What I find hilarious about journalists in general is they wrap themselves in "truth" when in reality they basically will do anything to get your attention for just long enough to pawn off some product in a 30-45 second ad. The only reason they seek the "truth" is so advertisers will buy another slot.
Don’t believe everything you read
61–70 of 94 posts
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#62Am I the only one thinking it's a very selfish and unfunny move? What if I call him saying I'm a physician from hospital X and announce him that his father just died. Oh, and then, I'll post a blog explaining how you shouldn't trust people calling you and post that on HN. Obviously there is a chain reaction when a big news comes out. You don't want to have a reputation for the latest in the known news website. And, f…
> And, furthermore, it's very common for journalists to > receive anonymous posts. Publishing implies validation, at least to a certain extent. Otherwise media become nothing more than a fully transparent channel; there's nothing useful about that in this day and age. This prank (which doesn't resemble the physician example you mention in the least) shows two things: First, fact checking and double or triple sourcing…
The thing is: How can they check or double check? It's a confidential memo from an anonymous user. If it was possible to check it, that wouldn't be a big news ;-) And yes, I do agree that anonymous tips have no credibility. However, experience shows that some anonymous tips were true and, especially when it's the only information you have, might become relevent.
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#63This is a very important topic to discuss here on Hacker News. I'll put it out there, as a person who had a different educational background and profile of activities in my teen years from most hackers, that most hackers have remarkably poor preparation in evaluating sources and figuring out which sources are reliable sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...
That's especially regretable when sources about human health and medicine are submitted here,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_...
as those sources often attract a lot of discussion, as we all desire to be healthier if we can.
The most embarrassing example I have seen of people using a good search engine (Google) to find lousy sources was when Larry Page posted a Google+ message
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+LarryPage/posts/32xY3Z1zckL
about his donation of funds to help young people in San Francisco obtain vaccinations. That resulted in a lot of anti-vaccine cranks decrying his donation, with one of those writing, "Just google it and do the research it's readily available" when asked to back up a statement decrying vaccines. The Internet is full of trash sources, and Google still spiders and indexes many of those as it searches the World Wide Web. Without thoughtful human brains thinking about which sources are reliable, the link structure that Google relies on in part as a signal of quality will include noise as well as signal.
The Hacker News welcome message
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement:
"Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."
But it takes actual reading and thought to know what's a crap link. And since stories once submitted can only be flagged (not downvoted), it is still dismayingly easy for crap links to gain top position on the main page--I saw it happen only yesterday.
To follow up on this topic, I'll mention that other Hacker News participants have informed us all about two frequent sources of submissions that really aren't much good at all, namely the press-release aggregation sites PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Users here on HN think there are better sites to submit from.
Comments about PhysOrg:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869
"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249
"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/ (press release),
http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/ (video),
http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien... (paper).
"PhysOrg: just say no."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888
"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857
"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."
Comments about ScienceDaily:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206
"Blogspam.
"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):
http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...
"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...
"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:
http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603
"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.
" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."
Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185
"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529
"Original source:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole-asymmetry...
"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).
"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361
"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766
"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.
"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."
To sum up, yes, as the interesting original blog post kindly submitted here points out, it is EASY to fool online news sites. And it is easy to fool whole groups of bloggers, and thus to fool news aggregation sites. Read a source carefully before submitting. Don't submit at all if the source is dodgy. Save the submissions and the upvotes and the comments for reliable sources that take care to verify factual statements.
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#64I don't want to get too meta here but...
Just as easy as someone can send out a fake news tip to a bunch of sources, a person can just as easily pick out a piece of news story that is being covered everywhere and write a fake blog post about how they created the news tip out of thin air. I'm not saying (or even think) that is what the author did, but it is interesting to think about the reverse of this.
He could have made up that he made up that news. I'm mean he could have just
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#65Every time I hear someone say that democracy won't suffer as professional news orgs fold and that bloggers will fill the void I think of stories like this.
You mean the same professional news orgs that publish 14 stories on Pussy Riot's plight but only a brief bit of wire copy from AP concerning Bradley Manning's first week of testimony? http://t.co/dCsfOEsf
That very article points out the best coverage of the trial has come from the Guardian, the second largest paper in the UK and now one of the largest by uniques in the world.
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#66Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#67> How would people react if they found out the BBC got all their news third-hand from a copied article that had been changed twice along the way? It is not reliable. No other industry works like this.
I got bad news for you buddy...
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#68A response from Rob Crossley: https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149670496768002 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149784678322176 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149862562353152 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149937736847363
Speaking of dont believe everything you read. I thought the update at the end sounded dubious.
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#69Great work this should fix the issue for a few weeks. But really this is how things are exposed. SO great work!
Re: Don’t believe everything you read
#70A response from Rob Crossley: https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149670496768002 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149784678322176 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149862562353152 https://twitter.com/Rob_Crossley_/status/294149937736847363
I can't decide who to believe.
I guess I should lean in Crossley's favour because he actually posted a conversation, even if that conversation is fake.
In addition, the author of this hoax claimed offense at an accusation that he is "18 years old with no job", yet this blog is anonymous, so how do we even know that he isn't 18 and unemployed?
I have now decided that the author is merely a petty attention whore, and he became angered when one of his intended puppets decided that he was full of shit.