It’s probable that astronauts on Artemis II know a lot more about the situation than we do — probably(?) even having read the Camarda document. Is NASA really “playing God” at that point or are adults making decisions based on their personal risk tolerances?
It’s not like they’re handcuffing convicts to the spacecraft because all the free people declined to go up.
I'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or outright false narrative while only presenting factually true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.
Not only that: it's impossible to report on everything that happened, so any outlet only reports on the important stuff. What is and what isn't considered important is a matter of bias, too.
All true. But you can choose what and how you report in order to give one side a boost, or you can choose what and how to report in order to give the best, most accurate picture you can of what's actually going on. The difference matters.
Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.
> It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.
"Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro
Who won the 2020 US presidential election? If viewers think it was A and you report that it was B, will they believe you? Will they continue to watch/read you? If not, what does that do to your revenue and ability to pay your bills?
As Jason Zweig wrote:
> There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
> We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.
But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.
And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.
Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?
Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?
Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?
You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.
> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?
Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.
As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.
That’s exactly my point: You present yet another alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the former two groups. There is no authority to establish which of the three views is the canonical truth, regardless of how much you think your own is obviously and objectively true.
I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the things I said in such a way that either of the groups you proposed would find no objection to my saying those things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I don't think I did. My point is that we can indeed agree upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are not what people argue over. They argue over an interpretation of the facts that tells some story about who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was acceptable for those things to happen.
I see your point, but don’t think it is correct: Opposing groups will absolutely debate whether and which events happened, and will attest to a different timeline. Moreover, I don’t believe you can cleanly tell facts from interpretation. Sometimes there is just no way to know (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce. This is invariably shaped by your personal lens of opinions, then.
> Sometimes there is just no way to know (or verify) what happened, and you have to deduce.
This ties into my original point. Once you can’t verify what happened and are reporting your deductions, you are invariably introducing your opinions. I would prefer to read “we don’t know what exactly happened, but what we do know is X” rather than “we know X, therefore Y must also be true” without any way to actually verify Y.
The site hosting the ads seems like a red herring? Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads? If so, that seems like a difficult proposition.
If we accept that most people won’t pay a subscription, and take ads off the table as an option, then I can only think of 2 other options:
* charitable patrons (this is a thing, but I guess not effective enough?)
* selling other products to subsidize the free content
These both appear to have obvious problems and for a dubious goal of making another party subsidize the visitor’s consumption cost.
Having the visitor cover their own cost seems reasonable. What currency do they have other than money or attention? Maybe a small work problem that provides an abstracted service to a separate payer (a la reCAPTCHA, but for $).
>Do you mean they could sell or design their own ads?
No, I mean they could host their own ads. The way ad-blockers work is that they see requests from a web page to other domains, particularly known ad-serving domains, so they reject those requests, take those elements out of the page, etc. But they don't alter self-hosted images. So if a web page has a bunch of JPGs which are really ads and not just helpful illustrations, and embeds those into the page, the ad-blocker has no way of knowing these are actually ads, and can't block them.
But these places never do this because they want to outsource the advertising to someone else, and the advertisers want to not just show ads, but also track how many times the ad was served, who it was served to, how long it was viewed, and lots of other information that isn't necessary for advertising (and was never a factor back when ads were simply printed on newspaper or shown on TV). In short, the advertisers insist on spying on people now. This should not be tolerated or excused, ever.
Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.
Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.
Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do. They're like fucking Eagles fans. They have this weird "team loyalty" that I just don't get.
> Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do.
This part makes enough sense.
> They're like fucking Eagles fans.
Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.
> It seems to be that there's a very strange crowd hanging out on Hacker News, who are not aware of very basic social rules. Those include not trying to impress strange rules on guests you invite to an event. Because people will simply make excuses and not come to your wedding or whatnot.
Are you genuinely suggesting that there is a basic social rule that says no other rules can be impressed on guests at an event? I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny.
Every event has rules — it’s inherent in being “an event” as opposed to pure chaos. Whether or not the rules are strange is open to individual interpretation. If you can’t abide by the rules of an event you are not welcome at the event. People’s polite tolerance of others’ anti-social behavior does not mean the behavior is welcome.
Your comment is confused as to you believing that people would want to come to events with strange rules and not follow those rules. What happens in real life is that people decline to go to those events. Everybody knows how to behave at a wedding and what is proper conduct.
> Are you genuinely suggesting that there is a basic social rule that says no other rules can be impressed on guests at an event?
Absolutely, in the case of strange, unusual rules. If you're invited for dinner to somebody and they ask that you oblige to things which are outside of the norm, would you be very keen to go? Or would you make up an excuse and do something else?
It seems you are trying to say "You're not welcome here!" to people who already declined an invite?
> It seems you are trying to say "You're not welcome here!" to people who already declined an invite?
These things are not mutually exclusive.
If you don’t want to abide by the rules, you are not welcome and you should decline. Perhaps the organizer isn’t aware of your preference and your declining helps inform them. If they prefer your presence more than they like their silly rules, they might change them.
Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.
It's really not about this. Many (most?) people don't want to go to events where the hosts are acting weird against their guests. When it comes to weddings, it's not unusual that you haven't seen the people for several years. And in that time people change.
> Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.
That's why I've said now about fourteen times here now, that people are going to decline an invite to events with strange "rules". For an adult the normal thing is that events you are invited to do not have any rules at all, because everybody already knows exactly what is appropriate. So real people have a low tolerance for those kind of things. If you're looking for "narcissistic", then maybe look at those people inventing strange rules for what is supposed to be their friends and family?
Maybe it is because HN is a forum for people who work in very corporate settings and are accustomed to having to follow a lot of silly rules without the option to decline?
I think everyone agrees that some rules for guests are fine, and some are silly. "No flash photography or leaning into aisles during the wedding procession" is a reasonable rule, "No taking photos when we're dancing and having fun" seems silly to me.
Just like a dress code for a wedding is fine, but if they said "also you need to wear blue cotton underwear" I'd think that was a bit inappropriate to require.
It’s not like they’re handcuffing convicts to the spacecraft because all the free people declined to go up.
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