The conspiracy theorist in me says it's a way of signaling via the (bunk) neurolinguistic programming philosophy, which suggests that emphasizing certain words will evoke a desirable response. (Personal words like "you" and "your", as well as positive words like "give".)
The theologian in me says this person writes about/to god frequently and thus treats words like "you" as a capitalized proper noun so frequently that it's autocorrected.
The rationalist in me says English is not their first language and spends most of their time writing in their native language which may include different noun forms and so is habitual. And given some spacing and punctuation oddities, possibly an older person.
While it's true that there is tremendous data of many events of police overreach--corroborated by many sources--certainly not all events in this data set are corroborated. How many? We can't know without enriched data.
Given that this is a resource for events of police brutality, it should be no surprise that contributors are likely to be biased to report events favorable to the assertion of brutality. The general premise asked, "what wrong thing was done to you/your people?" which is likely to result in emotionally biased response. If it was a dataset of reports of interactions between two different ant colonies, for example, the general bias is likely to be significantly lower.
If the goal is to understand the relationship between a population and their police, then obtaining data from both sides would be ideal. Of course, that's not what this data set is, which is why some people are raising concern of bias. As a data set, it's use is limited to support one aggrieved side. This is not much different from training ML models on, say, only Caucasian faces: it may work if the intent is to recognize or generate Caucasian faces, but it is by no means general purpose. As such, it seems reasonable to question the fitness and intent of this data set.
No data set is perfect, and we'll never have "all the facts." But I don't think upholding inherently-prone-to-bias data as "good enough" is a reasonable response to questions about its bias. We cannot achieve perfection, but that doesn't justify denial of bias in the data.
On the matter of "sea-lioning", I've never heard the term before, and I'm not sure if I've ever been exposed to this type of trolling because to recognize it would require me to be able to read minds. However, I understand the forum guidelines charge us to assume the best interpretation of any comment, so I am disinclined to assume that people here asking for more data are trolling. The essence of claiming "sea-lioning" appears, at least at face value, to be an alternative to saying "I don't have to explain myself to you" while maintaining the illusion of taking the high road.
People have brought up the very reasonable concern that the data is extremely prone to bias, and those people are being silenced. It seems this is because it's not a popular idea to challenge the aggrieved party, not because the data is somehow unbiased and they're asking for something unreasonable. This seems unusual for an otherwise truth-seeking community.
Perhaps I am wrong, and I recognize everyone has their own bias and not everyone always acts in good faith. I have just come to expect more from this community than what I've seen in these comments. It seems good faith is not assumed in many cases among these many conversations.
The number of comments in here that ask for additional/richer data and are being flagged is supremely concerning.
I understand that this is a hot issue with very polarized sides, but in what kinds of circumstances is having more data bad, except to intentionally support bias?
Please understand that my question is only to understand why, in the context of accumulating data, is trying to obtain more/better data NOT a good thing?
I do not wish to debate what is already being said in the many comments already, so if it helps to change the context of the data in question in order to discuss, that sounds like a good idea to me.
You just identified exactly what OP was asking for: context.
I can't hear what the police are saying to the protesters, can you?
That's context.
The police actions appear mildly questionable, I'll give you that. But we lack context to understand what happened here.
The problem here is that both sides are defensive of themselves. This is precisely why understanding context and nuance is important, because each is incentivized to favor their own viewpoint.
Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go.
Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example:
- You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media
- You conflate "conservative" with "selfish", presumably ignoring the selfishness of the extremes at both sides.
Frankly, I think the left (and by extension, most social media sites) are WAY more comfortable with censorship, banning, hiding, etc., especially of ideas that don't align with the left. (Typically characterized as "evil".)
The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent.
So when you have a whole segment of the political spectrum treated as evil and silenced, they tend to gravitate to fora that enable speech, even if unpleasant speech. The far-right might be most noticable on those platforms, but if you look carefully, you'll see a whole gradient of right-ness.
When the author writes about the "average" developer, that is--without ambiguity in a probability density distribution--definitely a male. To use "he/him" pronouns in that context is accurate.
The contention, I think, is that not every author wants to introduce sociopolitical agenda into their writing. However, there is a large contingent of the community that wishes to force political commentary into every word written. And with that, many are aggressive, threatening, and in some cases, dangerous. (To careers, relationships, etc.)
With that context in mind, you are absolutely correct that the grandparent was friendly and made a neutral suggestion with no threat of force. However, that is not always the case, and it is becoming more common for it to be a demand rather than a request.
As such, some people do feel threatened by the consequences of the growing vocal majority. Your parents' reaction may have been a little over the top, but it's a real concern for some people as they watch the trend to an unknown end.
Please understand that some people feel just as "othered" by the group that enforces "otherment" on people who do not prescribe to their pronoun agenda. If the equality crew doesn't like to be "othered", I imagine they can at least understand that others might feel threatened by being "othered", as well.
And, of course, many of them feel delighted by the "others" feeling "othered". Not everyone agrees that this is a healthy mode of change. And I think that is what your parent was reacting to.