Anyway, it seems that mostly I should assign much more weight to 3, bloody meatmech really needs an upgrade. On the other hand when the phonetic evidence pointed in a direction it was more in agreement with my interpretation. This is some evidence against me being insane, but it might also be the result of how I cut the chant into pieces?

To finish this up, the raw results I got:

* https://wuatek.tk/~timorl/dlaludzi/inne/transcripts_grouped.csv are the transcripts grouped by me as described in thee above toots.
* https://wuatek.tk/~timorl/dlaludzi/inne/transcripts_random.csv are in random order, went through shuf because I already modified the grouped file when I noticed this version would be useful <_<"

The links inside should be pointing to the files I used for the MTurk questions.

@freemo If you want to look through this yourself, you definitely want the **second** file. I know this is obvious, but stressing it to lower the chances of you accidentally biasing yourself more than needed by first looking at the first one.

Oh, and if you want to help me with all this investigation it might also be useful if you cut the chant into words the way you perceive them, preferably **before** listening to the cuts I made. I have a slight suspicion word boundaries might help me hear your version? I know this would take time though, so no pressure if you have better things to do.

@timorl Ok so not a big enough sample for me personally to do much with, but its a start. I would only use the full words.mp3 myself as a person needs context to pull out phrases in general.

How much did this cost you, I might be willing to throw in some money (if its cheap enough) to get a larger sample data on just the words.mp3

@freemo @timorl if its mturk you could probably get away with a couple cents per impression. jobs there are pathetically cheap.

@icedquinn Yup, I put 0.05$ per transcript, and I could have conceivably gone lower I believe.@freemo

@timorl @freemo i did some work there and transcription work ended up being something like 2$/hr, and people gave the worst quality audio imaginable.

@freemo

A bit more than 5 dollars, MTurk is terryfingly cheap.

I kind of disagree about the context helping, I would assume it increases biases (which means maybe I actually agree with your general point that it's easier for people to hear something specific with context?). I tried analyzing phonetics in the responses to specific words, which I thought from the start would give more useful results (see first toot, and some following ones where I explain parts of this reasoning).

On the other hand I really would like to hear your version of cutting the chant into separate words -- the only way I see context helping without just relying on increased biases is by making it easier to cut the phrase in a specific way, so if you suspect that is the case, then this could really help me hear your version.

@timorl Only way i could see it increasing bias is if it causes someone to identify the scene it came from and remember it. But we should already be rulling that out by asking explicitly if that is the case. Presuming, however, that they are unable to identify the setting in which the chant occured and never heard about it or saw the video then I cant see why it would increase bias.

But our brains need context to understand what is being said even in the best of circumstances. The "chinese telephone" example that is often done in schools is a great example of that, single words become distorted very quickly as they are passed on but phrases tend to remain intact and are understood and rarely become changed into something refelecting ones biases (though im sure it does happen).

@freemo There are pretty clear biases, for example expecting chants to start in a specific way (e.g. "We want..." is probably a more common way to start a chant than "Hang...", in a vacuum?) or expecting phrases to go together (e.g. maybe "Mike Pence" being more expected than "want Pence" in a vacuum?). And I still think we are in agreement here, just for some reason getting to different conclusions. It **is** easier for someone to feel they understood a phrase as a whole than a separate word, but this is precisely because of the biases they employ in interpreting the phrase. They have more context, and possibly more noise, to feed these biases, so they act strongly. In the case of separate words, the biases are still present and it's much less likely someone will be able to correctly recognize a word, but the biases will have to be based more closely on specific phonemes present, so they provide stronger evidence for these phonemes.

In other words in a longer phrase one catches a couple phonemes and treats the rest as noise to be filled by biases/priors, and the same happens in single words, but there are fewer phonemes so a smaller portion is ignored, because biases need _some_ input.

Also, if you don't want to do the cutting up of the chant (which is, as I said previously, definitely an understandable position!) I'd be grateful if you told me explicitly, so I might try finding someone else who hears what you hear and would be willing to do that.

@timorl yes but those biases dont work against what youa re testing they work for it. I remind you what your testing for from your OP:

> 1. I am so influenced by propaganda my basic senses are broken.
2. The above, but for the other participant.
3. This specific video is an auditory case of blue/black vs white/gold dress.

So you are trying to determine if people hear if we were hearing what we were hearing because its what the chant **sounded like** (not what it actually was) or if we were hearing what we were hearing due to our **personal political biases**

If you eliminate people who already know the context of the chant then you eliminated any chance of what someone hears is due to political bias, as they have no context for that. Therefore what you get when people hear the whole phrase will be what the average person, not viewing it within any politicial framework, is likely to hear "hang mike pence" or "we want pence".

If, as you say people who hear any chant are more likely to lean towards "we want pence" simply because that is a more common wording for a chant, then youa re arguing that me hearing "we want pence" is more likely **not** to be due to political bias than you hearing "hang mike pence" would be (since the latter is not what a non-political context bias would lean towards).

So in fact while the biases you describe are valid, they are also entierly in line with what you were testing for and not biases you would even want to eliminate.

@freemo I understand your reasoning for this approach, but I would argue it does not solve the basic problem I am trying to solve, which is about perceiving reality. There is an underlying reality in the words the people are chanting, and it consist of phonemes which I am trying to determine. A politically unbiased person being more likely to hear one interpretation more than the other is mostly evidence that "default" (i.e. non-political in this case) bias points towards that phrase. This might mean that a person hearing a different thing is politically biased, but it might also mean they overcame the "default" bias and heard something closer to reality. In general, if possible, determining reality is the most useful thing one can do. I am arguing that the single word approach is better at that.

Although this whole reasoning suggests that even if they actually chanted "Hang Mike Pence" then _you_ might not be politically biased much and just hearing what you hear due to the "default" bias. This would be something that could conceivably be a useful result if the full chant approach showed that most people hear something starting with "We want...".

@timorl Then you are trying to test soemthing very different then what you said you were trying to test, and thats fine.. what you are trying to test is, what was most likely actually said. Thats fine and a great thing to test, but also wouldnt tell you, then, anything about which of us is politically biased.

@freemo It would, although the best results are from both tests combined -- as I said the full chant test also has some merit in restricting the hypothesis space. That's why I did both, and not just the words test, on MTurk. Hearing something different from what was actually said is some evidence of bias, political or otherwise, and hearing something different from what most people hear is evidence of a _different bias than most people_ maybe in political ways, maybe in others. Any of them separately should change your belief in the amount of political bias you are under and combined they provide even more evidence. If I'm interested in overcoming my biases, then the words test is more interesting to me, because it is closer to reality, but that is all.

@freemo After getting some proper sleep I think I can express this more clearly.

In my original statement you focused on the "propaganda" part, while I was mostly worried about the "my basic senses are broken" part. If political propaganda would strongly move me away from general consensus, but at the same time bring me closer to reality, that would be the opposite of a problem with my politics.

Obviously in practice this is rather unlikely, and estimating the strength of political bias compared to "default" bias will be a useful thing to do. But the reasoning highlights the fact that this approach is just a proxy for what I really want, which is having my beliefs aligned with reality. It's always better to check that as directly as possible.

@freemo Oh, and I would still like to know whether you might cut up the chant the way you hear it.

@timorl yes i would cut it up the way you cut it up, but would not have picked the snipped you picked to cut up (it is the least clear of all of them IMO)

@freemo Oh, sure, feel free to pick a different one, just not amont the couple first ones before the person recording gets outside the building, they seem the most muffled. Unless these are the ones that seemed clearer to you?

Many thanks!

@timorl ill look through it again when i have a chance

For now i will say the one you picked is actually the one I'd expect to be most likely to come across as "hang mike pence" only because it is the one where the "we" which is the most distinguishing characteristic is most muffled and "mike pence" and "want pence" have similar meter.