SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Averting Toxic Chats: Computer Model Predicts When Online Conversations Turn Sour
The internet offers the potential for constructive dialogue and cooperation, but online conversations too often degenerate into personal attacks. In hopes that those attacks can be averted, researchers have created a model to predict which civil conversations might take a turn and derail.
After analyzing hundreds of exchanges between Wikipedia editors, the researchers developed a computer program that scans for warning signs in the language used by participants at the start of a conversation -- such as repeated, direct questioning or use of the word "you" -- to predict which initially civil conversations would go awry.
Early exchanges that included greetings, expressions of gratitude, hedges such as "it seems," and the words "I" and "we" were more likely to remain civil, the study found.
"We, as humans, have an intuition of whether a conversation is about to go awry, but it's often just a suspicion. We can't do it 100 percent of the time. We wonder if we can build systems to replicate or even go beyond this intuition," Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil[*] said.
The computer model, which also considered Google's Perspective, a machine-learning tool for evaluating "toxicity," was correct around 65 percent of the time. Humans guessed correctly 72 percent of the time.
[...] The study analyzed 1,270 conversations that began civilly but degenerated into personal attacks, culled from 50 million conversations across 16 million Wikipedia "talk" pages, where editors discuss articles or other issues. They examined exchanges in pairs, comparing each conversation that ended badly with one that succeeded on the same topic, so the results weren't skewed by sensitive subject matter such as politics.
[*] Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil: assistant professor of information science and co-author of the paper Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure. (pdf)
The technique sounds useful for non-internet conversations, too... is there an app for that?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:35PM (9 children)
The definition itself of toxicity is designed to feminize normal healthy male interaction and normal healthy well adjusted non-left wing judgment. In the sense of "toxic masculinity" being any masculinity at all, and so forth. Or non-left wing judgment in that you can always tell a guilty feeling leftist scum by repeated demands of "don't judge me bro"
I suppose there could be other criteria such that they intentionally exclude healthy banter among friends as being "toxic" or otherwise exclude healthy people and healthy cultures entirely.
In modern academia, anything harder core than two girl scouts talking about who loves unicorns and balloons more, is toxic masculinity.
Its amusing to consider fairly normal banter that would be considered highly toxic by the warped and weird study criteria.
I'm not sure "guess" would be the correct way to phrase answer selection, its more an intelligence and reading comprehension test of "which convo would be more likely to result in a protective-coloration purple haired SJW 1488th wave feminist ree-ing demands to check privilege?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @01:55PM (5 children)
At the end of the day, shit needs gettin' done, and normal healthy non-leftist Men are the best at getting shit done.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:53PM (4 children)
Heh, then pray tell why has the economic activity become concentrated in liberal areas? Oh right, just more of your jealousy leaking through so you try and use dumb shit like hanging a pair of nuts of your truck's bumper to make you feel important and manly.
You know how to tell when someone has been emasculated and needs to bolster their self-esteem with nonsense?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:00PM (1 child)
The mathematician and historian Oswald Spengler (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West/ [wikipedia.org]) wrote about this.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:00AM
I'm going to take an uneducated stab after reading the wikipedia bits.
The decline of Western civilization is actually the ideological decline of capitalism and oligarchy. The way forward for humanity is a more decentralized distribution of wealth and power instead of the top down pyramid structure that has been dominating heavily for thousands of years.
Western civilization gained power and control through technological imperialism, but now the general population in the western cultures are realizing what a sham the capitalistic ideal really is. We will take the good and try to fix the bad and start the next cultural / civilization epoch. Hopefully we can get most of the world on board with a better system before the insane people push the big buttons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:26AM (1 child)
Liberals are attracted to wealth, because you can't steal from poor people to pay for your stupid ideas.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 26 2018, @10:47AM
That's progressives if you want to use a name less triggery than the more accurate "communists". Liberal is the exact opposite of what they are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
Well, you'll admit that masculinity can actually be toxic. A lot of women have gotten all swollen up due to the toxicity.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:16PM
Everything old is new again, eh, Runaway? Recycling lame jokes from adolescence doesn't make them better though.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:38PM
I'm pretty left-wing. Being "left" used to mean being about freedom, possibly to the point of anarchism. Certainly the freedom to speak your mind. You're confusing the "old" left with the shouting brigade of red-painted fascists known as the ctrl-left.