Hacker News Reader

Comment by noacct152437 | Hacker News Reader

The very fact of being unbiased, or claiming to be, is quite a big claim and the burden of proof of being unbiased should lie on the side that claims being so.

Because the normal, expected state of things is that humans and the organizations that humans create are biased like hell.

> The very fact of being unbiased, or claiming to be, is quite a big claim and the burden of proof of being unbiased should lie on the side that claims being so.

This is a ridiculous claim. You can't prove a negative. If they are being biased, it's on the person making that claim to provide examples/proof.

Analogue: "Prove you're not hitting your wife", etc.

Your point is very poignant. Perhaps people should drop the pretense of unbias and wear their bias on their sleeves? It’s not like that’s too far from the current meta. Everyone is biased to all hell while saying on the tin “fair”, “unbiased”, “balanced”, or other weasel words

That's not my point. Everyone is unbiased until pointed out where/how they are biased. Maybe that is every action of every person on the planet, but in my biased opinion some are clearly less biased than others, and it's not that hard to compare.

This sounds like presumption of innocence in criminal court, but being biased isn't a guilt (and certainly shouldn't carry any penalty), it is, at least in my view, similar to being a left-handed or a right-handed person.

I wasn't focusing on guilt. I pointed out the logical fallacy in you stating the burden of proof was on the fact checker.

You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased.

This is not the same as "not beating your wife". Vast majority of people are indeed innocent of such crimes, so there is no problem treating them as innocent by default.

I would personally be happy if the medium didn't try to prove its absence of bias, which would indeed be hard, but at least tried to prove that it gives platform to sufficiently different views.

Note that we speak about "real world" proofs (preponderance of evidence etc.), not pure abstract mathematical logic which cannot be applied fully in real, messy human society.

> You consider "being unbiased" as a default in a world where most people are biased.

Again, it's not about being default, it's about not being possible to prove, which you asked for in your original post. The number of people or publications being 1% or 99% is irrelevant. If someone is biased, it's trivial to point out how, and if they're not, it's impossible to prove so. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

> Note that we speak about "real world" proofs (preponderance of evidence etc.), not pure abstract mathematical logic which cannot be applied fully in real, messy human society.

This I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean. Logic is basically a flow chart where things either follow or don't. It's absolutely applicable to real world messy human society.

Try solving any court case with flow charts.

In many situations, you will have contradicting evidence and you will have to decide the case anyway.

Logic is not complicared in your scenario either, but merely the veracity of the variables.

It's closely related if it's not your actual point. Some people actively try to minimize their bias, some lean into it. Also, not all bias is harmful. At some level, it's also an essential component of human existence.

Quite so! The reasoning (or excuse) with some folks seems to be "As I'm likely to be biased anyway, I may just as well be a bald-facedly lying propagandist", which is an even bigger problem!

Nobody's unbiased.

The best you can hope for is a source that wears its biases on its sleeve. Then you can judge how those biases might have influenced information from that source.

The least-reliable sources tend to proclaim their "neutrality", i.e. they deliberately conceal their biases.

The best sources I've encountered are the ones where they source their information to some form of verifiable data (not blog/youtube/rag), lay out their reasoning, fix/own mistakes, have clear information about who they are, and their information checks out outside their sphere. Neither of these involve their stating any biases.

Facebook recently admitted at court, that its fact checking is "personal opinion" rather than authoritative source. They did it to avoid fine.

If something claims authority, but with no responsibility and no oversight...

And the judge bought it:

> The labels themselves are neither false nor defamatory; to the contrary, they constitute protected opinion.

[1]: https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Faceb...

Sounds like perhaps it was the judge that was bought?

That document was written by Facebook's lawyers, not the judge.

"Protected opinion" is not equivalent to "opinion".

Example:

Rittenhouse carried a gun. Left wing sources said it was illegal and he was charged with it. Right wing sources (e.g. Viva & Barnes) said it was actually legal because of how the law was written and predicted it would be dismissed by the judge.

Politifact factchecked the claim that it was legal as false.

The judge dismissed the charge.

Politifact updated their page, not to admit they were wrong, but to double down that they were in fact right, not the judge. [1]

In many cases, fact checking websites strawman the claims to dismiss everything. In this case instead of factchecking "Rittenhouse was legally carrying" they fact checked "Rittenhouse was PERFECTLY legally carrying" so that when it turns out it was legal they can say "Yes, but not PERFECTLY legal".

[1]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/aug/28/facebook-p...

A judge dismissing a charge doesn't mean that the gun was legal, though: There are a lot of different reasons to dismiss. Technicalities and not having enough strong evidence for that particular charge are two that come to mind.

The judge dismissed because the statute is unclear, and a general legal principle says that unclear rules must be read to favor whoever they're being applied against. This principle is a basic protection against tyranny by arbitrary application of muddled rules.

In other words, the legislature may have tried to make what Rittenhouse did illegal, but they failed to do so clearly enough, and that means it is legal.

Even if we allow for a gray area of "legal but not perfectly legal", it's not the legitimate province of media fact-checkers to arbitrate the boundaries of that -- for the same reason it's not legitimate for the state to arbitrate the boundaries of its own vague laws. Media fact checks are, in part, a tool for the media to discredit and damage the reputations of people it doesn't like. So the media doesn't get to write the rules of what is a fact, and gray areas should be construed in favor of the person being criticized.

My current biases lead me to agree with your perspective.

How many "fact checkers" broke the artificial consensus view on the lab leak theory being "impossible"? None that I saw. The facts were pretty clear from the start if you actually read Daszak's bullshit, as eventually became clear despite the removal of millions of posts.

I recently saw USAToday "fact check" the claim that Fauci once said masks provided no protection from Corona. This was classed as misleading and lacking context - despite the fact Fauci said this on primetime national TV. There's video for it easily findable (thought certainly a little hard to find thanks to search engine fuckery). - https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/06/03/fact...

Did any fact check sites cover America's lies to go into Iraq?

How many of them looked into the promotion of a known torturer and destroyer of congressional evidence to a top US position?

How did your favorite fact check site cover the Deepwater Horizon spill? Are they talking about Stephen Donziger?

We could go on all day, but it's farcical that anyone still believes these people.

Answered like a typical "fact checker". I guess you solidly "debunked" my claims.

And yes, I only stated my opinion. If I would do a more thorough analysis, maybe I wouldn't waste it on HN, but try to sell it to some major newspaper for $$$.

You are welcome to completely dismiss my opinion.

The scientific method exists for a reason, and the "experimentally verifying against reality" part is what makes it better than "fact" "checking".

are these scare quotes or sarcastic quotes ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com