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The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead "emergently" appeared, then never goes into

The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead "emergently" appeared, then never goes into any detail about how that happened exactly... It's weird to me that the left right divide happened to appear, rather than a faith based/non faith based, or an authoritarian/liberal, etc dichotomy. Is there no public data on this we can use to prove it's true, just trusting the org at it's word?

jl6 3y ago
Not sure about proof, but the left/right dichotomy also “emerged” in the real world in most countries. It’s not the only axis of variation that we see, but it’s a dominant one. Since Twitter is part of the real world, the users may have arrived with a pre-existing propensity to group themselves into left/right tribes, and then the mechanics of social media bubble formation accelerated the polarization process.
- phatfish 3y ago
  Once a "tribe" gets big enough it starts to force others to pick a side. Inevitably the system reduces down to two. In politics voting methods can defuse this somewhat by allowing the smaller tribes stick to their own values and not loose out too heavily in the power grab. First-past-the-post amplifies the larger tribes, proportional representation (or similar systems) can partially reduce their effect.
- gostsamo 3y ago
  left/right appears only where nothing else is allowed. in the countries where the rule is not "winner takes it all" there is a spectrum.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    But the spectrum still ends up being "left/right", with some subdivisions over "red vs green" lefties.
    - gostsamo 3y ago
      No, not really. There are different types of centrists, religious vs liberterian right, and even some socialist religionists. The world is a tat bit more complex than the loud minorities want to make you believe.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  It's also one that is insufficient, you just have to look how often fascist-like parties are classified "right wing" (while they are centrists), or the likes of Gandhi and Stalin get put in the same "left" box, while they are polar opposites. Unless I have misunderstood it, this algorithm sounds particularly bad, because it's either only able to see the world through a single dimension, or worse, it's even forcing it into the same dimension (criticizing from competent mathematicians/staticians would be welcome). But in the end, I guess it doesn't change much : it's worse than useless, just like Twitter and the people that use it, for the last decade and counting.
krapp 3y ago
Both faith based/non-faith based and authoritarian/liberal views will often, if not exclusively, be interpreted as falling along the left/right axis by many people. It's simply a matter of interpretation and bias.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
The first thing that comes to mind is this classic Jonathan Haidt TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
FiloSottile 3y ago
The article claims all data and algorithms are public, are you saying that's not true or that the data is doctored? To me, the examples make a convincing case that the emergent [-1, +1] range ended up aligning with what most people call right/left.
nonethewiser 3y ago
I think it would be authoritarian/libertarian. Liberal is on the left/right axis and you could have authoritarian liberals.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  There's the classic right wing economic liberal who is pro free market, but you also have the bottom wing civic freedoms anarchist liberal (which is indeed anti-authoritarian/fascist top wing). Both anarchist and fascist are centrists in the usual left vs right sense. P.S. But you can add more dimensions, it's just that you cannot go below two without having nonsense as a result.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  What exactly would it look like to be an authoritarian liberal? Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    It's just a language issue. "Liberal" in the US doesn't mean the same thing it means in other English-speaking countries. Americans coined the term "neoliberal" to talk about what other people just call "liberal." In the US, "liberal" just means that you vote for Democrats, and that you're concerned. It's not a distinct ideological stance.
    - flagrant_taco 3y ago
      That really makes the distinction of am "authoritarian liberal" pointless at that point. One is a ideology and the other is a political party, the combination of the two is completely irrelevant as any party could align with one specific ideology.
myrmidon 3y ago
To me, it appears clear that the divide is not really left/right; my understanding is that the algorithm basically reduces a high-dimensional "alignment" of a user/note to a 1-dimensional "polarity", and this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split. I think this is almost to be expected if you have a 2 party political system, because each party is trying to align with as many voters as possible; so you can fully expect that the republican/democrat split is a "good" cut through alignment space. Basically, the algorithm explicitly looks for the "best" polarity axis (i.e. the one that contains the most information about whether a user is going to find something agreeable or not), while a 2 party political system implicitly alignes across such an axis (as an emergent property of party-politics-shifting).
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  > this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split That's not my reading. The negative polarity is clearly the US Democrats, but as Vitalik notes, the opposite polarity isn't anything obviously specific to the Republicans. His posts for negative were simply the first three posts and they're all of a very consistent political ideology and region. But he had to cherry-pick posts for positive polarity to try and sustain the claim that this is the opposite of the negative polarity, as Brazilian politics and Tesla people isn't something anyone would have picked if asked to guess what the posts would be about ahead of time. Then there's the clear content differences between the positive vs negative polarity posts. The negative polarity posts are all highly subjective opinions, usually about the tone of what some famous people said. Their references are simply left-leaning US media articles which are themselves opinion. They could be easily disputed and frequently are. The positive polarity posts are cherry picked for the purpose of making a point, yet are mostly specific factual claims with hard data and references, except for the second, which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist? I don't see any way to dispute any of the claims in the positive polarity notes. You'd have to fall back on "well that may be true but in wider context..." type responses. So it's not really clear exactly what this algorithm is picking up on. The differences may just reflect the inherent nature of politics in which left and right are often presented as polar opposites, but which in reality is more like the left being relatively homogenous and consistent at any given point in time, whereas the "right" is more like a coalition of people who aren't on the left than a specific set of policy or cultural concerns.
pjc50 3y ago
Not a direct answer, but years ago a friend of mine tried a similar experiment by taking a bunch of polarizing questions and then doing principal component analysis on the results. He came up with two axes (the maths would spit out a number of axes, but the rest were low-salience). The top one was very similar to "left/right". http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors It would be interesting to repeat this today, either with the same or different questions.
meowface 3y ago
One could argue that a particular question will always have a left/right-ish divide of some kind, even if people may disagree which is which. In many cases on social media discourse, it comes down to pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment (which previously would usually have been seen as right vs. left but now is generally seen as the reverse). Anecdotally, most community notes I've seen appear to take the form of "anti-establishment claim -> community note refuting the anti-establishment claim". But what's nice is that when it's the opposite, they still seem to work well.
somenameforme 3y ago
I think this is easy to explain by considering that the meaning of left/right constantly changes over time. For example, how would you characterize somebody who is pro free speech, anti war, anti hegemony, pro equality of opportunity, in support of a color-blind society, and so on? 20 years ago that would have been an absolutely textbook liberal, today that is no longer the case. So when we say left or right we're not really referring to any sort of static values, or even fundamental values. It all just keeps shifting and often in self-contradictory ways. So the terms just become a proxy for the ever-shifting divides in society. This makes it essentially a tautology that any fair sampling of society will end up divided on those terms.
- delecti 3y ago
  The changing of left/right over time is largely because much of American society views politics through the lens of Democrat/Republican. On a broader level, economic left/right and authoritarian/libertarian haven't moved, but both parties kinda rotate around them over time. At the moment I'd say both democrats are moving slightly further left, and both parties are moving more authoritarian.
pessimizer 3y ago
> The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead "emergently" appeared, No it doesn't. It's explaining that to you. It's explaining code that is available for you to read yourself. It is not trying to sell you anything.
jaybaxter 3y ago
The code is open source: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes The notes and rating data is released to the public every day: https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data Feel free to run the matrix factorization code on the data, and then try to interpret the resulting latent dimension it finds for yourself! And also, you can read the code to verify that it really is running a matrix factorization rather than hardcoding a particular left/right split.

jl6 3y ago

Not sure about proof, but the left/right dichotomy also “emerged” in the real world in most countries. It’s not the only axis of variation that we see, but it’s a dominant one. Since Twitter is part of the real world, the users may have arrived with a pre-existing propensity to group themselves into left/right tribes, and then the mechanics of social media bubble formation accelerated the polarization process.

phatfish 3y ago
Once a "tribe" gets big enough it starts to force others to pick a side. Inevitably the system reduces down to two. In politics voting methods can defuse this somewhat by allowing the smaller tribes stick to their own values and not loose out too heavily in the power grab. First-past-the-post amplifies the larger tribes, proportional representation (or similar systems) can partially reduce their effect.
gostsamo 3y ago
left/right appears only where nothing else is allowed. in the countries where the rule is not "winner takes it all" there is a spectrum.
- pjc50 3y ago
  But the spectrum still ends up being "left/right", with some subdivisions over "red vs green" lefties.
  - gostsamo 3y ago
    No, not really. There are different types of centrists, religious vs liberterian right, and even some socialist religionists. The world is a tat bit more complex than the loud minorities want to make you believe.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
It's also one that is insufficient, you just have to look how often fascist-like parties are classified "right wing" (while they are centrists), or the likes of Gandhi and Stalin get put in the same "left" box, while they are polar opposites. Unless I have misunderstood it, this algorithm sounds particularly bad, because it's either only able to see the world through a single dimension, or worse, it's even forcing it into the same dimension (criticizing from competent mathematicians/staticians would be welcome). But in the end, I guess it doesn't change much : it's worse than useless, just like Twitter and the people that use it, for the last decade and counting.

krapp 3y ago

Both faith based/non-faith based and authoritarian/liberal views will often, if not exclusively, be interpreted as falling along the left/right axis by many people. It's simply a matter of interpretation and bias.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

The first thing that comes to mind is this classic Jonathan Haidt TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...

FiloSottile 3y ago

The article claims all data and algorithms are public, are you saying that's not true or that the data is doctored? To me, the examples make a convincing case that the emergent [-1, +1] range ended up aligning with what most people call right/left.

nonethewiser 3y ago

I think it would be authoritarian/libertarian. Liberal is on the left/right axis and you could have authoritarian liberals.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
There's the classic right wing economic liberal who is pro free market, but you also have the bottom wing civic freedoms anarchist liberal (which is indeed anti-authoritarian/fascist top wing). Both anarchist and fascist are centrists in the usual left vs right sense. P.S. But you can add more dimensions, it's just that you cannot go below two without having nonsense as a result.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
What exactly would it look like to be an authoritarian liberal? Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  It's just a language issue. "Liberal" in the US doesn't mean the same thing it means in other English-speaking countries. Americans coined the term "neoliberal" to talk about what other people just call "liberal." In the US, "liberal" just means that you vote for Democrats, and that you're concerned. It's not a distinct ideological stance.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    That really makes the distinction of am "authoritarian liberal" pointless at that point. One is a ideology and the other is a political party, the combination of the two is completely irrelevant as any party could align with one specific ideology.

myrmidon 3y ago

To me, it appears clear that the divide is not really left/right; my understanding is that the algorithm basically reduces a high-dimensional "alignment" of a user/note to a 1-dimensional "polarity", and this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split. I think this is almost to be expected if you have a 2 party political system, because each party is trying to align with as many voters as possible; so you can fully expect that the republican/democrat split is a "good" cut through alignment space. Basically, the algorithm explicitly looks for the "best" polarity axis (i.e. the one that contains the most information about whether a user is going to find something agreeable or not), while a 2 party political system implicitly alignes across such an axis (as an emergent property of party-politics-shifting).

nvm0n2 3y ago
> this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split That's not my reading. The negative polarity is clearly the US Democrats, but as Vitalik notes, the opposite polarity isn't anything obviously specific to the Republicans. His posts for negative were simply the first three posts and they're all of a very consistent political ideology and region. But he had to cherry-pick posts for positive polarity to try and sustain the claim that this is the opposite of the negative polarity, as Brazilian politics and Tesla people isn't something anyone would have picked if asked to guess what the posts would be about ahead of time. Then there's the clear content differences between the positive vs negative polarity posts. The negative polarity posts are all highly subjective opinions, usually about the tone of what some famous people said. Their references are simply left-leaning US media articles which are themselves opinion. They could be easily disputed and frequently are. The positive polarity posts are cherry picked for the purpose of making a point, yet are mostly specific factual claims with hard data and references, except for the second, which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist? I don't see any way to dispute any of the claims in the positive polarity notes. You'd have to fall back on "well that may be true but in wider context..." type responses. So it's not really clear exactly what this algorithm is picking up on. The differences may just reflect the inherent nature of politics in which left and right are often presented as polar opposites, but which in reality is more like the left being relatively homogenous and consistent at any given point in time, whereas the "right" is more like a coalition of people who aren't on the left than a specific set of policy or cultural concerns.

pjc50 3y ago

Not a direct answer, but years ago a friend of mine tried a similar experiment by taking a bunch of polarizing questions and then doing principal component analysis on the results. He came up with two axes (the maths would spit out a number of axes, but the rest were low-salience). The top one was very similar to "left/right". http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/eigenvectors It would be interesting to repeat this today, either with the same or different questions.

meowface 3y ago

One could argue that a particular question will always have a left/right-ish divide of some kind, even if people may disagree which is which. In many cases on social media discourse, it comes down to pro-establishment vs. anti-establishment (which previously would usually have been seen as right vs. left but now is generally seen as the reverse). Anecdotally, most community notes I've seen appear to take the form of "anti-establishment claim -> community note refuting the anti-establishment claim". But what's nice is that when it's the opposite, they still seem to work well.

somenameforme 3y ago

I think this is easy to explain by considering that the meaning of left/right constantly changes over time. For example, how would you characterize somebody who is pro free speech, anti war, anti hegemony, pro equality of opportunity, in support of a color-blind society, and so on? 20 years ago that would have been an absolutely textbook liberal, today that is no longer the case. So when we say left or right we're not really referring to any sort of static values, or even fundamental values. It all just keeps shifting and often in self-contradictory ways. So the terms just become a proxy for the ever-shifting divides in society. This makes it essentially a tautology that any fair sampling of society will end up divided on those terms.

delecti 3y ago
The changing of left/right over time is largely because much of American society views politics through the lens of Democrat/Republican. On a broader level, economic left/right and authoritarian/libertarian haven't moved, but both parties kinda rotate around them over time. At the moment I'd say both democrats are moving slightly further left, and both parties are moving more authoritarian.

pessimizer 3y ago

> The article repeatedly makes effort to assure the reader that the left/right dichotomy wasn't hardcoded but instead "emergently" appeared, No it doesn't. It's explaining that to you. It's explaining code that is available for you to read yourself. It is not trying to sell you anything.

jaybaxter 3y ago

The code is open source: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes The notes and rating data is released to the public every day: https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data https://twitter.com/i/communitynotes/download-data Feel free to run the matrix factorization code on the data, and then try to interpret the resulting latent dimension it finds for yourself! And also, you can read the code to verify that it really is running a matrix factorization rather than hardcoding a particular left/right split.