Munroe's Law of Average Familiarity: Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.
The action item isn't easy if everyone has to individually remember it going forward. An easy action item would be to add a lint rule to prevent the X function from getting checked in, even if the author never heard of this rule before.
This article focuses entirely on people regulating their own decisions to share an article, not any attempt by a "tool wielder" to selectively block any content.
To put their study into context, it suggests that if Facebook asked users to rate whether an unrelated article was accurate before allowing you to share their own, many people would pay attention to whether their own articles were accurate, and less misinformation would be shared. This could be applied universally to any news article, both for detecting people sharing it, and populating the pre-share accuracy judgement. Instead, Facebook streamlines the process to increase engagement, and people blitz through it without stopping to consider the article's accuracy at all, distracted by thinking of all the likes they'll get for posting it. According to the study, when users are already primed to judge the accuracy of an article, they are more likely to self-regulate their own misinformation.
Absolutely, what more, and I'm culpable of this too, often things are re-shared where you only read the headline, or even just skimmed through the article barely reading it or spending any time to think through it.
Any rational person, upon hearing a suggestion that Jews are responsible for starting forest fires by using laser beams from space, would quite naturally dismiss the claim as nonsense. And the claim is so ludicrous on its face that a rational person would, quite justifiably, assume that it could only ever be offered as a strawman.
Yet, here we are--with a duly elected congresswoman of the United States House of Representatives subscribing to (or at least passively entertaining) said strawman.
There are, perhaps, too many well-intentioned, good-natured, level-headed people out there who are simply far too sheltered from the outright insanity that is permeating throughout our society. They are far too quick to assume that human nature tends toward the same pursuits of truth, justice, and liberty which they value--and that merely offering a level playing field for ideas to compete will inevitably result in the triumph of those which are most noble.
While this bright-eyed and bushy-tailed approach to life is certainly tempting to adopt, it is quite disconnected from the world around us. Rationality and competence are under siege by people who do not adhere to an evidence-based view of reality. One cannot be reasonable with unreasonable people. Moderation and ostracization are perfectly valid tools for dealing with such individuals.
As insane as that idea is, we have a democracy to effectively allow the public litigate the acceptability of holding such ideas. If her district finds no fault with her holding that opinion, then it matters not what others think. Democracy doesn’t mean politicians that you don’t elect can’t hold opinions you don’t like, however disparate from your own. If you disagree with that then you simply do not believe in democracy.
Again: I will not be shamed out of a liberal position by exceptional strawmen. Please make a real argument for why you think democracy is flawed. Appeals to emotion only degrade discussion.
> Greene "liked" posts calling for the assassination of prominent Democrats including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Greene also used social media to boost false claims that deadly mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, Newtown, Connecticut and Las Vegas, Nevada were actually staged.
>In light of the revelations, the Democratic-controlled House took the unusual step of voting to force Greene to be removed from her committee assignments on Thursday after GOP leaders failed to act on the matter themselves. Democrats were joined by 11 Republicans who voted to strip Greene of the assignments.
There is no evidence that a significant amount of the population seriously entertains that idea, regardless of this politician, so it remains an exceptional strawman that seems to used for the purpose of justifying censorship.
> Some apps, like Facebook, allow for some data tracking to be manually disabled. But by default, it is turned on. That gives the company reams of personal data on who we are and what we are doing, which it then vacuums up, packages and sells.
Facebook would be giving away money if they ever actually sold your data. As everyone here knows, they use that data to target the ads that they sell.
Do journalists phrase it this way out of ignorance, or is it an intentional lie to make Facebook look even worse than it is?
I agree that the most used phrasing of "selling your data" is factually wrong. On the other hand, I think it is approximately true enough for the general public.
I don't expect the usual reader to understand how that data is commoditized inside Facebook to serve better ads. Do you remember how a US Senator had a hard time understanding how ads allowed Facebook to remain free? People will not grasp without significant effort the ads economy and no journalist wants to take on that every time they write about tracking.
It's a tough situation. I'm not satisfied with how they do it, but I understand it's a limitation related to the medium and target audience.
But that still means a real estate agency doesn’t have my address, and the painter doesn’t have the list of shoes I have bought.
Only being able to show me ads in some apps is a comically narrow way of way of “having sold all my data”, akin to “Thugs have sold my house” for “temporarily skinny-dipping in my swimming pool while we were on holidays”. Not nice, but they didn’t sell my house, and Facebook didn’t sell my data, just told an advertiser they could put a picture in a window where there would be house-owners passing by.
I don't think the analogy helps. Digital goods can be sold infinitely many times, unlike your house. Explaining the difference between selling data and selling a service enabled by that data is not as easy as it sounds. It means that a real state agency doesn't have to know your address to assess how much your property is worth - someone else is doing the math and connecting you and them.
I think there's room to be charitable and that most people don't see a meaningful distinction between "sell ads based on your data" and "sell your data to people to use in ads".
This is often the problem of journalists not consulting experts on topics like these (although, a case could be made that the scale they had to adapt to with the Internet forced them to churn out news stories too quickly to get an expert for every story). They can still write an article about this problem (because targeted advertising is considered a problem to most people and/or NPR wants to make more people aware of it) but nuance is important and saying they 'sell your data' isn't misinformation I would want spread.
That's a circular argument. If journalists actually understood the distinction and explained it, more people would see the distinction after reading their articles.
The link is good and insightful, if you copy-paste it into the browser bar. If you click it it redirect to a fairly tasteless image complaining about being linked from HN.
>In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
>>Because of the release of GNOME 2.0 and 2.2, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME 1.4, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME 2, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks...
>This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
>I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the *"Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers"* model, or *"CADT"* for short.
>It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
>But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
[random GIF of a compass, that links to the homepage]
> I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short.
Sounds like the content is just as mature and insightful as the HN ddos redirect image. I see why objecting to being linked an image of a hairy ball in a 2011 image macro was wrong of me.
If the author complains about a HN ddos, then why does everyone suggest evading his ddos protection? It seems like reuploading the content works out better for everyone. It's just plain lazy to post a raw link to that site on this forum.
Munroe's Law of Average Familiarity: Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.