4 ms·

One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to remember: A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make. Because there's insane stuff happe

by ethbr1 3y ago

One thing I've found useful in parsing modern news is to remember: A pile of extreme occurrences does not an argument make. Because there's insane stuff happening somewhere, to someone, all the time. With the benefit of digitized news we've enabled lazy trawls to create a pile of "Look at how extreme and crazy ____ is!" to support any viewpoint on any topic. Anti-gun? Here's some insane gun owners. Pro-gun? Here's some horrific crimes. That's modern opinionated news in a nutshell -- here's a pile of extreme occurrences, look at how extreme they are, so you should agree that the other side is crazy. An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc. I've found arguing from questions rather than statements helps. What's the root question? And then what data would answer that question?

zdragnar 3y ago
It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in. Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students to review the data because he was himself surprised by the results). People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments, reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, forcing him to get police protection, suffering calls for his resignation, and worse.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Context for others who missed this particular storm in a teacup: https://freespeechunion.org/harvard-professor-needed-armed-protection-after-publishing-research-that-challenged-woke-orthodoxies/ https://freespeechunion.org/harvard-professor-needed-armed-p... On the question of non-lethal uses of force, the study found “sometimes quite large” racial differences in police use of force, even after accounting for “a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioural factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction”. In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, however, the study observed that when it came to the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – there were no racial differences “in either the raw data or when accounting for controls”. According to one case study of the Houston police department, black people were actually 23.5% less likely to be shot by police, relative to white people, in an interaction.
  - rendall 3y ago
    Fry's treatment was a travesty on multiple levels.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Wow, I hadn't heard this before l, and it made me pretty furious: > An important scholarly intervention within a particular field of academic research, you might say. But Prof Fryer has now revealed that at the time the research was conducted, Harvard colleagues familiar with the results urged him not to publish his findings, telling him that he’d ruin his career. This whole article is sad and disgusting, especially because, as a result of this research, Prof Fryer was proposing some actual interventions to reduce biased applications of non-lethal use-of-force, but because the data didn't fit the prevailing narrative, it was attacked. Just gross.
  - nucleardog 3y ago
    Any media coverage that isn’t from a niche right wing news site yelling about the woke kids?
    - clarionbell 3y ago
      So it's not true?
    - hnben 3y ago
      ground-news says "low factuality" and "100% right wing coverage". https://ground.news/article/all-hell-broke-loose-when-racist-police-shootings-narrative-challenged https://ground.news/article/all-hell-broke-loose-when-racist...
      - Palmik 3y ago
        Seems like ground.news is just very bad, I wouldn't rely on it. It was very easy to find other sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi... Note that the work is from 2016.
arp242 3y ago
In [1] there's: > Like other recent live-action remakes—such as The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White—some users accused the studio of "going woke" by modernizing the original story. > They'll make the hunter an evil White man, Bambi's mom will be a message about incel rage and Bambi will also be black," wrote @NintendoFan729. That's this Tweet: https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/1707561342566068373 https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/170756134256606837... – 5 likes, 641 views. From some random anonymous account with 322 followers and an average of about 5 tweets per day. Yet here it is, cited in a major magazine, as evidence of ... something or the other. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-sparks-backlash-1830811 https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-spar...
eastbound 3y ago
I do not find the argument that “newspapers be newspapers” excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very forcefully at that. And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in some form due to humans’s generous nature? Is it due to more people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization)? Is it, as the conspiracy theorists say, a small group of influential people? Is it the Russians who sponsor those groupes to divide us?
- ethbr1 3y ago
  It doesn't go only one way though. I can count 6+ instances on both the Fox News and MSNBC front pages right now.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    How many Fox-like outlets are there compared to the number of MSNBC-like? I don’t think these things are equal even on the surface. I don’t know how people aren’t asking themselves all the time “Am I even sure I believe in the things I think I do?”
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc. We've seen that even these aren't that hard to fudge. Selection bias, p-hacking, mobbing researchers who publish politically unpopular results as a deterrent, etc. What you need is basically the opposite of that. Replication of controversial results in preregistered studies by independent researchers trusted to be honest by both sides of the controversy. Refuting results you don't believe to be true using evidence rather than silencing the original authors. A culture of good science. How to get that is a different question.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  There's gradations of good. I'd argue that we're at bad now, and specifically worse than even 20 years ago, itself worse than 20 years before that. The pillaging of journalism funding, by Google and Facebook for ad revenue, substituted with "I dunno, the Internet will figure something out" isn't one of our better moments as a culture.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Everybody is always quick to blame the internet for everything, but I think we can actually pin this one on housing scarcity. Journalism was funded by advertising because ad space was rare and journalistic outlets got a big chunk of it. Then the internet made ad space common -- it's on every web page full of lolcats -- and it was this reality rather than anything specific done by Facebook or Google that took the ad money. But the internet also made it so you don't need a printing press to publish. That should have brought the cost down to what would still be sustainable after the drop in ad revenue. Until you have to make rent, because housing costs are out of control. This is the same thing destroying our communities. You and some neighbors want to get a community lodge for local events? Forget about it, the cost is prohibitive. Stay home and don't even know your neighbors' names. And then where do you learn who to trust? The Internet?
    - ethbr1 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dhananjay23 3y ago
[flagged]
- dhananjay23 3y ago
  [flagged]

by ethbr1 3y ago

zdragnar 3y ago

It isn't just modern news, people tend to be intellectually lazy on any topic they are emotionally invested in. Just look at the fallout from Harvard professor Roland Fryer publishing a study (after hiring a second set of grad students to review the data because he was himself surprised by the results). People didn't react logically, with proportionate arguments, reasoning or counter data. They reacted emotionally, forcing him to get police protection, suffering calls for his resignation, and worse.

resolutebat 3y ago
Context for others who missed this particular storm in a teacup: https://freespeechunion.org/harvard-professor-needed-armed-protection-after-publishing-research-that-challenged-woke-orthodoxies/ https://freespeechunion.org/harvard-professor-needed-armed-p... On the question of non-lethal uses of force, the study found “sometimes quite large” racial differences in police use of force, even after accounting for “a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioural factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction”. In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, however, the study observed that when it came to the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – there were no racial differences “in either the raw data or when accounting for controls”. According to one case study of the Houston police department, black people were actually 23.5% less likely to be shot by police, relative to white people, in an interaction.
- rendall 3y ago
  Fry's treatment was a travesty on multiple levels.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Wow, I hadn't heard this before l, and it made me pretty furious: > An important scholarly intervention within a particular field of academic research, you might say. But Prof Fryer has now revealed that at the time the research was conducted, Harvard colleagues familiar with the results urged him not to publish his findings, telling him that he’d ruin his career. This whole article is sad and disgusting, especially because, as a result of this research, Prof Fryer was proposing some actual interventions to reduce biased applications of non-lethal use-of-force, but because the data didn't fit the prevailing narrative, it was attacked. Just gross.
- nucleardog 3y ago
  Any media coverage that isn’t from a niche right wing news site yelling about the woke kids?
  - clarionbell 3y ago
    So it's not true?
  - hnben 3y ago
    ground-news says "low factuality" and "100% right wing coverage". https://ground.news/article/all-hell-broke-loose-when-racist-police-shootings-narrative-challenged https://ground.news/article/all-hell-broke-loose-when-racist...
    - Palmik 3y ago
      Seems like ground.news is just very bad, I wouldn't rely on it. It was very easy to find other sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi... Note that the work is from 2016.

arp242 3y ago

In [1] there's: > Like other recent live-action remakes—such as The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White—some users accused the studio of "going woke" by modernizing the original story. > They'll make the hunter an evil White man, Bambi's mom will be a message about incel rage and Bambi will also be black," wrote @NintendoFan729. That's this Tweet: https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/1707561342566068373 https://twitter.com/NintendoFan729/status/170756134256606837... – 5 likes, 641 views. From some random anonymous account with 322 followers and an average of about 5 tweets per day. Yet here it is, cited in a major magazine, as evidence of ... something or the other. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-sparks-backlash-1830811 https://www.newsweek.com/disney-modernized-bambi-remake-spar...

eastbound 3y ago

I do not find the argument that “newspapers be newspapers” excuses this, when it clearly only goes one way, and very forcefully at that. And therefore it would be extremely interesting to find the origin of this push. Is it systemic, i.e. always present in some form due to humans’s generous nature? Is it due to more people living in cities that we have to organize in such a way (DEI-Covid-Feminism-GW or ostracization)? Is it, as the conspiracy theorists say, a small group of influential people? Is it the Russians who sponsor those groupes to divide us?

ethbr1 3y ago
It doesn't go only one way though. I can count 6+ instances on both the Fox News and MSNBC front pages right now.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  How many Fox-like outlets are there compared to the number of MSNBC-like? I don’t think these things are equal even on the surface. I don’t know how people aren’t asking themselves all the time “Am I even sure I believe in the things I think I do?”

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> An actual argument involves more annoying to fudge (and admittedly, harder to compile) data like frequency, normalization against population or historical averages, geographic localization, etc. We've seen that even these aren't that hard to fudge. Selection bias, p-hacking, mobbing researchers who publish politically unpopular results as a deterrent, etc. What you need is basically the opposite of that. Replication of controversial results in preregistered studies by independent researchers trusted to be honest by both sides of the controversy. Refuting results you don't believe to be true using evidence rather than silencing the original authors. A culture of good science. How to get that is a different question.

ethbr1 3y ago
There's gradations of good. I'd argue that we're at bad now, and specifically worse than even 20 years ago, itself worse than 20 years before that. The pillaging of journalism funding, by Google and Facebook for ad revenue, substituted with "I dunno, the Internet will figure something out" isn't one of our better moments as a culture.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Everybody is always quick to blame the internet for everything, but I think we can actually pin this one on housing scarcity. Journalism was funded by advertising because ad space was rare and journalistic outlets got a big chunk of it. Then the internet made ad space common -- it's on every web page full of lolcats -- and it was this reality rather than anything specific done by Facebook or Google that took the ad money. But the internet also made it so you don't need a printing press to publish. That should have brought the cost down to what would still be sustainable after the drop in ad revenue. Until you have to make rent, because housing costs are out of control. This is the same thing destroying our communities. You and some neighbors want to get a community lodge for local events? Forget about it, the cost is prohibitive. Stay home and don't even know your neighbors' names. And then where do you learn who to trust? The Internet?
  - ethbr1 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dhananjay23 3y ago

[flagged]

dhananjay23 3y ago
[flagged]