Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 282 posts

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

#41

Post by dom96 »

> The whole investigation took me 5 minutes. A Web search, a few clicks, and some ctrl+f’ing.

Yes, it took you, a person with a blog and the technical know how. I bet you that 99.99% of people that have access to the internet have a very basic understanding of how to use a search engine, in particular the trick of quoting a phrase to match it exactly is not something I would expect the mainstream to be aware of.

What we need is a better education so that it is effortless to the majority, just like it is for you or me.

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

#42

Post by acdha »

jermier wrote: post #11

Very soon everything will exist cryptographically on some uncensorable blockchain, and websites & files will exist on the Interplanetary Filesystem[0] and will be impossible to take down. And 'things' will all be categorized and have their own QR code which when scanned, will reveal the context (or even price!) of the item. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Where by “impossible” you meant “quite easy”, right? There isn’t some technical exception to following the law. IPFS can potentially help with the problem of someone dying or forgetting their hosting bill but it is subject to legal requirements like everything else and the hash mechanism makes both detection and compliance easy: if you host other people’s content, you’re either blocking certain values or getting fined/jailed on their behalf.

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

#43

Post by edent »

cochne wrote: post #32

I'll start of by saying the author has provided some nice research. However, this particular example is the kind of thing where it doesn't even really matter wether its legitimate or not. The fact that it doesn't attribute it to any particular source makes it almost meaningless. It's basically just saying that some person 100 years ago said "X". Does it really matter if I have a source for that? This content is clear…

The claim is "even a hundred years ago we had prats who didn't want to wear masks because they were embarrassed."

This citation shows that, yes, this was a trope even back then.

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

#44

Post by Aerroon »

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #15

I would've agreed with this a bit more if we hadn't started banning content we don't like from the internet. Here I am without a link, but chasing away groups we don't agree with to the dark side of the web makes it very convenient for the current political saints to shape our views. I take any claim with URIs or without, try to think about who gains from such perspectives, weigh it with past experiences. I'd hate to…

>I'd hate to just see a URI and go "OK, I am convinced ty" and automatically pick up the pitchforks against those without.

Something to particularly consider are circular references. If you make the reference graph large enough then it's easy to fool people into thinking that there is a valid source for a claim when there actually isn't one. All you have are references that refer to one another. It gets particularly bad when some of those references end up as dead links, because then you can't even find out whether the chain ended up at a valid source or not.

Related to this are long reference chains that end up on a shaky source. A poorly done study (or simply a bought one) can end up being referenced in a long chain. The links in the chain might end up giving more credibility to the source.

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

#45

Post by ceejayoz »

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #15

I would've agreed with this a bit more if we hadn't started banning content we don't like from the internet. Here I am without a link, but chasing away groups we don't agree with to the dark side of the web makes it very convenient for the current political saints to shape our views. I take any claim with URIs or without, try to think about who gains from such perspectives, weigh it with past experiences. I'd hate to…

Virtually all of the "banned from the Internet" folks are still accessible via the Internet just fine. Infowars is a click or a Google away; it's just not on YouTube or Facebook.

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

#46

Post by rapnie »

anonymfus wrote: post #13
njsubedi wrote: post #2

>The whole investigation took me 5 minutes. A Web search, a few clicks, and some ctrl+f’ing. Am I the only one who thinks the last phrase sounds weird? I might be used to reading lots of articles that sensor words, but couldn't help reading it as "control-fucking". (Edit: uncensored)

I read what you wrote as "control-finding".

control-freaking is what I saw.

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

#47

Post by btrettel »

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/wiki/URI_fragment

Chrome can be even more specific now with this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-to-text-fragm...

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

#48

Post by dleslie »

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…

I find much of that sort of instant messaging communication is less about informing others and is more about social signalling. The sender is asking for emotional support and social solidarity.

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

#49

Post by greggyb »

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #15

I would've agreed with this a bit more if we hadn't started banning content we don't like from the internet. Here I am without a link, but chasing away groups we don't agree with to the dark side of the web makes it very convenient for the current political saints to shape our views. I take any claim with URIs or without, try to think about who gains from such perspectives, weigh it with past experiences. I'd hate to…

I don't read the article as saying:

URI == trust claims of content

Rather, it is saying that:

URI provides strong evidence that the content legitimately comes from the named source.

And more specifically:

If the content does not have a URI, you should put little weight on the attribution.

Evaluating the validity of the claims is always left as an exercise for the reader.

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

#50

Post by cmiles74 »

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #15

I would've agreed with this a bit more if we hadn't started banning content we don't like from the internet. Here I am without a link, but chasing away groups we don't agree with to the dark side of the web makes it very convenient for the current political saints to shape our views. I take any claim with URIs or without, try to think about who gains from such perspectives, weigh it with past experiences. I'd hate to…

I agree that there's a real push-and-pull between people trying to be responsive to content that is in some way damaging to other people (props up stereotypes, promotes some kind of violence, false information that sounds plausible but could get someone hurt, etc.) and those who would prefer leave content as it is and turn up the volume on some other type of corrective measure, like annotating clearly untrue content or information that has been proven false.

That said, I'm not convinced that one side is winning such that we'll end up losing primary sources. I was disappointed see episodes of "Community" pulled from Netflix and Hulu (one recent example) but the episode remains on DVD, saving it from the proverbial "memory hole".

I don't think anyone should be convinced of the veracity of information simply from seeing it linked to another page. Surely we have to click the link and then judge the source for ourselves.

Post reply on HN