timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@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 Then we clearly have a very different model of what constitutes violence, or rather when violence might be an appropriate response. (Whether you think a specific action is violence is just semantics, but the response criterion is crucial.) I believe in situations in which someone with more resources is doing things which lowers my chances of defending myself from unfairness I can respond disproportionately to their actions. Agh, I think I am a bit too tired to explain this properly with examples, because it's a delicate thing and definitely needs to be carefully defined to work. And my laptop batterry is running out, aaaa, see you tomorrow (written after the below obviously lol)

And I agree that escalations are not good in general, and better ways of crowd control exist. Unfortunately the policemen seemed to be extremely underprepared for what happened, and couldn't have employed less violent and more appropriate measures because of that. That's also why I was stressing multiple times that an investigation into why they were so underprepared is crucial -- were they better prepared, almost surely fewer people would have died.

@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!

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

@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...".

@freemo Differentiating "physically overpowered" and deliberately walking into someone from violence seems wrong to me. You think these are things to which one cannot respond with violence? In particular this principle applied to the former seems like it would put people initiating "phisical overpowering" at a very advantegeous position, while the victim of that overpowering in a dangerous one. And applied to the latter, especially in the case of crowds, it would make any kind of crowd control impossible.

And I think we might have gotten to the crux of our disagreement, strangely. I think the above paragraph pretty well explains why I think the whole debacle was so dangerous. The insurrectionists were trying to put themselves in positions in which they were physically advantaged over congresspeople through the fact that there were many of them (a whole mob in a room). I think that preventing angry entities (whether people or mobs) from ending up in positions in which their possible victims can no longer protect themselves even through violence, can be done using violence. I mentioned this once as a basic principle of policing in most modern countries, but this is also a general rule -- if a person is forcing themselves on another person I wouldnt wait for them to throw the first punch before attempting to stop them, and I would consider the latter person already a victim of violence.

@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.

@freemo I still think they were violent, I would say trying to enter a building by brute force with people standing in your way is necessarily violent. They weren't violent only when they were not being opposed. The fact that they were aggressive/threatening follows from both the violence and the (explicit or implicit) threats.

Also, I saw you linked an article claiming that Twitter blocked the "Hang Mike Pence" hashtag -- do you happen to know if "We want Pence" was trending at the same time? This seems like relevant evidence as to what was being chanted, if we have the data.

@freemo Hm, so that's pretty much the same slight-threat interpretation as I had, makes sense.

And I think we still disagree what constitutes aggressive/threatening behaviour (and maybe still a bit about facts, considering the policeman being beaten with the flag(?)pole?), but I guess this is kind of beside the point for this discussion.

It seems automatically transcribing chants is essentially impossible with standard speech-to-text models. Is this an #accessibility issue for deaf people wanting to participate in protests? Or are there some chant-to-text models I'm not aware of?

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

@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.

@freemo Eh, since you brough up the previous discussion I was curious about one more thing, still related to the chant, I hope you don't mind me asking, but if you do maybe stop reading or feel free to ignore.

How does "We want Pence" make sense as a chant? The closest I see in the context is a thinly veiled threat, instead of an explicit one. Do you see something better or is this how you understood it?

Interestingly, one of the interpretations in the file imo makes more sense as a completely non-confrotational chant (and in general as a chant in the context) -- "We want best". It's a bit stretched, but "best" as a kind-of-nickname for Trump who often insisted on being best at many things does make some sense. On the other hand, his supporters rarely call him by anything other than his name, so ehhh... a bit stretched.

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.

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?

The third word is the strangest. Three people guessed that it was the third word from the chant (I missed them in the original toot where I claimed there was only one, oops... >.<), but they are almost the only people who have noticed the "(t)s" sound at the end – only two more have that sound. There is one explicit unintelligible and two terrible guesses. The remaining 12 people all correctly identified the vowel in the word we expect, but 9 of them also heard some variant of "hey", which should influence the evaluation of the first word (at least the "hey"/"hello" variants might be almost pure bias; note that there were still many others which had different h-words).

Since the "standard" interpretations agreed as to what word this is, people not recognizing it is definitely evidence for 3. On the other hand, this is not really evidence for 3 as applied to the previous two words, they might have been perfectly legible and this word only guessed from context, so it's not very strong evidence for 3 as applied to the problem we are trying to solve... And correctly identifying the vowel seems to be a pattern too...

The second word is apparently the least intelligible. Three people explicitly complained about unintelligibility, six made suggestions that made no sense. Four suggestions contained the "w" sound, but none of them in a way that would be compatible with one of the standard interpretations, and the only one beginning with "w" was someone incorrectly trying to guess which word from the full chant it was (lol). Three people heard the "n" sound – that's not "m", but phonetically very close, and it was always at the beginning of the word. Four people heard the "eye/I" sound as the vowel – interestingly this group is exclusive with the previous one.

This is mostly evidence for 3., but also against 1., since the phonetics align somewhat more with what I heard.

@freemo Yup, I understand I'll write them down and post the file, so maybe don't read them beforehand if you still can? I'll tag you in the file-toot.

@freemo Right, I'll definitely do that, I should've done this before writing my interpretations down, but I did not think of it. >.<