I know politics are one of the more polarizing things to discuss, but are there any decent communities that have a similar level of respect and discourse to HN?
Reading reddit politics makes me more knowledable than those that watch Fox News, nbc news, msnbc. I’m more well rounded and know arguments made on both sides.
You sure you’re getting arguments from both sides? In /r/politics at least, unless you’re sorting comments by “controversial,” you are definitely not getting both sides.
What I liked to do before the election was bounce between T_D and HRC subreddits. Finding any unbiased source of news is a hopeless quest. The next best solution is to read bias on both sides and use it to triangulate the truth so you can develop your own point of view.
I actually think bias is very useful. As long as you consider all bias equally, it provides a mechanism for separating facts from narrative.
> The next best solution is to read bias on both sides and use it to triangulate the truth
You might be able to make a conclusion comparing two rational arguments.
You can't compare a rational, or factual argument to a lie and make any sort of progress. Unless your clear headed that one is a lie... Welcome to the reality of post truth America.
I agree that America has a massive cultural + media problem right now, but I'm skeptical that the problem is literal "lies," i.e. factually incorrect statements presented as facts. The real issue is in embellishments, misrepresentations, and generally mixing of fact and opinion.
The actual facts, i.e. verifiably accurate descriptions of events, would probably average less than 100 words per article. And yet every article is 800+ words. What are the other 700 words about? That, IMO, is the real issue with the content of media these days (ignoring the larger problem with the distribution of it, i.e. social media).
The other issue is lack of ability for the average reader to verify facts presented in the article. There is so much information on every topic, but we cannot be experts in every topic. So by nature, we must trust others to be experts and accurately interpret the facts. Not only does this inhibit us from verifying facts, it also makes it impossible to provably judge which facts are true, but embellished.
Before a false claim exists, there is a vacuum. It takes no energy to create false claim X. Anyone can post an article claiming X, with no real need to cite any authority. But for someone to then disprove X, it does require energy. They need to read the article, find motivation to disprove it, and finally write and publish a counter-article disproving the claim of X.
There will inevitably be a delay between the article claiming X and any article refuting it. Since there is a constant influx of new articles, there is a constant subset of articles that are provably false but have not been refuted. This comprises a certain percentage of news, which commands a percentage of daily eyeball time. In recent years, both these percentages have become way too high.
Interestingly, this seems like the same pattern of cat-and-mouse games that we see repeatedly in infosec. Perhaps there's something to be said for that analogy. False articles are like bugs in the global information system.
Just saying I know that not all laws are enforced and that is a policy preference given to the President. I also know that Obama was born in US and not Kenya.
In many cases biases are not nearly equal in magnitude however, e.g. anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, climate change. Similarly, for politics bias on the left includes misleading statistics or cherry picking, while T_D goes much further and just blatantly makes stuff up (e.g. murder rate is way up; reality heavily disagrees). The truth is probably inbetween these extremes but nowhere near the middle.
If you look at r/politics in comparison you will notice the very low signal to noise ratio in terms of partisanship and venting. A more regulated, argument and fact driven discussion is rational in comparison.
The best resource for dispassionate, objective and accurate information regarding international politics that I know of is actually a YouTube channel called Caspian Report. I have literally never found another place, in the physical world or the digital world, where people are dedicated to being objective about political or human issues. Hackernews is very bad in this respect and it has gotten really bad recently. I've been on this website for years and years so it's not the illusion mentioned by the moderators -- I'm pretty sure that there has been a large influx of people who used to be on Reddit exclusively. Refugees who were driven out by reddits own disasterous decline in quality. This website can in fact be found when Google searching "Reddit alternatives." This is extremely sad because if hackernews dries up then I have no idea where to go.
Others have mentioned several subreddits; I would like to recommend r/NeutralPolitics. I occasionally browse it and I'm blown away by the quality of the discussion compared to the discussions at other popular political subreddits, e.g. r/politics. Neutralpolitics's success is probably due to its rules and moderation, which help promote constructive discussion, and its lesser traffic compared to other political subreddits, meaning that it doesn't suffer from the unconstructive comments that result from the popular audience.
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Pretty well moderated and mostly rational if left leaning (not an issue for me but...)
What I liked to do before the election was bounce between T_D and HRC subreddits. Finding any unbiased source of news is a hopeless quest. The next best solution is to read bias on both sides and use it to triangulate the truth so you can develop your own point of view.
I actually think bias is very useful. As long as you consider all bias equally, it provides a mechanism for separating facts from narrative.
You might be able to make a conclusion comparing two rational arguments.
You can't compare a rational, or factual argument to a lie and make any sort of progress. Unless your clear headed that one is a lie... Welcome to the reality of post truth America.
The actual facts, i.e. verifiably accurate descriptions of events, would probably average less than 100 words per article. And yet every article is 800+ words. What are the other 700 words about? That, IMO, is the real issue with the content of media these days (ignoring the larger problem with the distribution of it, i.e. social media).
The other issue is lack of ability for the average reader to verify facts presented in the article. There is so much information on every topic, but we cannot be experts in every topic. So by nature, we must trust others to be experts and accurately interpret the facts. Not only does this inhibit us from verifying facts, it also makes it impossible to provably judge which facts are true, but embellished.
Before a false claim exists, there is a vacuum. It takes no energy to create false claim X. Anyone can post an article claiming X, with no real need to cite any authority. But for someone to then disprove X, it does require energy. They need to read the article, find motivation to disprove it, and finally write and publish a counter-article disproving the claim of X.
There will inevitably be a delay between the article claiming X and any article refuting it. Since there is a constant influx of new articles, there is a constant subset of articles that are provably false but have not been refuted. This comprises a certain percentage of news, which commands a percentage of daily eyeball time. In recent years, both these percentages have become way too high.
Interestingly, this seems like the same pattern of cat-and-mouse games that we see repeatedly in infosec. Perhaps there's something to be said for that analogy. False articles are like bugs in the global information system.
In many cases biases are not nearly equal in magnitude however, e.g. anti-vaxxers, homeopathy, climate change. Similarly, for politics bias on the left includes misleading statistics or cherry picking, while T_D goes much further and just blatantly makes stuff up (e.g. murder rate is way up; reality heavily disagrees). The truth is probably inbetween these extremes but nowhere near the middle.
TV news is a pretty low bar to set for yourself.
> I’m more well rounded and know arguments made on both sides.
Any decent political site will put out the talking points, but those don't give you much insight into the belief system undergirding them.
Also good