Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information? Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source. We know policing speech doesn't work, whoever does the policing introduces their own biases, this was clear as day with the hunter laptop story and how the goverment put pressure on social media companies to supress it.
This “sounds smart” and I’m sure it circulates well in conversation. In practice, no. The point of “facts” is to identify useful truths that guide decisions. When some portion of the distribution of people identify misalignment, which is inevitable—not optional—then they will true up.
4 years on and a significant proportion of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Just how many years will it take for that to true up?
I notice you don't make a definite claim that it wasn't stolen. You're annoyed by the fact others believe it was, based on what you feel is insufficient evidence, yes?
Surely the burden of proof is on those making a claim of election interference? Elections are designed to be reliable and there haven't been reports of previous elections being "stolen", so I would think that reasonable evidence should be provided if people want to push the idea that an election was interfered with.
There is no burden of proof required to assert a hypothesis. This is how none of truth nor science nor security operate. There is evidence gathering activity which supports or undermines, strengthening or weakening a hypothesis. Ideally, one dispositive form of evidence affirms or denies a hypothesis. It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud, but in any case, other claims are weak evidence.
These are recounts, audits, and security guards. No recounts deviated by that much, even the massive Arizona recount found no significant deviation.
> It is not difficult to find historical precedent of election fraud
Please provide that. The evidence AFAIK is counted as essentially "parts per million", it is so small. Meanwhile there are a variety of safeguards, audits, verifications & recounts.
The null hypothesis in this case I don't believe would be "fraudulent election", so it is a claim.
This is true, if you're billing your hypothesis as a hypothesis. The problem is that prominent Republicans billed their "election was stolen" hypothesis as a fact, claimed to have boatloads of evidence in order to convince the public, and then never published that evidence.
In the aftermath of this clearly deceptive behavior, they've maintained the support of Republican voters who still believe the lie despite none of the evidence ever being released.
It's one thing to claim something is true and that you have evidence, then release the evidence and find out that it's insufficient to win in court. It's another thing entirely to make a claim, say you have overwhelming evidence to support it, and never release any evidence at all. In the former case, maybe you got overzealous or maybe you were dealing with an unsympathetic judge. In the latter, the only rational way to interpret the situation is that you were intentionally misleading your audience.
Why do you say something is treated as fact? For example, are either the ‘cheating’ or ‘no cheating’ hypotheses verifiable in any productive regard? There may be confusion between “absence of evidence” versus “evidence of absence.”
It is absolutely fantastic that this assertion draws ire from those who have no substantial response. It is intended to poke you directly in the eyeballs. That crowd so often favors censorship to protect the same.
If you have a substantial response, cast it forth.
Your claim is not false, but not universally true either, the counter is alex jones, the flat earth movement, religion as well, you can spend nearly an infinity believing in lies. The human brain is quite malleable to lies.
So what? People have the right to be wrong and ignorant. It's far better than having The Ministry of Tru... sorry I mean Disinformation Governance Board. Even if lies spread far and wide they always get exposed eventually. For example consider the Iraq war, a war the american public was rushed into without the free flow of information, something you seem keen on, but now that the public has access to info the same republican base that was in support of the war now hates war hawks like john bolton.
> Even if lies spread far and wide they always get exposed eventually
Eventually, yes, but until it happens, bodies are piling up.
EDIT: Also, FWIW, the truth is often exposed nearly immediately, yet for some people, once they have chosen to believe the lie, they can't be convinced of the truth.
It's well established that adults who read incorrect information frequently don't find out it was wrong and become more skeptical of the source. Some people operate that way, but it's a small minority unfortunately.
In particular, it's been shown that people with dogmatic beliefs strengthen those beliefs when shown evidence to the contrary rather than questioning them.
> Why are we so worried about adults reading incorrect information?
Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
And I imagine the owners of Comet Ping Pong would have greatly preferred that adults didn't read lies about Hillary running a child sex ring in their basement. [0]
Haitian immigrants in Ohio certainly weren't fans of Trump claiming that they're kidnapping and eating pets.
Speech has consequences.
> Once they eventually find the info was wrong they'll be more sceptical of that source.
...have you been living in a cave for the last 10 years? I just can't fathom how someone can be so naive to actually think this.
If there was any truth to this, Infowars would have been damn near been dead on arrival. Fox News would have been bankrupt before Obama even began his second term.
Or maybe I'm putting the cart before the horse and operating under the assumption that people will accept when they're wrong.
Sorry but I'm not willing to live in an insane orwellian world just so your grandma gets her vaccine. It's her family's responsiblity to convince her and if she still refuses shes an adult she has the right to refuse treatment and vaccines.
As for libel, it has always existed and always will. There are laws against it to protect people if they suffer any damage from it. It's not without consequences.
What you're proposing is so much worse. Imagine a tyrant government is after you and has control on information like you propose. How will you protect yourself from the goverment's false accusations?
> Imagine a tyrant government is after you and has control on information like you propose
You're straw-manning. I never proposed anything like government enforcement against misinformation.
I don't think misinformation should be illegal, for the reasons you touch on: You certainly don't want government deciding the truth.
Who gets to decide what is misinformation is an entirely different issue. But I can at least hope you can agree that misinformation as a concept is unethical, right? People are literally dying because of misinformation. Again, set aside the question of "Well, who decides what is misinformation?" and consider just the mere concept of it.
Hmmm... I really wonder what the said tyrants did when they got into power? Oh that's right they imposed heavy restrictions on speech and all forms of media. And it's not like there was free speech before them, the Weimar republic tried banning them as well. It's almost like challenging ideas and defeating them on an intellectual level is far better than trying to supress them.
... Yeah but they didn't do that before they were in power. They abused misinformation to get to a position to then lock it down. That's indeed what I'm saying.n I'm not disagreeing that they lock it down once in power.
> Because I'd much rather my grandma get a COVID vaccine than trying to find a source of Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.
So the misinformation didn't affect your decision making. Instead, the misinformation you were exposed to was corrected by your exposure to more, better information.
I will never understand why companies make these ridiculous demands from their customers and just keep pestering them. I have a Samsung phone and it routinely sends me annoying user data agreement notices which I ignore. What exactly do they get out of this?
> But you will avoid many of the annoying things that come with a job, including a boss telling you what to do.
I hear things like this a lot and I'm sick of it. There's nothing wrong with working for someone, in fact it's the best way to improve your skills as a beginner since you're going to be mentored by people much more experienced than you. I still call my first boss to this day.
People like PG are at the apex of this weird fawning worship of entrepreneurs and getting rich that particularly affects the tech world. This culture places great intrinsic real value on not having a boss.
But of course this is all made up. Nothing has any real value in this sense. We just each get 100 years on Earth and we each get to decide how to spend that time. Those are the facts.
The entrepreneur worship culture is simply about making people who make those choices feel better about those choices. And as another commenter has observed, most of us are no more likely to make it as an entrepreneur than we are likely to play for the Lakers.
So, yeah, "a boss telling you what to do" is fine if it works for you and gets you what you want out of life. Some of us just don't give a shit and don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about things like market fit and business transactions and valuation blah blah blah.
"Selection biases filter out most women, underrepresented minorities, and those without connections"
I get those without connections but women and minorities? Give me a break. Asians absolutely killing it and there are simply far fewer women in the industry.
I think it's pretty hard to make the claim that people in startup-land aren't prejudiced against women. Just looking at empirical data on fundraising women attract a lot less funding (even weighted for the fact that there are fewer women in the industry). There's also a lot of casual sexism around, assumptions that women aren't technically competent by default, etc.
Also when you say "Asians absolutely killing it" I mean, Asians are a really big group! Some Asians are "absolutely killing it" and others are not.
Startups run on long hours and heroic efforts. That selects against women who are time sensitive due to caretaking duties. Even if a woman doesn't have a child, they're often still time constrained by other obligations to family.
Minorities, though I have no idea. Unless they mean there's a bias towards prestige degrees? Then sure.
It's interesting seeing a lot of people from tech culture recently freaking out over birth rates, led by characters like Elon Musk. Yet at the same time they insist on perpetuating an economy that is structurally hostile to reproduction, especially among high achievers (and not just women). They're complaining about a social phenomenon they're driving.
If the economy is a contest to time compress things as much as possible and demand as many working hours from everyone as possible, things like raising children get sacrificed.
This is the simplest explanation for the extraordinarily low birth rates in some countries like South Korea that have normalized insanely demanding work cultures.
Its like chess. There are just far fewer women that get obsessed with it. If there was a woman who played chess as well as Magnus Carlsen there wouldn't be any possible "systemic barrier" to hide it. But chess performance can be gauged objectively. Software is subjective, so we can point fingers at imagined systemic barriers.
I applaud (East) Asians for getting it done, but that still leaves MANY others. Most of the success stories tend to be East Asians, where Southeast Asians are mistreated and seen as a cheap labor source. The point stands.
> there are simply far fewer women in the industry.
How blasé of you to think it's "as simple" as "they don't like it".
They don't like it?
Take a look (or don't) at the org charts for any 20 tech companies that are past Series A funding.
You will find that most of the execs are white men, most (not all, thankfully!) female leadership is in HR or PeopleOps, and any exec presence from non-Asian ethnic groups are for the company's diversity efforts (and we all know how HN feels about those).
I've been doing this tech thing for a while. It is extremely difficult to find folks at the top that look like me (a black Latino). Hell, it is difficult to find folks in leadership positions that look like me in almost any industry except government.
Women still get stomped over in meetings by men who have something to say, and women who challenge that are perceived as "cold."
I don't disagree with you, but would like to clarify one point:
> Women still get stomped over in meetings by men who have something to say
Narcissist alpha-males always have something to say (even if it's not relevant, useful or constructive), and they always stomp on everyone else, which obviously includes women, but also includes introvert, shy, geeky, nerdish men - who are equally fed-up with being ignored.
> Because on average they're less likely to prefer working in tech. They don't like it, it's that simple.
Again, why do you think that is?
If you're saying women are less capable, be direct.
Humans are social creatures and are designed to go where we're a part of the ingroup. That is the manifestation of the "preference" of working in tech. The tech sphere is often a bros club and exclusionary to women. There are many examples of talented women in our field being trampled out by the mob. Nobody, not even the godly You, wants be a part of a group that constantly hassles you.
Women and men just aren't the same. Few women love cold machines, anywhere in the world. Even in highly feminist cultures like Scandinavia, female engineers tend to be in the minority.
We can look to the arts as well. In literature, you have a fairly clear picture of women reading different stuff than men. Same with music. Taylor Swift really seems to speak to the female mind, much less to the male mind. In the metal scene, the situation is flipped.
These are mostly introverted activities (reading, listening to music) performed alone, and yet there is significant gender difference. The same is true about, uh, porn.
> If you're saying women are less capable, be direct
This is an anonymous forum, if that's what I thought, I would say so. I have no reason to censor myself, could not care less about the points.
> The tech sphere is often a bros club and exclusionary to women.
There is no sphere or club, if the software you write provides value to some company or users you get paid for it. No one cares about your chromosomes.
>There are many examples of talented women in our field being trampled out by the mob.
What happened? Did paying customers suddenly boycott their favorite sofwtare upon finding out that a woman wrote the code for it? I'd love to hear some examples.
> What happened? Did paying customers suddenly boycott their favorite sofwtare upon finding out that a woman wrote the code for it? I'd love to hear some examples.
Don't go confusing online culture warriors with pesky things like facts or evidence :), this is the internet, sir. We run on outrage and accusation.
My only fear is that it's going polute the web to the point where it's not worth it anymore. I wonder if it's feasible to classify AI generated text and images with much less computing power.
> My only fear is that it's going polute the web to the point where it's not worth it anymore.
It will.
> I wonder if it's feasible to classify AI generated text and images with much less computing power.
It won't, at least not for text.
The only hope is that people value good information highly enough that a diverse range of centralized authoritative sources (basically old-school media) become economically viable again.
However this technology means they'll now have to resist the temptation of burning their reputation for short-term profits by sneaking in "AI"-generated crap. My experience with ads being introduced to previously ad-free subscription services and shoehorned into devices I literally own does not give me much hope there.
