[nvm0n2]

> this simply happens to somewhat coincide with the US party split

That's not my reading. The negative polarity is clearly the US Democrats, but as Vitalik notes, the opposite polarity isn't anything obviously specific to the Republicans. His posts for negative were simply the first three posts and they're all of a very consistent political ideology and region. But he had to cherry-pick posts for positive polarity to try and sustain the claim that this is the opposite of the negative polarity, as Brazilian politics and Tesla people isn't something anyone would have picked if asked to guess what the posts would be about ahead of time.

Then there's the clear content differences between the positive vs negative polarity posts. The negative polarity posts are all highly subjective opinions, usually about the tone of what some famous people said. Their references are simply left-leaning US media articles which are themselves opinion. They could be easily disputed and frequently are. The positive polarity posts are cherry picked for the purpose of making a point, yet are mostly specific factual claims with hard data and references, except for the second, which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist? I don't see any way to dispute any of the claims in the positive polarity notes. You'd have to fall back on "well that may be true but in wider context..." type responses.

So it's not really clear exactly what this algorithm is picking up on. The differences may just reflect the inherent nature of politics in which left and right are often presented as polar opposites, but which in reality is more like the left being relatively homogenous and consistent at any given point in time, whereas the "right" is more like a coalition of people who aren't on the left than a specific set of policy or cultural concerns.

[pessimizer]

> which is apparently disputing the claim that child trafficking doesn't even exist?

The troublesome part of that note is that "the movie accurately depicts" the issue. The following note has "these books are obscene." The first is a little bit different in that it is straightforward and factual, but with the (missing) context of the tweet it was probably thought to be an irrelevant insult i.e. I bet the tweet wasn't about the proportion of black children in single-parent households.

It's obviously a party split in a way, but to my eyes it isn't about assigning people to a party - it's finding people who hate current parties rather than people who love them. That is to say: polarized individuals. I think it's an accident of history that people who despise Republicans currently have their opinions fairly well-represented by the Democratic Party, but on the other side, people who hate Democrats aren't very well represented by the Republican Party. The Democrat-hating base is unruly, and I think it contains far more people who also dislike or are neutral toward Republican politics and politicians.

[nvm0n2]

That could be. It's not clear from the note what movie is being referred to. The lack of context makes it harder to interpret.

The last post reflects ideological values, but appears to be a factually unambiguous claim about US law. The images show cartoons of men sucking each other's dicks. In law "obscene" is used to mean something like "overtly sexual", which at least the first book clearly meets.

[pessimizer]

No, obscene doesn't mean that. Obscene material is illegal material, not adults-only material.

edit: so saying that the books depicted explicit sexual acts would be indisputable, but the determination that the books were obscene would happen in court. And if drawings of two people sucking each other's dicks were judged obscene, a lot of things would instantly become illegal in that jurisdiction.

[nvm0n2]

That's a circular definition (the law is defining what's illegal, so the category it defines cannot itself be defined as that which is illegal). Though the actual legal definition in the USA isn't much better.

I think the claim in question is about the first amendment issue. If the material was judged obscene then it could still be allowed, or disallowed, or disallowed in some contexts (i.e. schools, what's in dispute here) but such laws wouldn't get tripped up by the bill of rights.

[pessimizer]

It's not a circular definition. "Obscene" is a term used for content that has been deemed illegal. It is not a general term for sexual content. It is not a term for content that is illegal sometimes but not other times. It is not a euphemism for material that is restricted to adult consumption, or for explicit pornography.

more charitably, but still repetitious: when one says that something is obscene, that's saying that it should be illegal in any context; that it has no value. A drawing of two people sucking each others dicks has surely met that bar in the past - information about birth control has met that bar in the past. But I do not think the suggestion was that drawings of gay men having sex should be illegal, what was being suggested was that it is not appropriate for children. That's not a question of obscenity.

[enragedcacti]

Obscene in the context of the first amendment protections is defined by the Miller test regardless of how any laws define obscenity. The third prong alone is a high bar to clear in this case and its what makes the claim far from factually unambiguous imo.

> Whether a reasonable person finds that the matter, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

[nvm0n2]

It's meant to be an educational text, no? It doesn't seem to fit any of those categories.

[enragedcacti]

They are not categories, they are contexts, and educational texts can have value within any or all of those contexts. In fact being educational or informative could inherently be considered to be of literary value.

Many people rightfully complain about the lack of specificity and clarity in the third prong, but that is even more evidence for why it is a bad community note because there is obvious room for interpretation and the note leaves none. Thus, even if you agree with its conclusion, it lacks sufficient context which is one of the voting criteria.

[myrmidon]

> That's not my reading.

I'm not sure where you actually disagree with me.

I'd be very careful though about drawing conclusions about what exactly polarity means here because 3 examples are not nearly enough-- especially for conclusions like which polarity is more "fact based".

My viewpoint is that the polarity in the algorithm should be akin to a principal component in alignment space (because of how the algorithm works), and you would expect the political parties to be split along a very similar axis in a 2 party system (an emergent property-- if they were not, one party could gain voters or improve cohesiveness of its voter pool by shifting its alignment).

[nvm0n2]

I think on re-reading, I'm not strongly disagreeing with you indeed. I think it's just that the article says the positive polarity posts don't map cleanly to Republicans, whereas the negative polarity posts do map cleanly to the Democrats, so how much does it really coincide?