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Comment by thegrim33 | Hacker News Reader

It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.

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According to a 2001 poll, nearly 50% of the population drastically over-estimated the black population: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-bl...

I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.

Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?

Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.

I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1].

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

Do those charts actually show a shift in content, or is it merely a shift in terminology?

I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters.

I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.

They don't even show it as a percentage of articles.

It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.

Yeah... I don't know what you think I was saying. But I'm making the case that the news should cover issues that people actually face... And that an uptick in representation of different people's viewpoints and experiences is actually a positive and reasonable thing. It would be more informative if your data had that as a percentage of total articles. Because the case I'm making is that we went up from like <1% of articles talking about race to closer to 20-30% of articles talking about it. The other thing to consider is what qualifies as an "article" in there with the advent of the internet.

It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.

I’m curious to hear about your media diet because that has not been the case for me.

Coleman Hughes shares a good perspective on this in his new book. He cites surveys showing that people changed their opinions for the worse regarding racism in america around 2010. This could be explained by an increase in racism or by increased awareness of racism. But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police. The rise in media coverage has led them to think that certain events are much more common than they are.

> But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police.

What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question) The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.

Agreed. I’ve stopped watching anything recent. Theres a few Apple TV shows that I’ve enjoyed but it’s always so predictable that an engineered and coerced social justice issue is forced in. This is what the theory of equity is about, it goes over and beyond equality and actively helps by increasing exposure, opportunities, resources for historically disadvantaged people communities groups.

I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.

Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.

My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience.

But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?

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