Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Sorry. Most of the official sources in this recent campaign were dead wrong on a lot of issues, mostly because of their own massive biases.


Are you referring to wrong when they described what they thought was going on, which contains a large amount of opinion, or wrong on the facts as they exist?

Facts can be presented in a biases way (generally through omission of other contextual facts), but if what is said is factual, at least that bit of information is still correct. If combining multiple sources to generate a grouping of facts, that presentation bias way well disappear. If system weeds out people that present opinion as fact, all the better.


Frankly papers that lie through crafted contexts are much more dangerous because they give a false sense of authority due to their correctness at the micro level but incorrectness at the macro level.

Imagine I develope a newspaper that only reports crimes committed by a particular race and I excruciatingly fact check every incident and highlight when they are uneducated (but don't mention education otherwise). What will result is one of the biggest macro lies that will fuel racism through its broader message while everything will be perfect to a fact checker. This would rank perfectly in such a system while broader newspapers would get hammered for messing up picture captions and confusing Airbus A319s with 737s.


Or opinions can be presented as facts, or at least presented in a way that makes it hard to tell if it is reporting or analysis.


The polls were not that far off. If 1 in 100 Trump voters had gone for Clinton instead she would have won.

I think polling is pretty broken though. A lot has changed from 20 years ago when everyone had a landline phone.


The polls were off by the same percentage amount that would have allowed Romney to win the popular vote over Obama.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: