Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanadium | Hacker News Reader

"One in four people in the US have searched for or found a job using Facebook"

[citation needed]

Citation needed? That doesn’t make any sense in this context.

It’s a primary source. They know what people search for in their own site. That’s like me saying I found my job using a newspaper and you saying citation needed. I just told you what I know to be true.

Do you go around snapping ‘citation needed’ at anyone who tells you anything about their business? Madness.

Respectfully no, but it would be relevant to understand the methodology of how they were able to discern a 1-in-4 statistic which seems, on its face at least, questionable at best. Maybe they're right and the methodology might be sound, but it doesn't change my perspective without that backing information to contextualize it.

A "primary source" also isn't in any way immune to rational inquiry. I don't mean for this parallel in any way to imply a relationship, but just look at our administration or any one of innumerable other examples to this end. Taking something at face value, to me at least, requires more than a decontextualized statement of fact when my immediate impulse is to question it (in this particular case).

For instance, define "job". Are we talking about a recommendation leading to a project for a contractor, or are we talking a full-time position? I mean, that's just the start. In what ways are they determining what constitutes "finding a job"? Talking to friends and friends of friends? Or directly messaging a corporation's page on Facebook?

There's a lot of squish here and I wish they were more forthcoming about what that statistic actually means.

It sounds like you just want more information on how they determined this. That's not what 'citation' means.

A citation is a reference to a document where information came from in the first place. What document are you expecting to be cited here? A citation for some internal Facebook email where a manager asked for a stat and the data guys responded with a number? How's that going to help you if it's just the same number as in here?

If I tell you I saw a cat in my garden, and you demand 'citation needed', what do you want me to cough up? There's no document to cite. That's just me telling you what I saw.

It's as simple as citing a document that lays out how they arrived at this statistic. With all due respect, perhaps it's pleading for an ideal here, but it still remains a questionable statistic in my opinion.

I don't understand why questioning a statistic, or especially my use of the word "citation", is controversial.

When you throw out statistical numbers as some sort of fact, then "citation needed" is absolutely meaningful in this context.

Literally who do you think they could cite? Who else apart from Facebook knows what people on Facebook search for? You can't cite someone else for data you have collected yourself. At some point the chain of citations needs to start with someone presenting some data. We can't all endlessly cite each other in a big chain.

Do you reject all new collected data because it doesn't come with a citation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com