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Comment by oldmanjay | Hacker News Reader

What does this have to do with racist algorithms? I know that Ars is big on pushing whatever the latest progressive agenda is, but the connection is tenuous even considering that.

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The article cites academics looking at "possible racial discrimination in online advertising for housing and employment." Since online advertising tends to be selected algorithmically, I think the connection is pretty clear.

I'm not comfortable assuming facts not covered in the article. Generally, it's the journalist's job to fill in such blanks. If your take is correct, then this is just poor craftsmanship on their part, although it will certainly achieve the emotional resonance they pursue.

Unfortunately whatever algorithm computers come up with to assess creditworthiness is going to be "racist" by the broad disparate impact definition of racism that the government uses. Ironically, the algorithms will have to be made actually racist to correct for this.

As best I can tell, it's just a horribly mangled headline that has very little to do with the actual content of the article.

If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it.

Thankfully lately Ars has been a little bit less biased than say Wired or Verge. One of the founders is a conservative, his piece on the open source nature of the AR-15 made hacker news the other day. Though I have detected some bias with Ars, It hasn't been near enough to dump them like I have wired and Verge. I'll keep my eye on it. Lately a lot of these now-biased news tech sites seem to justify publishing an agenda-driven political hit piece JUST because the candidate used twitter to make a point. Or by branding themsevles "Tech and 'Lifestyle'" they justify having biased political writers / editors on staff who parrot the progressive narrative like that on the actual political sites.

That was a good article, but Jon Stokes hasn't written for Ars Technica for 5 years now. He published that on Medium. But the idea that supporting gun rights is a universally conservative position just goes to show how tribal and polarized everything is. Gun control has almost nothing to do with other liberal positions and yet it's packaged together in such a way that nearly every liberal comes out for increased gun control and every conservative comes out against it. It's very hard to find a person with individual opinions on issues.

You're right, I forgot about that. It was my thinking that Stokes must have some say in the direction Ars goes. I mean he's going to look at the site and give feedback, maybe even have say over who is hired and for what. If stories coming out of some department start getting too biased one might think Stokes would want to take action. Strange how he didn't put that story on Ars. It would have worked. Perhaps he wanted to keep it personal and keep even his own bias off the site. Which is a big plus IMO.

I think that you're right that he probably gives some feedback, but as far as I know he has no official involvement with it anymore. He sold it to Conde Nast and then later left the company, although being a founder must carry some weight with the staff still.

Gun control in the modern era got a hell of a start with Ronald Reagan (pbuh) keeping guns out of the hands of black people.

How do you distinguish 'unbiased' from 'biased in a way that matches my world view'?

I'm genuinely curious what you think about this. I'm not in the US and it sounds awfully like you don't see a distinction between the two cases.

Or you genuinely believe yourself to be neutral and impartial - which would of course be ridiculous ;-)

Finding bias is easy. You recognize patterns and often little cheap shots against only one candidate or only one party. And in tech sites it comes across as arrogant and amateurish or simply out of place. It's not hard to write unbiased copy or provide an overview that doesn't assume a particular political pov is right or wrong. It's also the job of editing chiefs to ensure that the big picture of a publication is providing a collection of unbiased or at least a balance of biased pieces in order to maintain an unbiased reputation.

You can write so as to describe an incident, you can get quotes to balance out a view. And what you choose to EXCLUDE matters just as much as what you include. Even down to how images are cropped. A writer who is self-aware of bias can do an outstanding job by understanding that what they think they know they may not actually know.

For example, a topic such as climate change, I may realize both that I have a bias AND I don't have very good info of the other sides of an argument. If I were being a responsible writer that should mean that I need to study up both on the topic AND on the view points, separate the valid from the invalid and go from there. Taking my own side on faith or from a narrow perspective is my undoing if I'm to be a reliable source as a reporter or journalist to 'inform'.

Also this is the age of clickbait so it's even easier to detect bias because the headlines are begging for scrutiny.

This all sounds reasonable but there are some problematic assumptions and circular reasoning.

'bias', 'both sides', 'balance' etc all rely on the idea that there is a reasonable middle ground. Aren't you assuming the very thing I'm asking you to justify?

For example in the UK - the BBC has been criticised for 'false balance' in it's science reporting. i.e. giving equal weight to mainstream views and fringe views: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10944629/B... (this is from a right wing newspaper - bear in mind that the right in the UK doesn't strongly support climate change skepticism in the same way they do in the US).

Also I've found the concept of the Overton window to be useful and fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

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