SkepticalButOpenMinded @ SkepticalButOpenMinded @lemmy.ca

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2

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506

Joined

2 yr. ago

But Canadians keep voting in conservatives at the provincial level, across the whole country. Only two NDP provinces (BC and Manitoba), and MB is very recent. This really seems like "voting against our interests".

Who is the Bernie of 2024 in your analogy?

Alas, “generic Democrats” don’t exist. All the ones we can actually vote for have pesky details, like names and histories. Generic candidates pretty much always outperform specific named candidates. That’s true of Biden, sure, but it’s also true of alternatives to Biden.

Instead, name a specific Democrat that you think will do better, and we can compare their performance to Biden. Who specifically do you propose?

According to the polling, Trump enjoys 75-85% favorability amongst Republicans. So, unfortunately, it seems Republicans really do love Trump that much.

I think the leading guesses are perceptions about his age, the economy, and his effectiveness. Biden’s favorability is similar to Trump’s at the same point in his presidency, which was, itself, one of the lowest in modern history.

It’s nonsensical but I’m not surprised. Even here on Lemmy, some people refuse to give Biden credit for anything. Cynicism is rampant on the left. I think those who are paying attention see that Biden is governing pretty progressively. Sanders recently said that, “I think he is a much more progressive president than he was a United States senator.”

But can you name someone specific? The fact is, Trump is enormously popular with Republicans. Biden isn’t well liked by anyone right now, but who is the competent and well regarded alternative? Sanders, Warren, and AOC are divisive with the electorate. Harris and Buttigieg are even less popular. If there’s a consensus candidate, it’s not obvious to me.

yeah totally. I'd even go so far as to say that a lot of the things he says are intentionally ambiguous, so that he can't be pinned down on the truth of any claim and his supporters can do mental gymnastics when he's wrong.

Indeed, it’s an empirical fact that most people cannot tell the difference between opinion and news.

Given how many people mistake opinion for news, I don’t think it’s realistic to solve this through media literacy. I think the major reputable outlets need to start applying journalistic standards to opinion pieces, including basic fact checking. I don’t know why anyone would be opposed to that.

Then you are also intellectually lazy, because there is no way you are verifying the truth of every claim made in the articles you read. The role of newspapers is to inform people, not make random claims of dubious truth and have readers “do their own work”. It’s astounding that people are actually against basic fact checking.

What? I’m sorry I hurt your feelings but I don’t really understand what you’re so angry about.

Do my words say that I didn’t notice it was an opinion piece or something? How is this related to your strange diatribe?

I was addressing your strong claim that they can’t do anything about it. I see no technical or theoretical reason to believe that. Give it at least a week.

You seem to think my objection has something to do with whether it’s obvious that this particular piece is an opinion piece? I have no idea why you think this. Completely bizarre, and what an unnecessarily aggressive tone.

I am against opinion pieces because most consumers do not know that they have lower editorial standards, making them a big source of misinformation. If opinion pieces had the same journalistic standards, I would not be opposed to them.

That sounds plausible. “Untruth” sounds gentler.

Seems simple enough to guard against to me. Fact is, if a human can easily detect a pattern, a machine can very likely be made to detect the same pattern. Pattern matching is precisely what NNs are good at. Once the pattern is detected (I.e. being asked to repeat something forever), safeguards can be initiated (like not passing the prompt to the language model or increasing the probability of predicting a stop token early).

Calling it “silly” and “incredibly stupid” is not an argument. I’m not even sure how to respond to this.

The fact that it’s “traditional” is not a good reason to keep something around despite the negative consequences. The fact is, most news consumers do not know about the lower editorial standards of opinion articles, so opinion pieces have been a significant source of misinformation. This is how we get Jim Carey writing about climate skepticism in a major newspaper.

What’s so impossible about a fact-checked journalistic article entitled: “Should opinion pieces be eliminated?” Seems possible to me!

I am someone who is against opinion pieces in general, regardless of the content. Nate Silver also has an argument against them: the main difference with an opinion piece and normal journalism is that opinions don’t need to be fact checked. In which case there’s no reason for them to exist. If the argument cannot survive fact checking, it shouldn’t be published.

There is a semantic difference between “untruth” (or “falsity”), and “lie”. Lies are intentional, so untruths are the bigger category. Obviously, in the case of Trump, most of the untrue things he says are intentional, but I’m sure a lot are also just garden variety ignorance.

Nowhere in your first comment do you make anything like the argument in your second comment. You say that my summary is reductive and that I built an “over complicated argument” by talking about broken promises. But then you essentially argue that this will be a broken promise!

Your second argument is more reasonable, and not at all over complicated, which is why I anticipated it. The problem with your fatalist take is that “mere talk” precedes, not only broken promises, but also fulfilled promises. Honestly, if your cynical take is right, then there’s no reason to expect anything from any party ever. Cynicism is depressingly fashionable on the left.