I'm not sure what's happened at the Guardian the last couple years. I guess my view of them was positive after the Snowden revelations. But esp since brexit they have been producing a huge amount of rubbish, with link bait titles and outright lies or vastly exaggerated claims (so many of these - for example, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/dec/23/queen-gives-...). You really can't believe anything written on the Guardian anymore.
Before anyone says public service: I would point to Sweden as a counter example.
Swedish public radio/TV (modelled after the BBC - there's a license fee for owning a TV receiver) used to be relatively benign, although leftist-leaning. Still, they had solid, smart and honest people who did good reporting. It used to be a very prestigeous place to work for anyone, regardless of political leaning. And there really wasn't much more money to be made elsewhere unless you started your own company.
The past decade has been depressing. As the Internet has killed the newspapers and quality reporting has ceased to pay well, our public TV has become a propaganda organ for low-paid activists. Somehow 99% of these people are leftist.
Pretty much all of the younger journalists at our public TV and radio (SVT and SR) are going into their jobs out of a (again, 99% of the time leftist) political conviction. (Smarter and/or less idealistic people get a job in the private sector.)
In recent years this created a dangerous scenario:
a) You have real humans, living in an actual society. They observe their environment. They do notice the crimes their friends and neighbors are victims of.
b) You have the public service media constantly stating/arguing for how everything is fine.
Obviously this dissonance creates a massive (and justifiably deserved) mistrust in "media".
Wait, what? The problem is that the facts themselves have a left-wing bias. Crime has fallen over decades, and deadly violence has not changed for a decade (http://www.bra.se/bra/brott-och-statistik/mord-och-drap.html). Real humans experience anecdotes, but it's the job of the media to report the facts. A (large) minority prefers the anecdotes but that doesn't invalidate the facts.
That this breeds mistrust is obviously a problem (maybe THE problem of our era) but the solution can't be to have the media report what your "real humans" want to hear, instead of the facts.
People here in Sweden are quite attuned to both general crime rates as well as the particular factors behind those rates.
We are all happy that crime has fallen. You seem to be against it falling further?
People in Sweden want the crime rates reported separately for:
a) "sorta native Swedes" (people whose families have lived here many hundred years)
b) "new Swedes" (e.g. people who arrived last year from Somalia)
It is a well-accepted opinion that the people in category b) are grossly (by a factor of 10 or more) over-represented in crime stats.
The authority you linked to has famously denied creating fresher stats than their 2005 report on origin vs crime frequency report - simply by saying "it's not needed". This is right. Sweden hasn't extracted and published crime stats based on the perps' origins simply because the results would be inconvenient.
I'm all for less crime, and for crime stats to be reported accurately. But come on, this is Hacker News, we don't do "well-accepted opinion". Find the facts, report them honestly and then we can have a discussion.
Truth is, crime has fallen everywhere for decades and we don't really know why. Maybe globalization? The banning of lead in gasoline? That's a real mystery worth solving.
So you support having BRÅ redo their stats on crimes per origin in light of the new immigration since 2005?
For any non-swedes who may be interested enough to follow this: BRÅ is the "Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention". The are tasked with doing research on crime and how to prevent it.
Meanwhile, this particular authorithy actually published new stats recently. For example:
Over the past three years 1.7% of the population of Sweden reported they were subject to sexual crimes. During the period 2005-2012 this number was relatively stable at around 1%. So we are talking about a 70% increase in just a few years.
The most obvious thing that changed during these three years? Massive, historically unsurpassed immigration levels from Africa/The Middle-East.
I'm definitely in favour of more high-quality research into the causes of crime and its relationship with immigration, social factors, gender etc. Again, we need facts, which can only be won by serious, honest research, not glib generalizations.
Yes. Of course, they should do it properly and not stop at that but look at all plausible factors. For example, there's a very common chromosomal abberration that leads to a ten-fold increase in the violent crime rate (or more), yet this is hardly discussed at all.
a) Yeah, I would say that it is highly likely that the incredibly dramatic demographic change the past three years has been quite relevant for the 70% increase in sex crime victimization during the same three years. Of course, if your're an academic type person you can chose to ignore what you're seeing with your own eyes. Just carry on.
b) How about you actually stating that BRÅ should re-do their crime stats based on immigration status etc? Not that it matters one bit in the grand scale of things, but since you seem to be escaping the issue I would like to see you say yes or no.
The media "sticking to the facts" (laughable) isn't what causes mistrust. Them treating whole swaths of public debates as taboo, and ignoring some sets of inconvenient facts, is. If there's no problem, why the taboo?
Violent crime has fallen over decades, but has increased since the refugee crisis. This manipulation of facts by the media is what causes distrust, and is their own doing.
Check out the journalism Tim Pool (Vice Media) is doing, right now, over in Sweden. He's reported on the Middle East, on the ground, in the past. He said he would investigate if there was any link between crime and refugee migration in Sweden. Before he even left for that country, he got harassed on Twitter by many on the left including journalists. Once there, after some continued trying to create a scandal out of nothing, several of the Swedes he had set up interviews with outright cancelled, and more agreed to speak but not on the record, meaning he can't publish any of what they said.
If there's no problem there, why are people being terrorized into silence?
If there's no problem there, why groups of men with masks threaten Tim and his co-reporter in the streets, and why did the Swedish police force them to leave the area, instead of defending them? (check his Twitter)
First, to claim that there's a taboo on discussing these issues is ridiculous on its face when it's discussed pretty much every day in every newspaper. You just don't like when people disagree with you that crime is linked to immigration. That link is far from proven. In fact, in the US it's pretty clear that crime does not increase when refugees arrive; if anything it goes down: http://www.citylab.com/crime/2017/02/refugee-resettlement-v-...
I'm not aware of any similar research in Sweden, which is a pity.
I watched Tim Pool's reporting on how media "skews crine statistics" and thought it was pretty good. I would just add that while it's true that some types of crime have increased in the last year or two, we'll have to wait a few more years to know if that's a trend or a natural fluctuation.
Homework assignment for tomorrow: what was the effect on violent crime rates in Sweden of the mass arrival of predominantly muslim refugees from the Balkans in the 1990s?
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
This is why the only profession that I'll actually be excited to see replaced by AI is journalism. A few tens of thousands of people out of their (pretty low-paying) jobs, but journalism is so utterly crucial to democracy and societal stability that that could only be celebrated.
AI-journalism would be much less expensive, so expect more non-profits delivering high-quality, unbiased journalism thanks to it. A media outlet is only as good as its most mediocre journalist.
Open-sourcing and reproducible builds (articles) based on that source code would fix the trust issue.
AI can and does have significant bias, as long as it learns from sources influenced by humans with bias.[0] Additionally, you still need to be really careful to write in ways that avoid furthering existing human bias.
> AI can and does have significant bias, as long as it learns from sources influenced by humans with bias
Sufficiently advanced AI would be aware of the bias of its data, much more than any human ever could.
By the way, the IAT has very little credibility, and isn't based on the scientific method but thought up by sociologists. Ironic to use flawed human-made tools to call AI biased. The whole presentation is a joke: she uses a sample size of just a few Trump tweets, and then complains that the output would be biased (duh! sample size!); treated Tay AI tweets that were not written by Tay AI as proof of how "problematic" things can be (Tay could be made to repeat tweets made @ her verbatim, so many of these "problematic tweets" had nothing to do with its AI). She's also arguing that society needs to be reengineered by benevolent """scientists""" (social psychologists) and that people be bombarded with carefully-designed stereotypes to counter the stereotypes we've supposedly internalized. Disappointing to see this from a Princeton grad.
> Additionally, you still need to be really careful to write in ways that avoid furthering existing human bias.
Usually that involves not using emotionally-loaded "hand grenade words" that bypass peoples' rational minds, and using clickbait headlines written by malicious editors. AI could be made to avoid both.
> Sufficiently advanced AI would be aware of the bias of its data, much more than any human ever could.
I am unconvinced that we've proven that - that seems like a hopeful wish.
> Usually that involves not using emotionally-loaded "hand grenade words" that bypass peoples' rational minds, and using clickbait headlines written by malicious editors. AI could be made to avoid both.
It also involves being very, very careful about presentation of data. "Black people in the US are convicted of more crimes" is a perfectly truthful statement - but it turns out that there's an awful lot of nuance to the reasons as to why, which rarely ever have anything to do with one's genetics. And yet there's a good many people who will take that statement as suggesting that black people are inherently significantly more likely to commit crimes, which isn't even close to what was actually said.
Specific speech patterns and words also lead to bias. You can quite easily write two articles stating exactly the same set of facts with very little fluff, and still result in differently biased articles.
Or, in other words, facts without reasons behind them tend to further bias, and it's only once you have reasons that you can actually start to suggest policy.
You argued that AI was biased. Now you're arguing that AI is too truthful, and that AIs uttering the truth would feed into a small minority's preexisting bias. This just proves my point that AIs are already less biased than humans as is.
You also seem to argue for blank slate dogma (that every group difference is caused by unfair government policy or societal "bias") and that provable facts must be silenced unless accompanied by their detailed etiology (which cannot be scientifically or factually verified, and therefore really just serves social purposes). I would argue that we should teach meditation in schools, every day, and that society should be more empathic and less judgmental. It should also be less afraid of truth, and less politically biased.
I'm arguing that none of the problems you bring up would be a problem with sufficiently advanced AI. They would move us towards the truth, not away from it.
Journalism's current credibility crisis stems solely from its attempts to be "socially useful" rather than truthful. I'm not sure why we should make AI copy us (again ironic since you're against AI taking on human biases).
No, I'm arguing that the definition of "bias" is incredibly varied and that being "truthful" but failing to tell the whole story (either because it's unknown, or as an editorial choice as to which data to present, or whatever else) can in itself be a form of bias.
Most bias isn't in the form of creating outright lies - it's picking and choosing what data to present. And if your solution is to not pick and choose what data to present, the output of your AI would be a life's work to study.
AI would allow us to form much more accurate etiologies than the current crop of sociologists, and better recommendations for solutions. There are simply no downsides to AI-journalism.
The more you understand the present, the more accurately you can predict the future. Big data increases your knowledge of the present, allowing you to understand what-causes-what much more precisely.
The issue is that you can't distill all the world's knowledge on a subject into something that can be read in an afternoon. Or rather, you can - so long as you choose to Trust In The Machine and ignore the details of how it got from there to the finished article. (I'm still entirely unconvinced that an AI could ever avoid bias, given that we're arguing over precisely what bias is in the first place.) That might work for Wal-mart deciding how much Kraft cheese to buy, but it shouldn't be acceptable for anything influencing public policy.
As opposed to trusting biased, rushed, financially-motivated humans of average human intelligence to distill the world's knowledge? Or biased, rushed, career-driven sociologists, that live under publish-or-perish and don't use the scientific method? Why the hell is it acceptable to have political activists and ideologues influence public policy?
Again, that isn't the point. AI would be a step forward, and I'd gladly take journalists becoming unemployed if it causes a new AI-led era of Enlightenment.
You're missing the vision: AI, with its swathes of data, would be able to tell you precisely what percentage of blacks that have been put in prison over drug laws would never have committed violent crimes. People's perception that these laws are justified for "public safety" would recede. That's just an example.
You're arguing from a fundamentally obscurantist point of view, arguing that unless we know 100% of the facts, it's better to keep certain things quiet to prevent human bias, whereas you should be arguing that we'll never know 100% of the facts (obviously) and should just stop being so quick to judge. More facts are always better than less facts, period.
> As opposed to trusting biased, rushed, financially-motivated humans of average human intelligence to distill the world's knowledge? Or biased, rushed, career-driven sociologists, that live under publish-or-perish and don't use the scientific method? Why the hell is it acceptable to have political activists and ideologues influence public policy?
Because we can discuss what bias these people have, and there is a "marketplace of ideas" so to speak. We're not asserting that there is one potential truth based on what a machine says.
On the contrary, there is no marketplace of ideas. These people are so insular that they'll hang on to their dogma no matter what criticism is leveled against them. They're fundamentally wrong, not just misguided. Case in point, the IAT.
> We're not asserting that there is one potential truth based on what a machine says.
But that is what you're suggesting - that a machine is capable of deriving a singular unbiased truth of the world, and present it in a way that is proven not to further bias in any human reading it, and we should all accept that on the face of it.
The alternative is that you wind up with multiple AIs with different biases, people pick the ones that match their own biases, and we're not much better off. One presents stories about how drug users are unlikely to be convicted of violent crime, the other presents stories about how drug use leads to unsafe workplaces and road accidents. Both factually correct - like almost all news today - and both playing into people's biases and not solving the question of "do we legalise weed?" at all.
You're arguing that AI will lead to much more nuanced discourse, and much more complex and detailed pros and cons rather than the ruffian binary polarization we have now, and I agree.
No, it'll be the exact same binary polarization. One side keeps arguing "weed doesn't lead to violent crime" and the other side keeps arguing "but look at all the ways it does harm people", because that's the news stories they've each chosen to see, exactly the same as any discussion I've had on the subject to date.
The issue with journalism isn't people outright lying. It's quite rarely a failure to understand the problem space either. It's framing the discussion in a certain way and picking and choosing which facts to prevent. Having multiple AIs which pick out different things to tell their readers doesn't solve that problem at all.
I'm cautiously optimistic, but I would like to understand a lot more about your vision. :)
Journalism is pretty much about about selection of data. The opposite is.. well, like a data viewer for a repository of stats.
How would having makefiles for articles help things? Wouldn't it just make it more efficient/cheaper for biased editors to create articles using cherry-picked data?
> Journalism is pretty much about about selection of data. The opposite is.. well, like a data viewer for a repository of stats.
Humans aren't good at dealing with data, especially on complex on nuanced subjects, or on topics where the data they need may seem unrelated and get disregarded by impatient humans, or data that doesn't fit their political narratives. Both humans and AI rely on heuristics and have false-positives and false-negatives, but it's intuitive that AI would be much more accurate overall.
> How would having makefiles for articles help things? Wouldn't it just make it more efficient/cheaper for biased editors to create articles using cherry-picked data?
Yes, but it would make it cheaper for them to be fact-checked.
