accurate nor complete, with an estimated $29.2 million of property at risk of being lost or misplaced. Source: https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2016/centers-for-disease-con...
These instances highlight that data, even from reputable sources, can be subject to errors, misinterpretation, or manipulation, underscoring the need for critical analysis beyond face-value acceptance.
> The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
Sure, such is the nature of power. Thus has it always been.
What's novel is not that people in charge can broadcast their favored view of facts, but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts, which has to led to the current demoralization crisis: in the presence of conflicting authorities, no one believes any facts anymore.
Of course, some of the "facts" being broadcast are not, in fact, facts. The problem is that the flood of misinformation is so large, the force of echo chambers so strong, and the cynicism of consumers so great, that it is infeasible to produce persuasive evidence sufficient to make the truth more appealing than lies.
> 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.
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.
> but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts
Some blame, if not a majority, belongs on whoever actually hears those views and facts though. Knowing someone's intent is extremely hard, it really shouldn't matter whether they intend to mislead or believe what they are saying. Just because someone shares what they may honestly believe to be a fact doesn't mean we have to take it as fact.
We lack critical thinking and somehow landed in a spot where we're highly skeptical of anyone in charge but completely believe what a random person writes online. It honestly doesn't matter what facts are being shared or whether they are accurate, without critical thinking and the ability to discern for ourselves how could this ever play out well?
> 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.
> Some blame, if not a majority, belongs on whoever actually hears those views and facts though. Knowing someone's intent is extremely hard, it really shouldn't matter whether they intend to mislead or believe what they are saying. Just because someone shares what they may honestly believe to be a fact doesn't mean we have to take it as fact.
I don't think that casting blame on individuals here is productive. I agree, lack of critical thinking skills is a major factor. Who is responsible for ensuring that a plurality of the population of a democracy learn critical thinking? We've gotten by without critical thinking for so long because we mostly don't need it: when you get all your news from Walter Cronkite, what good could come of further analysis?
So it's not an individual failure, but a societal one. Susceptibility to misinformation is like a plague, or a meteor strike, or some other natural catastrophe that we just haven't prepared for. Maybe we'll find a solution; maybe we won't, and the future of humanity belongs to those with the boldness to lie most effectively.
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?
> 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.
It's not relevant because the person who is MVP in a sport is an opinion. Or, to put it more bluntly, it's a marketing scheme to keep people talking about it. There's no correct answer when it comes to opinions.
If the question was who scored the most points in the year, that can be answered factually by data.
If the NFL was deleting all their data at the end of the season with the goal of creating arguments and sowing disinformation, that would be a more relevant example.
> 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"
I’m sorry, I’m no fan of the dems but if you think Trump isn’t above and beyond when it comes to lying and twisting truth you’re either a shill or just ignorant
True, though in order for brains to do that at all, they need data to analyze. Data is a necessary prerequisite for trying to understand things at all. Removing said data means there is not even the chance to achieve understanding or change. Which is kinda the point.
Barring said data being fabricated, deleting data seems to be a sign of bad faith.
Similarly, everyone feels like a camera captures truth except the people who operate cameras for a living.
True, numbers alone mean nothing. And the surrounding context alone also doesnt paint a sufficient story. You need both, for without both you can't be effective. Unless said data/context is fabricated, trying to suppress either seems like a clear case of acting in bad faith.
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.
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.
Lol - "cause of death" is often an opinion as well. Or no opinion at all - "natural causes."
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.
One will have a strong tendency to leave the easily challanged out.
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.
> 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
In case it helps you to have someone chime in besides the person you're arguing with, "You are not arguing in good faith" applies a lot more to "stop muddying the waters with your buffoonish rhetoric" and "What is this, the X Files? Vague allusions like this don't make you look wise" than to anything the person you're arguing with said. I don't know the answer to the point you're arguing and I can't tell who's right from this thread either (neither side posts sources or disproves the other side's central claim, from my point of view), but this isn't how to go about it
There not being another pandemic during the information age to compare with, it's hard to say whether The Democrats mishandled it or not. Perhaps one could look at aspects where there was consensus within at least one of the opposing parties about what should happen (before the outcome of any path could be known) and compare that against hindsight. If you have specific examples where others clearly knew better than the ruling party, that would be relevant to consider if it's chance or a pattern, but otherwise it feels like the age-old opposing of the current ruling force
I do feel like there is a limit to how biased a source can be when it tries to be based in evidence, though. Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, the climate has warmed enough that you can dump weather records into a spreadsheet and see the effect without needing to measure CO2 at all. That COVID causes disease and a warming climate causes more extreme weather is also rather easy to corroborate. Accepting the obvious is already a good starting point for deciding whether climate policy XYZ is good or not (combined with other basic facts and every party's proposals), but it seems to me that the current striving for unbiasedness leads to giving lunatics equal air time. Any amount of fact checking would at least remove this level of misinformedness
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.
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.
> You guys just always come back and cast doubt
If that's your attitude, maybe you're the one with the preconvieved biases.
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.
I strongly disagree.
When someone is wrong, you can correct them. When someone is lying, i.e. knowingly spreading falsehood in an effort to manipulate an audience, it's vitally important to call them out on it. People need to recognize who is using misinformation as a weapon. The points of highlighted are manipulative rhetorical techniques, not merely bad arguments. These people need to be identified and shunned, especially in a place as committed to dialogue as HN.
Sorry you don't like my phrasing. What method would you suggest to call alarm to a dishonest actor in a public space?
Oh there are societal issues here as well, no argument there. They all roll down hill from individuals' choices though.
Society didn't force Walter Cronkite on us. People chose to listen to him and a small number of other trusted sources, and they began choosing to take what was said by those sources at face value. I'm not even saying that was a bad thing or wrong, at the time news did seem to be reported in better faith.
We choose our sources though, and we choose how deeply to consider what they say. I don't see how this could have started as a societal issue rather than individual choice first.
> Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers,
But yet people believe these things, and will believe a source that supports them. What's obvious to you is not obvious to others.
> largely by the Democrats at the time.
Who was president in 2020?
> 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?
> I don't see how this could have started as a societal issue rather than individual choice first.
really? I'd say it's clearly a matter of education. Critical thinking and media analysis just isn't part of American public schooling. If anything, people are taught to believe authority figures.
Regardless of how it "started", blaming the individual isn't helpful, because that suggests there's nothing to be done. "Well," you say, "folks made a bad decision, c'est la vie." Instead, we should be looking for solutions to media illiteracy, and that solution is certainly social in nature.
> 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.
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?
Consider your own ignorance. It is impossible to be certain of anything because of unknown unknowns. You merely assume they are lying, but you could never prove that.
A righteous condemnation with no proof and all feelings is exactly the soil the grows facism.
> Consider your own ignorance. It is impossible to be certain of anything because of unknown unknowns. You merely assume they are lying, but you could never prove that.
Good point. In fact, I can't even prove that America exists. I can't prove that you're real person, or that I'm typing on a computer, or that I even exist. My own eyes could be deceiving me. I am condemned to a universe full of impenetrable doubt.
I should probably just ignore reason and logic, and instead spend my days shivering and alone, unable to interact with a world where so much is forever unknowable.
Of course, you can't prove that I can't prove that grepfru_it is lying, so really it would be you who should consider your own ignorance. I assume that a sage like yourself has already internalized your own advice and that you strictly avoid engaging in news or debate, since all externalities are unproveable. Right?
Sounds like we just have a very different view the relative merits of individual vs collective (or societal) approaches.
I very much shy away from control, and that generally means trusting the individual to generally do what is best or at a minimum accept that the result of that will at least be more resilient than the result of a collectivist or top-down approach. Both have risks for sure and there are absolutely times where individualism are a bad idea in my opinion, this just doesn't meet that bar for me.
Since we're talking about the functioning of democracy, which necessarily requires a plurality of people, I don't see how anything other than group- or society-level action could possibly make any difference.
You're not an American, so maybe you aren't aware how widespread conspiracy theories are in the US and how much they influence the public discourse. As a trivial example, the American Senate is currently interviewing the nominee for the head of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, CDC, and FDA, among other agencies.
The nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been very outspoken in his opinions, some of which are:
Wi-Fi causes cancer and "leaky brain"
Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender
Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings
AIDS is not be caused by HIV
the Covid is designed to target white and black people but not Ashkenazi Jews
This nominee will likely be approved. These opinions are shared by a significant body of people who voted for the president who nominated him.
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).
In theory, yes. But we're more approaching philosophy with Laplace's demon at this point.
A more realistic example: we can theoretically predict the weather weeks in advance. In reality, it's pointless because there so much data needed to collect for that, and so many events to away the weather, that's its impractical past a few days in the future.
No, cause of death is objective. Whether or not we have the data to figure out the truth doesn't deny the truth.
That's the point of data. To get us closer to the truth. Gravity will keep making you cling to the earth no matter your opinion. Even though as we speak we are still trying to develop models to properly understand the particles or forces behind gravity.
Meanwhile Biden has one bad day and everyone's saying "he's too old". While voting in the oldest president in history months later.
You can fact check it. No one wants to for whatever reason.
>What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.
True. It's a good thing media doesn't collect data on that case. Just interprets it to various levels of accuracy. Those who want a better interpretation can read the data itself and learn the mechanics behind it.
Many of us here are engineers. Similar to our work, databcollected by scientists will eventually get to "good enough" in that interpretations are nearly indistinguishable from the truth. We don't need to understand every atom in the atmosphere to predict rain coming soon, for example. We don't need to do a full body scan to see visible breast cancer lumps.
Okay? Then you disprove their claims and their bad sources. If they don't want to understand that, there's nothing to do. They are not a reasonable audience to debate with logos at that point.
Them denying nature's truth doesn't allieve them from nature's forces.
To give a much undeserved BOTD: I don't think he'll be approved because people really believe nor even trust RFO Jr. He will be approve to upkeep the status quo. A status quo to appeal to their voter base or to appeal to Trump or something like that.
Almost nothing on the RFO appointment is rooted in facts.
> He will be approve to upkeep the status quo. A status quo to appeal to their voter base or to appeal to Trump or something like that.
No, RFKJr will be approved because he was nominated by Donald Trump and Donald Trump has a total control of the Republican Party. That's all there is to it.
I agree with you, but that wasn't my point. The post I replied to simply said the answer is more data. Without any more context about what kind of answer it is or how it should be used, it seemed important to me to remind whoever passes by that data alone does not make truth and its always worth keeping in mind that what we "know" today may be considered false tomorrow.
What you're talking about is more a question of scape, impact, and how accurate a prediction really needs to be. Of course we don't need to measure every atom to predict the weather - weather predictions are wrong all the time and rarely is that more than an inconvenience.
I don't think it's that blatant. Even R's have limits when Gaetz got rejected. I don't think it's as rank and tow as implied.
But yes, a lot of policy for R's will ba passed. We'll see how much insanity they Will tolerate when it comes to Trump destroying the economy. Rich people kinda need that.
Naturally, garbage in, garbage out. Anyone who's worked any job should under stand that. And no data is ever perfect when measuring nature.
But I'm giving a best faith interpretation that the ones collecting the data are competent and have goals on what the data is collected for. We have too much talent flowing to assume the worst. We'll see how the next 4 years challenges my assumptions, though.
>What you're talking about is more a question of scape, impact, and how accurate a prediction really needs to be
Yes. That goal of data is to approximate the truth. More (good) data helps those who can interpret it to make better guesses. So the base truth of "we need more data then" is true. With a good faith interpretation.
Oh we were a very individualistic nation for much of our history. That does come and go over the years, and like anything it has pros and cons, but it can be done.
If group or societal solutions are the only viable option we might as well cut to the chase and go full socialist. I don't mean that derogatorily, if collectivism is the only solution when individual choices inevitably lead to bad outcomes why bother trying individual at all?
The challenge with individuals making choices that ultimately move in us a better direction is fear. That is really embracing uncertainty and trusting the average person to do what they think is best or "right." Its my opinion that we should absolutely embrace that uncertainty and trust people, but that doesn't land well for most people today.
A group or collectivist solution sounds much safer. As long as we have a good plan and trustworthy people in charge, we just need to empower them to do what they know we need. That can run into just as many, and just as dangerous, end points as an individualist model.
Both are risky. Both can work, and both can go horribly wrong. I just prefer the one where I get to trust myself and everyone around me to think for themselves and do what they think is best. I also personally prefer the bad result of reaping what we sow rather than it going wrong because the well intended leader was wrong or the ill intended leader was right (I.e. got what the evil end they wanted).
Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
Go watch some flat earther videos on YouTube. Lots of people are very committed to a particular conclusion and have developed elaborate processes for disregarding evidence that would persuade a rational person.
The US political system right now is built on believing easily disprovable lies. Unfortunately, their bad choices affect everyone.
I'm talking about public education. I don't know what you're on about.
This whole chain was you pushing back on the relative merit or feasibility of an individualist approach to this problem. You mentioned education very briefly a few posts up but that didn't seem to be the main point of that comment and definitely not of this back and forth.
Oh he is bad about it, don't get me wrong. That doesn't excuse other politicians though, and attempting to weigh and compare the relative lying and truth twisting seems like an extremely difficult thing to do.
Bush Jr blatantly lied to the country and rallied us around a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people minimum. How do we weigh that with Trumps ridiculous lies?
Nope, it was not. But 2020 is when it was first addressed by the US federal government (through various means including the CARES Act), and the US federal government was run by one Donald Trump. So it seems disingenuous of you to place the blame specifically on Democrats without citing what the Democrats did wrong but Donald Trump did right.
Okay, but… if there’s no feasible individual solution, it really undercuts your argument here.
>Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
No I do not:
>They are not a reasonable audience to debate with logos at that point.
but if people insist on arguing, that's your approach.
I just don't debate on Youtube. The people who matter aren't there anyway. Those people have to go through a slower process but one that doesn't care about the feelings of youtube comments complaining about Hilary emails (iroinc, isn't it?)
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.
> The people who matter aren't there anyway.
The people who matter are the ones who vote.
We're past voting. The people who matter now are those who can stop the country from falling apart.
But sure, if anyone feels they can change minds in 2 years before midterm, go for it. That is not where I am useful.
During covid links to the CDC that could be used by vaccine skeptics were flagged on Facebook. There was an actual problem with the fact-checking and it was often judged by who benefited from the information rather than the truth behind the information.
> 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.
Are they so widespread because of this "both parties/sides' views need to be represented" perhaps? And is that why they influence discourse so much, because they have to be brought up again and again?
Of course, you're right that I'm not an American, it may be that I'm missing something that would have been clear to me. Not meaning to pretend to know it all, just hoping that an outside perspective (from a place where, from my POV, it works better even if far from perfect) might be helpful
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.
No, it wasn't.
> Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
I've got two data points to offer!
For one, some research from last year showed that
> Over three rounds of back-and-forth interaction, [a tuned version of GPT-4 Turbo], also known as DebunkBot, was able to significantly reduce individuals’ beliefs in the particular theory the believer articulated, as well as lessen their conspiratorial mindset more generally — a result that proved durable for at least two months.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-c...
It's not like the chatbot gave them a beating or something, so it must be appeals to reason and evidence that did something? At least, that's my takeaway
Second data point is an anecdote. I somehow ended up on this flat earther youtube video where they had gotten their viewers to fund them an expedition to the south pole (wtf is a south pole if the earth is flat? Where did they fly out to? Idk, they seemed to have an alternative hypothesis in case the earth really was flat, such that this "experiment" mattered) to, and I shit you not, observe that the sun does not set during summer. Why they didn't just ask someone living beyond the (ant)arctic circle, I don't know, but so they're stood there watching the sun, waiting for it to set. It didn't, and after another glance at a wristwatch that it really is midnight, they now said they believed that the earth is in fact round because their alternative hypothesis had been disproven
Whether many of the viewers on youtube believed it, I have no idea. Also conspicuously missing from the video was any sort of remark hinting at "gee, what everyone outside of our little community said turned out to be right, I wonder if maybe this could mean that there isn't some big conspiracy going on", so perhaps they'll go on to believe the next useless thing now and it was all for naught? I'm not deep enough into conspiracy theory, but it does seem to me that: if you get them to work it all out (whatever that means for them) to a point where there is an experiment you can sensibly do, or evidence they can obtain or so, they'll actually be swayed if given that evidence. Or at least some of them are. (Or maybe these are just really good actors and getting a free holiday to the most exclusive continent by becoming famous was their long con all along, who's to say, but I'm inclined to apply occam's and hanlon's razors.)
> 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
<< 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...