For those interested in breaking free from the Facebook trending news headlines, I wrote an open source extension to replace them with stories from real news sources (or any RSS feed): http://www.fluffblocker.com/
Not trying to take away from your extension, which I'm sure is very useful for people who are interested in that kind of thing. I just find it a bit interesting that the article seemed (from my point of view) to imply that the problem with the Facebook trending news headlines is that it is exactly the same as the news headlines from traditional news outlets: it is curated content that is consciously or unconsciously organized to appeal to a particular mindset.
My take-away from the article (which I admit was also my pre-existing bias, so perhaps I injected it) is that the news is essentially a propaganda machine. It reflects the conscious and unconscious biases of the curators and attempts to present a consistent world view. The sad part is how unaware the readership is. From one of the quotes the the author included, people become more extreme in their views when surrounded by others who have the same views. This leads to polarization on every topic -- an us vs. them attitude. With such an attitude no substantial changes can happen. For example, if Trump wins the nomination, how many liberal thinking people would vote for an independent, risking splitting the vote and handing the country to Trump? If Clinton wins the nomination, how many conservative thinking people will allow the Clinton dynasty (the spouse of a former president!) to win the day?
In the end the status quo prevails. So it just seems a bit ironic that your extension, which allows you to dial in your bias even further, is mentioned here. Possibly (if you don't already have it) you can add an option to turn off the trending news headlines altogether :-)
This article is among many recently that have been citing Pew's ongoing research into political polarization. That's starting to bug me because although Pew puts out a nuanced 100-page interpretation of their data, most news outlets can't be bothered with nuance. Of particular interest to me are underlying long-term trends that must necessarily be interpreted by Pew's method as "polarization". One of their ten questions to classify respondents into liberal or conservative bins is whether homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged. This question probably made as much sense in 1994 as a question about interracial marriage would have made in 1950. At that time interracial marriage was universally opposed by white people (96% opposed in a poll), but today it is universally accepted (87% not opposed in 2010). Acceptance of homosexuality is on a similar long-term trend. Many people were opposed to acceptance of homosexuality in 1994 for the same reason that 1950's white people were opposed to interracial marriage: those people were bigoted assholes. As those bigots get old and die the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever. If you doubt this just look at the trends by respondent age. Practically all Americans under 30 years old are accepting of homosexuality.
So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.
>the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever
Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.
In my view your dismissal of 1950's whites against interracial marriage as "bigoted assholes" is itself a bit of presentist bigoted-asshole-ism. If our approach to people in the past who held opinions we find detestable is to condemn them, how are we supposed to deal reasonably with people in our present who hold similarly detestable opinions? Is everyone who disagrees with you just a bigoted asshole? Is there no possible way to see such people as responding reasonably to the information they have, the situation they're in, and the pressures they're subject to?
Sorry, I know it's not really relevant to the article. I just don't like the sense that everyone in the past who was racist or anyone in the present who's sexist or whateverist is just worthless garbage, or "bigoted assholes". People are more complicated than that. People holding opinions you hate can nevertheless be moral relative to their cultural environment, given the thoughts that made sense in their milieu.
Forecasting the development of moral judgments decades or centuries before it happens and living according to that future standard is an impossible and pointless task. People should be judged according to the times they lived in, not according to our privileged, 20/20-hindsight present moment.
I like what you said, but I have to admit that it seems like all white people in the 50's were actively racist. Showing up to lynchings, keeping black kids out of school, government institutions barring black families from moving to suburbs. Where do you draw the line between "understandable," "reasonable" racism and bigoted assholes? At what point do they take responsibility for their actions? Verbal violence? Physical violence? Imprisonment? Murder?
The next 25 years are pretty much locked in based on the aforementioned opinions of under-30 Americans. You must have had a longer time scale in mind before you made that statement.
That's not what historical polling data indicates. Polls show that opinions move along with a birth cohort, not that they are standing phenomena of age brackets.
Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from Facebook would actually be a civil benefit: at least we would all be starting from a common set of facts. What is far more damaging — and far more engaging, and thus lucrative for Facebook — is all of us in our own virtual neighborhoods of our own making, liking opinions that tell us we’re right instead of engaging with viewpoints that make us question our assumptions.
Agreed.
It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions."
Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.
The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is using human curators to assert, without challenge, what is "trending" with the other humans and then denying it.
i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.
Serious question. When it comes to "Top Stories" or "News" or anything on Facebook, did anyone actually believe for real that it was purely the output of an algorithm and that no provisions were made to have a human in the loop? I doubt anyone ever thought that, so I'm not sure how anyone is surprised by any of this.
You are way overestimating the ability of average FB (or American ?) users to think logically or judge something rationally.
I'm not saying they are dumb. I'm saying not that many would stop and seriously think if 'trending' news section on FB was possibly being used for spreading propaganda.
Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral."
I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.
This. I assumed this whole feature was bought and paid for when stories like "Jennifer Lawrence shares pictures of her dog" would regularly pop up. If you assumed their curation process was fair or unfiltered, you fooled yourself.
> i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.
I would say it's good they do that. Just like dang & co diligently try to control what gets to frontpage and what doesn't (specifically, banning certain outlets known to be bad/unreliable and trying to slow down hastily-thunk grab-your-pitchfork movements in favor of rationally-minded and considered stories).
If you don't do this, Trump happens. Trump is a product of a capitalistic-media which kept providing an easy diet of shit. If facebook is preventing brietbart stories from reaching the top, more power to facebook.
FB's entire business model is provided a UX that is curated for stickiness, comfort, and convenience with a veneer of organic feeling so as to make it a comfortable platform for multiple different kinds of ads, which are what they make money from.
I find it hard to believe that attempting to marginalize half your users to match the political outlook of your employees is driven by profit. If it was I wouldn't criticize it.
I don't get it. Facebook is a private company. If they want to present biased news they have the right to do that. If they want to withhold information about their editorial process, or even lie about it, they have the right to do that too. Fox News does it, why can't Facebook?
I don't think people are saying it's illegal -- people are saying it's a bad thing. Those don't necessarily equal each other. Concepts like "censorship" or "freedom of speech" can exist and be talked about independently of the United States First Amendment; there may not be legal grounds for prosecution but from a social/philosophical angle these are still things that can be legitimately debated.
My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically is the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.
If people go to a media source with the assumption that they're going to be receiving useful information about the world, then I'd consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them information that isn't representative of reality. To put it into machine learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e. isn't sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train people's judgment to be less in tune with reality.
I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.
There are rules regarding libel and slander -- they're not as overly strict as some other countries, but media isn't free to say absolutely anything about anyone.
I like that you accept to evaluate someone else's position before instantly putting them into the little "bigot" box.
It's much better to leave traces of your thinking process, instead of simply declaring that your conclusions are the only ones that are acceptable and others are idiots.
Let's take me for example. It just so happens that I'm rethinking my position on interracial marriage (yes, really). I haven't reached any solid conclusion yet, but I'm not as sure of my position as I once was.
My current uncertainty is based on a few things I learned in the past few years.
First, Sapolky's excellent "Human Behavioral Biology" did show me how incredibly susceptible we are to hormones; how a tiny little change can have huge impacts in our daily life. The part on delaying gratification was also eye opening for me. Some people are wired in a way that makes it very difficult for them to refuse a cookie now in exchange for two cookies later. So it's not necessarily that you are making a greater effort; you might be born in a way that makes it easier for you for delay gratification. I would recommend the complete playlist to anyone here. It is simply fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8).
By the way, for you parents, this means that you might not be as good tutors as you think you are; you might just have given your child better genes. :-p
And finally, I read about the IQ differences between races. This forced me to look at other biological differences (life expectancy, height, prevalence of diseases, hormones levels, etc.)
----
Okay, now let's see how this influences my thought process.
Say I want to have a child. I want to give my child the best chances in life. This means making sure the mom doesn't drink alcohol or smoke while pregnant, making sure the child is fed, entertained, surrounded with the best environment...
I also have Spinal muscular atrophy. This would influence if I'm willing to have a child with someone who is a carrier of the faulty gene. While it's possible to live with SMA(3-4) without major impact on life expectancy, it kinda sucks.
Same thing with a low IQ. You can certainly have a full life if you are less intelligent, but it's not something that I would wish for my child. Not only because it would probably make his life harder, but it would also limit the type of conversation I can have with him.
This brings us to the meat of the matter: I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels.
And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around.
It's great that you've thought this through, but I'm sure you would agree that your opinion on the set of people that people other than yourself should be allowed to marry is without consequence. That's what we're talking about here, not the race of the person you should marry, but whether you should be able to dictate that choice for others.
> And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around.
I think the poster is suggesting making that decision for (presumably) his race.
Though implicit is the assumption that the natural way to group people is by ethnicity, but you could argue for grouping by country, social class, income, education, etc. For instance, I feel way more connection with techy/nerdy people who grew up similarly than I do to, say, a gang member who spent years in jail but happens to be my ethnicity.
I'm pretty much a libertarian, so I don't have a strong opinion on what the laws should be. (At least for now.)
But I note that there are consequences.
Some people justify environmental laws because of their consequences on the future of a nation. I can easily see the same logic used to prevent the "degradation" of a population.
Assuming we're talking about America (apologies if not) and segregating populations into races in america as they're recognized, I don't see how these two goals match up.
If you care about the nation of America, then the answer according to the data is to ship in a bunch of smart asians to raise the IQ.
Or am I under the false belief that anybody can be American, not just (I'm guessing since it's the majority group) white people?
Preventing interracial marriage wouldn't change a thing for the country as a whole, because people would just continue to reproduce with their own race.
Nevermind, I was wrong.
I don't see how my personal race preference could be applied to a country.
> I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels
Why not just have your mate do an IQ test? People don't mate at random: those who value intelligence will select intelligent mates.
Race is a tricky thing in the US. It encompases not only genetics, but also social status, wealth and access to resources, etc. It also isn't the end-all-be-all, since even with all these factors the top 1% of every race will beat the average of any race: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WAIS-IV_FSIQ_Scores_...
> Why not just have your mate do an IQ test? People don't mate at random: those who value intelligence will select intelligent mates.
> For that matter, why pick race as your correlating factor? You could also correlate by college major, highest education attained, or wealth
There's a little problem with that, because from what I know, there's a regression to the mean in biology.
If two exceptionally tall Japaneses have children together, their children might be a little taller than their national mean, but they won't be as tall as the parents.
I suppose the heart of the matter I'm getting at is this: you have claimed to have delved into IQ correlation data and arrived at the conclusion that interracial marriage is not a good thing. However I have tried to point out that the evidence doesn't lead you to this conclusion since other variables may correlate and you can simply pick smart people from any race, because assuming regression to the mean, if I pick a 160IQ black woman and a 150IQ white man, we'd expect their kid to be centered around 155, regardless of race.
Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)
I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there. I've also heard explanations like "lack of culture", and I personally suspect much of it comes from attacks from activists (offline and online) in what amounts to a social power struggle, and that the natural response to being attacked is to band together and really delve deep into your cultural identity.
Many of us pick race in the US (apparently especially in US prisons), but I've somehow straddled race, tech, and maybe internet culture.
> However I have tried to point out that the evidence doesn't lead you to this conclusion since other variables may correlate (...)
They may correlate, but genetic is by far the biggest driver. Identical twins (same DNA) have between 0.76-0.86 correlation between their IQs. The 0.76 is raised separately; a completely different environment and they are still almost identically smart!
The other numbers you've written are the effect of moving away from perfectly identical DNA.
(You could argue that part of the difference is cultural, but that doesn't change anything if we don't know which part of the culture is negatively impacting the child.)
>because assuming regression to the mean, if I pick a 160IQ black woman and a 150IQ white man, we'd expect their kid to be centered around 155, regardless of race.
No, see my Japaneses example. Two geniuses of 160IQ will most probably have children returning closer to the mean (tho probably a little higher). In this case, the mean is different for every race.
If I'm a white with a IQ of 100 and I have a child with a black with a IQ of 100, the expected result is not 100, because the black is an outlier at this IQ.
> Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)
I do too. :-)
I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction).
Obviously "white" isn't my only criteria. I could speak at length how I like girls with a fighting spiring, but that'd be a little out of context.
Like I said in a parent post, my previous position was pretty much "all races are the same". It took -months- before I really changed that. What really prevented me from accepting the various studies was the survivor bias: All the individuals from the other races I ever saw was on TV. Actors, political commentators and such. If they got their job, it's because they were good. I wasn't looking at the average here.
The same apply for people of the same race by the way. Many people of IQ 120+ went to university and their entire social group is composed of smart people. They don't realize (and can't conceive) that a huge part of the population is less intelligent.
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> I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there.
I have no clue why that is, but I'd very much like to know.
But onto the topic at hand, the original theory was based on an incorrect understanding of genetics, where a child's genes were based on both the parent and the "ancestors". The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#His...
Over time if you keep breeding smart people, you can expect to see smart children. If you did this and ignored ethnicity, you'd overtime breed yourself a new "race".. after all how do ethnicities form in the first place but by separation, drift, and natural selection? Also if you did this long enough you might breed superhumans, but I suspect that genetic engineering would come first and beat you to the punch ;)
>
I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction)
I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white. In other countries, race is seen differently as well (though this has changed due to western media)
White today includes a lot of people who have historically not been considered white, and IQs will vary by those subgroups. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence is measured to be especially high. (Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews. I never understood that)
Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.
What we call race has formed mostly for social reasons: we look similar enough, share enough cultural similarity, and we're under attack by the "other" so let's band together. Asians in asia all hate each other. They all get along in the US. Pakistanis and Indians don't get along in their home countries. They're best friends in the US. Same story: you arrive in the US, you band together with people most like yourself to help you when faced with pressure.
Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though you're being civil. I suspect that this is the type of "under attack" that I mentioned in my last paragraph that gives rise to strong same-race stickiness to begin with.
> If regression to the mean dominated 100% of the time, evolution would not be possible.
> The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart
I think we are talking past each other (that or I'm terrible at explaining myself).
I made sure to specify that the offspring would return close to the mean while probably being higher.
Many characteristics are dependent of many genes (such as apparently IQ). You mention unexpressed genes and I agree with you on this. You have a pool of possible combinations of expressed/unexpressed genes. In a given population, all the combinations will cluster around a given mean; this gives you a bell curve. Now, if an Asian is born with an IQ of 70, this means that this particular combination was bad, but the rest of his genetic baggage is still able to produce other combinations which are more likely to be within the average.
Let's take a simpler example. Say my current genes would allow these results in a given characteristic: [1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 10]. Of these results however, only 1 is truly expressed per generation. It so happens that I got lucky and got the value of "10".
Then I mate with someone of a mean "8" having the following combinations: [8, 8, 8, 8, 8].
Our children would be more likely to be between 8 and 5 than between 8 and 10. It would take generations of selective breeding to bring my descendants back to the mean of "8"
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> I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white.
It's not a social construct, it's just that the resolution at which people are looking at it changed.
It's like trying to name species through evolution. When did rabbits become 'rabbit', rather than their ancestor species? It's a continuum, we just decide that after a threshold of differences, we change the name.
It doesn't mean that differences between species don't exist.
There are many differences between those we usually call "whites".
People in the Netherlands are taller than those in Ireland; depending on the resolution they could probably be called diffrent races/subspecies.
Yes and if the genetic hypothesis is correct they apparently had 2 major factors helping this: A selection for intelligence AND a strong cultural tendency to marry within the group. (See a few Kosher rules designed to make sure Jews don't eat/socialise with gentiles.)
> Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews.
Do you know if they want to distance themselves genetically or from the people with this culture? For example, are they opposed to marrying secular Jews?
> Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.
Well sure, but that doesn't change anything in my desire to not knowingly reduce the chances of my children. It's not just a "I support my local sport team" mentality.
In addition, it seems that most people think that some differences are worth preserving.
I would probably be judged as the devil himself if I had a plan to mix the Jews or Native Americans with Africans until they were one indissociable group.
> Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though y...
49 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 98.1 ms ] threadMy take-away from the article (which I admit was also my pre-existing bias, so perhaps I injected it) is that the news is essentially a propaganda machine. It reflects the conscious and unconscious biases of the curators and attempts to present a consistent world view. The sad part is how unaware the readership is. From one of the quotes the the author included, people become more extreme in their views when surrounded by others who have the same views. This leads to polarization on every topic -- an us vs. them attitude. With such an attitude no substantial changes can happen. For example, if Trump wins the nomination, how many liberal thinking people would vote for an independent, risking splitting the vote and handing the country to Trump? If Clinton wins the nomination, how many conservative thinking people will allow the Clinton dynasty (the spouse of a former president!) to win the day?
In the end the status quo prevails. So it just seems a bit ironic that your extension, which allows you to dial in your bias even further, is mentioned here. Possibly (if you don't already have it) you can add an option to turn off the trending news headlines altogether :-)
So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.
Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.
Sorry, I know it's not really relevant to the article. I just don't like the sense that everyone in the past who was racist or anyone in the present who's sexist or whateverist is just worthless garbage, or "bigoted assholes". People are more complicated than that. People holding opinions you hate can nevertheless be moral relative to their cultural environment, given the thoughts that made sense in their milieu.
Forecasting the development of moral judgments decades or centuries before it happens and living according to that future standard is an impossible and pointless task. People should be judged according to the times they lived in, not according to our privileged, 20/20-hindsight present moment.
Homosexual acceptance in the US was higher in the 1920s than in the following decades until the late 1960s. Arguably, this cycles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history#1920s*
Not necessarily. Homosexual acceptance in the US was higher in the 1920s than in the following decades until the late 1960s. Arguably, this cycles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history#1920s
Agreed.
It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions."
Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.
i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.
I'm not saying they are dumb. I'm saying not that many would stop and seriously think if 'trending' news section on FB was possibly being used for spreading propaganda.
I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.
I would say it's good they do that. Just like dang & co diligently try to control what gets to frontpage and what doesn't (specifically, banning certain outlets known to be bad/unreliable and trying to slow down hastily-thunk grab-your-pitchfork movements in favor of rationally-minded and considered stories).
If you don't do this, Trump happens. Trump is a product of a capitalistic-media which kept providing an easy diet of shit. If facebook is preventing brietbart stories from reaching the top, more power to facebook.
My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically is the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.
I understand that. But why is it a bad thing? We have freedom of the press in the U.S. That means that the press is free to be biased.
I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.
And I would agree. Nonetheless, in a free country, the owners of a media source are not bound by what you and I think (and that's a good thing).
> up to a limit, remember that!
Huh? What's the limit?
It's much better to leave traces of your thinking process, instead of simply declaring that your conclusions are the only ones that are acceptable and others are idiots.
Let's take me for example. It just so happens that I'm rethinking my position on interracial marriage (yes, really). I haven't reached any solid conclusion yet, but I'm not as sure of my position as I once was.
My current uncertainty is based on a few things I learned in the past few years.
First, Sapolky's excellent "Human Behavioral Biology" did show me how incredibly susceptible we are to hormones; how a tiny little change can have huge impacts in our daily life. The part on delaying gratification was also eye opening for me. Some people are wired in a way that makes it very difficult for them to refuse a cookie now in exchange for two cookies later. So it's not necessarily that you are making a greater effort; you might be born in a way that makes it easier for you for delay gratification. I would recommend the complete playlist to anyone here. It is simply fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
Second, the psychology professor Jordan B Peterson (https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos) teaches how an amazing predictor of success IQ is. You can see a little of what he has to say here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high...
Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8).
By the way, for you parents, this means that you might not be as good tutors as you think you are; you might just have given your child better genes. :-p
And finally, I read about the IQ differences between races. This forced me to look at other biological differences (life expectancy, height, prevalence of diseases, hormones levels, etc.)
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Okay, now let's see how this influences my thought process.
Say I want to have a child. I want to give my child the best chances in life. This means making sure the mom doesn't drink alcohol or smoke while pregnant, making sure the child is fed, entertained, surrounded with the best environment...
I also have Spinal muscular atrophy. This would influence if I'm willing to have a child with someone who is a carrier of the faulty gene. While it's possible to live with SMA(3-4) without major impact on life expectancy, it kinda sucks.
Same thing with a low IQ. You can certainly have a full life if you are less intelligent, but it's not something that I would wish for my child. Not only because it would probably make his life harder, but it would also limit the type of conversation I can have with him.
This brings us to the meat of the matter: I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels.
And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around.
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So that'...
I think the poster is suggesting making that decision for (presumably) his race.
Though implicit is the assumption that the natural way to group people is by ethnicity, but you could argue for grouping by country, social class, income, education, etc. For instance, I feel way more connection with techy/nerdy people who grew up similarly than I do to, say, a gang member who spent years in jail but happens to be my ethnicity.
But I note that there are consequences.
Some people justify environmental laws because of their consequences on the future of a nation. I can easily see the same logic used to prevent the "degradation" of a population.
> degradation of a population
Assuming we're talking about America (apologies if not) and segregating populations into races in america as they're recognized, I don't see how these two goals match up.
If you care about the nation of America, then the answer according to the data is to ship in a bunch of smart asians to raise the IQ.
Or am I under the false belief that anybody can be American, not just (I'm guessing since it's the majority group) white people?
Preventing interracial marriage wouldn't change a thing for the country as a whole, because people would just continue to reproduce with their own race.
Nevermind, I was wrong.
I don't see how my personal race preference could be applied to a country.
The correlation of IQ to heredity varies based on the relation, and isn't nearly as strong for parent-child.
Same person (tested twice) .95
Identical twins—Reared together .86
Identical twins—Reared apart .76
Fraternal twins—Reared together .55
Fraternal twins—Reared apart .35
Biological siblings—Reared together .47
Biological siblings—Reared apart .24
Unrelated children—Reared together—Children .28
Unrelated children—Reared together—Adults .04
Cousins .15
Parent-child—Living together .42
Parent-child—Living apart .22
Adoptive parent–child—Living together .19[60]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...
> I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels
Why not just have your mate do an IQ test? People don't mate at random: those who value intelligence will select intelligent mates.
For that matter, why pick race as your correlating factor? You could also correlate by college major, highest education attained, or wealth: http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle... https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/iq-years-of-educa...
Race is a tricky thing in the US. It encompases not only genetics, but also social status, wealth and access to resources, etc. It also isn't the end-all-be-all, since even with all these factors the top 1% of every race will beat the average of any race: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WAIS-IV_FSIQ_Scores_...
> For that matter, why pick race as your correlating factor? You could also correlate by college major, highest education attained, or wealth
There's a little problem with that, because from what I know, there's a regression to the mean in biology.
If two exceptionally tall Japaneses have children together, their children might be a little taller than their national mean, but they won't be as tall as the parents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpmlqtnrec8
Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)
I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there. I've also heard explanations like "lack of culture", and I personally suspect much of it comes from attacks from activists (offline and online) in what amounts to a social power struggle, and that the natural response to being attacked is to band together and really delve deep into your cultural identity.
Many of us pick race in the US (apparently especially in US prisons), but I've somehow straddled race, tech, and maybe internet culture.
They may correlate, but genetic is by far the biggest driver. Identical twins (same DNA) have between 0.76-0.86 correlation between their IQs. The 0.76 is raised separately; a completely different environment and they are still almost identically smart!
The other numbers you've written are the effect of moving away from perfectly identical DNA. (You could argue that part of the difference is cultural, but that doesn't change anything if we don't know which part of the culture is negatively impacting the child.)
>because assuming regression to the mean, if I pick a 160IQ black woman and a 150IQ white man, we'd expect their kid to be centered around 155, regardless of race.
No, see my Japaneses example. Two geniuses of 160IQ will most probably have children returning closer to the mean (tho probably a little higher). In this case, the mean is different for every race.
If I'm a white with a IQ of 100 and I have a child with a black with a IQ of 100, the expected result is not 100, because the black is an outlier at this IQ.
> Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)
I do too. :-)
I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction). Obviously "white" isn't my only criteria. I could speak at length how I like girls with a fighting spiring, but that'd be a little out of context.
Like I said in a parent post, my previous position was pretty much "all races are the same". It took -months- before I really changed that. What really prevented me from accepting the various studies was the survivor bias: All the individuals from the other races I ever saw was on TV. Actors, political commentators and such. If they got their job, it's because they were good. I wasn't looking at the average here.
The same apply for people of the same race by the way. Many people of IQ 120+ went to university and their entire social group is composed of smart people. They don't realize (and can't conceive) that a huge part of the population is less intelligent.
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> I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there.
I have no clue why that is, but I'd very much like to know.
Well, firstly racial studies demonstrating the need to protect the white race was kind of this guy's specialty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton
But onto the topic at hand, the original theory was based on an incorrect understanding of genetics, where a child's genes were based on both the parent and the "ancestors". The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#His...
If regression to the mean dominated 100% of the time, evolution would not be possible. http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/41982/regression-...
Over time if you keep breeding smart people, you can expect to see smart children. If you did this and ignored ethnicity, you'd overtime breed yourself a new "race".. after all how do ethnicities form in the first place but by separation, drift, and natural selection? Also if you did this long enough you might breed superhumans, but I suspect that genetic engineering would come first and beat you to the punch ;)
> I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction)
I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white. In other countries, race is seen differently as well (though this has changed due to western media)
White today includes a lot of people who have historically not been considered white, and IQs will vary by those subgroups. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence is measured to be especially high. (Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews. I never understood that)
Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.
https://www.google.com/search?q=anti+jewish&source=lnms&tbm=...
What we call race has formed mostly for social reasons: we look similar enough, share enough cultural similarity, and we're under attack by the "other" so let's band together. Asians in asia all hate each other. They all get along in the US. Pakistanis and Indians don't get along in their home countries. They're best friends in the US. Same story: you arrive in the US, you band together with people most like yourself to help you when faced with pressure.
Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though you're being civil. I suspect that this is the type of "under attack" that I mentioned in my last paragraph that gives rise to strong same-race stickiness to begin with.
> The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart
I think we are talking past each other (that or I'm terrible at explaining myself).
I made sure to specify that the offspring would return close to the mean while probably being higher.
Many characteristics are dependent of many genes (such as apparently IQ). You mention unexpressed genes and I agree with you on this. You have a pool of possible combinations of expressed/unexpressed genes. In a given population, all the combinations will cluster around a given mean; this gives you a bell curve. Now, if an Asian is born with an IQ of 70, this means that this particular combination was bad, but the rest of his genetic baggage is still able to produce other combinations which are more likely to be within the average.
Let's take a simpler example. Say my current genes would allow these results in a given characteristic: [1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 10]. Of these results however, only 1 is truly expressed per generation. It so happens that I got lucky and got the value of "10".
Then I mate with someone of a mean "8" having the following combinations: [8, 8, 8, 8, 8].
Our children would be more likely to be between 8 and 5 than between 8 and 10. It would take generations of selective breeding to bring my descendants back to the mean of "8"
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> I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white.
It's not a social construct, it's just that the resolution at which people are looking at it changed.
It's like trying to name species through evolution. When did rabbits become 'rabbit', rather than their ancestor species? It's a continuum, we just decide that after a threshold of differences, we change the name. It doesn't mean that differences between species don't exist.
There are many differences between those we usually call "whites". People in the Netherlands are taller than those in Ireland; depending on the resolution they could probably be called diffrent races/subspecies.
> For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence is measured to be especially high.
Yes and if the genetic hypothesis is correct they apparently had 2 major factors helping this: A selection for intelligence AND a strong cultural tendency to marry within the group. (See a few Kosher rules designed to make sure Jews don't eat/socialise with gentiles.)
> Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews.
Do you know if they want to distance themselves genetically or from the people with this culture? For example, are they opposed to marrying secular Jews?
> Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.
Well sure, but that doesn't change anything in my desire to not knowingly reduce the chances of my children. It's not just a "I support my local sport team" mentality.
In addition, it seems that most people think that some differences are worth preserving. I would probably be judged as the devil himself if I had a plan to mix the Jews or Native Americans with Africans until they were one indissociable group.
> Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though y...