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They really should filter the news to each person's individual bias. It'd just be easier that way. Cognitive dissonance is real and it can cause serious emoti

They really should filter the news to each person's individual bias. It'd just be easier that way. Cognitive dissonance is real and it can cause serious emotional distress. That's not a good way to drive engagement.

vinhboy 10y ago
You're repeating the false narrative that unbiased news does not exist. There are lots of unbiased news outlets who just report on stories as they come in. I learn about all sorts of government corruption and waste from NPR, NYTimes, WaPO, etc... And relating to current events, I also learn about all the unscrupulous things Clinton did from these sources. I don't need to be inundated with right-wing propaganda be unbiased. Just as I wouldn't spend too much time reading HuffPo or ThinkProgress. No one news source is complete, or 100% correct, but not every news source is credible or deserve our attention.
- wyager 10y ago
  > NPR, NYTimes, WaPO Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias. Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.
  - Natsu 10y ago
    WaPo is one of those doing some fairly shady things, in fact: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list-directory-photos-most-damaging-worst-rhode-island-delegate-fec-jvf/3/ http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni... I'm still waiting for them to do a story on their own involvement here....
  - jsmthrowaway 10y ago
    Name an unbiased publication from your perspective.
    - wyager 10y ago
      > Name an unbiased publication from your perspective. https://arxiv.org/archive/math https://arxiv.org/archive/math If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist. We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.
      - jsmthrowaway 10y ago
        Edit: The comment this one responded to has been basically rewritten, so my reply is no longer appropriate and I cannot delete it.
        wyager 10y ago
        I was disagreeing with the OP's assertion that NPR, NYTimes, and WaPO are unbiased. I'm not sure what you expected.
  - vinhboy 10y ago
    I am completely ok with you directing that comment at me, because I fundamentally disagree with your assessment. I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources. For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.
    - wyager 10y ago
      > being covered by conservative media. Where the hell did I say that conservative media was unbiased?
    - shard972 10y ago
      > For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media. That is not the standard for bias, and the fact you make your standard "Well if it doesn't have info that conservatives have". What about libertarians? Anarchists? Socialists? Fascists? Communists? Everyone is bias, some places do a great job of separating out their biases from reporting but its fantasy land to think that there are motivated journalists out there that just don't have an opinion one way or the other.
    - hueving 10y ago
      >For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media. No, information may have been made available by biased media, but it may have been presented in such a way to adjust the perceived significance of it. Take the email scandal for example. Every news outlet provided the information, but there are vastly different conclusions about the importance of it that a reader will be led to draw based on how the information was presented. Even the headline you were upset about was a logical conclusion given a viewpoint based on the information available about the recent shooting of the police officers. Information: Two policeman killed by a man who was in the country illegally Conservative news interpretation: Illegal immigrant a result of poor border control policies by current administration. Therefore, "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people." Liberal news interpretation: Immigration is a touchy subject right now, exclude anything related to it. Therefore, "Two policeman were killed by a person who happened to be a human."
anexprogrammer 10y ago
I really don't want that, and try to fight it when I'm experiencing it by reading opposing viewpoints. I want my views challenged, and to have at least a chance of finding out when I'm wrong. With almost any given issue and viewpoint it's what they don't tell you that's the part you probably should know or at least get exposed to.
darawk 10y ago
I genuinely can't tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. And I don't mean that insultingly. It's an obvious conclusion to jump to from the initially rejected premise that hyper-equality of treatment is wrong, but of course it ignores the enormous cost of creating echo chambers. It seems like the 'correct' solution doesn't lie at one of these poles, unfortunately.
- unityByFreedom 10y ago
  I think he's serious. This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.
  - dlss 10y ago
    Hmm. Now I can't tell if your reply is serious :p As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations. Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order. > This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general) > We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things. Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony. > Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals. Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...
timehastoldme 10y ago
Ethically, it's absolutely unconscionable to show people only what they want to see, enabling our worst features to simply fester unchallenged. From a Machiavellian standpoint (read: Thiel or Zuckerberg), this isn't an intelligent long-term strategy, unless your view of how dumb and malleable people are is such that by playing your cards right, so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. EDIT: could you explain why you want to delete this post?
- hueving 10y ago
  >so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. People already know about the filter bubble, but they don't actually care. Most people aren't going to Facebook for an unbiased stream of news and they don't like to feel uncomfortable (i.e. be barraged by things that challenge their core beliefs).
  - timehastoldme 10y ago
    They don't, but they also don't like going to the gym, waking up early for work, or taking out the trash. I think it'll be interesting to see who do and who don't Willpower and motivation fascinate me. I've been living with depression for a while, but I've been able to conceptually reorient myself to embrace my circumstances and find willpower to do the 'I don't want to, but I should' things whenever they come around. But just as I don't think everyone is capable of advanced systems programming, for example, I'm not certain that everyone is capable of strong willpower.
- 794CD01 10y ago
  The great thing about freedom is that it means other people finding your actions unconscionable doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop doing them. Some people would find it unconscionable that my wife drives and that I "allow her" to do so. The particularly zealous among them might even say that this kind of moral decadence enables our worst features. Although they'd probably find other sins to say that about first before they got to the driving.
  - 10y ago
internaut 10y ago
This is an interesting statement. I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular. However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts. Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality. In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level. These are serious, even dangerous errors. So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises. More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.

vinhboy 10y ago

You're repeating the false narrative that unbiased news does not exist. There are lots of unbiased news outlets who just report on stories as they come in. I learn about all sorts of government corruption and waste from NPR, NYTimes, WaPO, etc... And relating to current events, I also learn about all the unscrupulous things Clinton did from these sources. I don't need to be inundated with right-wing propaganda be unbiased. Just as I wouldn't spend too much time reading HuffPo or ThinkProgress. No one news source is complete, or 100% correct, but not every news source is credible or deserve our attention.

wyager 10y ago
> NPR, NYTimes, WaPO Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias. Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.
- Natsu 10y ago
  WaPo is one of those doing some fairly shady things, in fact: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list-directory-photos-most-damaging-worst-rhode-island-delegate-fec-jvf/3/ http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni... I'm still waiting for them to do a story on their own involvement here....
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago
  Name an unbiased publication from your perspective.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > Name an unbiased publication from your perspective. https://arxiv.org/archive/math https://arxiv.org/archive/math If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist. We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.
    - jsmthrowaway 10y ago
      Edit: The comment this one responded to has been basically rewritten, so my reply is no longer appropriate and I cannot delete it.
      - wyager 10y ago
        I was disagreeing with the OP's assertion that NPR, NYTimes, and WaPO are unbiased. I'm not sure what you expected.
- vinhboy 10y ago
  I am completely ok with you directing that comment at me, because I fundamentally disagree with your assessment. I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources. For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.
  - wyager 10y ago
    > being covered by conservative media. Where the hell did I say that conservative media was unbiased?
  - shard972 10y ago
    > For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media. That is not the standard for bias, and the fact you make your standard "Well if it doesn't have info that conservatives have". What about libertarians? Anarchists? Socialists? Fascists? Communists? Everyone is bias, some places do a great job of separating out their biases from reporting but its fantasy land to think that there are motivated journalists out there that just don't have an opinion one way or the other.
  - hueving 10y ago
    >For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media. No, information may have been made available by biased media, but it may have been presented in such a way to adjust the perceived significance of it. Take the email scandal for example. Every news outlet provided the information, but there are vastly different conclusions about the importance of it that a reader will be led to draw based on how the information was presented. Even the headline you were upset about was a logical conclusion given a viewpoint based on the information available about the recent shooting of the police officers. Information: Two policeman killed by a man who was in the country illegally Conservative news interpretation: Illegal immigrant a result of poor border control policies by current administration. Therefore, "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people." Liberal news interpretation: Immigration is a touchy subject right now, exclude anything related to it. Therefore, "Two policeman were killed by a person who happened to be a human."

anexprogrammer 10y ago

I really don't want that, and try to fight it when I'm experiencing it by reading opposing viewpoints. I want my views challenged, and to have at least a chance of finding out when I'm wrong. With almost any given issue and viewpoint it's what they don't tell you that's the part you probably should know or at least get exposed to.

darawk 10y ago

I genuinely can't tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. And I don't mean that insultingly. It's an obvious conclusion to jump to from the initially rejected premise that hyper-equality of treatment is wrong, but of course it ignores the enormous cost of creating echo chambers. It seems like the 'correct' solution doesn't lie at one of these poles, unfortunately.

unityByFreedom 10y ago
I think he's serious. This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.
- dlss 10y ago
  Hmm. Now I can't tell if your reply is serious :p As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations. Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order. > This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general) > We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things. Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony. > Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals. Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...

timehastoldme 10y ago

Ethically, it's absolutely unconscionable to show people only what they want to see, enabling our worst features to simply fester unchallenged. From a Machiavellian standpoint (read: Thiel or Zuckerberg), this isn't an intelligent long-term strategy, unless your view of how dumb and malleable people are is such that by playing your cards right, so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. EDIT: could you explain why you want to delete this post?

hueving 10y ago
>so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. People already know about the filter bubble, but they don't actually care. Most people aren't going to Facebook for an unbiased stream of news and they don't like to feel uncomfortable (i.e. be barraged by things that challenge their core beliefs).
- timehastoldme 10y ago
  They don't, but they also don't like going to the gym, waking up early for work, or taking out the trash. I think it'll be interesting to see who do and who don't Willpower and motivation fascinate me. I've been living with depression for a while, but I've been able to conceptually reorient myself to embrace my circumstances and find willpower to do the 'I don't want to, but I should' things whenever they come around. But just as I don't think everyone is capable of advanced systems programming, for example, I'm not certain that everyone is capable of strong willpower.
794CD01 10y ago
The great thing about freedom is that it means other people finding your actions unconscionable doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop doing them. Some people would find it unconscionable that my wife drives and that I "allow her" to do so. The particularly zealous among them might even say that this kind of moral decadence enables our worst features. Although they'd probably find other sins to say that about first before they got to the driving.
- 10y ago

internaut 10y ago

This is an interesting statement. I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular. However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts. Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality. In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level. These are serious, even dangerous errors. So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises. More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.