the_last_pigeon
shiggy
it's look who it is
User ID: 62
Anyone can start one of these discussions about a source at any time, although in practice you have to gauge community mood at least a little. The key question here is whether you can pick a sentence from an article within the given topic and be confident that it's factually correct, and that's what's being questioned for Fox's politics articles.
If someone managed to put together a big list for, say, the NYT, I'd like to see it and I'm sure the community would like to see it. I agree without reservations that all major news sources should be subject to the same level of scrutiny.
For what it's worth: BuzzFeed currently has the same "no consensus" rating as Fox, although honestly on the strength of far less well-attended discussions.
For what it's worth, part 2: A discussion on MSNBC was launched after the last big Fox News discussion, but nobody put in the same amount of effort to find instances of inaccuracies (only one person posted, and they posted a mistake in a headline, and it is known that headlines aren't written by the article authors and are thus junk - see WP:HEADLINE). Thus the discussion reaffirmed that MSNBC is unusable for opinion pieces, as all opinion pieces are, and is generally reliable most other times, with the caveat that they don't even have written reporting on their news site so it's a bit of a strange discussion to have. (They have lots of blogs, though, which are all not suitable for use by policy.) If someone came up with a similar list for another major news outlet, I'd expect it to be taken seriously. I can't immediately find any examples of someone dropping a large list in an RfC on a "famous" left-wing source, but there's plenty to look through on the main "source reliability" list.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Time and effort estimate: not gonna sugarcoat it, probably high. Kiwi Farms is probably the single worst possible article to do this sort of experiment on, because it's on perhaps the single most poisoned and low-trust topic area on the website. Every Kiwi Farms user (dunno the demonym, don't care) from here to Sunday has probably had a go at the article at some point. I'm gonna say the best time to work on this article is not now. Maybe in a year. Happy to stick to the relatively calm (ha, ha) waters of American politics.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Would you not agree that "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" merits a stronger noun than "criticism"? Perhaps "hatred"?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
While generally true, external temporary factors are in play from time to time, and in this case Kiwi Farms is both a current-ish news event as well as the target of some of the most dedicated trolls on the Internet.
It should not remain online. Several communities I'm in have people with KF threads on them, and having a thread dedicated to you is a pretty poor experience. The culture of KF is sick and malicious (citation: suicide counter).
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
8mo ago
The contention is that he knew he lost, and despite that he did all of the above. I don't personally know whether that's true, but the prosecutor thinks he can prove it.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))
People should be able to leave conversations for any reason at all, including no reason. Posting is not a job. I don't think giving people flak for "ghosting" helps foster a healthy community.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
OK, can you name people as notorious for doing assassinations and causing deaths as those two, that it would be acceptable to support?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Why would it not be OK for a person to tag themselves as being a believer in a continued existence of white people and future for their children who also likes Adolf Hitler and David Lane?
Violence. You're describing a violent ideology. David Lane and Adolf Hitler encouraged (understatement...) the assassination of their political opponents. "Not killing people you disagree with" is a pretty good social norm. Its benefits are self-evident: I don't want to disagree with people who advocate for it! Anyone who disagrees with it should be shunned and removed from any discussion space.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I must admit I'm not seeing the distinction, if you're intending any, between market response, market forces, market cost, etc.
What I mean to say is if someone says "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE", this will piss people off, and they'll stop doing business with that person. Which part of that do you think should not be happening?
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I wasn't around for GamerGate, so while I find that assertion highly plausible, I'd prefer to see an example linked here.
Carr's dissent, which the blockquote is from, is itself misleading in many ways. HN comment:
When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the FCC was required to assess if Starlink was reasonably, technically capable of supplying those speeds by 2025. Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch. On top of this, the statistics that were available at the time showed that Starlink transfer speeds were already trending down and the network is a lot less utilized than it would be in 2025. There are technical challenges that need to be solved before Starlink is remotely capable of meeting that obligation and the challenges don't appear to be resolved yet. Giving Starlink money is a gamble and the FCC would rather play it safe.
RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
From subsequent discussion:
- the "decision today to revoke"
- "They decided a while ago (2022) that Starlink wouldn't get the RDOF grant. This was essentially an appeal to see if the decision would be reversed, and they upheld the original decision not to fund Starlink. It's not a check after deployment thing, it's a 'check if they actually can deploy in the first place' situation." (HN comment)
- "They didn't decide now. The program was created as a two step process initially. Starlink succeeded in the first round, but was denied in the second, more in depth, review that lead to the rejection. This was basically an appeal of that rejection. The second round was designed to eliminate providers who didn't seem able to deliver on their promises even with the subsidies. It was made to prevent a situation where either party (but mostly the US Gov and tax payers by extension) was on the hook for unsuccessful delivery." (HN comment)
- from the dissent, "The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.":
- "Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds [approx] 61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches." (HN comment)
- "They need to do 180 a year [they've done 91 in 2023 so far] to put enough satellites up to even try to hit the 2025 deadline. That's not even counting any satellites which may fail between now and then and need replaced. This is a major reason why the FCC didn't think they could have met the 2025 obligation to reach [approx] 650,000 subscribers with 100/20 and rejected their application." (HN comment)
- "Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds [approx] 61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches." (HN comment)
tl;dr SpaceX's claim was not credible.
Actually I know some people who worked on Starlink. I may update this comment with what they have to say tomorrow.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.
Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.
Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
(I'm assuming you're saying "ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr made a crappy post, people called ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr on it, and ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr didn't engage with them".) I think the sin there is making the crappy post, not failing to engage.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Economically: There's a lot of money based on his personal brand, and he just dramatically reduced the value of the latter. I find it reasonable that the market would react accordingly.
Practically: "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" (henceforth, "his words") aren't acceptable to - rough approximation - anyone, and he hasn't issued retractions or showed signs of backing down in any way (which would have been nice, I do like his music). The straightforward conclusion is thus that anyone would stop associating with him. Which includes people with a lot of money and power. Hence the reaction.
Morally: To misquote an old guy, his words lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, so I don't know what he was expecting.
Regarding your "old 4chan trick": as a preamble, the fact that it's called an "old 4chan trick" tells me all I need to know about whether the people behind it were genuinely interested in collaboratively discovering truth through discussion (hint: hahaha; and to follow the rule on speaking plainly: not at all). Anyway:
-
if white people had been persecuted since before the first Crusades in 1096, yes, I think the reaction might be similar
-
if you go through Wikipedia on "Racism against Black Americans" and switch "black" and "white", and if the resulting text were historical fact, yes, if we lived in that world then again the reaction might be similar.
But we don't live in either of those two alternate realities.
While I can appreciate where you're coming from, by no means can the linked discussion be described as having a monolithic point of view. It would look very different if Wikipedia's community were as polarized as you suggest.
And the easiest way to fix any other issues you see is to do it yourself or convince someone to. I would like to make a standing offer to anyone reading this, that I will coach you through fixing any "political lean" problem of the sort you're alluding to. (Of course, a writeup should get posted here during/afterwards.)
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I have yet to see evidence that rape is a failure mode of trans rights specifically and not just human nature generally. To restate, being trans does not cause you to be a rapist.
Generalizations aside, among all strategies to reduce prison rape, putting trans prisoners in with their birth sex population is surely one of the least effective ones. Anything else is honestly more likely to eliminate the problem entirely. For example, getting the guards to stop raping the inmates will make them more effective at preventing rape among the inmates, including rape done by trans people.
Housing sex criminals separately would be another good thing to try. In some of the articles and stuff I looked at while writing this post, some people proposed we house trans sex criminals separately. But housing all sex criminals separately would obviously address the problem too. Even if we had limited space, severity of crimes would obviously be a better way to prioritize than being trans.
I guess some people see other people getting worried about prison rape by trans people and think they're calling trans people rapists. Obviously they're not, but it's still fishy. To focus on prison rape by trans people instead (and, observably, it's very much instead) of prison rape generally implies there's something special about prison rape when trans people do it. Maybe one argument in favor of such specialness is that we can apply a very straightforward intervention (no trans women in women's prison) and it straightforwardly gets rid of this one subcase of prison rape. But there are even simpler interventions that obviously work better, such as not housing sex criminals with everyone else. In summary, it's more effective to target the "rapist" part of "trans rapist" rather than the "trans" part.
The Vice President of the Confederate States of America (via Wikipedia):
Our new government['s]...foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Historian William C. Davis (Look Away pp. 97-98 via Wikipedia):
To the old Union they had said that the Federal power had no authority to interfere with slavery issues in a state. To their new nation they would declare that the state had no power to interfere with a federal protection of slavery. Of all the many testimonials to the fact that slavery, and not states' rights, really lay at the heart of their movement, this was the most eloquent of all.
I won't tell you Northerners fought "to free slaves" because that's as obviously wrong to me as it is to you. It's easy to reconcile the seeming inconsistency in Mr. Lincoln's thinking: the South seceded to preserve slavery, and the North took up arms in reaction. Perhaps the North didn't care about slavery, but that doesn't matter in evaluating the South's cause.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Would you like to work together to improve that article? I would enjoy seeing a "bunch of admins" get in the way. Let's start a new post for it, though. I hope our overlords would be OK with that, as it is sort of culture-war.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
All official efforts to combat it? It seems pretty straightforward that it would be nice to be emitting less greenhouse gases, and by and large I'm seeing pretty good progress and ideas focused on that goal, among others.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
I would be happy to specifically nix CNN talk shows in the same way that we already nix Fox talk shows and all opinion content in any medium (see WP:NEWSOPED, WP:NOROPED - parse, respectively as "NEWS section on OP-EDs" and "No Original Research section on OP-EDs").
For the other two, headlines have been banned for a while (WP:HEADLINE), and I'd imagine the bodies are more careful with their claims.
I would, in fact, love to see a list of claims for your preferred left-wing source (assuming the left-wing source is marked "generally reliable" on the big list). I'm sure one has been compiled somewhere already, but not in any of the few discussions on left-wing sources I spot-checked.
OK, so what's your solution to Jews being overrepresented in these institutions, assuming you think it's a problem? Actually, why do you think it's a problem? I would make this comment more high-effort by guessing answers to those questions but I don't think I have a good enough mental model to be using it for that yet.
the_last_pigeon
shiggy
1yr ago
Preliminary: I'm assuming (this being a gender discussion) that by "options other than traditional families", you mean gay/lesbian/trans parents, not single-parent households, which are obviously fucked.
Trans parents may be at higher risk of suicide, but that's covered by "let's not have parents who are suicide risks", and not related to them being trans specifically.
So we're left with "gay/lesbian/trans-not-a-suicide-risk parents". I claim they're just as fine. I offer two citations from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LGBT_parenting&oldid=1126262442#Research: this Australian Psychological Society literature review that cites a shitload of papers, and this amici in Obergefell. I find it unlikely that all of the papers cited therein are shit, but happy to spot-check a few.
Anyway, you also say the stigma is justified due to them being annoying. I am unaware of any ethical system that supports stigmatizing people because you find them annoying. Stigmatizing someone clearly does them more harm than any amount of "whining" could balance out. What's wrong with stigmatizing whining itself? Whining is pretty annoying. Also, you don't have to listen to them!
Moreover, I concur with @drmanhattan16 that you have no evidence that they have to whine. It is not an analytic truth. So, you have to demonstrate that there's something innate to the collective existence of non-traditional families that creates whining. I can't see any. But that's besides the point, because I've already established that whining isn't severe enough to justify stigmatizing them.
Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
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