Once again, Douglas Adams turns out to be prophetic.

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

In the sentence before, he also predicted his friend Richard Dawkins' books:

"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the theme of his best-selling book, Well That About wraps It Up For God.

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Babel_Fish

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

That reminds me of a cool trick that not many people seem to know, you can tell north with a analog watch: http://modernsurvivalblog.com/survival-skills/how-to-use-a-w...

It worked really well.

...I'd say that modern phones with internal compasses have obsoleted this technique, but given how unreliable phone compasses are, I wonder whether I should try producing an Android version.

So now I can generally (roughly) tell the time by looking at the sun, if I'm somewhere familiar (I know where north is) - and I can generally tell where north it is by looking at the sun, if I know the time.

I suppose most people (ie, those that don't live near the poles) can tell time roughly just by how high the sun is/how long the shadows are - but it's a little tricky in most of Norway, most of the year (except maybe around noon).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_watches#1920_Wristw...

I have a 1913 wristwatch in my collection. But, I don't seem to have time to wear that and many fine mechanical watches any more; my smartwatch is so useful I end up wearing that instead.

Sometimes I think that it is somewhat disappointing that things didn't work out the way this mid-1980s science fiction game thought they would:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nunnwt6ex5bo7e6/hand_computer.pdf?...

The "tech level" indicates which level of technology is needed for a particular piece of equipment to be available and/or normal (won't get you burned at the stake for using "magic") - in Traveller it is used to label different worlds in the universe AFAIK - with GURPS it also extends to cross-dimensinal travel, alternate realities, time travel etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_%28role-playing_game...

(I had realised it should have been from a rpg, but I kept the game term from the previous comment to avoid confusion)

So, when you say "People who wear watches as a status symbol wore elaborate mechanical ones, people that just needed time used their phones." you are wrong in the context of the time Adams was talking about. Digital was very much 'cool' back then, or at least not 'cheap' as we see it today. Also, no-one had a mobile in 1978, as they were first introduced in 1979 (and had no clock).

As for today, fashion works in cycles, and among hipsters the digital is 'in', but who really knows. We do know that the Casio F-91 is the watch of choice for IEDs and Casio admits that they sell "well" 25 years after introduction. I remember reading that the F-91 is a graduation 'gift'/shibboleth for IED school grads, but I can't find the source. I guess that earns a fair amount of street-cred or 'cool' in certain circles (of bastard child-killer terrorists). If you do see a group of people with a lot of old Casio F-91 watches, I really hope they are not company you keep!

Actually, this Q&A from one of his (amazing) talks seems to show otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0keUhMiZ44

I kept my watch. Still wear it. My Fermi estimate is that it's 100 times faster to check the time on your watch than on the phone you have to get out of your pocket. It makes a big difference.

I suspect you're greatly underestimating how quickly you can check the time with a watch on your wrist. Even if literally no thought were required, human reflexes are on the order of 200ms latency; 100x more than that would be 20 seconds. In reality, there's a conscious element and that always slows things way down. I don't think the actual effective time taken to check the time by any means at all is ever less than about a second, even if it feels faster. Maaaybe half a second if you truly don't need to move anything but your eyeballs.

On the other hand, I find that it usually takes me 3-4s to get my phone out of my pocket and check the time on it.

In other words, what's really a bad idea—that digital watches are a symptom of—is the notion that humans have a need to know the time with absolute precision. Having that information available—literally, on hand—seems to result in nothing but bad incentives (in much the same way that having access to stock-market quotes at an hourly granularity, when going long, results in nothing but bad investment decisions.)

I once read an article claiming that the invention of the bell-tower that struck once per hour was the proximate cause of people keeping 9-5 business hours, and that a lot of other things about modern labor followed from this. Whether or not this is true, I still have a vague feeling that we would be happier (and be annoyed with people for being "late" to things less) if all clocks were randomly skewed by ~15 minutes.

"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

We live in the most peaceful time in human history. Yes, it's true that we can't know the tail risk, but we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

http://pablobarbera.com/static/barbera_polarization_APSA.pdf

It's very fashionable, because it has produced jaw-dropping public idiocy with unprecedented immediacy on a huge scale. It has given a voice to the loudest idiots, along with the power of the mob. It has unprecedented power to give people license to denigrate other people and anger them, including people they know or are related to. This only figures, as its viral power comes from precisely that effect. (That effect on our affect, no less.)

Maybe it's just like the stylized mock battles carried out by rival little towns in Tuscany dating from the middle ages and renaissance. Maybe it will just amount to blowing off steam and "local color" in the long view of history. I sure hope that undergrads screaming that Yale is not a place of learning is not a harbinger of the future.

I don't know about that. I mean, sure, it's better to be trolled with tweets than hung, but there is something insidious about the way social media, etc. is changing us collectively. We seem to be getting meaner and more polarized on a macro level. Our interactions are more superficial and staged even.

And, the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

> the idiots seem to wield a disproportionate amount of "power" these days. It's like idiocy concentrate.

It looks like it sometimes. E.g. worry a lot when I look what is happening in academia. But then again - it's not like there weren't places that were insane before. At least this time I hope nobody gets burned at the stake.

It's basically:

1. now we can vent frustrations publicly more easily, anonymously (this should, I hope, lead to fewer actual violent incidents, sort of like many smaller earthquakes relieve pressure and reduce the risk of a big one)

2. since venting frustrations is very, very public and there's basically no curation for content these days, there's a deluge of garbage that could somewhat be avoided in the past

I think it's a good process since at some point we're just going to get immunized: we'll discover better channels, we'll improve curation and since all the garbage is floating to the top, there's a small chance people will actually notice it and actually act, i.e. try to take care of some of these misguided loonies.

That is, I was referring to the latter, versus suggesting that humans have never done bad things to each another.

I would suggest this causes greater polarisation and less tolerance. This leads to less reasoned discussion to understand perspectives and work out differences. Which leads to more polarisation... etc.

I also agree with you, and furthermore think that we live in the most prosperous and productive period of history and yet we are arguably the most asinine and facile society since the Internet arrived.

-- my grandmother

While it might be true for you and me, it is not true for a large chunk of populace, There is constant war going on in various parts of the world. For example Africa and Middle East is experiencing constant war and loss of lives. Ignoring the civil conflicts, look at the list of countries invaded.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invasions

Well, obviously they just need more social media and wikipedia.

I think that's unrealistic. What group has both the motivation and ability to rally both state governments and a large chunk of the military into open warfare on American soil? Both parties love polarizing rhetoric to keep their base riled up, but they have nothing to gain and everything to lose in an open civil war. Various militias, "patriots," and racial and religious warriors can occupy some government buildings, kill some cops, and provoke disastrous police standoffs, but have no ability whatsoever to prosecute an actual war.

Well, the media us polarising as well only in more subtile ways -- for example by throwing paranoid pro-Trump comments in an article about Wikipedia.

> we can take some comfort that, for example, war between two German provinces, or a North American civil war, are remote possibilities compared with 150 years ago.

What about the Yugoslavian wars? Or wars orchestrated by the US in the Middle East. If it's peaceful in your zip code it doesn't mean there's peace in Israel for instance, a country that has been in a perpetual state of war since it came to be.

[1]: http://en.itu.dk/About-ITU/Press/News-from-ITU/Danes-are-rel...

Any actual evidence for this? Or do you just mean the most peaceful for Western countries time in human history?

Knowledge don't always help in addressing a problem.

People usually are willing to acknowledge that knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to happiness, but few are willing to admit that in some cases ignorance is what holds things together.

The emperor is wearing no clothes? Religion? "A classic is a book everyone says is important, but no one gets around to reading."

I think a big part of the problem is deep knowledge and intimate knowledge vs. shallow knowledge. You see this a lot in programming and computer science. Sometimes almost no knowledge is fine, but just a little bit more is dangerous, whereas a lot of it would be much more beneficial. This also goes for knowing your neighbors.

given the existence of expressions such as "ignorance is bliss" or "out of sight, out of mind" in many languages, I have the feeling this is not such an uncommon thought.

> People usually are willing to acknowledge that knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to happiness

One human retina has about 120 million photoreceptors. In reasonably well-lit conditions they will all fire many times per second. I think this figure is too small by a factor of at least 1000, maybe more.

> A light bulb generates 10^60 photons per second.

Back of envelope: energy per photon = Planck constant times speed of light over wavelength (there might be a factor of 2pi or something missing there) or about 4x10^-19 Joules at visible-light wavelengths. A typical light bulb might put out, say, 10W of visible light, or 2.5x10^19 photons. If it's an old-style incandescent, a lot of energy goes out in the infrared; let's be generous and say it's 2.5x10^20 photons.

So this number is too large by a factor of at least 10^39.

It's still true that the great majority of photons emitted by a light bulb don't affect what you see when you look at it. For instance, because most of them are emitted in directions that don't let them reach your eyes. It is entirely beyond me how it is useful to categorize this as "ignorance".

But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.

How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of.

Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition.

There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.

What I've learned about the universe over time looks something like this:

    |         
    |          ____/
    |     ____/
    |____/
    +----------------

    |\
    | |
    | |    __     __.
    | L__.'  \__.'
    +----------------

The more I learn, the better everything seems to be.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. [...]

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." [...]

[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

Look at a more serious religion, and you'll see better results: Scholastic Catholicism, or the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari schools of Islam, or almost any form of Buddhism.

http://www.catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution

Catholic doctrine is to deny random mutation (god is twiddling bits manually) and insist adam and eve were real. That along with a host of other silly stuff the believe (virgin birth).

And for Adam & Eve : "[The Church] allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms"

So it's not the case.

Which tells us nothing about theistic belief. It would be foolish to conflate the two IMO; as appears to be happening in this exchange.

You say "mythical intelligent religious person" - few people could be considered more religious than Newton, you presumably consider him not to have been intelligent? What's your yardstick for intelligence?

Or did you mean "mythical" in the sense of "I'm going to ignore examples I know of because they contradict my position"?

That was easy, you answered your own question!

Inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence may be true, just not sure what it tells us. A statistical appeal to authority??

Many more people are theistic or spiritual than are religious -- I doubt any statistics exist for that, but again proving a truth that tells us nothing about the basic proposition seems pretty worthless.

You appear to think reasoning about a position requires someone to come to your conclusion.

Re the anecdotal nature of the data-points, are you disputing that the mentioned people are intelligent. What in particular is questionable about those data-points, they don't disprove the aforesaid conjecture but they do cast doubt on the implied conclusion being drawn.

An absolute value would mean rationality was totally correlated with intelligence. It isn't.

I posted this in another comment -- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...

I doubt that was meant, either. There have been studies, most show that intelligent people are less likely to be religious. The more education, the less religion. Etc. It is, of course, a statistical thing.

(I grew up in Sweden and can tell you that to get a large fraction of (mentally healthy) people to be religious, they need to grow up in a religious environment -- without anyone really contradicting that world view. It was a bit of a shock for me the first time I went to Ireland for vacation, since I knew that a large part of the locals were really religious, but they were sane.)

> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.

I offered myself as a simple example. I'm neither the smartest guy nor the best Christian, but I consider myself reasonably intelligent and I try hard to live by my beliefs. I also offered several other historical counterexamples.

I don't see a statistical argument here. But it could be my religion showing.

Many of the founders of modern philosophy believed in some form of a Supreme Being. I would venture to say that this is true of most of human history up until the last 20-30 years. Whether from cultural influences, expectations, or otherwise, many of the smartest people in history have had some religious belief. That religious belief may not have been mainstream or consistent with the dominant theology of the era (see America's founding fathers and the prevalence of Deism), but there is a conspicuous absence of outright atheism.

Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis: these were very smart people who also had belief in some form of God. You don't have to agree with everything they thought or said, but you would be wrong to say they were not intelligent.

In short, intelligent religious people certainly aren't "mythical."

> As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up.

The thesis that there is an inverse relationship between religion and intelligence is not evident when you look at the arc of human history. And if you take the most charitable view: "Of people who are alive today, there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence" there is no proof of causation.

For the sake of argument, I'll consent that there is a growing divide between "religious" and "intelligent." Given that the preponderance of evidence suggests that intelligence is largely hereditary, what would explain this shift?

One could argue that expanding our understanding of the universe is responsible for this divide. That as people know more they believe less. But that doesn't appear to pan out when you look at a longer view of human history. Did the Newton's of the past become less religious as their knowledge increased? I don't see it.

It seems more likely that this divide is unique (or at least more sharply pronounced) in today's society. It could be that this is because it is more acceptable in today's world to be harshly critical of belief in general. That is, while there have always been fighting between sects it was not socially acceptable to be hostile towards belief in general. This is an interesting argument, but is not dismissable nor provable.

It could just as easily be that the growing availability of universities and colleges (that are widely more liberal than the general population) impacts impressionable 18-22 years olds who are branching out on their own for the first time. That a growing proportion of intelligent people are being exposed to anti-religious zealots in the form of their mentors at a very impressionable time.

Show me the statistical argument for one vs the other and we can have a debate centered around numbers. Flaming me for providing counterexamples to an offensive and hyperbolic comment hardly seems like a rational counterpoint. To point your question back to you: what does it say about your position that you can't reason about it?

> Controlling for other factors, they can only confidently show strong negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity among American Protestants.

So... American Protestants. Okay. In the scope of living people, that's... quite specific.

>> I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations.

My use of these examples was not to counteract a statistical argument, but the opening sentence:

>>> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.

The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples. It was a simple exercise in showing that religious intellectuals are not a mythical creature.

>> The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples.

I discussed that and referenced it with "See my comment on the brother comment of yours."

I think I wasn't clear, so sturgill missed my trivial point -- I meant that it was not rational to believe in supernatural phenomena without good support.

And intelligence is probably less correlated with rationality than you'd naively think, so of course you'll find highly intelligent people that believe in anything. For instance, I've talked to a guy with mental issues that believed in lots of conspiracy theories. And so on.

(And many hundreds of years old books are not good support; there is better support and more witnesses that Elvis lives. And so on. This is a really old discussion.)

The fact they don't push their religiosity at you is a good thing, no?

You couldn't have met these two guys [1] [2], but you keep on bumping into what they did for all of us.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Eins...

The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do, and holding belief in a deity is not one of them.

PS: Those guys are dead. You haven't met him either. They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.

You cannot use Newton or Einstein as an example of a knowledgeable perspective and simultaneously ignore the fact that there exist more knowledgeable people today. That is a fallacy; you could just as well cite Aristotle or Thales or Zoroaster. They get worse as they get older, and that's not a coincidence.

1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)

2. Do you remember that quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Those two are a couple of the giants we stand on the shoulders of, today. That doesn't imply a claim about intelligence, more than being able to get through a science university education.

No, i think that the categorical statement of bleachedsleet (five levels up the tree) is a bit offending, to me it sounds exactly like if he was claiming absolute authority on the subject, which he obviously can't.

showing a counterexample is not a bad argument, at least not in mathematics.

2. bleachedsleet argument needs that intelligence is very correlated with rationality. Sadly, the correlation is probably quite far from 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differe...

(Regarding 2: For instance, there is mental disease. For another, if you raise children with one specific set of answers and they don't see any criticism of those answers, you can make most of them believe in anything all their life. Including creationism.)

Most intelligent religious people will reject most of the content in their holy book of choice.

Doubt is often encouraged, though min got the better of me and I've since been pretty distant from faith-based living.

EDIT: grammar and clarity, minor changes

Oh, of course. I am not saying there's only one way to do it. On the contrary, that's exactly what I'm saying is wrong to think :)

"If we replace the word 'religious' in this sentence with 'an Apple user', is this still acceptable comment on HN?"

Or, if we replace 'religious' with 'an atheist', is this still acceptable?

Of course not.

There's no point in being happy if you can't share it, and you can't share share stupid with people smart enough to see through it. Being ignorant fundamentally limits the happiness you can create in the world.

Also, this backward effect of the lack of friction is also why I believe Email is still there. A tiny and sweet spot for communication. It requires time, will to read, understand and respond. If you want to release reflex negative emotions, you'll still have to work a little bit for it.

As ppod said, we live in the most peaceful time in human history. Endless torrents of online vitriol suck, but they're not even comparable to the slaughterhouse of actual war.

Indeed, giving the tool for everyone to communicate with each other did result in everybody shouting their prejudices at everyone else.

What the article notes, however, is that the most biased wikipedia editors DO CHANGE with time and go toward moderation at a surprising pace.

Instant communication IS knitting society together. We are at the beginning of this process, it is far from complete but places like wikipedia already show some progress.

It works like this. Most of the time most editors are polite, but sometimes you get frustrated and are not. You might not write "fuck you fucking nazi-lover!" or something extreme, but something like "your opinion is idiotic!" or "you don't know what you're talking about here..." It happens everyone. However, if you don't agree with the "consensus" every little outburst will cost you much more. A newbie will be banned for much smaller infractions than a regular.

So, if you are having an argument with someone who is a "respectable editor" or "valuable contributor" in the community, they can and will be quite rude to you but you must not pay back in kind because you will be banned.

There are also intricate rules governing "reverting". Reverting means you are undoing someones changes and I can say from experience that having your edits reverted can be frustrating. I don't know exactly what the rules are but they seem to be effectively that the more "respectable" you are, the more you can revert your opponents edits.

This power imbalance can be seen all over Wikipedia if you look for it. Many articles have editors that consider themselves the "owner" of that article. The way they have written the article is the best way and they don't see their own NPOV violations (Wikipedia term for writing biased texts). Sometimes the talk pages and their archives contain dozens of comments from anonymous ip users raising issues with the article and they are all refuted by the owner. They don't have the endurance or enough standing in the Wikipedia community to fight so they give up and find more constructive things to spend their time on.

There is reasons for doing it but when you get into certain fields it just becomes a cluster F.

Wikipedia has to come to terms with the fact that if you claim you're making an encyclopedia that comes with certain expectations, namely, that you've verified the facts you are printing. They try to obfuscate this with endless layers of rules and procedure, but that no more eliminates the need to check facts than credit default swaps eliminated the need to pay back debt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

A brief stroll through the page history seems to show something like what you describe.

Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks WaPo. What would we do without you?

“We thought this was quite striking,” said Greenstein, a professor at Harvard Business School. “The most slanted Wikipedia editors tend to become more moderate over time.”'

Uh yeah maybe because the people in question grew older? Many of them may have joined wikipedia in their teens or early twenties and like so many others in that age group had quite raical political views and like so many others become more moderate as they mature and learn more about the world.

Maybe let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they meant the one that doesn't sound like a type-error/makes sense and avoids outrageousness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damerau%E2%80%93Levenshtein_di...

Another explanation that fits the results of this study is that the popular party idioms changed over time. As the old idioms were replaced by new ones this analysis made the Wikipedia pages and editors appear to become less biased.

"Illegal aliens" stood out to me as something I don't hear much from either party - the fight today is generally over "illegal immigrants" versus "undocumented immigrants". That looks like an obvious candidate for a marginalized phrase distorting the analysis.

"Death tax" is still around, but I think there's a euphemistic treadmill thing happening - plenty of people on the right will now say "estate tax" and expect it to be understood as a thing they're strongly opposed to.

Finally, the example given seems to be about maturation rather than moderation. "Turbans and terrorists" is rather un-encylopedic, and it would be totally possible to strip it from an article even while preserving a strong conservative bent.

I wouldn't be shocked if these results were right, but it also feels like a sociology paper I wouldn't want to trust without a secondary analysis.

I mean maybe it has some bias, it's quite large so I didn't analyze it, but it's not blatantly bad like WaPo seems to imply. I suspect they fallen the victim of what many journalists fall victim too - concentrating on rare exceptions like some troll putting there "turbans" for lulz and it surviving on the site for some short time - and not on the processes that govern the regular life of the site.

Changes in usage would significantly alter the result over longer time periods.

The article's argument is: "Something's terribly wrong with the internet." Evidence provided for something wrong was three pro-Trump comments about an anti-Trump article. The article then suggests "recent research from Harvard Business School suggests that Wikipedia has become increasingly balanced in the course of its 15-year history."

So, the internet is biased, and people are uncivil. Wikipedia is civil and not biased; here are some points to learn from them.

The irony is that the article itself is no shining beacon of neutrality because it provides an anti-Trump and anti-alt right narrative. Any right-leaning comments must be fixed by editors, but left-leaning comments 'fix themselves over time.'

Instead of the article making a sound argument for neutrality, it does nothing of the sort.

Disclaimer: criticism of the DNC, media and Clinton != support for Trump. I do not support Trump.

This article is masterfully written, but it's not very pure in its intentions.

Yeah, you'll see some ugly comments on all kinds of social media once in a while, but seeing an uncouth phrase or three is absolutely nothing compared to the WAR PROPAGANDA on behalf of the military industrial complex that leads to the deaths of thousands and thousands. So yeah, I'll take the cesspool of a comment section where I might see some truth every time over bought and paid for presstitutes, which we all know as absolute and undeniable fact now from Wikileaks.

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

The more ironic as I was using that argument with a Wikipedia editor who'd run into issues of petty dictators on certain Wikpedia articles:

https://plus.google.com/+PeterStrempel/posts/Rbm6AusBgmt

Comments sections of most online sites are tripe. It takes effort and curation to make them otherwise. Finding ways to offer voice without drowning in noise is difficult. HN is one of the exceptions, as are Metafilter, some subreddits, and a very few other places online, as Google's Lea Kissner points out (she's involved with Google's own privacy and abuse team):

https://plus.google.com/+LeaKissner/posts/JUEgFFJQWWC

unfortunately a lot of news sites seem to have gotten rid of the comment section [1] [2] also if you look at mobile versions then most of them don't have any comments at all.

They say that it costs a lot to moderate these boards and that social media took the place; i think that it is because of the competition between news outlets : they are all in a struggle to retain some of their importance/relevance, and you are not quite as (self) important if someone puts you right on an issue ... nobody likes it when the customer questions his/her authority - journalists are no exception.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/10/brief-history-of-the-demise-of...

[2] http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-33963436

“She is a treacherous, lying, murderous woman that could care less of our rights and our constitution."

It's no pulitzer-prize winner but it's also not "[Your candidate] = Hitler."

I cannot say that the media is getting more biased - it might have always been biased, and I just failed to notice - but I think it's getting more obviously biased, to the extent that "normal" people (i.e. the majority of the population) are loosing any trust they had in media. This doesn't bode well for the media and for our collective future...

  > > “She is a treacherous, lying, murderous woman that could care less of our rights and our constitution."

  > Basically, that statement about Hillary is 100% correct.

I'd be genuinely interested to see any evidence that points to treachery, murder, or her not caring about rights or the constitution.

I'm not looking for 100% evidence here, just any evidence that strongly points in that direction. (With citations to other sources, obviously. Just saying she has killed people doesn't count).

Treachery - AFAIK, other people have been charged with treason for toying with Top Secret information like she has (sending it to/from insecure email addresses).

Not caring about rights - she voted to build the Mexican wall (something Trump is often criticised for even suggesting), and said that US should "drone" Assange. (Technically, assuming the original commenter is a US citizen, that's not technically "our" rights, but given her statement about Assange, I'd imagine she'd also support "droning" of US citizens, as US has done in the past few years.)

Not caring about the constitution - I don't really disagree with her here (I don't agree with her either - basically, it's complicated), but I guess you could frame her support for greater gun control as "not respecting the constitution".

[1]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Poe's_law

I find all comment sections are easier to read if you imagine that everyone is being ironic and mocking the type of person that would actually have those beliefs.

There is a dichotomy on the internet between those who believe that the most emotionally powerful argument wins, and those who believe that if you use emotion in an argument you can be automatically discounted.

The two sides find it very hard to discuss things, and I think there is a natural tendancy for any discussion forum to gravaitate towards the emotive. Those that like unemotive discussion tend to withdraw once people start shouting, or they join in the shouting. Possibly because it's very easy to turn a rational discussion into an emotive one, but very hard to go from emotive to rational.

It reminds me of the opposite of evaporation, whereby the hotter the discussion gets, the less likely cold agents are to contribute, thereby increasing the heat of the discussion.

I value quality in comments, which is one of the reasons I come to Hacker News. It is not a waste of my time. Reading comments on Facebook or any newspaper usually is.

Wikipedia isn't a waste either, mired in a Yahoo Answers low quality answers. That is why I donate.

Creating quality interaction isn't easy on the internet - I admire every success.

Shitposting in the comment-section of a newspaper or indeed Hacker News isn't "free speech", it is just disruptive and destructive.

When governments and corporations engage in bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense) programs to disrupt public discourse, the answer isn't to yell and scream in the comment sections - that only helps them, in fact. The answer is to insist on solid arguments against their gish-gallops and red herrings.

Quoting rules, policies, passive aggressive civility was the norm, rather than sincere attempts at compromise.

Comments sections are also extremely REVEALING... It seems we are getting a theory of why public opinion is so moderate -- it's not just one opinion. It's half of people expressing one view, the other half expressing another view. The version on Wikipedia is effectively the average between the two.

The history sections of wikipedia document this process in action. A lot of the things I look at are pretty dead but I am often impressed when a crappy wikipedia page and a few months later the page has really excellent discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_triple and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem

Pointing out the guidelines on the page themselves didn't matter.

Reverting with comments in the revert itself didn't matter.

Whether new people or established editor, everyone was falling over themselves to get the edit in.

I decided it was futile when they started deciding the solution was instead to rewrite the "guidelines" for what measurements were acceptable, basically "Screw you, we're putting the Tesla in. If it doesn't count based on the rules, we're changing the rules."

So now it's in three categories, "independent/ verified", "manufacturer tested", and "manufacturer claimed" (the latter of which only had the new Tesla).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Edit_warring

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Automobi...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment

Edit: Since HN is saying that I'm "submitting too fast" even though I haven't commented in half an hour, I'll reply to the replies here. (Really stupid that it throttles you just because you went against the hivemind)

@basch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA....! :)

Also those are pretty important policies, would you rather Wikipedians just ignore them and cede to whatever demands you have?

@FireBeyond

Yes I was being optimistic because all I had to go off of was your own description. If people are ignoring you, add a comment and tell them to discuss it until a consensus is reached. If they still edit war, then you can request page protection. And yeah you're right that I assumed you're naive, apologies, it's too bad in this case then. Still, there's nothing stopping you from removing that information and restarting the discussion.

1. Agreed. Except: I discussed my concerns on the Talk page. Nobody paid any attention to it, let alone replied. I discussed that I had removed an edit because by its own statement didn't fit the criteria on the page.

2. No. No other editor discussed anything, on the Talk page, or elsewhere. Just reverted my reverts, or rearranged slightly.

So really, your example is more a failing of the system, rather than a complaint of "me just not getting my way".

"Use the Talk Page" - works only if all parties also do so. You can see here how well this worked out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_fastest_productio...

"Don't edit war" - works only if all parties do so, otherwise it's "Victory of the Stubborn"

"Assume Good Faith"... like you did here, and assumed the worst, that I'm naive about these things.

The reality was that a certain group were hell bent on being the first to add the Tesla as one of the fastest production automobiles and weren't interested in hearing any discussion to the contrary.

For full clarity: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&title=Special%...

Instead it is used anytime an editor thinks one section weighs too much, or personally doesnt find the information of value. The thing is, if I only have part to contribute to an article, it makes no sense to put my contribution on hold until other parts of the article flesh out, it becomes a catch22, self limiting the article.

I think its pretty obvious I side with inclusion of just about everything. The belief in not letting part of an article grow until the other part does is asinine. If weight becomes imbalanced, write more. OR Maybe viewpoint A requires 10,000 words, and viewpoint B only requires 100 to prove its point. Eitherway WP:UNDUE stinks.

WP:UNDUE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... WP:SYNTHESIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...

so on and so forth. people citing conflicting rules back and forth at each other forever, ad nauseum

that is one of the reasons people leave wikipedia right away, they get hit with pages and pages of rules and style guides and tons of other technicalities. reject over help fix is the status quo.

But as a hint, in an area which isn't exactly new - manufacturers have been releasing new cars for a century, some faster than others, have been releasing press releases ever since, too, especially for supercars/ etc., on a list that has been updated for years (and this is one of my first edits on the topic, so I'm hardly claiming ownership)...

the fact that you have to add another column that completely defies the "real world" measurements of every other vehicle there in order to get their fandom vehicle in should be indicative that it was a stretch.

Here's an example:

"List of fastest 100m races" lists the top 20 verified 100m times in history.

Along comes an athlete's team and they release a press release saying "Based on our simulations, we predict he will run 9.45s in this race in a few months time" and, rather than do nothing with it, editors fall over each other to add a new column to the list, so it now has "verified times", "independent times", and "team projected times" and based on that states that Athlete is now the third fastest 100m runner in the world.

Instead of, as you say, waiting for that event to verify (or prove false) that claim.

But yet, to witness sibling posts, my perspective is "wrong".

I think there's no real reason (to use an old example) of why every Pokemon needs its own page, while other more worthy topics get deleted.

But overall? I'm an inclusionist, if there's a consistency. Instead, the practical application is "included if it gels well with certain fads or obsessions, but more more critically considered if not".

Out of curiosity, though, I went back. Over a thousand edits to WP and of those, 12 on "Articles for Deletion". Of those I voted keep on 2, delete on 10.

Of those ten, five were Biographies of Living People, and three were Original Research - including "List of Problems Solved by MacGyver", "Suggested Reading Order for Discworld Novels", and "Star Trek Vessels by Size". The other two were "WP: Admins Willing To Make Difficult Blocks" and a sub-user page from a now disgraced admin that he used to collect "evidence" on users he disliked.

Using a stats tool I can see that on other edits my ratio of "Content Created to Content Removed" is 28.37:1. So I think I'm doing okay there, too.

Recently WP has recognised that's a serious problem, and was a risk to the project.

Some stuff like Twinkle and Rollback got a lot more oversight. Various "vandal patrol" groups got shut down. New Page Patrol got revamped. Here's on discussion about new page patrol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol/RfC...

I've found far fewer of my gnome edits get reverted now than what used to happen.

> If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole. - Raylan Givens, Justified

On a more serious note, I always hear people complaining about getting reverted. What they don't realize is that, often, their edits really are just bad. Here's some of the stuff I have to revert daily:

* Test edits/gibberish

* Vandalism

* Original research [0]

* Changing stuff to match their variety of English [1]

* Making the grammar worse, or going against the Manual of Style [2]

* Improper tone [3]

* No edit summary giving a rationale for the edit

A lot of the time, the changes people make are just arbitrary or don't improve the article. If you ever feel you were improperly reverted though, you can always bring it up on the talk page.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Nati...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_artic...

Also, that saying has been around alot longer than Justified.

Wikipedia has converged on a referenced-to-death style, like a PhD thesis. This is part of what keeps it from becoming too biased. People who have never had to write to tightly referenced standards get very frustrated editing Wikipedia. Those who have don't find it difficult.

There is one faction of people that treat pages like a final draft, and others who prefer it as working space (with extremely high visibility.)

Github isnt a fair comparison, because it has a much better workflow for proposing changes.

There are sandbox pages, user pages, and talk pages for working drafts. But the main space pages are seen by millions of people, and are not an appropriate place to write drafts. Realistically, if you can't write English without grammatical errors, trying to edit Wikipedia will be a frustrating experience.

The visibility is entirely why it should be where contributions are made and not in behind the scenes obscure spots.

It's ok for pages to be flawed.

If you fix a grammatical error instead of reverting a contribution, you might teach the person who made it something. If it's uncited, you should cite it, tag it, or leave it, you shouldnt be reverting it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy#Try_t...

>Fix problems if you can, flag or remove them IF YOU CAN'T. Likewise, as long as any of the facts or ideas added to an article would belong in the "finished" article, they SHOULD BE RETAINED if they meet the three article content retention policies: Neutral point of view (which does not mean no point of view), Verifiability and No original research.

I dont have some radical position here. It's written right into editing policy. Removal should be saved for when contributions cant be fixed, not because you think they are ugly blemishes, and dont want to take the time to improve them. An "incomplete" contribution should stay IN the article, waiting for someone else to come along and mend it. Preference for an article to look "finished" should take a back seat.

Facts and Ideas first, spit polish next. Always prioritize the former.

Oh, for the really good talk sections, you need to look at anything vaguely related to Macedonia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Alexander_the_Great

See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AProtect...

The talk page for San Jose (or is it San José?) has a very passionate debate about whether the article's name should be accented or not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:San_Jose,_California#Requ...

> What’s even more interesting is that Wikipedia seems to exert a moderating influence on its contributors.

This is a great concept, but usually is horrible in practice. It says that wikipedia was partisan and quite left, and has since become more balanced. However, this illustrates a positive outcome of a dangerous potential. This model works much worse for less authoritative sites, but I personally do not believe wikipedia should moderate based on anything other than "truth". Regardless, this is extremely subjective and difficult to do. I think it is working at wikipedia (compared to other places) and am optimistic, but I have seen this go wrong so many times.

I like the comments sections. I often go there for a chuckle, or to see what other people think. Yeah, some people use that opportunity to troll, or say hurtful things or whatever, but that's what the world is, I'd rather never forget that. I also don't want everyone to mellow to the same position and then everyone holds the same (possibly wrong) position forever, that sounds like a bland existence.

Free discourse is not a flaw, it's a feature.

Similar projects like the Genius web annotator[2] tries to achieve the same.

It doesn't mean the commenters (or annotators) will be any less mean, but it certainly is preferable to a Disqus widget dangling on the end of a page, or the default Wordpress commenting engine which allows seemingly anyone to comment regardless of whether they signed up or not.

[1]: http://hypothes.is/

[2]: https://genius.com/web-annotator

It's annotations all the way down! :-D

> The Internet is dotted with cesspools, also known as comments sections.

Comment sections are the only thing keeping a check on publications like the Washington Post. Whether they're on-site or off-site (like what you're reading now on HN), they're invaluable. Sure, not all of the audience with an opinion will be politically correct, but I value the commentary of a piece as much or more as the piece itself. Especially when it's something purely opinion based like this one.

Because the function of Wikipedia is to exhibit different viewpoints (where applicable) rather than to convince anyone of them, it's much easier to step into a relativistic, descriptive mindset, rather than a prescriptive one.

It allows people to actually get things done. It allows them to spend less thought on the topics that are not concerned them in their day lives and spend more on their... day lives!

Basically, if you want people to go out of their cocoons, make their life easier. Otherwise, the fight is futile.

This works as long as the cocoon is perfectly insulated. But it isn't, as elections show. The political process basically cuts through the cocoon like a predatory wasp-- assuming there is at least one candidate or law that is incompatible with insulated beliefs. And then all that saved energy is wasted on moral warfare against the invaders.

Cocoons are always bad in a non-homogeneous society.

Sure, but "cocoons" breed intolerance by magnifying the fears and insecurities of the group. Maybe if you have balanced, open, secure people, blocking information doesn't hurt, but those people are not only rare, they tend to go out of their way for new information. They don't willingly slam the door on new streams of information so it seems their "cocoons" if they exist at all have fairly thin walls.

The most non-homegeneous society I know is New York.

I remember walking it and seeing Chinese area, black area, finance area, etc.

People always try to create bubbles around them with people they know they can trust. Or "facts" that supports their world view. Or familiar ideas. This all helps them spend less energy on "uninteresting" things.

And then they burn all that saved energy on moral warfare, raging furiously at non-threats. That's the problem.

If the past 200 years are any indication it won't make a difference.

And I mean easy when I speak about USSR. Life in contemporary Russia is much harder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Could something like this actually 1) create value for the media by engaging users and generating content 2) elevate the discourse between readers and 3) actually make the media less biased over time as it is repeatedly called out for partisan slant in its editorial and reporting?

This seems obvious: as you are exposed to more points of view, you start to develop your own nuanced view of the world. At a certain point you feel okay with reading FOX News because you would like to see how other people think and it trains you to see the logical fallacies and biases.

Edit to add: I think the problem is not only that people don't see views other than their own, but that they become unaware that other views even exist.

http://archive.is/Wh2iM

Well worth a watch imho https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hqFvXm57M

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not...

I think the NPOV policy has been great for Wikipedia and contributes to many positive outcomes, but I often think Wikipedians are too sanguine that they can recognize and/or achieve it, and about the scope of the "neutrality" they're actually working towards. One reason for that is the other policies on reliable sources and undue weight, which means Wikipedia will usually appear to be NPOV when it reflects the attention and approaches given to something by media and academic scholarship that are readily accessible to Wikipedia editors.

While that might be more neutral than any available alternative, it's still going to reflect tons of biases found in the underlying sources and in the editors' ability to select and access them. I've been thinking of trying to describe some examples, maybe deliberately including points of view that I don't hold or agree with instead of those that I do. :-)

I think one highlight is that if a point of view is now a minority view or extremely unfamiliar in middle-class English-speaking communities, paying a lot of attention to it on enwiki will be considered undue weight because editors can correctly describe the status of the view as marginal. But that point of view might be more correct or extremely important from some other perspective, even though reading an encyclopedia that gave more weight to it would be jarring for many readers and they might find it less useful overall. (It might also be a majority view in some other social classes, cultures, or language communities whose views aren't expressed in reliable sources that many Wikipedians can access, understand, or defend as reliable sources.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_do_need_to_cite_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories