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Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

shkspr.mobi

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

#181

Post by brabel »

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 find it useful to provide sources even to just make sure I don't misrepresent something myself. Many times when I felt like posting an outraged comment to disagree with someone, after looking for sources for my points, I just gave up because apparently, I was wrong.

Sometimes you just misremember things... sometimes you're just ignorant on a topic and what you've heard is all secondhand (and wrong). Providing sources is not something you do only for others, you should do for yourself.

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

#183

Post by brlewis »

clairity wrote: post #133
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…

furthermore, calling for citations is primarily an expression of disbelief, not a furthering of discussion. either the argument was indeed faulty, in which case the responder should call out the weakness directly, or the responder has no specific objection but wants simply to object. it's lazy and should be discouraged (e.g., downvoted). another lazy response is providing links without summarizing the linked content,…

Why is expressing disbelief less furthering of discussion than citation-free expression of belief?

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

#184

Post by btrettel »

adrianN wrote: post #120
tW4r wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

Now you only need to convince the scientists to write proofs in their papers in Coq or Isabelle so that you can check them.

I basically work in mathematical physics and I'd like a system that allows me to write one thing, and output LaTeX code that can be put in a publication and also check the math.

Coq and the like seem way too "low-level". I'm sure it's possible in principle to handle proofs involving partial differential equations in Coq but it surely is not easy.

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

#185

Post by duxup »

DharmaPolice wrote: post #171
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…

One of the chief benefits I find to providing links when in a discussion is - I get to realise I'm wrong before I've posted. I'll have some half-remembered quote or statistic in my head and I want to provide a link to evidence it. But after finding a decent source I find that I've misremembered something - usually it's a minor detail but sometimes not and sometimes it undermines the point I was going to make. That ki…

That's a really good point. That does happen to me when I go looking and find I misremembered some details and it turns out... yeah I'm wrong.

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

#186

Post by shishy »

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/…

Well, only because this is relevant to the bit about citations in academic papers: you may find what we're doing at scite interesting!

https://scite.ai/

You can see how papers are cited by others, see the context around the citation snippet, and whether others just mention, support, or dispute your findings.

Feedback is always welcomed (drop me a line at ashish@scite.ai if you have any thoughts)

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

#187

Post by londons_explore »

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.

Curious... The page I saw was actual Google Recaptcha...

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

#188

Post by brabel »

johngalt wrote: post #115
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…

The challenge with the link fights is often about the difference between data and conclusions . For example, if I claim that "marriage has a positive impact on men" then cite a bunch of data showing that married men live longer and make more money on average etc... Have I truly proven my conclusion that marriage benefits men? Or does the same data show that healthy men with jobs are more likely to get married? Yet, I…

I've seen even people who will attempt to discredit the data you've shown with kind of reasonable points like "the data is biased too, because it was collected by people who have the same bias". Well, yeah, that's possible, I guess... but if that's the case, then no discussion is possible at all and we have to rely on the feelings and intuitions of the people involved... and we all know how reliable that is.

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

#189

Post by dane-pgp »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #149
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/…

> Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed. I've seen that here on HN, too. Person 1 claims X. Person 2 asks for evidence. Person 1 posts a URL, as if it's evidence for X. But when you read the contents carefully, you realize that it doesn't actually provide any evidence for X. It provides evidence for something that's somewhere in the same general topic as X, but that's not what P…

> I've seen that here on HN, too.

Oh yeah? Give us an example then.

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

#190

Post by agustif »

dane-pgp wrote: post #189
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed. I've seen that here on HN, too. Person 1 claims X. Person 2 asks for evidence. Person 1 posts a URL, as if it's evidence for X. But when you read the contents carefully, you realize that it doesn't actually provide any evidence for X. It provides evidence for something that's somewhere in the same general topic as X, but that's not what P…

> I've seen that here on HN, too. Oh yeah? Give us an example then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899838
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