The cited paper shows the results of LLM opinions plotted on a political compass. The other dimension to this is time as these models are getting updated and having their system prompts updated.
My friend has been tracking them since September 2023 here: https://trackingai.org/ . GPT4 seems pretty stable over time, but Llama-2 for example got more conservative in November 2023, and stayed there with only a brief reversion in February 2024.
Went to the same school, was on the same math team, but was a year ahead of the author. Quit math team in my junior year because I wasn't at a competitive level, but it was a great time while I was on it. As a SWE, I rarely get to exercise the tenacity and problem solving skills I learned on the math team, but when I do they are "transformative" to the rest of the team.
> Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. ... The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds
This is the tail wagging the dog; work really hard for 4 years in HS so that the next 4 years will be spent at a comparatively more prestigious college. I don't think we should expect high school students to be able to optimize this correctly themselves, and from my experience guidance counselors weren't particularly helpful. College admissions feel like a local maxima that have a lot of unintended side effects but would be difficult to change.
Personally, I didn't do the extracurriculars that would look good for college, but rather the ones I enjoyed; I didn't study very hard either. Didn't get into Stanford or an Ivy, but I look upon my experience in high school/college fondly rather than bitterly. Life seems to have turned out ok too.
I can relate; I didn't study quite as hard as my peers, didn't get into the prestigious private colleges that they got into (still went to an excellent public school across the Bay from Stanford), studied a fair bit of math, and ended up with a decent job where I've found that my math and problem solving skills have paid dividends. I'm certainly not making tech or F-U money, but I have a comfortable life a few years out of college and I'm lucky that I didn't have to sacrifice my youth or my interests to get here.
It's also interesting to follow the trajectories of people who were in the group that over-optimized for outcomes but have fallen off that path. I think the author was able to mitigate his burnout (I presume he had a good tech career), but I know a fair amount of folks with good pedigrees who haven't, and are still in limbo (unemployed, underemployed, or taking an extended break early in their career/schooling). I know they have the potential to do great things, but it seems the stakes of burnout are much higher today and harder to recover from financially.
My experience, a few decades later, is that everyone who optimized for STEM and long hours in high school made the right choice. The only downside I’ve seen is some wistfulness about lost romances and the preciousness of childhood. The upside is much higher earning power and greater opportunity later in life. I’d actually be interested in counter examples. In my circle I’m not aware of any, which is different than saying they don’t exist.
Optimizing for STEM is a bit different for optimizing for extreme puzzles.
Math Team is a corner of math (not even the main part), and not STE at all.
It's a bit of a distraction from learning useful math for S, T, E, and even pure and applied M. One of the choices a math student has to make is whether to pursue advanced caclulus/stats/engineering math, or pure math, or contest puzzles.
It's a (hard!) puzzle contest (and those are fun too, but we don't pretend that taking them to an extreme level is relevant to a career).
Location: New York, NY, USA
Remote: Yes
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Technologies: python, javascript, typescript, java, ruby, django, flask, celery, react, postgres, spanner, kubernetes, AWS, GCP
Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dcyfj8y5w15qk2jijwenb/Alexander-Yankov-Resume-2023-07-03.pdf?rlkey=hzado5uym118mfi0orf01slux&dl=0
Email: contact info in resume
Full-stack/backend engineer with extensive experience in tech companies and finance. Looking to join an early to mid sized startup that is doing something innovative and useful.
Regarding Homejoy, this article [0] that didn't get much traction at the time but lays out the best theory about their failure.
I was working at its competitor Handy then and it was clear that the dealsite method of customer acquisition was non sustainable. At the time Groupon was super popular. It worked like this: a service provider eg Homejoy would sell a coupon through Groupon for $50 for a "regular" $100 service, $25 would go to Groupon and $25 to Homejoy, Homejoy would also pay $45 to $60 to the cleaner. This made sense for some business like a spa that after getting the customer in the door might upsell a $100 massage (and get 100% of that). It did not work with Homejoy because customers who got a deep discount on a cleaning did not retain and did not get upsold to. Since Homejoy had to pay the cleaner, they would loose $20+ on each such "acquired" customer. LTV was negative.
On top of this, Homejoy needed to raise funds and for that you need to show customer growth. If you spent $1000 to acquire 50 customers one month and none of them retained, you need to spend $1200 to acquire 60 customers the next month, or you won't have growth to show investors. Homejoy needed to spend more and more each month or it wouldn't get its next funding round; which it didn't. I don't know but I believe that Homejoy collapsed at its largest size with the peak number of monthly customers.
Other cited reasons for Homejoy's failure like worker classification lawsuits and worker retention are unlikely to have been the real reasons behind its collapse. Handy would have had the same issues and yet they are still going 7 years later as part of Angie's List with little noise.
I think a major problem is the cleaners are very easy to go direct. All that work to recruit cleaners, acquire customers, and then they hand out a business card and the middleman is cut out.
If you get a cleaner you like, your best bet is to get their contact info and book directly with them. It will be cheaper than going through the platform, you will get exactly the cleaner you want and you will get a better service.
This disintermediation was a worry, but I don't think this happened frequently enough the justify the fear. It was hard to discern how much this was happening from the data; anecdotally it was rare.
The best quote I read on HN (and am paraphrasing now) is that a lot of these venture capital backed startups are in the business of selling dollar bills for 90 cents.
The major innovation of VC is high amounts of capital being made available for business experiments. Before VC it was a small time entrepreneurs scraping to make something that could sustain itself, or new business models funded by existing large corporations that could siphon off some money for experiments. VC enabled big money on truly crazy ideas.
VC will continue to exist but entrepreneurs will be far more focused on earning revenue ASAP. You can’t rely on easy money continuing for each round based on your name and connections.
Congratulations to the VCMI team. This has been a long time in the making and I hope will help keep HoMM3 community vital for decades to come.
Currently, and for quite some time now, Horn of the Abyss mod has been the premier way to play single player and the most popular way to play multiplayer HoMM3. Really excited to see how the mod (HotA) and the engine remake (VCMI) projects will interact. Will they find a way to work together or will they split the community?
Thanks. While I not personally actively working on VCMI itself I can still say we have amazing contributors right now. They did a lot of work on project in 2022 and there are a lot of features coming in next release that we plan to make for Christmas.
HotA and VCMI we are not competitors. Main goal of VCMI is support for proper modding, scripting, different AIs, platforms and preserving unique gameplay for new generation. Reverse engineering project that work using memory patching and a lot of assembly magic can't really compete here.
At the same time no one on VCMI team is actively working on multiplayer or some crazy UI features that competetive multiplayer audience would care about. So for foreseable future we are not competing for an audience.
PS: Unfortunately one of primary developers behind "HotA the town" has died so I have no idea if it still being actively developed. In any case VCMI now support almost all of HotA assets so if you just want a town it's should be fully playble.
This "ban" is removal of the book from required curriculum for 8th graders rather than from the library system, which is what traditionally referred to as a "book ban". Not that I agree with this particular decision, but school boards must be able to make decisions for what is appropriate in their district. It should be just as easy to add a book to the curriculum as to remove it without summoning undue unwelcome outside attention that something sinister is going on.
I looked briefly through rather lengthy minutes [1] of the meeting. Objections seem to come down to usage of words like "bitch" and phrases like "god damn" that students would get in trouble for using in the hallways according to existing school rules. The participants seemed quite queazy about saying the objectionable words themselves and instead either referred by their abbreviations or spelling them out by letter.
One part of the discussion that was also interesting was they considered censoring the book with whiteout for the offending words and one naked drawing but decided against it. They thought they need to get permission from the author because of copyright laws. I believe these kind of redactions are considered fair use for education under copyright laws.
It's very important to reserve the use of "banned" for actual bans, this kind of misuse is apparently very common when something like this happens.
That having been said, the people debating the issue seem to be grossly intellectually unqualified to be deciding anything regarding the education of others, which should be very concerning.
> the people debating the issue seem to be grossly intellectually unqualified to be deciding anything regarding the education of others
I'd say they have the one qualification that actually matters here: they were elected specifically for this purpose by the residents of the school district.
Consider that these people are also likely eligible for jury duty, which could very well mean that they would be considered qualified to literally condemn someone to death. Thought of in that light, removing a book from the local school's curriculum seems downright inconsequential.
Maus, and works like it, are powerful because they show the history of the holocaust through the eyes of those who survived it. This recollection will include the way the corpses were piled naked, or the verbal abuse they suffered. The intention of this board may not have been to water down or remove history, but this sort of knee-jerk reaction to anything objectionable will do just that by removing some of the most visceral works. The photo of “napalm girl” at the burning of Trang Bang village is deeply moving, and historically important - yet it includes full frontal nudity. Any attempt to “correct” something like this - whether it be with black bars, a blur, or with a photoshopped on shirt - would cheapen the impact of the image and dilute reality. Any attempt to censor Maus would be the same - a cheapening of the recollection of a survivor of a horrific event. Regardless of intention, exorcising or modifying works like these for superficial reasons despite their value will result in a watering down of history, simply because the real history is often crude or objectionable.
I don't know if it's possible to traumatize people by showing them pictures, but it seems like it would be, so it may be wise to delay some things for, say, college or highschool.
As evidence, I present this photograph, captioned: "A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia."
Is it worthwhile to do authentication via SaaS instead of a local library?
For password use case, it seems nice that you don't have to store client secrets (eg encrypted salted passwords) on your own infra. However now instead of authentication happening between your own servers and the users browser, there is an additional hop to the SaaS and now you need to learn about JWT etc. At my previous company, moving a Django monolith to do authentication via auth0 was a multi month project and a multi thousand line increase in code/complexity. And we weren't storing passwords to begin with because we were using onetime login emails links.
Maybe SaaS platforms are worth it for social login? I haven't tried that, but I am not convinced that auth0 or some one else can help me connect with facebook/twitter/google better than a library can.
100% - for OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) I only use passwordless auth (enter your email, get a magic link emailed) and Google via OAuth for this reason.
Screw losing sleep over whether you're storing credentials correctly.
What happens when the emails fail (like spam folder)?
I remeber a thread here on HN on a number of projects where they dumped email link sending as a login method for various reasons and complications. Have you face any challenges as well? If not what's your secret sauce? A better email provider? Would love to know.
Use a properly maintained library to salt and hash your passwords and the credentials will be the absolute least of your worries if your database is breached.
Generally it’s not the auth itself that is the problem but RBAC, multi-factor auth, integrations, etc.
We’ve looked at Auth0 and Okta because we wanted to see if we can save some dev time devising RBAC and supporting a lot of different auth integrations. Ended up doing it in house since the quote was unacceptable (essentially a mid-level dev salary per year)
Ironically I found this conversation on censorship with 19 upvotes flagged and dead here on HN. Vouched for it to bring it back. It is 30 minutes long, but the fact that there was an attempt at censoring it, made it much more likely that I will listen to the entire thing.
The HN community is using political speech guidelines to clamp down in critique against MSM (Main Stream Media) and Silicon Valley conduct. At the same time I find political topics all the time on the front page that are deemed fine as long as they stay away from the above topics or are leaning "liberal" or "progressive".
It's been three weeks and I still can't use Instagram. They are still blocking #hashtag-recent-lists with a banner:
"Recent posts from all hashtags are temporarily hidden to help prevent the spread of possible false information and harmful content related to the election."
The hashtag I used to check is #handtoolwookworking. Very political indeed.
Not sure what you mean by "The HN Community" (users? moderators? both?) but there have been countless discussions of both media and Silicon Valley here—so many that the reaction among a large segment of users here is "oh no, not that again". Meanwhile others are so eager for more more more of this that anything less than "all of it featured" counts as "suppression and censorship!"
I can't tell which side you're claiming bias in favor of or against, but both sides get pissed off when they see something from the opposite point of view and, once they've seen two or three such things, fixate on seeing HN as biased $opposite-to-me. What's ironic is how identically the battling sides mirror each other this way.
That's not the point, isn't it? Of course the accusations are probably true, but what about other serious accusations about mainstream media, about mainstream democratic politicians about Y-Combinator in particular and the SV culture in general? Will they be treated with the same attention?
It's a political piece about regime change ops that highlights phrases like "... U.S. backed authoritarian capitalist regime ..." and "... Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program ...".
This isn't a critique piece against today's MSM. It's a piece that makes the point that the US is the evil force in the world today. You can feel that way and have arguments about that. That's fine and fair. But it's certainly not an example for critique against the MSM in the context of today and this discussion.
Probably the Title: “ How the US Used Disinformation and the ‘Jakarta Method’ to Change the World “
>The Jakarta Method is a 2020 non-fiction book by American journalist and writer Vincent Bevins. It concerns American support for the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66.
> political speech guidelines to clamp down in critique against MSM (Main Stream Media)
That is sensible, because the MSM label is primarily a label one side uses to describe media outlets that don't lean their ideological direction, while they ignore that there is absolutely no shortage of media outlets that do. So when you see someone using the loaded term, you know you're not reading a neutral analysis.
"not shortage of outlets that do" The problem isn't that they are biased per se (That is a problem)...
The problem is that they pretend not to be biased and they are the largest players.
"Neutral analysis" Yet Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, etc all promise they are "unbiased" while they let stories without facts run against targets on the right (IE: 'anon person says Trump said' or Covington Highschool kids)... while they sideline or suppress stories with actual backing facts that target the left (IE: "Laptop from Hell").
You call it a loaded term... we call it the largest players in the pond are "stopping election interference" by literally practicing election interference by deciding what's "true" even when it's easily proven they are wrong more often than right.
What? MSM is anything but loaded. It's a description of the largest media platforms and that includes outlets like Fox News. And none of them provide "neutral analysis" hence the critiques.
Everything you said is wrong, imo. You're advocating censorship and labeling people you don't agree with. You might as well get a job in the MSM.
>MSM is anything but loaded. It's a description of the largest media platforms and that includes outlets like Fox News. And none of them provide "neutral analysis" hence the critiques.
Not really. You can argue that "fake news" is not loaded, because according to you it only means "news that are 100% fabricated with no basis in reality", but that still doesn't change the fact that a significant amount of people use it to refer to any news that they don't like.
I wouldn't say it's 'clear' but you're right that it's at least ambiguous.
For a less ambiguous case, look at how CNN and MSNBC treated the Bernie campaign/movement. Calling them "MSM" doesn't mean that one is a reactionary, it just means that one is outside of their set of approved viewpoints in any direction.
Does main stream media just mean fact-based, non-radicalizing, and trying to nudge sheeple towards peace and tolerance rather than violence and hate? I agree that is execrable, I think violent, bloody liberty for a few is better than peace for everyone.
Its really hard to call what HN does any serious form of censorship. You can still see flagged/dead links on HN. Also the content isn't removed or modified on their source site.
Not every decision to remove some content is censorship.
Users flagged it. It seems weird to me to call that censorship but the word has become diluted enough that people use it for whatever they dislike, so have at it I guess.
Some users flag these things for political reasons while others flag them because they lead to crap threads, like the current thread, and because these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible.
> these discussions have become so tedious and predictable that there is no curiosity left in them and no learning possible
Given your experience moderating this site, do you have any thoughts / insights on how to build a platform that brings the best out of discourse while preventing the downfalls you see here?
I think that there are a lot of people on HN and similar communities who either didn't live through the crypto wars of the 90s or are burned out on the critical privacy and societal implications of networked software and services.
It's nicer to just "shut up and hack", but the last time we did that, we ended up with hollywood indirectly dictating what we can do with our own devices. This time the stakes are much higher, as it's not just the "hollywood-only" devices like disc players and TVs they're getting ready to totally ruin.
It's disheartening to me to see the trend of people in technology, at least in certain circles, wishing only to enjoy the benefits of giant corporation resources (eg golang, TLS1.3, HTTP2/3, v8/node, Chrome, Android, iOS) without contemplating the implications of the downsides of giant corporation resources (surveillance, censorship, AMP, javascript hard dependencies, browser monoculture, et c). A system needs to be evaluated on the whole.
I think about this semi-constantly, and have a lot of trouble getting most of my friends to factor these kinds of issues into their world view or consider their importance. I'm too young to remember the crypto wars of the 90's (I was a kid back then), but I'm well aware of them and bring them up fairly often when talking to peers about the background pushes against encryption that constantly happen. I also make a lot of personal effort to rid my life of resources owned by large corporations, but I often wonder if there is something more I could be doing to resist these things.
It ultimately has nothing to do with whether or not we outliers use these services or not; the world needs to be changed so that these services are either modified to preserve privacy, or the services need to be shut down, or the user base needs to abandon them.
I'm not a big fan of forcing people to do things they don't want to do, so I think the best way forward is 3, via education. Already it's uncool to use Facebook. The next step is Instagram and WhatsApp, and perhaps even the facebook spyware SDK.
While i didnt vote for red this year (independent) I totally agree and the sudden labeling of certain tweets is egregious towards free speech.
There is so much fake stuff on the Internet and tech companies suddenly labeling tweets of the president, but not others is disgusting and goes against free speech. No labeling is needed.. speech that doesn't cause physical harm should not be labeled!
Im speaking as a proponent of free speech only as I could not vote for that person and do not believe much of any political mumbo jumbo (to me it's two billionaires using their resources to do whatever and make up whatever to win).
Yes, but if your labeling one viewpoint and not another then your stifling free speech/free thought ... you no longer are a neutral platform. Idiotic for them to go down such road as labeling only further riles up that persons base.
For many of the kinds of things that get labeled, I'm having some trouble figuring out how you would label both viewpoints.
If X says that the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines are made using aborted fetal tissue and Y says that they are not, and I want to label X as false, what label should I put on Y to label the other viewpoint?
Isnt it opinion like any other then? Just from someone with better platform. You dont need to be general arbiter of truth ro be like "wait, election law is actually different".
You’re misrepresenting what’s being labeled. Trump doesn’t get labeled for stating his opinions or policies, he gets labeled for lying. If Biden starts flagrantly tweeting malicious lies he’ll get labeled, too. The difference is that the modern Republican Party is a couple decades into using their own propaganda supply it's easy to feel like their side is being singled out because the distribution of lying and threats of violence is so heavily skewed.
Who are the two billionaires? I had thought you were talking about the recent Presidential election in the US, but Biden is nowhere near a billionaire.
Almost all of his wealth came from his salary as a Senator (1973 until he became VP) and then his salary for 8 years as VP, plus Social Security starting in 2009 and also pensions. His net worth at the end of that was under half a million.
He's boosted that to somewhere in the $10-20 million range since leaving office, mostly from book deals for him and his wife ($8 million), speaking fees (basic fee is $100k, but it has ranged from $8k to $190k), and a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement ($540k).
Is the democratic and republican parties not two billionaire or more machines? So, pardon I should have been more clear.
If you choose to believe what your side tells is truth that's fine. I just have a different view and if i have money and want power i am going to use it either solo(ly) or collectively to get what I want. Look at what Peter Thiel did with his money cause of the axe he had to grind with Gawker. He paid for Hulk Hogan's legal defense to annihilate Gawker. I'm sure other money/power bags do similarly and lots in politics. So and for me that is why I believe all politics is mumbo jumbo spun up by billionaires to win; whatever it takes!
Why? Are people with deep technical knowledge, both soft and hard, not allowed to profit from that knowledge? Can you point to some conflict of interest in writing a book, speaking, and being a professor while a private citizen? Are you just against capitalism?
The man spent his entire adult life in service to this country and never profited from it while in the act of that service, which you can't say for many of his colleagues.
This, I think, is such an important point. We hold too many powerful people in our society less accountable then those with less power. We should be striving to achieve the opposite, the more powerful you are, the more accountable you are, the harsher the penalty is for abusing that power.
If I say something inflammatory on HN, it will get flagged, downvoted, potentially result in a temporary or permanent ban, but if the POTUS says something inflammatory on Twitter, we're all just supposed to let it go? It makes no sense, I am, in the grand scheme of things a nobody, and the POTUS, no matter who occupies that position, is one of, if not the, most powerful person(s) in the world. The current occupant is currently screaming "RIGGED ELECTION" on Twitter, and they're not supposed to put some context, note that it is false?
Sock puppet accounts like this are a sybil attack. You can remain anonymous and use an existing HN account to participate in the conversation. Brand new accounts look ambiguous with the propaganda accounts pushed by various nation states.
One of the reason people need to make new accounts when they post anti-censorship thoughts, is that censorship has reached into our industry and a sort of neo-McCarthy blacklisting can occur if you don't espouse neo-liberal talking points. If your pseudonym can be traced to your identity, you risk your career when you fight for individual liberty.
I suspect that this person doesn't understand what neo-liberalism is, who is a neoliberal, or what their talking points are.
Neoliberals are the centrist or right leaning part of the democratic party and the moderate republicans. It is the political position of laissez-faire capitalism, reform, and reduced state influence over the economy.
Reagan and Pelosi are both neoliberal. Maybe this person meant Leftist, Socialist, Anticapitalist, or Progressive talking points?
Yes, Nancy Pelosi. She's part and parcel a corporate democrat, interested in incremental changes that fundamentally support the capital class.
She's against universal healthcare, she's committed to austerity, she supports the surveillance state, she fights against progressive reforms.
It's easy to see the grandstanding that people like Pelosi do as somehow leftist or progressive, but fundamentally she's playing a much more conservative game. She's a democrat who will put on Kente cloth and say black lives matter, while doing nothing to actually improve black lives.
For instance, she mandates pay-go, meaning any new programs must come with new taxes. Seems reasonable, but she's not proposing new programs. She's letting the progressive wing propose them, then letting the right wing attack the progressive wing, and then saying "there was nothing that could be done, maybe we should be taking my compromise, which is predominantly a market driven compromise."
Pelosi is not someone who is out there calling for labor strikes and strong union protections. Compare her to, say, Martin Luther King Jr and his Poor People's Campaign.
I'll leave you with a quote from her:
"I have to say we’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is."
I'm a little surprised you're being downvoted. I thought you captured the philosophy of neoliberalism well and explained how that mapped onto the US political parties.
I'm not super surprised? I think often centrist dems like to think of themselves as different from moderate republicans. (And vice versa.) More extremist right wing types tend to think Pelosi is some sort of progressive bogeyman and that she's nothing like folks like Reagan or Thatcher. I think all of those groups would disagree with my assessment enough to downvote it. (I suspect a lot of people are upset I called Pelosi a neoliberal.)
That said, my view is only one lens, and there are others. Many don't consider Clinton/Obama/Pelosi and their ilk to be neoliberal. Many do.
Edit: Also, I told someone they were wrong, which is usually a few downvotes. :D
Reddits /r/conservative only allows those who have 'proven they align with conservative views with the mods' to interact with many of their threads.
This is in line with my general experience that those who claim 'conservstices are being censored' are the boy who cried wolf so that they themselves can censor what they don't like. Also called hypocrisy, double standards, the usual.
The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
The fact that places like youtube and Facebook even allow it to exist demonstrates how little 'conservstives' are censored. You can find plenty of conservative channels that advocate for all manner of immoral, factually incorrect and Ill intent to people.
> The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus.
I think it is important to note that there is nothing inherent in conservatism that leads to this. Conservatives are not dumber or more gullible than liberals.
It is just an accident of timing that has resulted in conservatives currently being more likely to fall for such stuff. With just one change 12 years ago, it would be liberals far more than conservatives embracing fact-free conspiracy theories today. In another few years, it may go the other way.
Social media got big enough that a lot of people started getting most of their news that way. More and more people stopped noticing the difference between actual news items in the feed, sponsored items in the feed, opinion pieces in their feed, comments on stories the haven't seen from friends, and satire in their feed.
Two things arose to take advantage of this.
One was governments. They started state sponsored operations that made fake accounts to post material on the social media of countries they were not friendly with.
The other was content farms that generated a bunch of low quality content cheaply, and make money from ads.
Both of these concentrated on content that would be divisive. For the state sponsored material, governments know that just posting a bunch of stuff that extols their government or directly attacks US policies against their government would not help them. That would be caught and called out.
By concentrating on things that would be divisive they hoped to at least distract the US government by making it have to devote more time to dealing with domestic issues.
For the content farms making money from ads, divisive content gets more eyeballs which means for ad revenue.
This started seriously happening during the Obama administration, and so the foreign governments and content farms pushed material aimed at encouraging conservative conspiracy theories because Obama was a liberal.
If McCain had won in 2008, it would have been liberal conspiracy theories that got pushed.
That's a lot of writing to blame a singular event for the rise of disinformation within conservative circles that ignores a whole lot of other reasons that conservatives are prone to this type of disinfo and not (American) liberals.
My recollection is that before around 10 years ago or so, there were these same kind of conspiracy theories and similar nonsense, and I saw them aimed both at conservative and liberals. None of them got much serious traction.
So what do you think changed between then and now to lead to such a dramatic rise in disinformation in conservative circles compared to liberal circles?
Probably 30+ years of priming by conservative politicians, consultants, and their media mouthpieces spouting white aggrievance agitprop combined with the explosion of social media and a black man becoming President and nearly 8 years of pure obstruction by the Republican party to any real national governance.
Liberals on the other hand in general, but specifically those in national political power still read the NYTimes and Washington Post and listen to NPR. And while those institutions are not perfect, they are far more reality based and balanced than FoxNews and the rest of the right wing media ecosystem. Jon Stewart basically made a career of tearing into the hypocrisy and lies of FoxNews every night for over a decade and the left turned in for that.
> The reality is most political conservatives align with immoral and/or factually incorrect ideas, therefore they're rejected and filtered out because they attract anti-intellectuals that you can find on any youtube comments section about the coronavirus. The number of people that claim they 'do their own research' and then claim the 'virus is a hoax' is representative of the kind of people you attract when you allow those kinds of people.
How would you recommend handling false information then? I'm talking about false information that has real world impact, like yelling fire in a crowded theater. Telling people a polling location is closed when it's not is a practical example.
It's a difficult problem to crack. My current line of thinking is that we need to improve critical-thinking amongst the population. People with critical thinking will question the things they hear and read, and with an unfiltered source of information (E.g. the Internet) will be able to determin fact from fiction.
I used to think they we should censor bad information (E.g. 5G causes COVID), but that's just not going to work in the modern era.
I don't think it is just lack of critical thinking on the part of general public. I think that there are also some cultural contributors - it is often deemed uncivil or rude to call lie a lie. And if you want to appear impartial, you will need to make things sound middle - softening some stances and making others stronger.
You cant actually distinguish fact from fiction by logic alone. You need specialized knowledge for that, the rest of us you need to decide who to trust.
People who gravitate toward conspiracy theories tend to be intelligent and tend to question things they read. They then proceed to build wild theories, beyond possibilities of dumb people.
You wont, human nature is more or less fixed, cognitive skills are normal distributed, we are not blank slates. You first recognize that the problem is difficult, recognize you cannot social-engineer humans without infringing their rights and you try to come up with some basic rules with the implicit understanding that A) They are not perfect B) They are not immutable, and you start working from there. This is the total opposite to what it is happening now in the way the powerful groups are managing this new global, social landscape.
Yes, that. Simple things like a little stats, a default position of skepticism, an understanging that the message and the messenger are separate, would go a long way.
Not to get overtly political, but one of the two major parties will do literally anything to prevent that. Their ideology interprets critical thought as a direct assault, and they respond accordingly.
From the bottom of the page: A spokesman for the Republican Party of Texas said that the "critical thinking skills" language should not have been included in the document after the words "values clarification," reports Talking Points Memo. The members of the subcommittee "regret" the mistake, he told TPM—however, since the platform was approved, "it cannot be corrected until the next state convention in 2014."
They regret the mistake, it sounds like, so I guess it's all good. Nothing to see here.
* their curriculum explicitly aims to develop "lifelong, critical thinkers"
* they feel "reading, writing, and
critical thinking continue to play central roles in the development of literate individuals"
* students learn to "Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning"
I understand that you're saying beliefs such as creationism don't stand up to any real critical thought, and I agree. But I feel the same way about many beliefs that left-leaning people tend to hold.
Sure. Many people (both commentators and friends of mine) express extreme forms of race and gender essentialism, regularly referring to groups like "white men" or "black women" as though they all have the same thoughts, feelings, and desires.
Yes, but whatever one you are thinking about, rest assured the other would do the same. This idea that half the country is bad and the other is virtuous is as infantile as it is dangerous.
(Shrug) Whatever. It wasn't "the other party" who tried to teach me, at a public junior high school, that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work.
One half of the country is bad. The sooner we pull our heads out of the ground (and other low regions) and face up to that truth, the better off we'll be. A key aspect of critical thought is that there is no inherent virtue in denying reality, and the reality is that BSAB is no longer a viable rationalization.
I am sorry, I really am, that you see the country that way. I humbly suggest that you might be shocked at what you find out if you hang out with some of the people you think are so bad. I think you will find they want the same things you do and have many of the same fears. At any rate, whatever one might think of the other half of the country, it seems we must find a way to live together. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
Hang out with them? I grew up with them. That was enough for me, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual.
66% of Republicans in a recent poll [1] say that Trump should not concede regardless of what happens in the courts. That amounts to advocacy of a coup d'etat. There is no room for negotiation with these people, any more than there was with the Shining Path or the Red Brigades or the Khmer Rouge. They have chosen their side and committed to it.
The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
It's time we started contemplating it. Because the other side is doing just that, and then some.
It was a very tense election. What do you think Democrats would say if Trump had won and you polled them? Do you think they would politely accept four more years of Trump? What do you think would be the odds of violence in the cities? Say in Portland, for example? Or Seattle? Do you see violence from Republicans right now?
You seemed to have had a tough time with conservatives growing up and that is unfortunate, but I think you are being incredibly extreme in your blanket assessment of the motivations of half of your countryman.
Yeah, as a black man who grew up in the mid-west, and then lived in new england… I left the states in 2016 and have no intention of coming back until things resolve. Even during in 2016, I knew things were going to get much worse… and Trump (not necessarily his words/actions, but primal response he could evoke in otherwise "rational" or "academic" people who often see themselves above the fray) was just the latest harbinger of that (maybe the straw that broke the camels back, piled high already with many straws of societal malfeasance)… people want to ignore the slow erosion of social-economic freedoms that have been going on for decades and only decreasing more with the next administration placed in power by those who think that things will change for the better just by placing paper in boxes…
Corporate collusion with government baked in with articles of incorporation, solidified with runaway debt spending for their services against the masses is just a tip of the iceberg of societal decay ongoing here with many thinking they can always keep kicking the bill into the future for someone else to deal with… lol… I have no will to live around such a populous with such delusions of the mind.
I agree with most of your assessment. However I am myself an immigrant and, warts and all, I still think that comparatively the US is still a great place to live and I am grateful for the opportunity I was given to settle here.
If you do not mind me asking, where did you move to? How much better are things there? And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
My dad was an immigrant, and my mothers parents were was well, and I do think some aspects do provide opportunities, but I'm not sure it will negate the long term tail winds faced by many and would rather wait it out while they seem to be ok with engaging in the state of affairs.
> where did you move to?
I moved to Jakarta for now (and a few other places "nearby" for weeks/months here and there pre pandemic) and have been working remotely for the past 5 years for a variety of companies globally.
> How much better are things there?
For me, there is more social economic freedom, cheaper cost of living, more social cohesion (probably related to the fact that the distribution of wealth isn't as skewed towards the wealthy as it has become in the US), and relatively weak government (less downside risk with federal diktats) with nowhere near the amount of %debt to gdp in household/corp/gov sectors. But still faces similar headwinds stagnation in many places and issues unique challenges to being spread out over many islands. Though, I still remain flexible and have my eyes out for others places that could be better in the future.
> And what other countries do you think are in better shape than the US?
Overall I think SEA is pretty good as far as near future. Not really sure about anywhere else (besides nice island enclaves few on earth can enjoy like caymens, seychelles, etc.). There's just a lot of convergence going on between areas globally in all aspects of ones life and I really think that with our current global communications infrastructure being able to enable different forms of organization, there are a lot of existential questions about what things will look like going forward: what most people will accept? what actors will exert sovereignty? how will the most indebted nation/city states (and sub jurisdictions and corporates) deal with declining tax revenues/cash flows in the face of not just mobile capital, but a mobile workforce?
We are talking about media companies exercising discretion and control over content, not about what is constitutionally protected. I think a more relevant legal discussion would be on the tension over safe harbor provisions vs exercising editorial control.
You claimed to write about “false information that has real world impact, like yelling fire in a crowded theater.” That example is from the real world when the government acted against private parties that engaged in what the government characterized as sedition. Do you withdraw your example?
That's a rather tenuous link. Because a famous person said the same quote in a different context doesn't mean it actually has bearing and what we are discussing. If you don't like the first hypothetical, maybe focus on the second hypothetical, as it is extremely relevant for today.
0k, if an entity starts grading the claims of others for truth or falsehood, would it be held responsible for those claims it does not grade or for incorrect grades? Or is the grading “caveat emptor” and the recipient of information has no guarantee of truth or falsehood anyway?
Is a lack of a label on the below an endorsement of Theranos’ technology?
It's not just handling false information. That is just a very small part of how the far left are trying to stop freedom of speech. How many in-person talks at universities have been shut down in the past 4 years? When people disagree, they call whoever it is a Nazi and get it cancelled.
Today if you post something that is pro-gun, or god-forbid, you support one of Trump's foreign policies publicly, your account on Twitter or IG will get attacked and shut down. Most informational gun accounts on youtube won't show up in searches anymore. I'm not even talking about the tacticool losers posting dangerous videos. These are the people trying to educate others on usage and safety. Because a small part of the country abhor guns, but they also happen to control Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, they shadow-ban and move along with their day.
If flagging false information was the primary usage of censorship, there wouldn't be so much uproar around it.
To be fair, the actual 'far left' is Pro-gun. You're confusing leftism with Neoliberalism (you're not alone in this thread). The anti-gun people in this category are firmly rooted in the Auth-Right quadrant of the political compass (just a few hairs to the 'left' of Modern Republicanism).
That being said, it's understandable why these platforms don't want to be involved with promoting 'gun-safety' information, and it's not about censorship, it's about liability. You can't talk about gun-safety without talking about proper operation. This information has implications regardless of a users intentions (good or bad). Imagine the headline: 'Mass Shooter planned attack with help from YouTube videos'... The following uproar would only lead to greater censorship and restriction. Restricting content is not about censorship, but preventing scenarios like this. It's impossible to separate 'safety' from 'tactical training', and I for one, would prefer such information was not readily available to any would-be rogue actors.
If you want to have a gun, that's fine. Take a class. Want tactical training, take a class. Better yet, join the military.
I'm not particularly convinced that owning a gun offers any net-benefit as far as safety is concerned. I'd reckon you're statistically more likely to injure yourself (or a family member) than you are to prevent an attack from an assailant. It's also a really hard argument to make that there is 0 correlation between the high level of gun-ownership in the US and the extremely high homicide rate. Especially when looking at hand-guns (Canada for example has similar levels of 'ownership' and a lower homicide rate, but less hand-gun ownership compared to US).
TLDR; restricting 'gun-safety' info is not about censorship, it's about liability and owning a gun probably doesn't make you 'safer'. (these are, of course, my opinions)
More and more very highly esteemed journalists, not pundits, are starting to voice their concerns about this more and more publicly. At the same rate they are being censored. I wouldn't be surprised if Snowden gets a pardon before inauguration. Imagine that. How the tables turn.
Greenwald, Snowden, Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, Aaron Maté,
Max Blumenthal, Bret Weinstein, ...
None of these can be called right-wing or conservatives. I'm not even mentioning people like Rogan. All of them are aware or actual targets of the censoring.
Maybe hacker news should forcibly insert a modal saying that they don't think it's true, and make you click through that to display the objectionable content, like twitter does.
Can't have people thinking there's censorship out there.
Or they - where "they" is "every social media platform ever" can just not do a goddamned thing, and I'll make up my own fucking mind.
This viewpoint that people need or want shit to be labelled for them is the most disgusting, paternalistic, anti-freedom bullshit to disgrace America in recent memory.
Too many of these fucking people, not just in tech, but also in politics, have this viewpoint of "nudging people into better patterns", etc. My best friend, a smart man, but by no means the smartest of my friends once said something that resonated with me so strongly I doubt I'll ever forget it:
"The problem with freedom is what other people do with it."
Turns out people don't always do what you want, and that's the "true" price of freedom. Tolerating other people's stupidity.
Your first source describes some members of Congress scolding the CEO of Facebook and Twitter, and the second is an opinion poll.
Neither would even be strong sources showing a censorship event happened, they don't even attempt a comparison between conservatives and liberal censorship targets.
Don't do that. If you're gonna come on HN and pontificate at least try to keep the level of discourse up, eh?
- - - -
FWIW I'm left-leaning (by US standards) and I'm concerned about the increasingly censorious actions of left-leaning (again by US standards) mainstream media. E.g. the editorial that Sen. Cotton wrote and the blowback from publishing it seemed really sketchy.
My hope is that we see the moderate Left and moderate Right come together and form a new political party around common ground like free speech and fiscal responsibility.
> My hope is that we see the moderate Left and moderate Right come together and form a new political party around common ground like free speech and fiscal responsibility.
That already exists, it is called the Democratic party. The moderate right won, people like Biden, Pelosi or Warren, the moderate left (AOC, Sanders, etc) played second fiddle. The tension between the 2 groups is clear and if it werent for a common enemy (Trump/GOP) they would split in a second.
> That already exists, it is called the Democratic party.
I don't see a lot of conservatives and right-moderates who want to distance themselves from the Tea Party/Trumpists flocking to the Democrats though.
> moderate right won, people like Biden, Pelosi or Warren
(FWIW, by US standards those are Left politicians.) Yeah but only barely. None of them are wildly popular are they?
> the moderate left (AOC, Sanders, etc)
(FWIW, by US standards those are extreme Left politicians.)
But those folks aren't "second fiddle", they're sops: distractions to keep the Left's equivalent of the Tea Party from becoming a real political force.
America is run by the rich, for the rich, and they do pretty well for themselves. I'm not even talking about gathering real political power (right OR left), just having less sturm und drang and more stability. We've got serious problems on the stove (climate, disease, etc.) that are going to take some concerted effort to tackle, eh?
There is a direct intellectual line of descent from classical liberals to 1960s liberals to the woke vocal elitists dominating tech culture, academia, and corporate media today. But liberal is no longer a good noun to represent them.
Anecdotally I see this in work online chats, with the younger liberals totally supporting censorship and firing people for tweets. Where the "older" liberals are saying no, that's not right.
10 minutes in and it's still mostly about Silicon Valley and private companies, as announced as the main subject by Greenwald in the beginning of the video.
This is one of the reasons why I switched to alternative HN viewers like http://hckrnews.com/ which are less affected by flagging of controversial posts.
With only one foreign conflict[0] at Rome's behest, Neros reign was remarkably peaceful too.
The other day I was casually reading the wikipedia article for Commodus[1] the baddy Emperor from the movie Gladiator and noted how peaceful his rule was. His only wars were when he was co-emperor with his father Marcus Aurelius, and ended when Commodus became solo ruler. By contrast, Marcus Aurelius[2] entire reign was at war and and he is marked by history as the last of the Five Good Emperors.
Wonder how much we think of Roman Emperors comes from the writing and propaganda of their contemporary elites. Rome had an economy based on the back of slaves [3] captured in war after all, so it would not surprise me that elites would praise hawkish Emperors and deride the doves.
> Wonder how much we think of Roman Emperors comes from the writing and propaganda of their contemporary elites.
Almost all of it. Most of the time, all we have to go off are the Roman historians, which are notoriously extremely biased. You learn pretty quickly in any Classical Studies program to unlearn a lot of the preconceptions about Rome and its history that are embedded in modern culture.
I don’t know about under the Emperors, but during the Republic the Senate was actually the house that tried to prevent war and the plebs tended to be hawkish. Wars tend to be sought after by up-and-comers.
Would Marcus have gotten better results from bribing the invaders, like Commodus did? Scholar Pierre Hadot apparently endorses Marcus and descendants risking their life for 400 years at Roman frontiers.
The five good emperors were not sons of their emperor. Marcus offered Caesar title to Pomeianus, a great general who didnt have nepotism to back his rise, married Marcus's daughter Lucilla and provided the inspiration to Maximus in Gladiator. He refused it the three times it was offered. We could have had six good emperors.
Aurelius' positive aura and reputation for being a "good" emperor may stem from his good relation with the Senate, as the senatorial historians would have been the main determinants of what image of him gets passed down to us (albeit indirectly). The same thing would go about other emperors.
Also, w.r.t. wars and other state matters, a ruler generally will not operate in vacuum, and had to account for the provincial gouvernements' needs and demands, the Senate, etc, ... and of course, the need to defend against aggression.
I think the fact that his writings were passed on also helps, don't know how good a person he was in actuality, but I was left with a very positive impression of him after reading meditations.
Yes, I think so. But I'm talking about how his actions and decisions as Emperor have echoed through history, as opposed to how others (f.e. Nero's) are remembered.
On the telephone game of history, I enjoyed a line in 1984 (ch.7):
> "There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories."
It's not true (as we well know, being our own primary sources[1], but upon reflection, even without the explicit right, it's not exactly difficult to find some capitalists[2] who behaved as if they had had the implicit right, so neither is it strictly false.
[1] and having heard the slander instead applied to feudalism
[2] Pedantically, the ones who have been in the news are the capitalists' agents, the high class house servants we call CEO instead of majordomo. Actual capitalists sleeping with factory women (pace Zweig's account of the pre-1914 World of Yesterday) is generally found more in genre literature than in journalistic pages.
Between this and recent substantial progress in VCMI and HotA for HOMM3, it is an exciting time for retro PC fantasy gaming.
[1] https://www.u7revisited.com/