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Please read the paper before you comment

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Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#161

Post by tokai »

chrisseaton wrote: post #149
rendall wrote: post #119

Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…

Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.

On the contrary - use jokes and sarcasm to root out posers, trolls, and ideologues.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#162

Post by thinkloop »

skrebbel wrote: post #155
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them. You can create a comment section,…

> Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow…

It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#163

Post by martin_a »

gmac wrote: post #146
cm2187 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.

This is exactly what I’ve noticed lately. Is it a known/named phenomenon? Do you have a reference?

> Is it a known/named phenomenon?

I think it's just called "journalism" these days. I find it hard to find publications without clickbaity stuff like this.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#164

Post by twic »

afarrell wrote: post #96
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.

Thats because an awful lot of people are chewing ice. (epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though) A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird. There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes fro…

I've noticed that when i'm bored or switched off at work, i'm more likely to go on Twitter and start arguments with people i don't know. That usually makes me unhappy, which makes me more switched off at work!

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#165

Post by WA »

neilwilson wrote: post #108

You get the same when people cry "peer-review" without actually understanding what peer-review actually means. Once you dig into it, you find it is far from the last word in validation in a modern world and very often an argumentum ad verecundiam As explained, in depth, in "Why I don't publish in Peer-Reviewed Journals". https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-pee... Please read the article before co…

Read it. And read more from the blog. Certainly some truth to this, but the blog is a great example why peer review actually matters.

The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review dismisses the whole process.

Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true.

Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus because it makes you stronger in a natural way".

Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several posts.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#166

Post by twic »

rendall wrote: post #119

Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated…

There's a bit more to it than that - once reactionaries started saying that 2 + 2 could only be 4, anyone who was woke and knew a bit of maths started brainposting about how actually 2 + 2 could be defined to mean 5 in various ways, and that was perfectly valid mathematics, and the reactionaries were showing their mathematical ignorance - all as a dunk on the reactionaries, not a defence or explanation of the original joke.

I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra.

This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic.

The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#167

Post by C4stor »

afarrell wrote: post #96
ekianjo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.

Thats because an awful lot of people are chewing ice. (epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though) A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird. There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes fro…

[1] says "Craving and chewing ice (pagophagia) is often associated with iron deficiency,", not what you claimed which is the opposite.

As far as I can see, there's no indication on this page as to how frequently iron deficiency leads to ice chewing.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#169

Post by 082349872349872 »

dumb1224 wrote: post #156
chrismorgan wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, this time you haven’t read far enough! The author, on page four of the comments: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... > yak8998 wrote: >> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%... >> "bananas" > That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our edi…

But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article? It's fine if the content is very compelling. I think it has to have something to do with reading online. It's really challenging to get readers glued to the page while traditionally physical books and magz have an easier environment (less distractions).

Once upon a time there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
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