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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait.

There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.

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They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1].

If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

This is a reversed appeal to authority, and the fact that you keep attacking “credentials” rather than anything solid is telling. As Vkou said, they cite their sources. I’ll take that over vague hand-waving around credentials any day. Like people who dismiss Wikipedia, the issue is that you need a case-by-case basis to dismiss cited works.

Again, you're doing everything but addressing the claims.

Again, if I was to link to WashPo or NYTimes, you'd dismiss them as well.

Again, you're just covering for the liars of the world.

You are defending the expert status of indisputable laymen by demanding a line by line refutation of everything they have ever written? And this seems not merely reasonable to you but you perceive it as upholding good reasoning and logic itself?

Every single one of Snopes' items could be correct and it wouldn't save your argument, because you're relying on the idea that what Snopes chooses to debunk is an unbiased representation of who actually tells more lies.

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