News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
The reasoning you just used was in the form of an anecdote, which undermines your whole point. Anecdotal thinking is one of the most common ways that humans arrive at irrational conclusions.
Why should you care? Well, if you believe what you stated, then you should want other people to believe it too. In order to do this the first step is to learn how to present it without any of the common logical flaws humans are born with.
Your argument pattern is, "Event X happened and I saw it, therefore Y". No. You need a much larger sample size to make a point. I can't teach you rational argument in one post, but hopefully you'll become curious enough to learn. Have a nice day.
Yet most of the negative sentiment on cops comes from anecdotes. And of course now we have the Internet so now there's availability bias of all of the extreme cases that go viral. When a study asked how many unarmed blacks were killed by police each year most left leaning were wrong by an order of magnitude.
Oh, I thought it came from the years of empirical evidence of corruption, bias, and state-funded violence.
There are some biases inherent to the relevant data. For example, you might be right about this specific situation (police shooting unarmed black people), but what about other instances of violence or misconduct?
We need to consider where data about that comes from. Are we to trust the accuracy of police reports and their own statements as they pertain to misconduct? IA investigations that frequently find no wrongdoing even when it's plainly obvious that the situation was handled improperly? Or at least could have been avoided? Should we rely upon charges filed against police and their conviction rate?
There's no official national database for this stuff by the way, and localities almost never produce such metrics willingly, so it's up to someone to comb through public records. And that, like the case of body cam videos, assumes that police will properly follow FOIA requests.
I'm not suggesting that we assume the absolute worst, but we need to recognize that whatever the data says, the situation is almost definitely worse than that due to these biases.
Oh I'm sure it's definitely worse than the data we have suggests. I'm not arguing against police reforms or standardization. But in the situation I stated, there were a large percentage of people who believed it was in the thousands, or 10s of thousands on an annual basis.
The prevailing opinions and rhetoric on police paint them not as individuals, but as a cabal of cartoon villains.
Nothing about this is anecdotal.
You're right, it's a broad generalization followed by a fear-based assumption.
That you segued into with an anecdote.
Okay.