formalsystems
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
Just wanted to let you know that your keystrokes did make an impact on the writer, who sincerely appreciates your honest thoughts.
It has also made me aware of how well-researched many HN user's opinions are on both sides. My opinions have largely been formed in conversations with young people of the liberal city I live in. They will cheer at anything that attacks whoever they see as their opponents, regardless of the research quality or partisan tone behind them. I have received a far greater range of perspective from brilliant HN users on both sides, which has prompted me to take a step back and re-evaluate how I am writing about this incendiary topic.
I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.
The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and was never expecting this level of attention. I'm taking a step back from writing to ensure that whatever work I put out there can be reproduced/verified/criticized by others (ideally by more experienced/knowledgeable data scientists) and that uses the complete scraped archive of Parler, however long the wait for that may be. I will also be reworking the visuals to use a non-proprietary language.
Lastly, I believe one point you mentioned about explicitly calling for violence is important - even someone who talks about hanging a politician may have simply reiterated a hashtag they saw elsewhere, without explicitly stating their own malicious intent. I am now using AWS Comprehend and plan to share this data in a more engaging way.
Thank you again for taking the time to help me think critically about this.
I've updated my writing to clarify it as an opinion, and I'm taking a step back to improve my research and tone of writing. The truth is I have never written anything for the Internet before and the constructive criticism of HN users has helped me tremendously. I want to make neutral statements/analysis of facts and rarely if ever provide my personal opinion.
Thank you both for taking the time to provide your feedback.
I am taking a step back to read deeper and improve the statistics/reproducibility side of my write-ups first.