We're all definitely in an echo chamber. Hacker News is an echo chamber. So is Reddit, FB, Twitter, etc.
This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorrected. All of our apps are just too personalized and they don't work hard enough to tell us what we should know, as opposed to what we want to know.
HN is an echo chamber when it comes to tech choices, but it's absolutely not when it comes to politics. I've seen many pro-Trump supporters in the ranks here, which is very surprising given the demographic.
Watching the front page through the historical lens of hckrnews.com was very insightful. By default, hckrnews shows articles which have made it onto the front page for at least a little bit of time. Then it would continue to display those, highlighting them in HN orange if they were still on the front page, or turning them black when they fell off (even marking them as dead with a faint grey font when appropriate).
Pro Trump articles (and anti Clinton) would appear on in the sea of other articles, but they were always black or grey within a minute or two of their appearance. Pro Clinton articles were about 50/50 throughout the day, some staying, some being voted off.
I attribute a lot of the lost articles to the feeling of "keep HN clear of politics", and a lot more to fringe/fanatical news sites making being flagged, but the overall trend of preferring Clinton to Trump was definitely visible. Bernie Sanders articles were ones which stayed up even longer than the others combined.
So, long story short, yeah, HN is still quite the political echo chamber. It's understandable: many of us share both general job descriptions and life goals; I'd hazard a guess that most even share an age group and fall within a handful of ethnicities.
It is fascinating the extent to which smart-ish coastal city liberals cannot conceive of an intelligent or even highly intelligent Trump voter. There are plenty of them.
When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't wanna hear it!"
But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.
I think the difference with this site is that enough of us recognize that the world isn't black or white, but grey. It seems like most sites don't have the majority of people that think like that.
It has everything to do with human behavior. It takes energy and induces cognitive load to interact with 'the other' - other people, other view points, etc. So people group up by like interests. Technology just makes it possible to highly concentrate.
I agree, but I think this goes beyond technology at this point. I hypothesize that we are self-segregating as a nation into Rural and Urban tribes and this is going to cause a lot of pain for half the country and further erode the trust in our institutions. I think we are on a dark path, not because a Republican won, but because we can't effectively govern by coming together and being nuanced and compromising.
Perhaps a way forward is instead much greater personalization?
Yes, reddit, HN, and the NYT, are echo chambers. But is that the problem, or the eternal-Septemeber, clueless reporting, low-signal high-noise level of the echos?
Is the problem that the LA Times publishes a propaganda piece on Copyright Office staffing? Or that it's so very hard to find high-quality commentary? With which, if you cared to, you could to discredit the dreck? Is the enormous role that groupthink plays in Washington the problem, or that even when people wish to break out of it on some topic, the information infrastructure doesn't exist to support them?
Imaging an HN which, instead of pretending its quality hadn't declined over the years, was instead trying to technically address the decline. What might be done?
Well, why couldn't a high-quality discussion community exist embedded in a reddit? A necessary condition is "we don't see the dreck". Personalization. Everyone has control of what the site looks like to them. So you can be fine with reddit-style puns on topic A, but only see insightful expertise on topic B. And I can make the opposite choice. On Tuesdays.
A core idea of machine-learning-based human-computer-hybrid systems, is that the system learns about the people at the same time that the people help the system execute the process. The candy machine bribing CS undergraduates to grade CS 101 exams, learns both about the answers being graded, and about how much to trust different people's grading of different subjects.
And the system can recognize when it needs advice. "This clearly goes in bucket M, and this in bucket N, but hmm... I'm not sure where to put this one. Hey, statistically well-executed sample of people, which bucket?".
Perhaps it's overly optimistic to think that people might choose to not live in mind ghettos if given the choice. But we won't have a choice until we get better at cultivating quality. Instead of chance "Oh, look over there, by the petunias! A thoughtful thread! Oh, no, it's dead now".
There are now a multitude of echo chambers, you could easily argue that each user has his own personalized bubble. What is different from before social and personalized media is that there is (much) less common experience anymore, no dominant common denominator like a major newspaper.
What Zuckerberg should point out is that – in a way – this is detrimental to what his alleged aim with FB is: to connect people. I'm not sure where this will lead us to. Since I started using FB more intensively I actually feel more disconnected from people than ever.
Is social media really more of an echo chamber than traditional newspapers/TV stations?
* Most of the liberal stuff in my FB/Twitter feeds are from NYT or Washington Post
* Back in the day, consumers of traditional media probably zoned out of TV bits/skimmed over newspaper articles that they didn't agree with
The whole "echo chamber" thing seems like a meme to me. "In the olden days, we used to go to ye olde coffee store and have intellectual conversations with randos with different political beliefs."
Yup. But at a more core level, the real problem is that what we want to know isn't what we should know. The two ideally would be equivalent. The solution for this problem is personal wisdom, and hopefully the shock that people are feeling regarding this election's results will produce a bit of wisdom for us all. :)
> On Facebook, a Trump victory was likely, or a Clinton win was all but assured.
And if you were watching the election coverage the night of you could very discernibly see the change in the commentators narrative from "yay! Clinton!" to the shock of "Wait, Trump?" to "Those dirty rednecks! (er ... uneducated white folk)" as their reality was changing before them.
I watched CNN and it was so painful to watch them try to keep it exciting. They didn't want to call Florida for so long even after it became statically impossible for Clinton to make up the difference.
The sense I got is the sooner the conclusion is reached, the sooner people stop watching.
Tom Brokaw was especially insulting to the half of the country that voted for Trump. After several comments about uneducated rednecks causing the downfall of our nation, he summed it up this way:
"This election was much more about ‘Duck Dynasty’ than ‘Saturday Night Live’."
That Trump won in large part due to disproportionate support from voters without a college degree is a plain fact worth being reported. Reading insult into it is discretionary.
I think the issue is more with the false equivalency presented by some journalists. A college degree or lack there of, does not automatically denote greater or lesser intelligence.
It's not designated as a measure of intelligence, instead as a level of education, which comes along with correlations to profession, income level, religious identification (non-college educated folks are more likely to identify as evangelical), etc. etc.
Donald Trump - a serial philanderer that has been married three times - hardly had any appeal to evangelicals. The reality is that a huge chunk of votes for Trump were anti-Hillary votes, not pro-Trump votes. You don't have to be an uneducated redneck, as Brokaw and other liberals believe, to have serious problems with Hillary Clinton.
I live in Nevada - a "battleground state" - and I saw almost no pro-Hillary commercials or campaign flyers. Rather, she ran almost entirely on an anti-Trump platform. She didn't think anyone wanted to know her stances on the issues. Running that kind of campaign is dangerous when your own likability is a serious issue.
I agree with you, although the original point was that there were individuals in the media who appeared to suggest not having a college education == unintelligent.
I don't have a college degree, so I agree. But I have enough knowledge of history to know that giving power to a loud, xenophobic demagogue is worse than giving it to a career politician who's trying to preserve the status quo. And journalists are concerned to see how many people don't.
The problem with this is it's begging the question: it postulates that the status quo she would preserve is at least bearable for everyone. For a lot of people in the US that is simply not the case. Trump actually broke an American political taboo and correctly and vocally identified one factor that is causing these people's miseries: neoliberal globalisation. This is the key factor in his success, he made an issue of a thing that must not be questioned if the ruling class is to peacefully remain ruling (this, not his bigotry and whatnot, is the reason he was so unanimously opposed by the elite — where are all these people when minorities are being literally killed and savagely harassed by the state right now?). Democrats arrogantly refused to acknowledge this problem, and even made sure it was swept under the rug (the case with Sanders). The people recognized this, and now you have the result. Those who accepted that voting is the way to change things and who were persuaded that a third party vote was a waste (both points a cornerstone of mainstream American political ideology) had no other choice but to vote for Trump. The more realistic ones (in my opinion) simply refused to take part in the charade and didn't vote at all thereby refusing to give the corrupt system legitimacy. That Trump has the wrong answers to correct problems is somewhat beside the point when he's the only one left to even acknowledge the problems if you a) have the problem, b) believe one should vote, and c) vote for one of the two major tickets.
For a lot of innocent people outside the US, ironically for a lot of Muslims, HRC's status quo was literally lethal. As someone outside the US, who finds Trump's views unacceptable, and is in Europe, and in no direct danger of US induced violence, I can tell you this: he was not the candidate who enjoyed practically unanimous support of the US industry of death (the so called defense industry), and the whole state military and political neocon apparatus, all the while announcing to try real hard to get in an open confrontation with the other nuclear superpower. In that regard, I am somewhat relieved, and despite what the media might be telling you, a lot of other people are.
So you're saying that half the country are racist rednecks (as Brokaw did). Got it. What you and Tom Brokaw are effectively saying is that one had to have been an idiot to either withhold a vote from or vote against Hillary, despite literally hundreds of perfectly valid reasons to do so.
You replied to a comment about how Tom Brokaw literally said on national TV that Trump voters were uneducated racist rednecks that watch Duck Dynasty. In that reply, you defended his position. That's where I'm getting it from.
Was there more to his quote than what you wrote above?
I've seen both shows, and it seems to me like he's saying this election was more about rural/middle America that it was about urban/coastal America, just based on the typical viewers of the shows.
To me, being from a rural area doesn't mean you're racist, or uneducated - even if you don't have a degree, there are plenty of other ways to learn, and also plenty of useful things to learn that aren't taught in any college.
But - I'm Canada, not the U.S., so although I get a ton of exposure to U.S. media up here, it's definitely possible I'm lacking some important bits of context that would help me understand better.
Well, as a liberal, educated white chick who lives in an urban area, if I said someone was more into Duck Dynasty than SNL, it would absolutely be an insult. It would imply they are hick rednecks, and in a bad way.
Did he actually call them rednecks? Do you have a link to that? That sounds like an unprofessional thing for a journalist to say. Level of education is a straightforward fact in the makeup of Trump's voters, and that his views are racist is demonstrable. But if Brokaw really used a slur, he shouldn't have.
The article links to the WSJ "Blue feed, red feed" page, which is very interesting. It shows two different Facebook feeds side-by-side for various topics and makes it clear just how much bias (in either direction) is in the feed. In general I think the Internet has reduced the "filter bubble", but these Facebook feeds, wow, that's a lot more filtering than I would have expected.
Exactly! Up until this week, presidents had to be... well, presidential. I'm truly astonished that a demographic who is normally very outraged at moral missteps voted this man into office.
> To make matters worse, social media is a poor platform for getting people to understand opposing views. Another Pew study found that only 20 percent of users modified their stance on a social or political issue because of what they saw on social media. ...
OK, but did people "modify their stance on a social or political issue" due to newspapers? TV? Or did they just pay attention to things that reinforced their existing biases?
There may be a good criticism of FB, but this isn't it. And a scientific study (not sure what that would look like, but whatever) might well show the opposite.
A popular uprising against Silicon Valley is coming. Already I hear it from people in my life, all over the country.
They blame social media for allowing the Trump memes to warp people's opinion. They're starting to put the pieces together on unemployment and blame tech automation for taking jobs and not offering a replacement, especially in the heartland. They're angry with Silicon Valley execs for not putting up any visible fight against Trump. They're starting to see how clustering all the best paying jobs in major cities leaves people outside of the bubble desperate, seeing desperate solutions. A tidal wave of rage against the election is about to be directed towards the tech industry, it's just a matter of time.
And sure, Facebook and Twitter played a part in this information aspect certainly. But companies like Salesforce that automate people out of work, these companies have zero accountability for the people who get laid off when eliminated with CRM workflows for example. There's no framework for understanding the consequences of who you eliminate when you automate. How are these people supposed to feed their families when you've automated them out of work?
As a tech worker, I've been responsible for eliminating far more American jobs, many in the heartland, than any Mexican immigrant ever has. What have I done to deal with the consequences of that? Many, many people have been laid off because of the things I've built in the last 15 years. I ignored them, told myself they weren't valuable anyhow. We owe these people solutions for basic income, we owe them more opportunities for jobs out in the red states, the red counties of america. We created this. All of it.
I agree this is likely. You know, it's a funny sort of thing - people work in the left-coast SV bubble-world making friendly-looking social media applications and suddenly they find they're being looked at by the Old Media crowd like they're a bunch of weapons dealers. I saw a surprisingly self-aware look at this the other day: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/04/political-me...
In short, former cool-kid Adbusters "meme warrior", accustomed to culture-jamming the elitist logics of "late capitalism", finds himself alarmingly surrounded by the shadowy Meme Magicians of Esoteric Kekism. Meanwhile the Hillary-friendly corporate media looks on, powerless to sink Trump with criticism, but equally unable to stop themselves from giving him free publicity. Suddenly, he finds the corporate mass media to be a "protective membrane between the public and overly toxic ideas."
How the turntables, as they say.
I think what's really interesting is the difficulty of discerning how effective this social media meme politics actually is, or to systematize its internal structure. This isn't a TV ad campaign or a stump speech, it's a distributed, continuous cacophony. So how can you tell whether it's what's boosting the campaign, or whether it's just an epiphenomenon of an already-successful campaign? This makes social media campaigning seem very threatening - when you can't tell how it works, who knows how powerful it might really be?
So true too. A long long time ago I was actually involved with Adbusters.. later on, in between stints of automating knowledge workers out of existence, I worked to help engineer some of the viral marketing techniques that were weaponized in this election. After Brexit, I went completely insane from knowing what would happen this week. There was no way to stop it.
The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically underestimates the power of viral manipulation. People believe that they have the power to make their own choices, that they have their own thoughts. But the truth is, they really don't. At all. Manipulating a tribe of humans to your cause is all just a matter of effort and patience. My worldview is shaped by the information I have. I just happen to spend a lot of time consuming complex information. Most people don't have that luxury. So they're completely vulnerable. Social media is powerful beyond the capabilities that I think anyone ever envisioned. And it's begun to take on a new life of it's own.
I tend to think that the effectiveness of advertisement and memery really depend on the context. When it comes to something where a choice has direct effects and costs - when buying a plane ticket or an appliance, for example - there is a strong incentive to discern true information and disregard advertising fluff. This is because one's own choice is the determining factor, and a poor choice has clear consequences. But in politics? A single vote is astronomically unlikely to influence anything - so voting is evaluated socially, expressively. Its benefits and costs are what it does for one's self-image, or group membership, or whatever. So there's not much incentive, for nearly everybody, to sort the real from the imaginary when considering politics. That's the kind of environment in which meme magic flourishes, because believing does make it real - real enough for its purposes. This also means that it's nigh-impossible to design or predict success in this sort of information distribution. When your content is made real or unreal by raw imagination and social dynamics, most of it is, I think, a case of people succeeding accidentally and claiming later that that's what they meant to do all along. So it can be powerful - but is almost impossible to control in an organized way.
Well, it's not just tech; it's any large corporation that gets coverage. Some people can only hear "we're making the world better" so much when by all appearances they are just making their own world better. I know it's not a fair assumption to make, but look at what gets reported (billion dollar companies that produce nothing with no profits, high level executives greatly rewarded for failure, and so on) versus the unknown companies that actually are trying to make things better with no coverage.
Certainly. But this is about information. There are a lot of people who increasingly understand the dynamics of how the information economy affects popular opinion, how it affects the workforce, how it has disrupted work and yet done nothing to solve the problems that came with the consequences of that disruption.
And many on the left outside of the valley bubble really thought that a boom in the left-leaning Bay Area meant that there were powerful people there who had their backs in all of this. They feel very hurt that tech seemed to sit on the sidelines through the election, and in some regards pretty much enabled and profited off the mass-dissemination of misinformation.
So it's not just about corporate greed this time. It's about information, disruption, workforce automation, and the responsibilities that come from building and wielding powerful information tools.
What an absurd article. Facebook is worldwide but somehow the US only elections popped it's bubble? Not to mention this was a 50/50 opinion split.. not exactly earth shattering.
That also happened for Brexit before.
And there are more western elections to come in the coming months (Italy, France) where this is likely to be a factor.
The reality is that not everyone wants open boarders and free trade and rights for all. Some.. actually about half of the people seem to reject this for some reason.
That's the perception tilt that doesn't seem to be reflected in the media
"actually about half of the people seem to reject this for some reason." that was probably a small portion of those peoples views. This election is a lot of things, but they didn't seem to really care about the candidate himself. It's very bewildering that nothing negative seems to have affected their view of the man. He had as many votes as McCain in 2008 and a bit less than Romney in 2012. So he practically 0 republican votes (give or take some shifts) but didn't add any either.
I am sorry if this does not fit with your world view. In my environment facebook is some social media platform, with a few uplifting news but mostly irrelevant personal stuff. As anyone i am "friends" with way to many people without a specific genre, so i dont think my feed is special in that regard.
There is barely political or relevant stuff on my feed, and as said i never heard anyone say "did you read _that_ on facebook?" when talking about something in the news.
If that helps you: my circle is mostly from Austria and Switzerland
As mention, but i am glad to do it again. I AM NOT AMERICAN
Edit:// To further clearify: Nether are any of my facebook friends, nether have i ever been there or plan to. I have no relation with the U.S. i was just making the point that Facebook might simply is not the right place to find information.
Honestly, i can imagine the UK beeing not much different.
Around here Facebook lost its appeal some time ago and mutated to a semi relevant social network. People (especially teens) use a lot Whatsapp & Snapchat now. We mostly stopped having requests for facebook marketing campaigns as well since a few years. And businesses slowly stopped to maintain their Facebook sites.
Please dont project your english environment into my german bubble. Thanks
When you see a political post do you tend to interact with it? Do you interact more with personal uplifting stories? Your feed tends to contain the sort of things you interact with to the exclusion of the sort of things you don't.
You are probably in a Facebook bubble without even realising it...
No. I dont do anything on facebook at all, i just happen to scroll through my feed every other week when i just went online to contact one of the few people that i cant reach otherwise.
I really see where you are going, and i see that we all are in our personal Facebook bubble. But my point stands that Facebook simply does not have the same relevance at here that it seems to have in the U.S. People here read news, many even young, read actual newspapers. There is not so much place for facebook in a system that already works.
And before someone asks, yes our newspapers are heavily favoring too. But thats not the point.
I dont do anything on facebook at all, i just happen to scroll through my feed every other week when i just went online to contact one of the few people that i cant reach otherwise.
Well there you go again: at last count 1.26 billion people check Facebook daily, and they're not all American. The figures in German speaking countries are huge too, your personal usage is simply not very representative of most people's.
As an American and former FB user I must admit that before I gave it up entirely, it was my primary channel for finding news. This is still true of many of my friends and, I suspect, no small number of Americans.
this is really strange to me honestly. From what i can tell (i avoid facebook as much as possbile) "News" on my feed are mostly just uplifting news style. Everything relevant and political has no place on facebook within my environment. And i dont consider myself sheltered.
Typically how it went for me was I would see an emotionally charged headline in my feed from a website or blog with a palpable agenda, and then I would seek out a couple other, more fact-based articles covering the same story. But what I found was that initial "encounter" still set the tone for me, and also served as the prime metric of my engagement with Facebook. So its algorithms learned pretty quickly that I "liked" stories like that, and that drew more people of like mind, but whom I didn't really talk to face-to-face, into my circle.
Not sure how characteristic that is for folks, but that's how I found myself consuming news eventually, and a big part of why I quit it.
Tons of people consider FB their primary news source, mostly because it serves as a "reasonable" aggregator. The problem is, of course, that it isn't actually reasonable.
Not just the left and right's echo-chambers, but those who attempt to actually listen to reality got it wrong, too: FiveThirtyEight for example has been using proven, reality-based statistics for a while and should have predicted this result. (As it was, Silver was lambasted for being too generous on Trump's chances.) At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters.
Huffington Post was one of Nate Silver's largest critics because his math disagreed with their political desires. This graphic [1] - laughably claiming to be scientific - was on their home page on Tuesday afternoon. 538 had Trump at about 28% at the exact moment I took this screenshot, and HuffPo's "scientists" had him at 1.7%. If anyone wonders whether HuffPo and its ilk are "biased but reliable," wonder no more. They're just biased.
No, the idea of being persecuted for what you believe and then in turn, lying in public about it is not a new idea.
It doesn't need a Wikipedia article nor a term for it. It has been around since the beginning of time.
What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
That's what you get when you behave that way. When people are threatened when they speak out, they just wont speak in public, but it doesn't change what they believe. Our society is worse off for silencing their voices.
No, the idea of being persecuted for what you believe and then in turn, lying in public about it is not a new idea.
However, formalizing the concept this way allowed the further step of the preference cascade, and that, while also not exactly new in practice, was a more enlightening concept.
> What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
Very true unfortunately. That's not all of HN of course. Many of us supported Thiel and his ideas, or else thought it was worth having an opposing voice around even if they disagreed with it.
I wrote an essay on Peter Thiel's ideas and (partly about) how the Media misunderstood him here:
It was composed from a chain of HN comments before the election went to Trump, so I can credibly state that I saw a media malfunction with reality on the cards.
I was watching his press conference from a few days ago at the National Press Club event, and I really did Laugh Out Loud when he said (paraphrasing), "You know, this is pretty much the first time I'm not making a contrarian stance, I mean literally how can I be a contrarian when half the population agree with me, and for this I get the flak? Unbelievable!".
Together with the investment in Seasteading, this has been incredibly high impact for comparatively minor sums of money. Thiel has managed managed to make himself the only venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who appeals to the majority of the working class. That is power. He'll be reaping dividends from that for the rest of his life.
This is because many serious inventions and innovations were created by the working class, not the middle class as they appear to think today. In fact historically (and I would argue currently too) the middle classes and elites looked down on entrepreneurship. Entreprenurship is seen as being unprofessional. Most engineering was created by working class with the aristocrats holding up the exploration of science. The water mills, the steam engines, these were not created by the kind of people who studied at universities. We no longer understand our own past.
This may sound like an attempt at provocation, but I swear it is not. I really do think many of the best innovators and inventors have a working class way of looking at the world.
Let us take something that isn't directly in Silicon Valley's ballpark. Tiny Houses.
All the non-cosmetic innovations I've seen in Tiny Houses have been created by working class people.
The majority of Tiny Houses are created by young aspirational middle class or those who want to retire without worrying. It is especially gratifying to see many young women picking up the hammer to forge something for themselves. I saw one who built a VOC-free house recently and that is impressive if you know anything about building.
Despite this, the only major differences between most builds are cosmetic. People really are afraid of being different despite being adventurous enough to live differently to most. There is a finite amount of adventurousness people have and it is easily exhausted.
The names in italics are Youtube channels if you wanted to inspect what I'm talking about.
Esket Tiny House is built by a carpenter, and he has built a magnificent curved roof when everybody else went with a standard gable roof. If you're perceptive you'll notice that a Tiny House only has 13 ft 6 inches to play with. So logically changing the roof shape would hugely improve the living space in the loft area. Yet they choose not to change it.
Tiny House Customs is another working class Joe (framer). He has cleverly hidden the trailer's wheels and tow bars so it doesn't even appear to be a potentially mobile structure.
Life in a Box (electrician) has introduced the concept of a rain screen, despite being in Arizona! Everybody's builds (in the more rainy regions) are going to have the siding rot off in five years! This is smart.
The Not So Tiny House (power plant operator but definitely working class) has very cleverly hidden his trailer using a faux rock skirt. It now just looks like a regular house on a foundation. It is a rather brilliant solution.
The reason why I mention these is because there are very few working class people building Tiny Houses. I think that is a shame. However the thing to notice here, is that when they do build, they build them very differently to the cookie-cutter approach most middle class people do.
In retrospect, all their innovations are extremely obvious. That is quite curious.
I think this says something pretty profound. There is something about being middle class that could damage your ability to integrate innovations into real life. I realize this is anecdotal but in retrospect I have the feeling I see this pattern everywhere in life.
One explanation could be that: once your comfort increases, your comfort 'zone' decreases. I think this could be a powerful explanation for why so few Silicon Valley companies are truly inventive despite being a Mecca for all kinds of talent and enterprise.
As Peter Thiel points out: all kinds of clever young minds go to Harvard, and despite that they keep electing to join industries just as bubbles are bursting. That is not an accident, it is culture.
tldr; When you think of diversity, maybe think of the working class also. Maybe they have something to add nobody else does.
First of all, yes, they got it wrong, in that they gave Clinton a higher chance of winning than Trump. They didn't give him a 0 chance, and a model that has 67%ish certainty should be "wrong" about 1 in 3 times. They were better than the other major forecasts, insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of winning.
I respect Nate Silver for his opposition to non-data-driven media narratives. In 2012, when the media was calling the race super close, Nate called them out for making a media circus when the race was actually looking really good for Obama. In this race, he did the opposite, constantly pointing out how likely a 30% chance was and how big of a polling error there could be (and also how many undecided voters there were). He also called out herding (the tendency of pollsters to not publish outliers) when he saw a ton Clinton+3 and Clinton+4 leads in the week before the election. His forecast may have been wrong, but his instincts are pretty good.
Regarding the shy-Trump effect, we didn't see this play out in the primaries (Trump often underperformed his polls), which makes me skeptical. It might be that with all the reluctant republicans felt a need to vote for him in the general election, the effect got played up. Personally, I think there are 2 big problems in polling as we do it today:
- Not enough pollsters are polling in Spanish. From the polling we do have, we know that Spanish speaking latinos vote very differently from English speaking latinos.
- Our methods for finding people are a mess. Phone polls often use land lines (Cell numbers are often unlisted and may belong to people who live in other states despite their area code) which prejudice them towards the demographic of "people who still have/answer a land line". Internet polls suffer self-selection bias. We need a way to randomly sample people without them making the first move to join a poll. This problem needs to be solved.
Lastly, I want to point out that even Trump's campaign didn't see this coming. No one (except Bill Mitchell's yard sign and Halloween mask model) saw this coming. We have a lot of work to do to fix polling.
They were better than the other major forecasts,
insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of
winning.
You might be interested in the LA Times / USC Daybreak poll, which projected a Trump win for some time. (And similarly, "caused dismay — even outrage — among some readers, especially Democrats, who have denounced it and often criticized The Times for running it".)
Nate Silver actually wrote a post about the LA Times poll. I don't think it makes sense to compare individual polls with poll aggregates. A single data point being accurate/inaccurate can be due more to luck than methodology, while an inaccuracy in a probabilistic model like Silver's indicates more of a systemic bias across all polls.
I spent 5 years living in Wisconsin, and I've been telling everyone that Trump would definitely win there. The week before the election, I actually went so far as to say that I expected Hillary to win the popular vote, and Trump to win the electoral college.
I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were willing to overtly say.
I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.
Yeah, I deal with a lot of people all over the spectrum and there was an undercurrent of something going on. A lot of those leaked e-mails really offended people and they got passed around a lot. Its one thing to believe a group looks down on you, but its a whole different thing when you read the e-mails. I was amazed at the number of people that were going to that site and sending links.
It also seemed like the celebrity endorsements had the opposite effect. Some of the people who I've met who spoke ill of the celebrities used language that I don't think they normally use. It has been quite odd.
I agree with your analysis, but it's sort of an orthogonal point to the issue at hand. The issue is that the personalized media bubble effect prevented more people from attaining your insight, because we were simply not exposed to the same media as those who were galvanized by Trump, and on the other side of the coin, it allowed Trump supporters to avoid exposure to valid critiques of their candidate and instead be hyper focused on (sometimes fabricated, often exaggerated) content that was critical of Clinton.
That's fair. I also go out of my way to seek out people's thoughts on divisive but relatively popular topics, because people have some reason for believing what they believe. It probably helps that I don't spend much time on Facebook because I think most people who share my ideology are at least as closed-minded as people whose ideology conflicts with mine.
That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.
I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.
I think his methodology was fine and pollsters were shit. If you look carefully at the map, he basically called all the swing states hilary and trump took from one another. His model saw the holes in the pollsters data. I think to swing trump to winnning, he'd probably just have to adjust a weighting factor by fractions of a percent. Look at how close michigan, florida and wisconsin were. The tiniest of margins won it for trump in the end. Literally a handful of factories that had closed in the past decade between those states determined this race.
The scarier thing is that for the next 10-20 years, boomers in the rust belt are going to swing republican unless dems can get a Bernie. To me, whatever democrat wins the michigan primary, is their candidate above all else.
He should call it quits together with all other pollsters. All that predicting is at best a totally useless activity or even worse, it influences voter behavior. Bet on football games instead. At least that doesn't do damage to the country.
The main point of polls is to influence and give social proof to selected candidate.
Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive campaign in history couldn't help her.
Technically, they did predict it: 538 had 35% chance of Trump winning and emphasized the uncertainty factor, while other outlets had Clinton's chances as high as 99%.
If the results had been different, our prediction would have been correct.
First, that comment is about the polls, not their model.
Second, it's called a polling error. It's actually a thing.
This election happened to be extremely sensitive to polling errors due to the nature of the electoral college and the fact that a number of key races were extremely tight.
When an average poll has a 3% margin of error, and you factor in state-level correlations (and the fact that the state level polls tend to have more variable quality than national polls), a slight error results in a huge swing.
Which is the entire point they're making, if you're willing to set aside the snark and read what they wrote (since it's actually, you know, interesting and informative).
If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account.
If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the same polling error in every other state.
As I understand it, FiveThirtyEight's models reflect current and past uncertainty, but do not properly take into account future uncertainty. This greatly undermine's their models for use as a prediction, a probability, or a forecast.
At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment in time, their implication is that she would win the election in two out of three times. Taleb is saying that is nonsense, that there is more variability than that.
Of course, Taleb's model wouldn't drive page views or get people excited. FiveThirtyEight gives voters a reason to check-in daily on how their candidate is doing in polls, but it is misleading as a forecasting tool.
Eh? Taleb was criticizing the variability of 538's estimates and said they should not have been making such drastic changes to their estimates. Taleb waffles between Bayesian and Frequentist and in this case he's being Bayesian.
He didn't criticize them for underestimating uncertainty, but for being too uncertain.
Particularly nasty this time around with the amount of name calling and threats of violence[1]. I'm pretty sure any tech person who was for Trump shut the heck up after the whole Peter Thiel narrative. The amount of people who would rather act out than understand what is going on is a bit mind blowing.
Of course, this is just a weird year when a third-party had a shot at the 5% and all of them sabotaged themselves by picking people who were uniquely unlikely to get votes. Could have been the setup for a 2020 three party run.
1) you would have to be insane to run a business and have a Trump sign in your window unless you were hoping for an insurance settlement.
I'm not in the US and I was a bit taken aback when people on my Twitter timeline started calling for boycotts of a certain online sticker service entirely because the CEO came out on Twitter as supporting Trump a few weeks ago.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
It's easy to underestimate how deeply polarized the US really is.
Trump in particular is so far out of the bounds of normal politics that to many people, support for Trump appears no different than support for, say, Mussolini. It may only be fringe extremists playing the racial supremacy song, but half the country is marching along to the beat. At that point it doesn't matter what your private reasons for supporting a Mussolini or Franco or Trump are - you're still a collaborator. The justification for boycotts etc comes from that point of view.
It's a difficult problem - the left (such as it is) needs to find some kind of productive path forward, but I'm not convinced that pandering to the sensitivities of people who have no intention to reciprocate is at all useful.
Did you glance at his charts? He's saying a "rigorous updater" would have estimated Trump's chances at almost nothing all year long, until dramatically changing the estimate just before the conclusion. In contrast, 538 estimated Trump's chances as much higher all year.
He has a point that the chances of winning shouldn't shift so rapidly, but a rapidly moving gauge is a decent indicator of uncertainty.
At issue in this election is apparently a new idea: people who hold positions that are being publically shamed tend to lie to pollsters
Definitely not that new. For example, pollsters in France have for decades been applying a "coefficient of shame" to account for Le Pen voters' underreporting.
Ex falso quod libet. The statistical mechanics can be rock solid, but if the data is garbage or the model is garbage then the prediction will likely be garbage. Hiding behind mechanical minutiae is no excuse for the overtly bold and wrong predictions.
There's no better reality-based approach than aggregating polls across the political spectrum. But who would have thought that all polls would be wrong in the same direction?
Is it uncommon that I can't ever recall being asked who I'd likely vote for? I suppose there's been a website once or twice that I've clicked a button on, but no one has ever asked me, or called me, or even handed me a survey that I can think of. What is the most common to actually make the inquiries.
After HRC supporters have gone to such great lengths to explain how Trump's warnings about fraud were delusional and unrealistic, I would really love to hear a justification why Trump could have pulled this off when supposed Clinton couldn't have.
You know, after the debacle that was the Bush vs Kerry election, there were widespread allegations by Democrats of voting fraud on the part of the Republicans -- especially in respect to electronic voting machines. For some months after the election, the Democrats made a lot of noise about those electronic voting machines, trying to get them removed. After a few months, they apparently seemed to forget all about it.
When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.
Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.
Of course there was fraud. We know better than most how easily a box can get pwned when the attacker has unsupervised physical access for a few minutes, and the manufacturer gives short shrift to security and practices security through obscurity--such as by keeping the source tightly closed.
The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.
My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.
It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.
Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.
It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.
They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.
In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.
Tyler Durden had multiple Fight Clubs, all of whom were completely loyal, anonymous, and committed to operational security. That's why I said he'd be the only one able to do it.
For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.
Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.
Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.
So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.
Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.
Well, for me, it was usually because of the high quality commentary, wherein folks had rational discussions about the content of a piece rather than resorting to Reddit-style content-free snark that neither educates nor illuminates.
All the dissident views about polls being outright wrong were met with disbelief when it was clear to anyone who looked that they were blatantly off. Mainly to create social proof to vote Clinton.
There is a need in the internet age to educate people on how to consume information. When we had fewer news organizations, information was more controlled. It was done by professionals with years of training.
While there's a lot of benefit in providing more voices and more outlets, there's a real danger of spreading misinformation propped up by false equivalences as to what qualifies as a professional news organization. I'm not sure the answer other than education.
Or maybe - just maybe - they report the news without opinion.
Facebook injects opinion into everything by it's very nature. Maybe that's not a good thing.
There is no such thing. Even if only through the selection of events considered "newsworthy", reporting news _always_ implies a particular narrative of the world, and politics is nothing but competing narratives.
What if the articles printed are randomly selected from a pool?
Additionally, I am talking about the content of the articles. News Papers for example already have opinion pieces so the paper as a whole cannot be unbiased.
Additionally it is obvious that a news paper cannot print all of the news and to some extent that betrays a bias, but no one expects a single news source to contain all of the news in the entire world.
My point is that articles themselves are often unbiased, and blanket treatment of media networks as biased is not a fair statement.
Besides the obvious empirical weight of your condescending dismissal I have yet to see any evidence that states it is impossible to report the news without an opinion. In fact, if you open the NYT you will find it divided into sections on opinion and factual news.
Give me some evidence of main stream media reporting opinion with news. Give me a non-opinion piece newspaper article that has opinion.
how about this: some time ago when the news that tortures did not produce any valuable intel to counter terrorism was wildly reported in USA, the Polish media instead run a story about how terrorists were planning attacks in Poland during mayor holidays. See: no real opinion is conveyed here explicitly, but by controlling which and when facts get reported you get the same result as directly stating the opinion (in this case defending the need for doing nasty things to fight terrorism).
When there were only 3 networks, there was less exposure to varying opinions. Over time that has diminished, but I think Facebook is the closest you'll find, given its reach.
> Facebook didn’t just reflect your views back to you
Hardly. I'd say it accurately represented the view distribution of my social group, which I infrequently agree with.
> But beyond that, it turns a blind eye to the nature of the content within its walls.
Is this article claiming that FB should censor more? It's also wrong; I know of several Facebook pages that have been unpublished for being politically unsavory (from Facebook's perspective, of course).
I'm not exactly sure what this article is supposed to convince us of.
Do you mean that even if Clinton would have won the election, you would still have been shocked? Because even if she did win, Trump could have won, as many pollsters predicted he has a double-digit chance of winning?
Without reservation yes. I have been in a state of shock for months now. The frustration of the reality is what makes it bubble over into visible outpourings.
My assumption wasn't that because no one I interacted with on social media was supporting him therefore he can't win.
My assumption was that people are too basically decent for him to win.
There's a lot of ground between knowing something can happen and being emotionally prepared for it to happen.
Yeah because, all the other news outlets predicted a trump win... this is a shit piece article... Show me one outlet that gave Mr. Trump > 50% chance of winning (Fox doesn't count as news). If anything this is more the fault of bad pollsters, and people not realizing that 4 million Bernie or Bust voters were real and not just spouting empty promises. I was one of those.
I wrote in Bernie, and I'd rather have Trump and a rebuild the DNC from scratch -- from the far left, than see Clinton -- the epitome of corruption rise to power. We might as well let mob-bosses run for President.
"Show me one outlet that gave Mr. Trump > 50% chance of winning (Fox doesn't count as news)."
I actually don't recall Fox predicting it either.
But isn't it kind of weird that you both supposed they were the only ones who might have gotten it correct, but also that they were not "real news"? Didn't "real news" just let you down hardcore?
It doesn't do any good to say "The deviation of reporting from reality means I have to re-examine my views" if you secretly include the caveat "as long as none of my views have to change".
That said, I've got no particular reason to give you that Fox should be given any more credit than any other major news source. But I'd submit that isn't because you should give Fox more credit, but because you should adjust your view of the others to match your current view of Fox. There isn't that huge a difference between Fox and, say, CNN. But there's a lot more people who will mouth agreement with that sentence, but then don't follow through with their actions. CNN is trash, and it's more dangerous for those who are generally inclined to agree with them than those who aren't. And so on for all or at least almost all of the other "real news sources". You need to follow through, stop watching, stop trusting things they say, and really stop trusting things they say that make you feel good.
(BTW, as for "what's my suggestion" then, at the moment I don't have a place I can point at and say "If they say it, I trust it.")
FiveThirtyEight consistently gave Trump a %25+ chance of winning. That's obviously a pretty good chance which is something they constantly reminded their audience of.
So basically Facebook shows its users content they want to see. How is it a problem? if I have specific centers of interests, I don't want Facebook to show something I'm not interested in. Not because I want to live in an echo chamber BUT because I'dd have to filter content manually which is time consuming. There is nothing wrong with how Facebook works. The goal of Facebook is make money through ads, it's not a charity or a governmental agency (well, that's debatable). My point is Facebook needs to retain users or they'll go somewhere else.
The biggest problem with our country isn't the people who voted for Trump, it's the people who are surprised that he won. For what it's worth, here is an email conversation about this that I submitted to HN before the election:
If you were cynical, you would have predicted that the United States, a country full of racists and bigots, would never elect a black man for President. But they did: twice.
There were good reasons to predict that George W Bush, an embarrassing, arrogant, stupid buffoon who got the country in to two disastrous wars and failed to prevent 9/11, who had massive protests against him from all over the country would not get elected for a second term. But he did (arguably with the help of voting fraud, but regardless of how he got there, he still served a second term).
Many were surprised when an actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected as President. Another actor was elected Governor of California, and arguably may have become President had he been born in the US. A wrestler became Governor of Minnesota.
Most analysts, and even American intelligence agencies, were shocked by the swift downfall of the Soviet Union.
In the 1960's, when Segregation was in full swing, many could not imagine that it would ever end. They thought, as the song goes, "That's just the way it is. Some things will never change". But it did end, and in relatively short order. Some argue the US is still not fully desegregated, but in many important ways it is.
For my part, when Bush Jr managed to get a second term in office, I stopped trying to predict the political future. So now I'm no longer surprised. Any idiot or asshole can get elected President in the US, and anything, no matter how unlikely, can happen.
It reminds me of when the Yippies nominated a pig for President.[1] They did it as a joke, but the US has been headed in that direction ever since.
Many were surprised when an actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected as President. Another actor was elected Governor of California, and arguably may have become President had he been born in the US.
Urrrmm, did you know that Reagan was the Governor of California for 2 terms, from 1967 to 1974?
No, it just succeeded wildly. A lot of pundits and media types now need to go back and re-examine their thinking, because almost all of them were wrong about everything. Stop listening to them, because they are naive people who think themselves worldly but they don't understand the present moment nor the future. They all need to go.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Twitter and Medium are excellent reads these days.
I think the cities and the small rural areas need a project to work on together. My suggestion would be infrastructure projects. Hire the people locally and from the city in masses.
There was an assumption that Bernie voters would go to Clinton, but instead some of them didn't vote or went third party.
In swing states, 1% more votes could have made the difference. Florida for instance was very close.
In addition, the democratic party acted in a very biased way against Bernie. Superdelegates also didn't care about what candidate was more popular in each state.
Locking up isn't the only way to punish people. There's actually some talk about e.g. firing someone from his/her job for supporting a candidate. Recently, there was a long discussion chain in HN about how Y Combinator should sever any ties to Peter Thiel because he supported Trump. That Thiel "should be fired".
Discrimination at work may also be about free speech.
Right, and it's not because Trump is a republican. That's what people keep missing. Trump is a man who has openly incited violence against ethnic groups! Called for the deportation of muslims. He's called women fat pigs, and boasts about how he screws people in business. He boasts about avoiding taxes! This isn't GW, or McCaine...
Most organizations have a very understandable right to not want to be associated with that. It's called a PR disaster. Somehow Trump is immune, and I will never know how.
Please don't start flamewars here. Whether it's arson or just negligence, the effect is the same. (Edit: I see we've had to ask you several times already not to do this kind of thing. We ban accounts that repeatedly ignore these requests, so please up your game.)
All: when commenting about inflammatory topics on HN, please take extra care to be more civil and substantive, not less. We're trying to go against entropy here. That takes energy.
That is such an absurd and reductionist dismissal of this election that is no different than the equally wrong people saying "59 million people liked all the old sexist, homophobic, racist and xenophobic attitudes, and 59 million other people didn't"
What you are doing here is just perpetuating the problems that have plagued this election cycle and made it so people are completely unable to discuss real issues.
Start with a reasonable statement. Back that up with some interesting facts. Then drop a bomb in the room and wait for the aftermath. Pretty nicely crafted, all things considered...
Could be, but personally I'm done with being silent and just chuckling silently to myself or rolling my eyes when people pull out these infotainment zingers disguised as "insight".
The last year has ripped covers off the culture war that the US has been slowly boiling in like a frog. BLM and Trump aren't one offs, there are tons of people with serious gripes in this country, and for myself I'd rather call out the BS that obscures this than just sit here and let it stand unchallenged.
Could be, but personally I'm done with being silent and just chuckling silently to myself or rolling my eyes when people pull out these infotainment zingers disguised as "insight".
I agree. Throwing a derogatory zinger out there like "SJW" (which is unquestionably a dog whistle... anyone who would claim otherwise is being dishonest) does nothing to enhance public discourse, and it's about time we all worked to recognize and discourage that kind of behaviour while we all try to have honest, forthright conversations that help everyone understand each other a little better.
It's not just that, it's also the people who want to trot out "hur hur hur, only uneducated people voted for Trump"
I'm just so sick of all the navel gazing going on between the Bernie or Bust'ers, the Establishment Dems, the NeverTrumps, the Pro-Trumps, the Libertarians, and on and on and on.
Every last one of them is pushing some absurdly reductionist hot take argument in their bubbles and papering over the real issues plaguing people.
I'm as liberal as they get, but Trump appealed to a broad demographic. Reducing it to "uneducated whites" does a disservice to the very foundations of American democracy, as it dismisses out of hand the very real concerns of nearly 50% of the American electorate.
It would behoove everyone, including those in the media and the political system, to step back and get in touch with the values and concerns of those folks. Without that, the US is only going to become more polarized... and I'm not sure how much longer that can go on.
Come on, "SJW", "trigger word"? That right there is loaded language to begin with. And you can't explain the Obama/Trump voter with the SJW angle. To me the most telling statistic was how many people that voted for Trump believed him to be unqualified.
The divide is clearly between insider vs outsider, and dissatisfaction with the status quo. For me the Dems got caught with their pants down because Trump is so despicable as a human that they deemed him unelectable. But they got blind-sided because Trump's message resonated so strongly with half the country that his personal flaws were beside the point.
What does SJW mean to you? Just someone who cares about social issues, or someone who only pretends to care for self-serving purposes? Or something else?
I really dislike that term, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what exactly people mean by it.
is a pejorative term for an individual promoting socially progressive views,[1] including feminism,[1][2] civil rights,[1] multiculturalism,[1] and identity politics.
Are you really going to claim that you weren't aware of this when you threw that term out there?
>Let's all admit SJW has a clear, negative connotation. I mean, geez, it has a Wikipedia page:
Many of them also own up to the term and use it to refer to themselves in a positive manner, even placing it in their Twitter bio's next to a link to their Patreon.
Anyone who actually spends any amount of time in the political sphere where SJW run rampant is aware of this. Someone like myself uses it with the full negative connotation implied, because every SJW I know is a self-centered narcissist. But go ask the Twittersphere SJW's if they identify as a SJW and many will say yes. They see nothing wrong with it at all, after all they're in the right. They claim the moral high ground so how could being a SJW be a bad thing? "Oh, you're calling me a not-racist, not-sexist, not-misogynist? How is that a bad thing again?"
Anyone who is distanced from that political sphere but might know some college-aged SJW crowd could easily see and use it as a "positive phrase".
> Anyone who actually spends any amount of time in the political sphere where SJW run rampant is aware of this.
I have been reading up on politics or engaged in political discussion online for maybe ~4 hours daily for the past two years. I have never seen "SJW" used non-pejoratively, and I've never seen anyone own the term and apply it to themselves. Not saying you're wrong, but it's not nearly as common as you're pretending.
When I have access to my bookmarks later today, I have no problem providing countless prominent individuals in the "SJW Sphere" to prove my point that they use it positively and someone less engaged could easily see it as a positive term.
>I have been reading up on politics or engaged in political discussion online for maybe ~4 hours daily for the past two years.
The exact opposite of not being politically engaged and having the few times you've seen the term be in a positive usage...
I've been actively against SJW's and every niche they try to get their grimy paws on for the past four to five years. Almost all of my political engagement has been contrary to SJW talking points - not because of what they argue for, but because of how they go about it.
I use it negatively and have no issue with saying I do. I'm around crowds that exclusively only use it negatively. I also see it used positively, or at least tongue-in-cheek all the time. If someone uses the term and claims they did not mean to use it with negative connotations - I believe their intentions.
I'm not pretending it is common. I'm declaring it can be, is used, was used, and has been used positively and neutrally and that people still do so. Prior to #GamerGate turning it into a slur the Wikipedia article even mentions it was a positive thing. It's very easy to not be actively aware of #GamerGate or TiA (TumblrInAction) and outside of those two bubbles you're not very likely to even run into the term "SJW".
sickbeard denies the intent and claims to have viewed it in a neutral, if even slightly positive, light. Arguing otherwise is dishonest and viewing things from your own viewpoint. Projecting intention where there is none. Ironically that is something people are sick of SJW's doing. And yes, I used it negatively there.
> The exact opposite of not being politically engaged and having the few times you've seen the term be in a positive usage...
Not sure what you're trying to say here.
I honestly don't care that much about any of this. I know that there are people like you who hate "SJWs", but really what a weird thing to get riled up over. My political engagement has been entirely contrary to the war-profiteering, plundering, pro-corporate elites that run the world, but by all means you keep going after those evil college kids and feminists!
My apologies. People who are not politically active (eg: casual Facebook browsers) will never, ever come across the term "SJW". They may have seen it a few times. If they're college-aged maybe they have a friend in college who describes themselves as a "SJW" in a positive light. 1-2 interactions with SJW's using "SJW" as a positive term is enough for them to see the term in a positive/neutral way, as opposed to the way heavy internet users who scour Twitter for hours a day and are active in the #Gamergate hashtag will see the term "SJW".
If you browse Github, HackerNews, /r/TumblrInAction, or Twitter frequently then your chances of running into the term "SJW" increases as does your chances of seeing it used in mostly a negative way.
To then assume that everyone "knows" the term is a negative one when it's sphere of influence is a few small niches of the internet is being dishonest. Especially when that person denies said accusation.
>My political engagement has been entirely contrary to the war-profiteering, plundering, pro-corporate elites that run the world, but by all means you keep going after those evil college kids and feminists!
Why not both? Dangerous elites are only as dangerous as the public allows them to be. How many singular elites can kill thousands or millions of people without people to do the killing for them?
History has a historically thin line between "these people are bad" and "these people are bad and we should round them up and kill them". When people actively use the rhetoric of the latter, I listen and grow concerned...
To then assume that everyone "knows" the term is a negative one when it's sphere of influence is a few small niches of the internet is being dishonest.
Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
I have very little faith that sickbeard didn't know full well that he was employing a dog whistle when he dropped "SJW" into the thread.
>The reclamation of the term has spread to people who have never had it used upon them, and as a result, it is seen by many social justice advocates as a legitimate and accepted label for people who promote social justice. This has, in many circles (for example, Tumblr), heavily mitigated its pejoration, and consequently, heavily increased its positive usage by SJWs themselves
Okay, actually this is boring. You don't care and have already convinced yourself - abandoning the principle of charity. So we'll leave it at this I guess.
Riiiight. So because the n-word and the f-word have been reclaimed by their communities, I shouldn't assume that folks not in those communities aren't still using the term in a derogatory fashion?
Please.
Go back and read the original post. SJW was not being used with a positive connotation in context, and to suggest otherwise is just being willfully stubborn simply to make a point.
Are you really comparing "nigger" to "SJW"? One started off as derogatory and still is except within it's own community. The other started off as positive and became derogatory only within a few, niche communities. A more apples to apples comparison would be "Tea Partier". It became a political slur to call someone a "Tea Partier". Do you not think people use "Tea Partier" without the negative connotation when referring to someone in the Tea Party?
A Google search for `site:news.ycombinator.com sickbeard + SJW` only results in this comment thread. It was their first usage of the word on this site. Which means they have no historical basis to judge how they used the word. They even gave you the description: "To me it it means you believe in something and you're going to stand up for it."
I did not read it with a negative connotation, otherwise I would not have responded to you.
> History has a historically thin line between "these people are bad" and "these people are bad and we should round them up and kill them". When people actively use the rhetoric of the latter, I listen and grow concerned...
This makes sense. Sorry for being overly confrontational in my last post. I do agree that the language and tactics used by the far-left (which I'm very much a part of) can be silly or even slimy at times. I certainly took issue with the language that liberals used to describe conservatives in this most recent election.
Overall though, knowing quite a few people from college who are stereotypical SJWs, they are mostly harmless. A lot of them really do have a rough past, and aren't the privileged "special snowflakes" that the alt-right makes them out to be. Many people like the idea of a trigger warning, for example, because they really did experience something deeply traumatic, but you'll never discover that about them by hurling insults. And also many of these people tend to be socially awkward, and when I see people lashing out online about "tumblrinas" or whatever, it just feels like a continuation of the bullying that these people probably faced in childhood.
I think you missed the point of my post. We live in a distortion field, but it's not because our beliefs are wrong, rather we underestimate how many people don't share it.
Pre election they were all over trump. post election they have completely flipped and are blaming democrats/hillary/etc. When in reality we have a near perfect balance of competing views
Recognizing a cultural divide is fine, labeling one side new age SJW's and the other side racists bigots doesn't do that though. It just polarizes us even more and actively moves us further apart when we desperately need to start looking at ways to come together.
It is a federation of States, not a single State. Each one has its weight as State relative to the federation. So it is not "the people" who vote for the president. It is the people who vote whom their State will vote as president.
Due to the way the electoral college gives small population states more electoral votes comparatively, votes in small population states have more weight.
Why do you ask him? YOu rehashed what he said, putting a negative spin on a very reasonable system. You can't have California drain the other states through economic superiority and then dictate political agenda on the population left in them. The political agenda benefiting California might not be suitable for Wisconsin.
The system we have incentivizes campaigns to maximize their electoral college votes. So while we could switch to a popular vote for a future election, looking at the popular vote in an EC-based election doesn't necessarily tell us who would have won the popular vote if we'd changed the rules before this election.
The campaigns would have done things differently (like dems not ignore TX and repubs not ignore CA).
Considering the number of times the electoral college and the popular vote agreed then it would seem the system works fairly well. It's not like no one knows the rules going in, they've been in place for a while now.
Ratified by 10 blue states representing 165 electoral votes, and zero red states. Most of the bluest states (CA, MA, NY, RI, DC, WA) ratified it during the Obama administration.
They only had control of the House for two of those years, during which healthcare reform was the major priority. It also requires state level work, where the GOP holds 2/3 of the governorships.
No, they're not. Read the article. Their research indicates Facebook shows you news, even fabricated news that agrees with whatever you already believe.
I've read the article, it says that Facebook did favor Trump somehow and and does passively suggest that they did this knowingly by showing other cases where they did that.
I realize its not the complete message, but its appearantly the subtle message they want to bring over.
I don't use Facebook, but no one I know was surprised by the outcome.
Bill Clinton was disbarred, impeached, and he sexually exploited young female interns in the White house and was also accused of sexual crimes by many women. Hillary Clinton defended him in all of these things.
The Clinton Foundation is a front (masquerading as a charity) for political favors and payments. The Clintons are political/criminal cronies enriching themselves while impoverishing others.
While they claim that average Americans are too 'uneducated' and 'low information' (i.e. stupid) to understand these sophisticated political topics, we all see right through it.
Enough is enough. Follow the same rules and laws that we all have to and treat us fairly and we'll vote for you. Abuse us like this and we won't. It's that simple.
This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorrected. All of our apps are just too personalized and they don't work hard enough to tell us what we should know, as opposed to what we want to know.