Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious • Hacker News Board

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#91

Post by tonmoy » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

scoutt wrote: post #86

duxup wrote: post #59

I hate URL fights. I give little extra value to people providing links with their clams. I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time. Discussion on the internet is broken in most places (HN is less broken than most). I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually…

> providing links ... when called out People got so used to seeing links up to the point a fight might end in a "URL request": you have to sustain your claims by bringing a link to the discussion, and if you fail to do so, you are wrong. Like if every research and every paper, study or whatever is publicly accessible and indexed. If am I wrong, please provide a link to a study which demonstrates it.

I claim there is a tea pot in orbit around the sun. I can’t sustain my claims by bringing a link, you need to provide reference to prove that I am wrong.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#92

Post by raxxorrax » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #24

raxxorrax wrote: post #10

Judge me all you want, but I would have clicked on "dirty hippy vibes"... Honestly, I don't really believe in ubiquitous misinformation being as a large problem as it is made out to be. Everyone arguing for more content regulation had their own motivations or was in some kind of panic. There will always be people misinformed on the net. Doesn't mean I want a babysitter cleaning everything up, even if I thought they w…

I'm not sure where you got the impression that I wanted people to clean up misinformation from the web. That certainly wasn't my intent. Perhaps you and I move in different social circles - but I get a lot of forwarded "claims" on WhatsApp and Twitter. Well-meaning people who see an image with some text on it and send it to their friends & family. My blog post is mostly aimed at them - showing how easy it can be to c…

Sorry, maybe I am burned on that already, but that is what I often hear when people bring up misinformation. That is the feedback legislators often give on that topic.

Certainly a good idea to search for some background. I think the velocity of social media might encourage people to skip that step, made the mistake myself too. People want to be the first to share this "hot" news with their peers.

I think reducing expectations of users towards content on the net could help as educational measure. Treat it as false until you know better yourself.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#93

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #69

mapgrep wrote: post #55

Any claim with a URI should also be treated with suspicion. There is plenty of reliable information locked away in offline books and government documents and all kinds of other non Google-able locations. This is true even for brand new information (which is why we continue to have “leaks”). Meanwhile there is plenty of misinformation with URIs. I would go so far as to say online status is almost orthogonal to accurac…

> Any claim with a URI should also be treated with suspicion. Agreed. I've noticed a huge uptick of "here is a random YouTuber's 45 minute rant about X" used as "evidence" in discussions. Opting to not watch it in its entirety is then dismissed as being unwilling to discuss; watching it and picking it apart leads to "oh, but you haven't seen his OTHER videos".

Sounds like run-of-the-mill bad faith discussion :/

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#94

Post by cblackthornekc » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

tonmoy wrote: post #91

scoutt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> providing links ... when called out People got so used to seeing links up to the point a fight might end in a "URL request": you have to sustain your claims by bringing a link to the discussion, and if you fail to do so, you are wrong. Like if every research and every paper, study or whatever is publicly accessible and indexed. If am I wrong, please provide a link to a study which demonstrates it.

I claim there is a tea pot in orbit around the sun. I can’t sustain my claims by bringing a link, you need to provide reference to prove that I am wrong.

I mean I have a teapot on my stove. It's orbiting the sun. So you're correct.

*I know what reference you're making, I just like to be a pain. :)

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#95

Post by donarb » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

jpswade wrote: post #34

Surely "don't trust everything you read on the Internet" is just a given at this point, especially if it originates on Twitter.

That was such a great, prescient quote by Abraham Lincoln.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#96

Post by throwaway0a5e » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

Legogris wrote: post #68

duxup wrote: post #59

I hate URL fights. I give little extra value to people providing links with their clams. I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time. Discussion on the internet is broken in most places (HN is less broken than most). I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually…

I think it’s very worthwhile; it allows readers to judge the legitimacy and relevance of sources for claims made.

>it allows readers to judge the legitimacy and relevance of sources for claims made.

And that leads to a world where HN commenters trip over each other in a rush proclaim that Ghandi is morally equivalent to Atilla the Hun because he once said something that they can twist as not being totally in support of whatever the fashionable morals of the minute are.

Point is that if people don't like what they read they'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to delegitimize the source even if it's a squeaky clean source.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#97

Post by sepulchers » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

black_puppydog wrote: post #8

Zhyl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Ctrl+F seems to be more popular than 'grepping' these days, although I would very much be in favour of bringing 'grepping' back.

there's just so few people who still grep through website code directly. :P

You mean you don't `curl | rg` web pages?

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#98

Post by donarb » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

vezycash wrote: post #23

londons_explore wrote: post #12

Site down... Shows ReCAPTCHA in an infinite loop...

>Site down... Shows ReCAPTCHA I suppose this is cloudflare + their new captcha provider. This behavior is annoying / suspicious. They know the site is down, yet make people solve captcha repeatedly before finally telling them that the site is down.

Well, the site may be active once you are finally able to solve the CAPTCHA.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#99

Post by throwaway0a5e » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #78

duxup wrote: post #59

I hate URL fights. I give little extra value to people providing links with their clams. I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time. Discussion on the internet is broken in most places (HN is less broken than most). I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually…

>I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time. Demanding citations you don't plan to read, to either waste a person's time or to make them look unreliable, is a tactic I've seen used so often I normally don't care to provide links. Instead, I'll just point out some 'so you agree with my argument but doubt data backs it up?' at which point, if they respond, it'll b…

>Edit: To clarify, I mean discussions in other sites.

"to clarify" being roughly analogous to "before y'all see what I've written and rush to hit the 'make the wrongthink gray' button before you understand what I've said".

Nobody ever got rewarded for trash-talking the platform they were talking on. It's kind of funny to see all throughout these comments people are taking great pains to exempt HN from criticism when pretty much every social media site has these problems and it's a matter of degrees.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#100

Post by tW4r » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

melvinroest wrote: post #71

btrettel wrote: post #47

As many of those who have read academic papers know, even claims with citations are often suspicious. Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed. Sometimes, citations are not specific enough (e.g., citing a huge book rather than the specific page with the evidence). So, better than giving a URL would be to give a URL with a "fragment" if possible, i.e., #id. https://en.wikipedia.org/…

This is exactly why I submitted [1] to HN, coincidentally a few hours ago. IMO, assertions should be computable (if possible) and backed by data. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896279

I think this could be a great application for a DAG blockchain, with the axioms of a given scientific field as initial seed blocks.

Then any proofs can be derived using the previous blocks, and, should any proof be disproved the whole sub chain depending on it would collapse and need to be rewritten “remined”