10 ms·

Confimation bias in dense networks: Or why Obama is the anti-christ

13 points by ChaitanyaSai 17y ago

icey 17y ago
This article would be just as interesting without the linkbait title.
- fburnaby 17y ago
  I had concluded just the opposite.
  - icey 17y ago
    You feel that the linkbait title somehow improves the article?
- ChaitanyaSai 17y ago
  The title might be linkbait-y but I thought/hoped it would immediately counter the assumptions of some readers that conspiracy theorists are atypical kooks.
davi 17y ago
I was at a family gathering of my in-laws last weekend. A bunch of older men, aged 50-75, were sitting around the table with beers and scotches, and talking about the decline of the newspaper, what it meant, etc. One had an iPhone and read the New York Times using their iPhone app. It was interesting to see the web reaching these men, who came of age in the pre-PC era. My contribution to the conversation was exactly this idea: that the subtler problem with web-based news was how easy it becomes for like-minded kooks to come together and confirm each others' realities. In some cases, this is a good thing -- like how D&D players or startup founders can find each other and form communities. But in the case of semi-delusional, 911-was-an-inside-job, birther, we-didn't-go-to-the-moon types, or even Rush Limbaugh's misinformed dittoheads, what we have is a fragmentation of reality, in which each subculture occupies a different narrative about what is happening in the world. It's like a Philip K. Dick novel. After I disgorged my profound insight, the 75-year-old told me it has always been that way. :) But it does seem plausible that the web is accelerating and amplifying the tendency.
- pg 17y ago
  Oh, very clearly, and not just recently, either. I think the ability of people to connect peer-to-peer via the Internet is one of the forces driving the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US. Those forces were always there, but they were deliberately suppressed back when the media was dominated by a few big companies. I remember once watching an NFL football game on TV, probably in the 90s, where at some point a group of players spontaneously knelt in prayer. They switched cameras off them instantly. It occurred to me that this probably happened quite a lot during games, and that the network probably had a deliberate policy of not showing it.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say. Even more interesting is the assertion that somehow the media used to deliberately suppress this. Football and prayer has gone together (as with other sports in America) since their inception. Same goes for politics. I remember reading a guy who studies political speeches. He said that only recently has it become commonplace not to mention god or some kind of faith in a political speech. Up until now, state of the union addresses, senatorial speeches, stump speeches, etc. well full of religious imagery. (Still quite a bit of it) None of this was ever "suppressed" I wonder how much of this is not only clustering and selection bias by various groups, but also quite a bit of "us versus them" going on. I'm sure in some evangelical group somewhere they're probably lamenting how the internet is causing the rise of atheists and how, up until now, the media was helping keep a lid on these kooks.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say. It doesn't "seem" like you really mean "interesting", but there's nothing controversial here. From the most recent survey of American religious identification: "Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as 'Born Again' or 'Evangelical'" (emphasis added) http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Repo... (pdf) There's also the fact that evangelicals just came off an unprecedented 8-year run of political power, surely the apex of their influence in US history to date. So they've been rising in at least two senses. On the other point, I don't know about the influence of the internet, but it's pretty clear that until some time in the late 90s, or perhaps with the advent of GWB, evangelicals were almost exclusively treated as an unseemly species of white trash by the media and mainstream US culture. It isn't far-fetched to say that expressions of that faith were suppressed. In fact, it used to bother me that they were treated with such knee-jerk contempt. (It now bothers me less, after observing what they did with their newfound influence.)
chrischen 17y ago
We should hook up politicians to MRI during debates to see which one is bullshitting.
- chadgeidel 17y ago
  (snark) If you think the MRI's would show different results, you haven't been following politics long enough.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    ... which one, or both
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
warfangle 17y ago
Interesting article, but the google trends he uses are quite noisy. It might have been better if he could have gotten trends from one (or several) of the many meyers-brigg test sites out there. Google trends only track how "interesting" a topic is... not how many people have a given trait. So the second half the post is fairly bunk.
- ChaitanyaSai 17y ago
  Google trends are noisy, but there is still a pretty strong signal in there (http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-presen...). And almost surely that signal is gathered from a far larger audience than the MBTI sites. That said, it would be interesting to correlate their numbers with the google trends.

13 points by ChaitanyaSai 17y ago

icey 17y ago

This article would be just as interesting without the linkbait title.

fburnaby 17y ago
I had concluded just the opposite.
- icey 17y ago
  You feel that the linkbait title somehow improves the article?
ChaitanyaSai 17y ago
The title might be linkbait-y but I thought/hoped it would immediately counter the assumptions of some readers that conspiracy theorists are atypical kooks.

davi 17y ago

I was at a family gathering of my in-laws last weekend. A bunch of older men, aged 50-75, were sitting around the table with beers and scotches, and talking about the decline of the newspaper, what it meant, etc. One had an iPhone and read the New York Times using their iPhone app. It was interesting to see the web reaching these men, who came of age in the pre-PC era. My contribution to the conversation was exactly this idea: that the subtler problem with web-based news was how easy it becomes for like-minded kooks to come together and confirm each others' realities. In some cases, this is a good thing -- like how D&D players or startup founders can find each other and form communities. But in the case of semi-delusional, 911-was-an-inside-job, birther, we-didn't-go-to-the-moon types, or even Rush Limbaugh's misinformed dittoheads, what we have is a fragmentation of reality, in which each subculture occupies a different narrative about what is happening in the world. It's like a Philip K. Dick novel. After I disgorged my profound insight, the 75-year-old told me it has always been that way. :) But it does seem plausible that the web is accelerating and amplifying the tendency.

pg 17y ago
Oh, very clearly, and not just recently, either. I think the ability of people to connect peer-to-peer via the Internet is one of the forces driving the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US. Those forces were always there, but they were deliberately suppressed back when the media was dominated by a few big companies. I remember once watching an NFL football game on TV, probably in the 90s, where at some point a group of players spontaneously knelt in prayer. They switched cameras off them instantly. It occurred to me that this probably happened quite a lot during games, and that the network probably had a deliberate policy of not showing it.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say. Even more interesting is the assertion that somehow the media used to deliberately suppress this. Football and prayer has gone together (as with other sports in America) since their inception. Same goes for politics. I remember reading a guy who studies political speeches. He said that only recently has it become commonplace not to mention god or some kind of faith in a political speech. Up until now, state of the union addresses, senatorial speeches, stump speeches, etc. well full of religious imagery. (Still quite a bit of it) None of this was ever "suppressed" I wonder how much of this is not only clustering and selection bias by various groups, but also quite a bit of "us versus them" going on. I'm sure in some evangelical group somewhere they're probably lamenting how the internet is causing the rise of atheists and how, up until now, the media was helping keep a lid on these kooks.
  - gruseom 17y ago
    Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say. It doesn't "seem" like you really mean "interesting", but there's nothing controversial here. From the most recent survey of American religious identification: "Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as 'Born Again' or 'Evangelical'" (emphasis added) http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Report_2008.pdf http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Repo... (pdf) There's also the fact that evangelicals just came off an unprecedented 8-year run of political power, surely the apex of their influence in US history to date. So they've been rising in at least two senses. On the other point, I don't know about the influence of the internet, but it's pretty clear that until some time in the late 90s, or perhaps with the advent of GWB, evangelicals were almost exclusively treated as an unseemly species of white trash by the media and mainstream US culture. It isn't far-fetched to say that expressions of that faith were suppressed. In fact, it used to bother me that they were treated with such knee-jerk contempt. (It now bothers me less, after observing what they did with their newfound influence.)

chrischen 17y ago

We should hook up politicians to MRI during debates to see which one is bullshitting.

chadgeidel 17y ago
(snark) If you think the MRI's would show different results, you haven't been following politics long enough.
- chrischen 17y ago
  ... which one, or both

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

warfangle 17y ago

Interesting article, but the google trends he uses are quite noisy. It might have been better if he could have gotten trends from one (or several) of the many meyers-brigg test sites out there. Google trends only track how "interesting" a topic is... not how many people have a given trait. So the second half the post is fairly bunk.

ChaitanyaSai 17y ago
Google trends are noisy, but there is still a pretty strong signal in there (http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-present-with-google-trends.html http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/04/predicting-presen...). And almost surely that signal is gathered from a far larger audience than the MBTI sites. That said, it would be interesting to correlate their numbers with the google trends.