How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick
medium.com
medium.com
* If you are without a doubt, you are wrong
If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from, you, are in fact, biased beyond listening to facts, and are likely wrong.
* Words matter
As my grandma said, "If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all."
Easier to move forward with that default assumption and try to prove I'm not as wrong as I thought and that "right" is the wrong attitude to hold.
However, some things are tautological. Some things may be necessary in reality, even if they are not in any model. (I wake up each morning because I have no alternative, not because it is the 'right thing to do'.) Some things are very safe to assume because our human cultural context or our biological environment is stable over multiple generations of activity. And some things are true simply because assuming otherwise contradicts the assumptions needed for language to work effectively. And sometimes we do prove things, even if we lack any meaningful ability to prove what we'd like to the degree that we'd like.
The point is, we're not always wrong in a linguistic sense. Any time you have a statement that is perfectly symmetrical and valid in every context, you do not have language which can be used to make decisions. It's only meaningful to be wrong if there are things you can be right about.
(In ML terms, how do you apply gradient descent if every path forward is up?)
This one especially applies to politics. If you are one of those looking for "sanity", or "common sense", and can't imagine how the other side can possibly hold some position, then this applies to you.
If you believe that banning sex education in schools will decrease teen pregnancy, and it turns out that teen pregnancy rates actually increase when teens aren't educated, then your belief about sex education isn't rational.
Many - possibly most - public policy decisions are open to this kind of testing.
The fact that formal testing rarely happens, and that it's consistently ignored even when it does, suggests that politics itself is inherently pre-rational.
Arguably it's then irrational to expect it to be rational - but that's a deeper problem that doesn't just apply to politics.
Before people knew the earth was a globe, it was entirely rational to think everything that goes up goes down again.
And for all testing you can do, ie, throwing an apple up, it'll come down again.
It is entirely rational to conclude from the available evidence that everything falls down when thrown.
But recently we've discovered that things you throw up hard enough may not fall down at all.
Thusly, the rational thought was still rational but wrong.
Predictability is important when you want to evaluate scientific models (ie, assume earth is flat, assume earth is round, assume earth is a mostly round potato all have different predictive quality, though the first ones are easier and sometimes sufficient)
I, like many, was appalled to hear the statistics on the number of people who believe news they didn't agree with was "fake news" regardless of its accuracy.
Then I heard a counter-argument: in short they're applying the rubric "fake news" to biased news, which is a whole 'nother discussion I'd rather not dive into here.
I don't think there are all that many truly irrational beliefs out there, political or otherwise. The world is a massively complex place, and I can't really blame people for letting con men tell them otherwise.
(Ok, who am I kidding: yes I can blame them, but it does no good to assume everyone who disagrees with me is stupid or a victim.)
The actual requirement for persuasion is a believable narrative with a bit of moral weight, and a random selection of standard persuasive tricks that politicians and lawyers have been deploying with outrageous success for millennia.
Generally, being objectively correct is one of the least effective ways to change anyone's mind. You might have some hope in a scientific setting. But in popular debate, facts and rationality are almost completely powerless.
I do know that not challenging them respectfully is unlikely to persuade anyone least of all yourself.
If you’re debating the optimal sales tax rate, yes, being unable to comprehend the other side means you’re doing it wrong. If the topic is, say, wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.
As a nihilist I would disagree.
The kind of people that want to do that have a much different set of morality and ethics.
There is no objective moral framework that you can base claims for or against wiping out a particular religion. You can however use your own, personal, subjective moral framework and most people will probably have something vaguely compatible to it and agree with you that wiping out religions and it's people is bad.
Am I supposed to question myself here? Supposed to assume I'm wrong? Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
White nationalists present some interesting problems, problems that are real and valid. Their lens is wrong (this problem exists, therefore I will interpret the problem in a way that I am superior and others are inferior).
Your doubt should come from that understanding.
Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror. If you have no doubts on that subject, YOU are wrong.
You can critique the way we acquire information and use that to cast doubt on conclusions. But you definitely can not use those criticisms to add validity to any conclusions either. So I don't see how this world view does anybody any good.
At some point, you see nazis, you say "those are bad", and you just know you're right about it. In that sense, morals are a true compass when faced with endless doubt that can creep in if you want to be maximally scientific about things.
No pressing need to point out the obvious criticisms. Fry was already roundly criticized up and down for saying it. But it has become my favorite quote about the way people talk about ideologies.
In this case, I would say that the nuance lies not in whether it is good or bad, but in understanding the constellation of factors that would lead someone to hold the objectionable viewpoint. Reducing the issue down to the question of whether it's good or bad is itself the simplistic mentality that Fry was very explicitly criticizing.
There are plenty of reasons why one would be nazi. One is fear, other ressentment yet other that you was raised that way by parents. And yet others grown to be cruel, aggresive and sadistic and nazism makes them feel like it is good thing.
However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important. Understanding that is more important then understanding poor them and having emphaty toward them. Otherwise they will use you emphaty to convert you to their case, bit by bit. It is not simplistic, it is values that you need to keep in mind lest you lose the lm.
> However, being clear on whether it is good or bad or even dangerous and what is cost of they get their way is practically speaking super important.
Yes, it's important. It's important that children learn this, or sort it out by very early adulthood. That is what is meant by infantile. In my opinion, this is not a serious problem for the vast majority of civil folk. I do not understand the value in grown adults belaboring it. It's baby food. Eat grownup food.
Actually, grown ups have bigger problem keeping this straigt. Grown ups made originally nazism happen after all. Grown ups dont want to insult nazi because of career or just trying to look nice and rational. Then again, young German soldiers were more cruel then old ones I read in historical accounts.
I don't know what you mean by eating grown up food here. There were quite a few unapologetic grown ups in history who were quite inflexible in their values.
Maybe it is another attempt to shame that has nothing to do with what actual grown ups do, for better or worst.
Can you expand on that? It sounds like it may contain a very interesting perspective, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.
It doesn't matter what ideology you're battling for or against. It's the genre of ideological flamewar itself that's damaging here, and therefore unwelcome, and therefore will get you banned if you keep doing it.
By "the users", do you mean four or so hyperpartisan ideological zealots who exploit your rules to get their rush of moral supremacy by downvoting instead of commenting to refute the points?
Because downvoting is technically political activity and your rules totally allow that all day long.
I said, "If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from..." meaning, you should "seek first to understand", also known as Habit #5 from Franklin Covey.
> Your line of thinking is very dangerous and not safe, it enables very bad people by making good people assume they are terrible people themselves.
It is always healthy to examine why one is convicted about certain beliefs. Is it rooted in fact, or fear of the unknown? Since you brought up White Nationalism, this is one of my favorite success stories from a man that sought to understand the very people that hated him: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...
Daryl Davis has done great things just by listening.
Certainty in actions, when well prepared, has a magical and transformative effect on things.
I am willing to entertain thought experiments about how I can be wrong but I know I am not about certain ideas and philosophies.
Can you give some examples?
any philosophy/belief system that is descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive/normative) will be _apodictically_certain_ to the extent that it is free from internal contradictions. in simple cases we can examine the ideas and be very confident that there are no internal contradictions.
for example: given "A implies B" and "A" then we can conclude "B".
essentially any time you formalize definitions to the point that a statement of equivalence becomes obvious as a tautology, then you have an idea you can be certain about.
rejection of the principle of identity leaves one at the point where no further intersubjective dialogue is meaningful. which is why Avicenna said that anyone who denies the identity should be beaten until he acknowledges that "to be beaten" is not the same as "to not be beaten" and he should be burned until he acknowledges that "being burned" is not the same as "not being burned." [1]
I'm very interested in any corrections, comments, or other replies. I'm also aware that there are other approaches to logic besides the aristotelian approach I have tried to convey above. an example of a non-aristotelian attempt at communicating would be e-prime [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_noncontradiction#Avicen...
Oh, absolutely. I was merely suggesting that there is a difference between a lack of doubt for all practical purposes, and a lack of doubt in principle. This difference may not be terribly helpful or pertinent, of course.
There are cranks who could respond to these rules, but I believe (though I am not a mental-health professional) that many would be unable to.
For me, the stakes feel high enough that it's easy to get worked up and spit vitriol. But I've found that I'll lose the interest of anyone I'm talking to when I do.
https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/long-hair-dont-care-5eeba2...
Sample comments: If that title leads you to expect off-brand evo psych exploring massive behavioural changes induced through the complicated medium of hairdressing… well, you’d be right.
Mmmm.
It's also worth bearing in mind your audience.
This article was written by two guys who by and large are going after junk science in psychology, nutrition, and so on, where the worst motivation can only be to advance the careers of the scientists - and quite possibly the errors are just the result of over-optimism or lack of statistical abilities.
For that sort of work it makes sense to try and fix psychology from within, by pointing out errors. There isn't much point in trying to spread the word through the wider world that psychology is full of errors: what's the best outcome, exactly? A few people stop being invited to give TED talks? Big deal. Psychology isn't going to stop being studied, nor should it be!
But in the case of economics, there are two problems:
1) Economics is absolutely riddled with not just bad individual papers but entire sub-fields that are nonsense, it's an epidemic. It probably cannot be fixed by shaming individuals who make simple errors via their own journals and hoping for the field to improve. Even when major economists like Paul Krugman or Paul Romer have gone on very serious attacks against their own field, there has been no visible impact and in Romer's case he simply lost his job.
2) Economics is routinely used to justify massive government interventions (or lack of interventions) in markets and society. Bad economics research can have a very serious impact on people's lives.
In this case, it's probably better to work at a different level and try to spread the word amongst the general public that economics is not trustworthy. Thus the audience is not journals or the authors of the papers themselves. It's the public.
This is not hard because most people who follow the news have already encountered major cases where consensus economic predictions were simply wrong. Polling shows that trust in economists is quite low as is. If and when the field reforms it can try to rebuild trust.
1) https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/how-brian-wansink-forgo...
In other words rather than figuring out a strategy to get him to read it that is adversarial but somehow slips under his defenses, figure out how to get yourself in the right frame of mind to introduce ideas on how to be more effective to someone you think is important. Presumably your father is enough like you that he will be able to tell when you are treating him like someone who needs to be emotionally managed, as opposed to when you are having a two-way conversation.
Maybe one marker of managing someone is when the speaker is not focusing on themselves at all. When you talk to a friend you like you are likely concerned about how you are portraying yourself as well as whether or not you are getting your way.
Gelman does real, solid work and confines his righteous takedowns to a side hobby. And his criticisms are directed at individual, specific cases, with evidence, and he reserves most of his wrath for repeat offenders rather than one-off mistakes, which are unavoidable given enough projects. He confines criticisms to his area of expertise, which is statistics.
Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once. Followed up shortly by a paper that implied (but didn't directly state!) that regression to the mean on replication implies error or fabrication in the original. And he has ridden this sort of tired argument into a lucrative and prestigious career and Stanford appointment. Never mind the collateral damage on funding and morale. My theory is that people pay attention to Ioannidis and wring their hands about these highly generic issues for the same reason most people pretend to be highly, highly concerned about sexual harassment/discrimination in the workplace -- they're praying that if they act concerned enough, the hammer will fall somewhere else. But indiscriminate criticism like this is highly toxic to science (or anywhere else, for that matter, and has the side effect of letting real bad actors off the hook).
A further moral of the story is that, for better or worse, I don't trust and generally ignore criticisms that do not come from someone who has invested time into a field and made useful contributions to it. 'Full-time critics' strike me as generally sleazy and opportunistic, and I doubt the sincerity of their desire to 'improve' a field if all they can do is tear down others' work and not provide any of their own.
Fundamentally, however, I don't believe, for example, that physicists are more scrupulous/intelligent/honest than biologists, who are more so than psychologists. The irreproducibility rates in a field have to be primarily caused by the nature of the system studied in that field rather than some inherent attributes of the researchers.
So any field will have some constant level of irreproducibility which which essentially cannot be changed. But some researchers do better than others. My fundamental point is that if you want to change what can be changed, and genuinely improve a field, you have to focus the criticisms on specific bad actors rather than target an entire field at once and leverage a near-tautology (more complex systems yield more irreproducible results) into a 20-year tirade/career.
Also, helpfully for people like Ioannidis, a statement like "field X has lots of errors and irreproducibility" is non-falsifiable, and indeed will be true no matter what, so he is taking no risk with his criticisms -- even though they do more damage to public perception, morale, and funding, and help less to change things than targeted criticisms would do.
If I sound irritated by this sort of thing, it is because my graduate advisor dabbled in "meta-science" / "error correction" and I stoutly refused to have anything to do with those projects. I thought, and still think, that it is considerably more valuable to try to build my own solid lego tower despite the difficulties rather than knocking down other people's, despite the latter being considerably easier and a fairly simple and reliable route to a high citation count. In the end, irreproducible or erroneous papers in science just get ignored rather than retracted, and I think that's fine.
It's solid probabilistic reasoning about the dominant statistical methodology, and its conclusions have been empirically demonstrated in multiple fields.
- A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios.
- A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R.
Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what factors will affect the PPV of a field. In that regard it was a good contribution. But the enormous leap to the title -- which can only be achieved by massive assumptions about R and u -- was baseless fearmongering and demagoguery.
If one wants to address these issues at the 50,000 feet level, it would be far better to look at something concrete, such as reproducibility rates, as indeed many have done, rather than models based on pre-study odds. If we actually knew the pre-study odds, or IOW the proportion of hypotheses in hypothesis space that are true, then we could just correct our p-values for that and be done with it. Although I suppose that many Bayesians would not see any problem with abstracting away everything we don't know into priors R and u, making wild guesses about them, and drawing conclusions.
We do have a replication crisis on our hands. But the pre-study odds, whatever they are, are unchangeable. If this paper had been framed in terms of "the lower the pre-study odds, the higher the power will need to be to compensate to get an acceptable level of reproducibility", I would accept it wholeheartedly, although then it would have been a simple and obvious statement rather than a citation-grabber.
Until such time as someone does bring theory to biology, for example, wet-labbers (not me) struggle on. I am in a little doubt as to whether general theories about complex systems could provide useful predictive frameworks, but if so, great. But until then, pre-study odds are zero if you don't do the study.
https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
I feel some sympathy with fellow Brit Nick Brown after reading this story about his work:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-...
(as an aside, totally unsurprised the guy works in computing, developing an intolerance for abuse of logic is a job hazard.)
But I don't know if this perspective is helpful to be honest. "Don't be a dick" is both quite an obvious principle and also rather useless when criticising people's work: some of the authors, and some of the people who want to believe the research is true, will inevitably view any criticism as being dickish. This is doubly true if you take the obvious next step and speculate as to whether the issues are mere oversights or (far more commonly, in my view) deliberate deceptions intended to further an agenda.
One problem is that genuine, honest mistakes tend to get picked up already by the existing peer review process. The really bad papers that get through are usually bad in support of some wider social mission, usually leading the public to some policy goal, and they don't get struck down because the peer reviewers share the same goals. Thus pointing out mistakes has no effect, because they already knew the science was bad. The only thing that can work is pointing out to the people who they're trying to influence that something has gone wrong.
There is a responsibility to be harsh in these cases. Failing to do so can simply let the issues fester and compound. From the Guardian article on Brown:
There were several psychologists, versed in non-linear dynamics, who smelt something fishy about the maths in the published paper. Stephen Guastello, from Marquette University, wrote a note of mild complaint to American Psychologist, which it chose not to publish because "there wasn't enough interest in the article". Guastello feels now that he should have been more forceful in his opinions. "In retrospect," he says, "I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of what looked like an article that could move the field forward if someone would follow up with some strong empirical work."
The story describes Brown's first debunking of a paper that used lots of clever looking math to reach obviously absurd conclusions about psychology. One author of the paper admitted that she had never understood the maths and the person who did create the maths (Losada) has refused to ever respond to the debunking in any way. All the reviewers were successfully intimidated by the maths and were unwilling to criticise it, allowing Losada to get away with it:
John Gottman, a leading authority in the psychology of successful relationships, wrote to Losada because he couldn't follow the equations. "I thought it was something I didn't know about, because he's a smart guy, Losada. He never answered my email," he says.
So the critics weren't critical enough and a paper based on pure mathematical bullshit racked up 350 citations. Vast amounts of time, money and effort was wasted. What does this say about the scientific process?
By the way, in case anyone thinks computing is immune to this sort of thing, it's not. Papers about "Russian twitter bots" are a current streak of bad science in computing, for obvious reasons: the authors want to undermine political trends they don't like. The last one I read claimed to have constructed a neural network that could detect Russian bots with 99%+ accuracy. Nowhere in the paper did it give any examples of what the network detected, nor what the ground truth they were comparing to was. When I emailed the authors to ask for the data so the study could be replicated, I was told the data was not available (despite being just a bunch of tweets i.e. public data).
It was literally an entire paper that looked scientific but boiled down to "we made a magic black box that without fail finds evidence of a vast conspiracy, but we can't show you. Trust us."
In fact, mike_hearn's first link is to a blog post where he debunks claims of evidence that Russian bots influenced the Brexit vote. (He doesn't offer evidence that that didn't happen; what kind of evidence could exist? But he does argue that the alleged evidence offered by others that there was such influence is unconvincing.)
I've been out all evening, and my post is now at +11. But if it was getting downvoted I am 99% certain it's because a lot of people really want to believe in the whole Russia/Trump/Twitter story and can't stand anything that challenges it, even incidentally. It meets their pre-existing biases and grants a feeling of moral and mental superiority: the other tribe might be brainwashed by something as trivial as a retweet, but there's no way I'd be like that.
But that's the whole point of this blog post we're discussing: lots of people have very, very strong incentives to believe in pseudo-science dressed up as the real thing. That doesn't just include scientists themselves but also journalists, politicians and so on.
The psychological paper that Nick Brown did a takedown of was cited by hundreds of papers and led to lucrative speaking careers. The underlying equations that made it seem like science vs mere opinion weren't connected to anything and boiled down to nonsense (a problem I've seen several times). Yet it took enormous efforts to do anything about it, and in the end the scientists who got caught are unrepentant: one of them didn't even bother to respond and the other agreed that the maths was nonsense but doesn't believe it really matters.
The same thing has happened repeatedly in recent years. See the story of Amy Cuddy: her 'power pose' research was thoroughly debunked but she simply refused to accept it, despite her co-authors accepting that the research was wrong. She continues to milk the speaking circuit and has even been cited by the BBC as an example of an "inspiring woman", although her career is arguably built on deception.
At this point, if you believe in Russian twitter bots influencing elections, why shouldn't you be the crank? Where is the evidence? All claims I've seen on this topic fall apart under examination. Even the premise is absurd - it relies on the belief that millions of people are so politically ungrounded their vote can be shifted merely by seeing a spammy retweet. That is a very dubious belief.
But if you believe you have a reliable study that proves the existence of armies of bots capable of swinging elections, please do show it. I will enjoy examining it. However, it is not sufficient to merely point at high-status individuals and delegate to them, because - as this entire discussion shows - bad "science" is capable of spreading and even becoming a consensus far too fast.
I have no idea if you’re right, and I’m not about to waste time down that particular rabbit hole. But you’re arguably doing wrong everything the article mentions. Starting with the impulse of “hold on, I’m not a crank and here are 12 paragraphs and my blog to prove it”. It’s simply off topic in this discussion.
I don't think it came across that way to most people. I'm a bit surprised you got that impression from it, and can't see how you'd read it that way. There's nothing in there about "I'm not a crank," for starters, and it didn't seem at all verbose.
Quote from the Science article linked to in OA. I think the OA is useful in laying out a less confrontational approach to raising issues.
1. criticism is easy. penetrating criticism that demands an answer beyond the evidence already presented lest the criticized appear totally defeated is hard. it's also the only kind of criticism worth doing, imo.
2. being listened to is a matter of having penetrating criticism and offering a reasonable alternative. if you destroy, you must offer a chance to rebuild afterward, or else the criticism will be too uncomfortable to respond to, and nobody will appear to listen as a result. if you are skeptical of this point (as you should be) refer to the position of string theory within the world of particle physics; its criticism of the mainstream is very difficult to recover from if accepted, and there's no real mental way forward as a result.
3. it sucks to have your work criticized in public -- it's intolerable, even. but it sometimes gets results. it also sucks to have someone be impolite to you. but i am sure we can all remember a time that someone (perhaps a teacher or parent) has corrected us impolitely when we did not deserve courtesy. you need to retain the ability to dismiss cranks out of hand once you've suitably proven that you can beat them by making a diligent argument. anything else would lead to your time being wasted rehashing the same mistakes of others in detail.
4. scientists are, very frequently, in their professional life, jerks. i am speaking from my own experiences and my own actions. the OP doesn't exactly brush on this, but sometimes being a jerk to the right people is what makes you the right friends. you don't really want to be friends with baddies anyway. this next point is super important and directly related.
5. don't be a jerk to people because they produced incorrect work. often the theories that turn out to be totally wrong are the ones that move the field forward the most by virtue of the work put into disproving them. if they're fabricating data or doing things that are methodologically unforgivable, that's a different story.
6. scientists are a stubborn lot, until they break in the face of evidence. if you are "right" and the world is "wrong," perpetually aggregating more evidence and showing it off will eventually work, especially if you make a point to summarize your findings every once in a while. this is just as true regarding criticism as it is regarding experimental results. here is a secret: if the subfield where you are directing your criticism has only made incremental progress for a long time -- which is to say, recently there have been no major breakthroughs or destructive revolutions which reshape prior understandings -- time is on the critic's side. incremental progress isn't stagnation, but it rarely adds enough evidence about fundamental assumptions to protect those assumptions from a sustained attack. if a field is making leaps and bounds forward, criticism is going to be shrugged off because there will be new understandings which are too juicy to slow down to refine. the later refining stages are where critics are the strongest.
Death threats towards people that use death threats, really?
I don't like the article. Some people are more knowledgeable on a topic than others, "if you aren't in doubt you're probably wrong" doesn't apply there. Not even in general in my estimation.
A better alternative to "you have to sugarcoat all your thoughts by 30% before you speak them out" would be to train people to be better at taking criticism. People get spoiled by a high baseline positivity. I'd like to bring my points objectively without sugar coating, if everyone did that there would be no problem. Now i would have to either pretend to be more nice than i am ( talking behind people's back is a consequence of this), be straight to the point and get disliked by people who are used to sugar coating or keep silent. It usually boils down to the latter. Let me work alone if i can't be my critical self.
Also, this article seems to be mostly aimed at unfair criticism, let me pose the following.
If the criticism is fair and reasonable, it is justified, doesn't have to be nice, and the receiver is at fault if they dislike it.
If the criticism is not fair or reasonable, it is not justified, the criticizer should express uncertainty where applicable, they are at fault as the article suggests.
You can disregard such advise, and simply launch more and more over-the-top screeches against the MSM trying to silence you. But you’re not going to change any minds.
Unfortunately, we don’t. Which is why we still put on pants for interviews, write in full sentences, and occasionally waste oxygen being nicer to others than warranted by the cold hard facts alone.
When you see through it you can choose to either exploit it or be fair. That's your call.
The amount of extra effort involved in having a few people "sugarcoat" (as you call it) is tiny compared to the effort in retraining vast swathes of people out of what is after all a fairly standard human behaviour. Behaviour so standard in fact that this doesn't count as "sugarcoating" at all, really, at least not in my view - more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument from the unrefined raw material.
(I originally started this post with "Come on, come on, don't be silly". But then I took it out, because it felt a bit rude. But, if you don't think it will hurt, you can imagine I left it in.)
"more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument"
Why do you use "persuasive" there? If you were right you should be able to prove your point without politeness. Furthermore, if you /need/ politeness to be considered right, /then/ either they're buying bs or you're selling bs. Both are bad for this world.
In my view, people should agree with you based on logic, sane thinking, and not on "what feels good". Because true news isn't always good news, but it's always better news.