I've written on paper from childhood and I still can't read my own handwriting.
I remember one time I found something I'd written in grade school and I could barely make it out -- until suddenly the memory clicked in my brain and I could understand every word. But only because I was associating the crude shapes with memories of what I wrote!
In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.
And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.
And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
The conspiracy theorist in me says it's a way of signaling via the (bunk) neurolinguistic programming philosophy, which suggests that emphasizing certain words will evoke a desirable response. (Personal words like "you" and "your", as well as positive words like "give".)
The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected.
The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person.
No, but previous ancestors. Rape of the enslaved was very common. The difference in skin tone between Africans and the majority of African-Americans is not because of something in the water.
The number of comments in here that ask for additional/richer data and are being flagged is supremely concerning.
I understand that this is a hot issue with very polarized sides, but in what kinds of circumstances is having more data bad, except to intentionally support bias?
Please understand that my question is only to understand why, in the context of accumulating data, is trying to obtain more/better data NOT a good thing?
I do not wish to debate what is already being said in the many comments already, so if it helps to change the context of the data in question in order to discuss, that sounds like a good idea to me.
I think context is good and we should be wary of videos that have been edited to remove critical information.
However, there is such a large corpus of evidence against the police in these protests, I have to wonder if the people asking for more context are doing so in good faith, or rather to argue for the innocence of the police. Having been personally on the receiving end of police violence during these protests, it bothers me that anyone could look at this wealth of videos and see anything other than a clear pattern of institutional violence being wielded against those who are in opposition to just such violence.
One thing that comes to my mind (note: I do not support this view) but I am trying to put myself into the opposite party's shoes:
- Listing videos of police brutality during protests without also listing videos of protestors brutally attacking the police perhaps creates a dissonance to the counter party?
I think there have been a few incidents were cops were attacked but they are far and few between, but listing those would help clear the accussation of hypocrisy.
Furthermore, I personally think that we should separate police brutality videos in normal civic life (before the protests began) to gather evidence of systemic violence vs. the enraged/emotionally outraged protests that both sides were not willing to concede. I categorize them as different.
The constant request for more and more "context" is textbook Sealioning [1]. When faced with an overwhelming video evidence of misconduct, the only viable way to deny it is to endlessly seek out some kind of magical exculpatory "missing context". That's pretty the only way misconduct-deniers can sow doubt at this point. It's bad faith argument and disheartening to see here on HN.
Your argument is the essence of "sea-lioning" itself. There is indisputably a tremendously large dataset of unassailable evidence (video, cross-referenced personal accounts, audio), things we consider meeting our "beyond a reasonable doubt" in the court of law. And, yet, here you are, saying "maybe we don't have all the facts." At what point are you simply wrong? Never?
While it's true that there is tremendous data of many events of police overreach--corroborated by many sources--certainly not all events in this data set are corroborated. How many? We can't know without enriched data.
Given that this is a resource for events of police brutality, it should be no surprise that contributors are likely to be biased to report events favorable to the assertion of brutality. The general premise asked, "what wrong thing was done to you/your people?" which is likely to result in emotionally biased response. If it was a dataset of reports of interactions between two different ant colonies, for example, the general bias is likely to be significantly lower.
If the goal is to understand the relationship between a population and their police, then obtaining data from both sides would be ideal. Of course, that's not what this data set is, which is why some people are raising concern of bias. As a data set, it's use is limited to support one aggrieved side. This is not much different from training ML models on, say, only Caucasian faces: it may work if the intent is to recognize or generate Caucasian faces, but it is by no means general purpose. As such, it seems reasonable to question the fitness and intent of this data set.
No data set is perfect, and we'll never have "all the facts." But I don't think upholding inherently-prone-to-bias data as "good enough" is a reasonable response to questions about its bias. We cannot achieve perfection, but that doesn't justify denial of bias in the data.
On the matter of "sea-lioning", I've never heard the term before, and I'm not sure if I've ever been exposed to this type of trolling because to recognize it would require me to be able to read minds. However, I understand the forum guidelines charge us to assume the best interpretation of any comment, so I am disinclined to assume that people here asking for more data are trolling. The essence of claiming "sea-lioning" appears, at least at face value, to be an alternative to saying "I don't have to explain myself to you" while maintaining the illusion of taking the high road.
People have brought up the very reasonable concern that the data is extremely prone to bias, and those people are being silenced. It seems this is because it's not a popular idea to challenge the aggrieved party, not because the data is somehow unbiased and they're asking for something unreasonable. This seems unusual for an otherwise truth-seeking community.
Perhaps I am wrong, and I recognize everyone has their own bias and not everyone always acts in good faith. I have just come to expect more from this community than what I've seen in these comments. It seems good faith is not assumed in many cases among these many conversations.
If people want more data, why don't they go get it themselves? Then they could supply it to the rest of us here and tell us what they learned.
The people who built this Github repo voluntarily spent their own time and effort to do so. The people here on HN who think the repo is incomplete can do exactly the same thing if they want to--put in some effort--and thereby address the concerns that they themselves raised.
I generally object to comments here that demand more info, more citations, or complain there might be something missing. How about: do your own work.
"Self-starters teaching themselves what they need to know" is an idea that finds powerful agreement here on HN when it comes to developing software. Somehow, though, on other topics, there sometimes appears a group of commenters who seem more inclined to sit back, complain, and demand answers from everyone else.
I will say that it has occurred to me that demands for more data might not always be in good faith. It has occurred to me that such open-ended questioning might be a convenient way to undermine conclusions that contradict personal beliefs--while avoiding direct conflict over the substance.
Here's a thought I've had recently: it might be worthwhile to have a page, perhaps linked to from the topic's comment page, that shows all flagged comments for said topic. People would not be able to reply to these comments, but everyone would be able to read them. I'm not sure if it has any merit or not, but it's just an idea.
You just identified exactly what OP was asking for: context.
I can't hear what the police are saying to the protesters, can you?
That's context.
The police actions appear mildly questionable, I'll give you that. But we lack context to understand what happened here.
The problem here is that both sides are defensive of themselves. This is precisely why understanding context and nuance is important, because each is incentivized to favor their own viewpoint.
Mildly questionable and actively stupid. They have a multi lane road and force the one lane with seated protestors open. I am not sure that there is any context that could explain that choice unless the police is actually prohibited from routing traffic around an obstacle.
Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
> The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad.
Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave the site, is just fine.
[0] or their allies or people who don't want to be surrounded by assholes.
Do you know what happens when people don't want to deal with harassment due to a certain position they hold? It's called self-censorship, and the far right censors people all the same by harassing, berating, demeaning people etc until they leave or censor themselves. That's a common tactic of sites like Voat.
Weird, r/anarchocapitalism will ban anyone who is on the left, and r/conservative will ban conservatives who speak out against Trump. Even r/TheMotte will ban people for things like tone. I've yet to find these mythical spaces where conservatives tolerate speech they in particular don't like.
The chans are the exception, and not the rule. Most normal human beings don't use any of the chans, but there are tens of tens of millions of subscribers to the online conservative spaces on Reddit and Facebook, and they're all ban happy.
Another popular story today was about parler, a twitter clone which allows mostly all legal speech besides obscenity. It may be a conservative safe space, but its not ban happy.
