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So on the one hand you had Twitter, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to win the electi
by wyager 2y ago
So on the one hand you had Twitter, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to win the election.
On the other hand you had most other platforms like Reddit, with relatively heavy-handed moderation, where the impression you would have had in the first few days of November is that Trump was probably going to lose the election.
So when you want to make a prior judgement on an extremely consequential outcome, which a posteriori was not even close, and one information ecosystem gives you the right answer, and most of the other information ecosystems give you the wrong answer, which information ecosystems do you classify as "echo chambers"?
It's possible that this was just a fluke, but it should certainly make you update your priors on which ecosystems provide a more representative sample of base reality.
- bandyaboot 2y agoIf I confidently declare ahead of time the result of a coin flip, I may turn out to be correct, but my confidence was still unjustified. And furthermore, my getting it right would not necessitate a “fluke”. I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what I see individually, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that there was a bias toward a particular desired result. But, I honestly didn’t see much in the way of a bias one way or the other in the expected result. I mostly saw a lot of anxiety over not knowing what result to expect.
- lazyeye 2y agoElections are not remotely a "coin flip" though?
- jkubicek 2y agoWell sure, but the predicting the results of this particular election was very much a coin flip.
- lazyeye 2y agoI disagree. The media makes it seem like a coin flip, but the prediction markets where people are focused on making money was accurate. This is compared to the media who are more interested in pushing lies and ideology.
- threeseed 2y agoThe prediction markets can be influenced by governments, companies etc who have no desire to make short term money.
- itsoktocry 2y agoBut polling results cannot. Right.
- bandyaboot 2y agoPersonally, I don’t care what the “media” was saying. I care what the polling data and the election models based on the polling data were saying. They were saying pretty consistently that this could go either way, but that at the same time the result may not turn out to be actually that close. Those two aren’t incompatible.
- lazyeye 2y agoIf any other profession was as consistently wrong as pollsters are, would they be taken seriously? I think the main job of pollsters is to provide content for corporate media (the closer the polls the better for attracting eyeballs for advertisers). And they do this job admirably. It just has nothing to do with the election.
- bandyaboot 2y agoYou don’t value polling, ok. No use continuing to go back and forth about it. Instead, maybe you’ll feel like responding to one of the other commenters that replied to you about prediction markets…
- eastbound 2y ago> I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees Left. Censored media leans left. Censored forums, news, communities are censored to give credit to left ideas. Symmetrically, left ideas only thrive by hiding information. With complete transparency, people lean right.
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoThank you for capably providing a successful demonstration of the point you replied to: it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees.
- thomaslord 2y agoModerated media leans left. At least some of the reason it ends up that way is that many of the people who violate incredibly reasonable rules are conservative. Certain groups of hard-right people will say some incredibly bigoted shit that's absolutely out of line and makes it impossible to have a civilized conversation, then they complain about getting banned and drag a bunch of moderately-more-reasonable people with them when they leave. Once those people leave, normal everyday non-asshole conservatives realize the platform has less conservative content and leave in search of spaces that they feel respect their viewpoints more. In some cases entire topic-groups get banned (/r/the_donald is a good example) for legitimate reasons that frequently involve a small extremely-active group of members, and the rest of the members will also leave the platform because all they see is that a group they were part of got banned. People who lean to the left tend to believe that it's bad to do some of the things that get you justifiably banned (such as intentionally using language that demeans people based on immutable traits). Because of this, it's much easier for them to avoid being deplatformed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cmdli 2y agoGiven the large amount of information that Twitter claimed that turned out to be false, one correct claim doesn't really change much. It goes from around 0/1000 correct to 1/1001 correct. Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
- tailrecursion 2y agoOne of the two echo chambers was bound to be correct in terms of vote counting.
- 2c2c2c 2y agowhat's the standard now for a not close election? dems have to always win the popular vote now? 4 swing states were decided by a 1% difference. this election was close.
- permo-w 2y agothe game is to win the swing states. that is all that matters and both parties know it. Trump won all 7 swing states and the popular vote by a few million. it was not a close election whatsoever. even Clinton won Nevada
- guappa 2y agoReddit depends very much on which subreddit you are. There's plenty of racists, trump supporters and so on on reddit.
- SCdF 2y agoThe vibe on other platforms was that it was going to be close, not that Kamala was going to win, which is the correct even handed judgement, and now all the votes have being counted, was correct. The idea that I stopped clock is right twice a day but because it's twitter that means it's always right is a bit... come on. Hackernews commenters are supposed to be better than that.