Comment by jack_tripper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack_tripper | Hacker News Reader

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I don't really care what some arbitrary number on Wikipedia tells me about the freedom of a country I know quite well, as long as I am unable to insult my political leaders on the internet for their fuckups or say that 'Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide', without police later knocking on my door to arrest me for "hate speech" or "far right extremism", I consider the freedom score of that country to be ZERO. This is mostly a UK, Germany and Austria exclusive issue in the EU-zone and not an EU widespread issue quite yet, but boy they sure are trying to get everyone at that same level.

Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.

Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.

  > Any scientist will tell you

The number of people, including scientists, who treat algorithms as black boxes is incredibly concerning. The math is meaningless without interpretation, and that requires understanding what goes into the scores.

That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).

It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04vqldn42go

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