Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious | Hacker News Reader

Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

shkspr.mobi

470 pointspavel_lishin270 comments

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...

This is exactly why I submitted [1] to HN, coincidentally a few hours ago. IMO, assertions should be computable (if possible) and backed by data.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896279

I think this could be a great application for a DAG blockchain, with the axioms of a given scientific field as initial seed blocks.

Then any proofs can be derived using the previous blocks, and, should any proof be disproved the whole sub chain depending on it would collapse and need to be rewritten “remined”

As always, this solution doesn't benefit from a blockchain structure. You could do the same thing with an immutable, publicly readable database.

The currently unsolvable problem is that there is often disagreement about axioms and proofs bring disproved. Even mathematical proofs can be very controversial.

This is one of many problems that humans can't solve yet, which means it's hard/impossible to teach computers to do it.

Axioms can also be mutually contradictory and this may not be obvious initially. Then you can prove and disprove everything at the same time.

If axioms are mutually contradictory, that doesn't actually prevent the concept of computing them and attaching them to logical chains.

The core problem with computing them is that no machine can decide whether the axioms are contradictory in the first place. In most cases, even humans won't 100% agree.

Where does that immutability come from? If you have a centralized service controlling the flow of knowledge, this could have its own consequences.

Maybe some sort of CRDT + gossip network? But at that point you are quite close to a blockchain.

(Not that I'm confident such a thing is a good idea, but I do think that a decent portion of the blockchain stack makes sense given the idea)

> Where does that immutability come from? If you have a centralized service controlling the flow of knowledge, this could have its own consequences.

Data can be:

- decentralized

- public

- immutable

- redundant

- verifiable with asymmetric cryptography

..without being part of a blockchain. The technology to do this has existed much longer than blockchain has as a concept. Torrents are a good example.

Now you only need to convince the scientists to write proofs in their papers in Coq or Isabelle so that you can check them.

or Lean

I basically work in mathematical physics and I'd like a system that allows me to write one thing, and output LaTeX code that can be put in a publication and also check the math.

Coq and the like seem way too "low-level". I'm sure it's possible in principle to handle proofs involving partial differential equations in Coq but it surely is not easy.

Don't Gödel's incompleteness theorems show that this approach is impossible even for a domain as simple as arithmetic?

Science doesn’t need to be complete. It needs to be useful (that’s what I value in it).

> Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed.

I have similar experiences with Wikipedia; if I want to know about something I generally go to Wikipedia first and just loads a bunch of the references. They usually pan out, but not infrequently the reference simply doesn't contain whatever the Wikipedia article claimed.

One of the problems with Wikipedia is that the citation syntax does not require (it's possible but quite rare) specifying what part of the preceding text the citation relates to. As a result it often covers, deceptively, only part of the sentence it's attached to, or the paragraph it's attached to, and it can get worse with editing which doesn't account for the citation's content.

I still remember one fake news site that took this to the extreme, in that it linked to a story that flat out didn't exist on the site it linked to. You clicked on the link, and you just ended up with a 404 error page.

The fact that fooled anyone should probably give you a worrying insight into how many people are willing to trust/distrust links without even clicking on them.

But yeah, either way, make sure the link actually goes somewhere, that it goes to a relevant page/article/video/whatever, and that said source does indeed say what the linking said says it does.

That's also a good reason for news orgs to have strict policies around never taking down articles or changing URLs. It happens enough to give cover to the behavior you cite.

News sites could also replace their 404 page with an explanation "there used to be an article here, but we decided to remove it because ____" or "there's never been an article at this address".

There's a HTTP status code for pages which were deleted: 410 Gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_...

This was famously used by Mark Pilgrim:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pilgrim#%22Disappearance%...

Has anyone ever seen this in the wild? I didn’t even know it existed. Who knew there were so many different status codes.

Seems that I edited my comment to add an example at the same time you posted yours.

I'm sure I've seen 410 in the wild, but it's pretty uncommon. If you're keeping track of things well enough to know that there used to be a page there in order to serve a 410, you're probably keeping track of things well enough to be able to do something better, like redirect to an updated URL.

> Who knew there were so many different status codes.

As an HTTP nerd, the authoritative listing of the different codes is: https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes

Note: Everything with a reference that's not RFC 7231 is an extension; don't use that status code unless you actually implement that extension. For example, don't use 401 (Unauthorized) instead of 403 (Forbidden) unless you actually implement the RFC 7235 Authentication extension.

GitLab does it for links to deleted repos!

I use it for APIs when an item gets marked as deleted, vs actually deleted... depends on the underlying data though.

I use it to mark pages that I have taken down for good [1]. I have also used 418 ("I'm a teapot") response code on my gopher server to discourage web bots from attempting to index the site.

Edit--added note

[1] For all the good it does. I just checked my logs and I still see requests for pages I marked as "gone" 15 years ago.

About five or six years ago I spent a long time making outrageous claims on Reddit, and I'd wrap various parts of it in link tags. The links would go to random nytime articles, random papers, or simply nowhere at all. Then I'd watch as the outrageous claim propagated (this in niche communities). It was absolutely terrifying.

I never, ever got called out.

EDIT: I'm remembering now I'd pretend to be all sorts of people, swapping hats within minutes, always waiting for someone to just pop open my post history and see that at one moment I'm a teacher and 5 minutes later a firefighter. It was kind of a joke, kind of an experiment, kind of an angsty setting-of-fire to the internet.

There is a huge asymmetry between the effort to make an outrageous claim and that to refute one.

> I never, ever got called out.

In Reddit parlance: ain't nobody got time for that

They also have an inherent information theoretic advantage over non-outrageous claims when consumed by someone who is unable to discern their veracity.

Could you expand on that? Are you saying the more outrageous a claim it's the more likely people are to believe it? That itself sounds like an outrageous claim to me, so I would like to see evidence for it.

"Another topic is derived from things which are thought to happen but are incredible, because it would never have been thought so, if they had not happened or almost happened. And further, these things are even more likely to be true; for we only believe in that which is, or that which is probable: if then a thing is incredible and not probable, it will be true; for it is not because it is probable and credible that we think it true." Aristotle, Rhetoric 2:23 (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...)

Wikipedia says it nicely:

> the "informational value" of a communicated message depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising [0]

Of course, this assumes the message is factual. If it's not factual then the message carries no information (aside from the information it implies about the sender). But, that assumes the receiver is able to discern whether or not the message is factual. If the receiver can't discern that, then it simply appears to be a highly informative message.

False outrageous claims have the further advantage that they are unconstrained by reality. True surprising claims are by nature less likely to occur. That's why they're surprising. But there is no probabilistic throttle on false outrageous claims - one can generate them at whatever frequency they desire.

Thus, false outrageous claims have an information theoretic advantage over true claims because they outnumber true surprising claims, and they appear to be more informative than true unsurprising claims. My argument isn't that the more outrageous a claim is, the more likely people are to believe it, per se. My argument is that outrageous claims get more attention from people because they are less likely, and those who are unable to discern that they are false will simply see them as highly informative.

You could probably argue further that the more frequently an outrageous claim is repeated, the less improbable it will sound. In other words, start with an outrageous claim to get peoples attention, and then repeat it a lot to normalize it and reduce doubt about it's validity.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

> There is a huge asymmetry between the effort to make an outrageous claim and that to refute one.

Asking "Got evidence for that?" is sufficient refutation for baseless claims.

Make the opposite of your claim with an alt account. Then challenge it for evidence. Now your position wins by default.

I think this is the part that ain't nobody for time for

If nobody's going to answer you, your position wins regardless.

To prevent a position from winning by default it only requires a very simple reply: ask for evidence.

Just because 1 side doesn't provide evidence doesn't mean the other side is correct. If neither side provides evidence then neither side is necessarily correct.

And in the absence of evidence, generally the simplest (common sense) explanation should be presumed most likely (Hanlon's Razor).

When I was in university one of my friends tried to win a bet at a bar by editing a Wikipedia page to add the outrageous claim he made. At first my trust in Wikipedia increased because it got removed in less then an hour. The next day it decreased, because he registered a free blog account, published one post with his outrageous claim in it (and basically nothing else), then edited Wikipedia again adding the blog as a source. That edit stayed up for years. He still tells that story when drinking with friends...

The thing about is that if you create the source, then link it back to Wikipedia, then reference it in Wikipedia, it will not likely go away...

I still remember one fake news site that took this to the extreme, in that it linked to a story that flat out didn't exist on the site it linked to.

More common what I see is these sites just link to other articles on the site as a "source" for claims made in more recent articles. You almost never see sources to external sites or resources, its just internal site links all the way down.

Many news sites will do this to keep you on-site instead of bouncing elsewhere.

But its still common to have links to outside sites and resources within a given article, which you just don't see on these more "alternative" news sites.

Almost every time I check a source in a Wikipedia article I get either a 404, or it actually links to the homepage of the target website, or the domain redirects to a YouTube channel, etc.

I arrived to the conclusion that nobody every check the source.

They started using archived articles for some links, that’s already an improvement IMHO.

you should be able to make an argument without resting primarily and directly on other people's words, even if you largely rest on other people's ideas. whether it convinces any particular person is largely out of your control, and shouldn't consume the debate. citations don't change that calculus.

Citations can give data, though. If your ideas are based on more than just your own experience, you need external data.

but then you run into the old saw about damn lies and statistics. the argument needs to stand on its own and be taken in good faith, otherwise discussion is futile.

(edit: that's not to say provide no links, just that it won't make the argument, per my other comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899088, ironically, a citation.)

If your argument is based on some fact (e.g. some number being above some threshold), then you absolutely need to back up that number to make the argument resolve into "it's most likely true". If you don't back the number up, then the argument resolves only to "if the data is indeed as argued, then it's most likely true".

Keeping beliefs with free variables in them is fine, IMO, as long as you're careful about not accidentally collapsing them into an outcome without having first checked the dependencies.

sure, i'd go one step further and note that there are no absolute certainties, so those free variables always exist, even implicitly. in that vein, most threshold numbers like that should at least come with uncertainty bounds (damn lies and statistics).

said another way, outside of math and formal logic, real-world arguments resolve at best to "if the data is indeed as argued, then it's most likely true" (perhaps gödel is relevant here, as @marcinzm referenced downthread[1], another citation!).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899111

I remember at a certain point I realized that the citations on cracked.com were often abused or flat out debunked the very thing the author claimed they did. I hadn't given up on the site yet, so I would post in the comments what the citations actually said. I'm still baffled by the generally negative reactions to doing so, but I do remember people saying things like "why should I trust you, some random dude in the comments, rather than a professional writer whose job it is to research these things?" Because it's a link to a website that anyone can read! But people will argue with you for 5 minutes rather than click on a link and read the surrounding few paragraphs to see that the writer took the source out of context.

Disinformation is pretty bad and hard to combat.

The common game my family will play is "I've done my research and it's XYZ" When asked "Oh, what resources did you use to land on XYZ?" It's very frequently met with silence.

The problem, as I see it, is that they'll read something on a facebook post which agrees with their existing biases. Over time they'll see the same thing reposted but with a slightly different twist and.. viola.. They've "researched" it.

A good example of this is when anti-vaccination comes up. If you've done your research, you know that vaccines are safe[0], effective[1], don't cause autism[2] and pretty much a good thing for most everyone (excluding immunocompromised and the very VERY few people that react to vaccines). Yet, still, I'll run into family on facebook that have "done their research" on the matter and generally can only link back to some anti-vaxx blog post for evidence (if that, often nothing).

What's worse, they'll completely dismiss any evidence to the contrary as being "shills", "biased", "payed off" or whatever other conspiracy theory they like. They've made the position their identity and refuting it makes them feel attacked.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/index.html [1] https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/graph-us... [2] https://vaccines.org.il/images/4/4e/Vaccines-are-not-associa...

What might be better would be some sort of reputation system. Something where I can see that other people that have looked into the person's citations confirm they actually say what they claim they say, on average (regardless of agreeing with their conclusions).

Reputation is everything, and it's so incredibly scarce today.

We could have different dimensions of Reputation (citation validity, logical argument validity, unsupported claim predictiveness, etc...)

Do you think reputation can be manipulated?

It's funny how we circle back to reputation - or, in other words, authority. People like to point out "appeals to authority" as fallacious (particularly when they don't like what's being said), but reputation is still one of the best heuristics for rapid evaluation of information that we have.

But then there's the issue whether the quoted authority actually said what's being quoted. Reputation is transitive, so you could technically chain it (a "web of trust" :)), but then again, looking at most regular people I know in real life, this doesn't work - it's hard to trust second-hand information even from a friend or family member, unless you know they're way above average in being pedantic about information provenance in their speech.

Unfortunately, most people I know will say "X is Y", where the correct thing to say would be "I remember reading 2 years ago in Foo that they claimed Bar said X is Y". This makes reports from such people pretty much entirely noise, as it's impossible to evaluate provenance.

> Time and time again I've found cited sources that don't say what was claimed.

I've seen that here on HN, too. Person 1 claims X. Person 2 asks for evidence. Person 1 posts a URL, as if it's evidence for X. But when you read the contents carefully, you realize that it doesn't actually provide any evidence for X. It provides evidence for something that's somewhere in the same general topic as X, but that's not what Person 2 asked for.

Just as often person 1 says something, providing no citations (but living in a world where we know that anyone can support/debunk with their own searches). Person 2 comes along and posts a retort with a number of citations, properly linked in the footer of their post.

HN upvotes person 2. Downvotes person 1 to the nether. Clearly they were debunked.

Only person 2's citations were noise [1]. They were just marginally connected nonsense [2] to add gravity to whatever else they were claiming as a credibility multiplier. They were playing the crowd [3], knowing that extraordinarily few will ever bother reading anything, and just want to browse past and give passing judgments.

This plays out on HN daily, and is spectacularly effective.

----CITATIONS-----

[1] - https://processing.org/reference/noise_.html

[2] - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/inside-the-cult-of-t...

[3] - https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote...

It's an appeal to authority that short circuits the fast nature of HN. Most people are just skimming and some will vote based citations.

@dang what do you think of a rule against citation spam?

Is it really so prevalent? I've followed up HN citations on topics I disagree with, and I've rarely found them to be rubbish.

I've seen it enough to chuckle when I see it now. In any scientific or medical discussion it is rampant. People will cite things to support claims they are making, but the things they cite don't concur at all. They might be related, but the obligation is on the reader to go through and parse whether that giant research paper supports what they're claiming which is a task that extremely few will undertake.

This is a good point although I would say that citations are still better than no citations as they at least give the basis for a reasonable discussion. Now that "evidence" for X has been cited, person 2 can come back and explain why the URL does not actually support X.

> I've seen that here on HN, too.

Oh yeah? Give us an example then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899838

Thank you. ;) That was the response I was hoping for.

Hahaha no problem, I almost restrain myself from it so dang or other mods wouldn't think it's pointless. But couldn't help myself and is something I see in HN sometimes, like it's own internal meme... hahaha

It occurs to me, though, that many people may not even click that link, or its content might disappear* one day, and its mere existence in the conversation might let readers assign more weight to the argument.

* Thanks to the good folks at Internet Archive for working this problem.

The extension’s author here. Just wanted to let you know that—apart from Chrome—it’s also available for Edge, and a beta version based on a (still unfinished) polyfill for Firefox. The same code also works on Safari 14, we hope to release it there, too. Install links: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/link-to-text-fragment#in...

How is it different from this bookmarklet?

https://twitter.com/austegard/status/1228150401427529728

The big difference is that the original intended text is encoded in the URL. An element-id fragment is better than just a URL but will often be less granular than the exact text being linked (e.g. a heading).

If you're looking to link a citation to a statement, having the text is far more useful since the person following the link doesn't have to now find the statement in a potentially large and broad section. Also, if the page has since changed and the text no longer substantiates the cited claim, that'll be immediately apparent.

The extension needs to be installed by both the creator and the receiver of the URL with the original intended text encoded into it?

The extension uses a new URL fragment addition that Chrome has shipped: https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment so these links will work on any Chrome/Chromium-based browser. (in non-Chromium browsers without the extension the link will load but the fragment wont be recognized)

The hope is that this is useful and adopted by other browser engines and links like this would eventually be interoperable.

Ohh nice! I wondered where scroll to fragment did lead to.

I have a lawyer friend who complains about this in the legal field. A brief may cite a case for a specific proposition. They have to be pretty thorough because there is a nonzero chance that the cited case doesn't actually stand for the proposition, and in some cases says exactly the opposite!

> As many of those who have read academic papers know, even claims with citations are often suspicious.

Yes, I've encountered that numerous times. One problem is the chain of strengthening citations; citation X supposedly proves Y, but it cites something less conclusive that cites something that has very weak evidence for Y.

Then there's the self-citation: citation X shows Y, but citation X is by the same author and cites something else by the same author and there's nothing solid at the bottom of the chain.

Then there's the authority-strengthening: a journal cites a less-rigorous journal which cites a book that cites a random person.

The point is that a citation is only the starting point for evaluating a claim. (The other conclusion is that I wasted a lot of time in the library researching claims for stupid internet arguments.)

This is disturbingly common in the legal world too. A judicial opinion will cite some earlier case as supporting a proposition, but if you dig into it, you'll find that the earlier case is merely tangential. (Or totally unrelated, or even completely contrary.)

Well, only because this is relevant to the bit about citations in academic papers: you may find what we're doing at scite interesting!

https://scite.ai/

You can see how papers are cited by others, see the context around the citation snippet, and whether others just mention, support, or dispute your findings.

Feedback is always welcomed (drop me a line at ashish@scite.ai if you have any thoughts)

also people shouldn't blindly be going to links on the internet posted by randos. It would be easy to post a script to write replies on comment threads linking to a malicious site.

its nice to have urls, but I think we all know deep down they wont change much in the grand scheme of things. I know when I see a quote on the internet, its almost assuredly fake, but if I am interested I can always just google it.

what field are you in? this is not my experience; citations follow a standard (chicago, ama, etc) for handling page numbers. there is of course citation in the sense of "i read these 3 books while studying a subject" so they go in even though you are not quoting them. weighted by readers accordingly

I work in fluid dynamics.

Page numbers for an article are standard. Page numbers for a specific piece of information are not. E.g., it's common for someone to write [1] but not [1, p. 528].

In fact, I recently had a typesetter seem confused about my use of the latter style, thinking that the pages referred to the article I wrote rather than the cited article.

I can't find it but the appropriate XKCD has a character make an outrageous claim and then tells the skeptic to check Wikipedia... in five minutes.

As an Academic I find the whole discussion and usual Wikipedia style request for sources doubtful and sometimes even comical. Of course I understand that it's often a good thing to provide a source for a claim in online discussions, but it's neither always necessary nor is there always a burden of proof on the person who makes a claim. Especially online people often confuse arguments with explicative discourse, I certainly have made that mistake in the past. If somebody explains something to you, better listen. You should be skeptical of any claims, whether they are in books, newspapers, or online forums. It's not as if peer review or printing books somehow eradicates errors. I've seen logic books full of mistakes and sloppy reasoning.

The most important thing for anyone is to keep a mindset that is aiming towards truth. If someone doesn't have that mindset, no amount of discussion will be fruitful. It will just go round and round in circles and get lost in an orgy of bogus sources. I could virtually prove anything to someone who believes anything that has been written, by selectively looking for the fitting sources.

The lesson I've learned from Usenet: Don't argue with people online, but allow them to teach you.

There is an additional trick that the media use which is generally referred to as 'the media sourcing itself'. To do so, article A will make a claim, and as evidence will cite article B. Upon inspection of Article B, you find that it is merely making the same claim. Frequently, article B will cite the supporting evidence, but not always.

Here's an example:

A top-level Ars Technica article claims "the US fossil fuel industry receiving huge subsidies, estimated at $649 billion in 2015 alone."[0] To support this claim, they don't link supporting evidence, but instead they link a Forbes article[1] which merely makes the same claim. Only by searching the Forbes article can you find a link to the actual supporting evidence [2], which, as it turns out, doesn't even support the original assertion.

[0]https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/us-green-economys-gr...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/united...

[2]https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

I didn't read the linked IMF paper but the summary seems to directly support the claim:

>The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion).

I assume the parent poster takes issue with the definition of “subsidy” in the paper, which is probably better called “unpriced externalities” in the context. (It’s still IMO a subsidy, but it’s not what we intuitively think of as such, and thus the data point is rather misleading when quoted in the press.)

Fair enough point.

I would argue that you can't really take issue with calling it a subsidy unless you're willing to take issue with the unpriced externalities.

If a government refuses to price them in it's effectively the same as directly subsidizing the present generations at expense of future ones.

I agree, however to ensure everyone knows what is being talked about, it should be called unpriced externalities, not “subsidies”. Overloading the word like that, without indicating that is what is happening, is begging for misunderstandings.

I mean, that's not a trick. That's totally legitimate. Obviously it means there's a chain of trust here - if Forbes is incorrect, then articles that cite it will also be incorrect. But that's the same as when citing an original paper.

(Obviously there is some difference - two different takes on the same original source are better than one take on a source, and another take on the first take - but it's not invalid or wrong to do this IMO.)

I'm sure there is often a case of incompetence at play... however, I'm also sure there is often an amount of dishonesty to say the least and outright evil at worst when news organizations do this.

Another problem is not understanding the differences that statistics play in terms of how those statistics are gathered (controlled experiment vs epidemiological study for example).

URI fragments would indeed be better, but you'd be relying on the page author to provide enough granularity. I like the concept of the Chrome extension, but would like to see it standardized since I don't use Chrome.

For my website ( https://ontherecord.live/ ) I'm relying on user feedback/manual moderation, which currently works but doesn't really scale.

I think bit rot is an even bigger problem (either that or people maliciously quoting their own page/a Wikipedia article, which they can then change). I'm considering using the Wayback Machine ( https://web.archive.org/ ) to preserve a copy of the page being quoted, similar to what Wikipedia is doing, because unlike a published scientific article web pages can and do change over time.

A youtuber demonstrating how hard it is to verify a citation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjlKIjLWq-Y

Even in research papers... often the summary isn't supported by the paper, it's often over-stated, simplified or outright lying.

Also, this is a huge part of why I don't like paywalls for research paid for by govt funding. It's really easy to get a summary, but actually getting to read the thing takes work, money or access that the general public doesn't have.

I hate URL fights.

I give little extra value to people providing links with their clams.

I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time.

Discussion on the internet is broken in most places (HN is less broken than most). I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually honest way and usually they respond with some bonkers links of their own that don't say what they think they're saying.

Much (not all) of the time I've given up providing links to basic information it doesn't change the conversation in any meaningful way. It's usually just an argument where folks who feel like URLs are some sort of scoring device.

I get the idea put forward here, but I don't know if it makes sense in an age where you can find an URL that says anything and discussion on the internet is so bad that nobody is really reading them anyway.

I frequently visit the links found in comments here. But in these instances I am reading someone else's "URL fight."

HN is certainly an exception I'll make for providing / reading links.

> Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it

I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

Only a small fraction of people that read comments will respond.

Plenty of viewers will probably check out the link and derive value from it, but won't have anything valuable to contribute to the discussion.

Antagonistic viewers that already strongly disagree will be much more likely to respond (and without reading the link), skewing your perception.

It helps me sometimes to remember that my conversation has an audience, and just because my opponent didn't learn anything doesn't mean that I wasted my breath.

I think it’s very worthwhile; it allows readers to judge the legitimacy and relevance of sources for claims made.

A big gripe I have about youtube links: I can't learn anything about the video from the link. Once in a blue moon a youtube source is actually good. But the odds are so low that I often wont even bother clicking.

I completely ignore YouTube links, if they are secondary, or tertiary sources. (They can be pretty good as primary sources. If someone claims that an event happened, and then links to a YouTube video of that event, that citation is often quite conclusive as to the validity of that claim.)

They are unsearchable, unskimmable, and require way too long to get through. And if someone links them with a particular timestamp in mind, because some fifty-second segment is the salient part of the link, then, at best, they are an appeal to authority.

You can't maintain an asynchronous conversation with a youtube video in the middle.

With a link I can scan for support of your position and mine. With the video the conversation just stops for 20 minutes while I watch a stupid video. And then I can't cite anything from it unless I'm a transcriptionist.

Agreed.

YouTube links are automatic ignore for me. Video that isn't a sound byte or "here is that thing happening exactly" is a horrible way to consume information related to a discussion.

Good point. I derive a lot of value as a reader from the ability to verify someones claims.

>it allows readers to judge the legitimacy and relevance of sources for claims made.

And that leads to a world where HN commenters trip over each other in a rush proclaim that Ghandi is morally equivalent to Atilla the Hun because he once said something that they can twist as not being totally in support of whatever the fashionable morals of the minute are.

Point is that if people don't like what they read they'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to delegitimize the source even if it's a squeaky clean source.

I think that happens much less often than you think. It just so happens that stubbornly opinionated people are more likely to respond, so that's what we see.

The emptier cans rattle loudest.

> And that leads to a world where HN commenters trip over each other in a rush proclaim that Ghandi is morally equivalent to Atilla the Hun because he once said something that they can twist as not being totally in support of whatever the fashionable morals of the minute are. Point is that if people don't like what they read they'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to delegitimize the source even if it's a squeaky clean source.

There seems to be a natural tendency to believe that people do this deliberately/consciously, but if you look at it from a psychology/neuroscience perspective, I think it seems more likely that this is just the nature of the mind. The mind evolved to make decisions, and there is a trade-off between accuracy and speed. When the mind is considering something, there is (something like) massively parallel, high-dimensional computing going on under the covers, and then an "answer" is calculated and pushed up to the conscious level. And if this answer is questioned, a secondary process of post-hoc rationalization [1] will kick in to justify the conclusion. But if you really think about it, this whole process is typically the equivalent of educated guessing.

I don't think it's very controversial in 2020 to say that our perception of reality and cognition is quite a ways off of the objective truth of what is really going on, and this applies to everyone.

Above, @duxup says:

> I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually honest way and usually they respond with some bonkers links of their own that don't say what they think they're saying.

To that I say: look a little closer. Once one has gone through this work (for years or many decades), you then have a massive amount of data (of unknown quality/accuracy) resulting from direct observation of actual human behavior, as opposed to extremely low-dimensional and inaccurate (but confidently stated, and peer-reviewed!!) insight into human behavior. My conclusion from this process (and reading about the mind) has brought me to the tentative conclusion that most people usually only kinda know what they're talking about. Reality is far too complex (and our data sources too sparse and inaccurate, and our language too limiting, and so forth and so on) for the human mind to properly process even mildly complex problems with high accuracy.

But...all is not lost. If knowledge of this phenomenon somehow became widespread, what outcomes might mankind be able to bring about? Consider the amazing benefits that things like the first enlightenment [2] and the industrial revolution brought to mankind. Then, imagine if we could have something like another enlightenment, that consolidates and corrects (to the best of our current collective abilities) all the aggregate knowledge that is currently scattered all over the place (in books, scientific studies, the internet, within people's minds, etc), and brings widespread awareness and acceptance (or at least consideration of the possibility) of the fallibility of the human mind, and our corresponding beliefs - what might mankind then accomplish?

I think there's lots of reason for optimism, you just have to look for it (and support/promote it, to increase the likelihood of it happening, as nature seems to not guarantee an optimal outcome).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

Page 58 of "The Art of Conversing With Men" (an 1805 translation of a 1788 work by Knigge) shows that trolls were a thing in the eighteenth century:

> "There are people who pretend to know every thing better than others, contradict every one, frequently against their own conviction, merely for the sake of disputing. There are others who are fond of speaking in parodoxes, and accustomed to maintain assertions which no sensible man can take seriously in the sense in which they utter them, from no other motive than to provoke contradiction; there are finally others whom the French call querelleurs (wranglers,) that studiously seek opportunities to engage in personal disputes..."

After saying "Don't Feed The Trolls", a phrase on page 59 shows that eighteenth century mores did differ from twenty-first: "...it is extremely wrong to use against a wrangler any other weapon than contempt, or at most a cane, if he carry his impudence too far..."

https://books.google.ch/books?id=PtQGAAAAcAAJ&printsec=front...

original available at https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/knigge/umgang/chap005.html §8

> "Es gibt Menschen, die alles besser wissen wollen, allem widersprechen, was man vorbringt, oft gegen eigne Überzeugung widersprechen, um nur das Vergnügen zu haben, disputieren zu können; andre setzen eine Ehre darin, Paradoxa zu sprechen, Dinge zu behaupten, die kein Vernünftiger irgend ernstlich also meinen kann, bloß damit man mit ihnen streiten solle; endlich noch andre, die man Querelleurs, Stänker nennt, suchen vorsätzlich Gelegenheit zu persönlichem Zanke"

> "...und der hat doppelt unrecht, der gegen einen sogenannten Stänker mit andern Waffen als mit Verachtung, oder, wenn es ihm gar zu nahe gelegt wird, anders als mit einem geschmeidigen spanischen Rohre kämpft..."

It is a bit of an art to separate those who are discussing a point for sake of clarity or persuasion, from these bastards whose only goal is to get a rise out of you or consume your time with their own amusement.

Disengaging from those conversations is easier though. Don't answer, walk away, just stop playing their game. Although there is a part of me that wants to shout them down and ridicule them, that plays right into their bs as well.

Sigh. Hell is other people.

My filter is politeness.

If someone is polite to me while "tricking" me into wasting my time providing sources, I do have to wonder who, if anyone, was actually tricked.

On the other hand, life is too short to waste talking to people who start sentences with "you do realize...," no matter how earnest.

> Disengaging from those conversations is easier though.

Assuming you've accurately identified one.

> Don't answer, walk away, just stop playing their game. Although there is a part of me that wants to shout them down and ridicule them, that plays right into their bs as well.

Assuming that you have not misunderstood their intended message, or made a mistake in the formation of your belief on the matter.

My comment right here could easily be considered (evaluated as) an example of "BS". However, here it is useful to realize that there are many ways to evaluate many things, that can produce extremely different conclusions. Sometimes conclusions can even be completely contradictory, while simultaneously being objectively correct.

You could (sometimes) view it as a benefit though. Somebody trying to poke holes into your position, even if they are not being fair, is still practice for defending your position. If you're not well-versed in defending it, then you might end up discovering better evidence or it could make you vary of problems with your position.

Obviously you can't do this every time. It's not at all wrong to blow off those that are simply trying to get a rise out of you. However, in the rare cases that you do engage them, you can rest knowing that you didn't entirely waste your time.

To be honest, lately I've been coming around to the idea that a culture that permits you to simply punch someone who walks up to you and flagrantly insults your spouse is probably more civilized than our culture where the puncher faces years of jail time, while the troll gets to do it risk-free.

Let me explicitly say I don't mean this as something to draw out much farther than the example I give. I don't mean to punch people who merely disagree with you politically, or beating them excessively, or any other bizarre extrapolation you may want to accuse me of. It doesn't even particularly apply online since there's no physical interaction component. I'm just thinking, you know, you get what you reward, and when you permit endless, endless trolling but punish the natural human reactions to it, you're going to get a culture of trolls and churlishness. We're paradoxically both too nice and too churlish as a culture right now.

https://centerforinquiry.org/news/buzz_aldrin_punches_moon-l... (& note the punch wasn't for the conspiracy or denial, it was for flat-out insult.)

(There is moderation in the process, in that generally the people around you are going to need to mostly agree that was justified. This prevents total chaos. One must aggressively, persistently, and willfully step over the cultural lines for this, it is not something that would be deployed for every minor disagreement.)

Masterfully written, sir or ma'am. I agree wholeheartedly.

The existing situation favors quick-witted people who can fire back another insult and come away unharmed. But your proposal favors physically advantaged people who are strong/brave/skillful enough to punch someone. I don't think it's clearly better, just different.

It's also how it works in lawless societies where everyone has to protect their honor using violence otherwise they'll be seen as an easy target and get abused by everyone else. That includes, school, prison, and countries with poor rule of law. It seems like a default way for humans to behave in the absence of civilization.

It's also an almost uniquely male behavior, so women wouldn't really function in this system very well. They may make alliances with and become dependent on men to protect their honor on their behalf.

The notion of beating jackasses with a walking cane is supremely satisfying.

Arguments are for the spectators.

online arguments are for spectators now because we don't have effective moderation and because our formats don't promote this kind of exchange

philip tetlock claims that constructive arguments happen in relatively small high-trust communities where people are incentivized to get the truth, accountable for being wrong, and don't know the alignment of their audience.

Thanks for the mention of Philip Tetlock, I found and just read this recent interview with Tyler Cowen and it's very interesting: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/philip-e-tetlock... (audio & transcription)

Yeah that's the truth.

More and more often as a sort of puritanism takes over replies have near 0 to do with me.

I'll put forth an idea X, and someone will maybe think (sometimes reasonably, sometimes less so...) it also supports another idea Y.

I'll be all "oh man no not Y".

And I'll get a diatribe about how I support Y ... despite explicitly saying that we both agree that Y is bad...

It sometimes feels like in most places nobody believes anyone is honest and just is looking to riff off some tangential thing and yell at people.

>I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time.

Demanding citations you don't plan to read, to either waste a person's time or to make them look unreliable, is a tactic I've seen used so often I normally don't care to provide links. Instead, I'll just point out some 'so you agree with my argument but doubt data backs it up?' at which point, if they respond, it'll be a negative indicating a link wasn't relevant except to waste my time.

Edit: To clarify, I mean discussions in other sites.

As someone who gets censored for wrongthink routinely, I’ve taken up having GitHub repos of links so it’s easy to support my point.

Case in point: I’m “banned” on HN because @dang thinks my genuine view, calmly stated is inherently a flame war and I shouldn’t be allowed to join the conversation.

Flame wars aren't always launched or avoided due to the level-headedness of rhetorical delivery

I don't know which view it is you're talking about, but what @dang did isn't universally wrong. If the view is something that is as close as possible to objectively wrong, in the moral sense, as something could be, I'd say it's justified.

An example of this could be genuinely stating "Hitler did nothing wrong" or "black people deserve slavery". You know, reprehensible stuff. There's no reasonable way to have that discussion. How do you debate whether a large minority is inherently sub-human? Like, I'm sure a Neo-Nazi would be able to calmly explain their views without attacking me (a white man) personally, verbally, or physically. But their view is inherently an attack on the humanity of other people.

To be clear, I'm not saying you are actually a Neo-Nazi or a racist. They're just very, very clear-cut examples of the point I'm trying to make. Another example could be that someone stating that every LISP programmer is a child molester. There's no flamewar in the comment itself, but it's a view that can't be expressed without inciting one.

Yet another example could be thinking that every person earning more than $50k is a capitalist pig and deserve the guillotine. Again, calmly stated as a matter of fact. But it's also calling for the execution of a large part of this site's audience. It would inherently cause a flamewar too.

All of these examples are extreme, but I think the point that some views inherently having a piggybacking flamewar has been made. Where @dang decides to draw the line between controversial point with legitimate room for discussion, and views so abhorrent or nonsensical that it's easier to simply ban users perpetuating them is up to their discretion.

I also don't think @dang bans people because of a single comment, but rather someone continually pushing the view that inherently leads to flamewars.

Can you point to any HN documentation which is misleading in this regard?

So that is to say, where does HN have a discrepancy between what it "says on the box", and what's "in the box"?

Where or how can a HN visitor be led into believing that HN is a site where one can post anything whatsoever without facing a moderating mechanism, as long as the material has a calm tone without any abusive language or personal attacks?

>Edit: To clarify, I mean discussions in other sites.

"to clarify" being roughly analogous to "before y'all see what I've written and rush to hit the 'make the wrongthink gray' button before you understand what I've said".

Nobody ever got rewarded for trash-talking the platform they were talking on. It's kind of funny to see all throughout these comments people are taking great pains to exempt HN from criticism when pretty much every social media site has these problems and it's a matter of degrees.

It was because I was primarily thinking about reddit when I was posting and only after posting did I consider that someone might think I meant on this site. So I decided to immediately edit to clarify any potential confusion, as I do honestly find this place to have one of the best chances of 'good faith' discussions happening.

That isn't to say discussions here are perfect. Sometimes I do find people will stereotype or strawman my argument, but I find it happens less here than in any other site and to enough of an extent I don't find it influencing my discussions.

> Demanding citations you don't plan to read

Yes, I often ask for a citation, and make a point to at least always scan them when provided, out of respect for someone putting in that effort on my behalf.

And often, turns out they are right and I make a point to sincerely thank them for the new information.

So yes, requesting a citation and then not reading it is extremely rude.

> providing links ... when called out

People got so used to seeing links up to the point a fight might end in a "URL request": you have to sustain your claims by bringing a link to the discussion, and if you fail to do so, you are wrong. Like if every research and every paper, study or whatever is publicly accessible and indexed.

If am I wrong, please provide a link to a study which demonstrates it.

I claim there is a tea pot in orbit around the sun. I can’t sustain my claims by bringing a link, you need to provide reference to prove that I am wrong.

I mean I have a teapot on my stove. It's orbiting the sun. So you're correct.

*I know what reference you're making, I just like to be a pain. :)

But there are many tea pots orbiting the sun, the path they follow is a bit weird though ^_^

If you made the claim then the burden of proof is on you. The thing I was talking about is that I can automatically win the fight by asking you to provide a link.

Edit to add: a link that I know for sure you won't be able (or will be very difficult for you) to provide.

While difficult for me to characterize, I feel that there is a middle ground for more casual interactions that doesn't call for maximum rigor so as to fend off the most radical claims. In practice, we can just dismiss them without engaging.

The challenge with the link fights is often about the difference between data and conclusions.

For example, if I claim that "marriage has a positive impact on men" then cite a bunch of data showing that married men live longer and make more money on average etc... Have I truly proven my conclusion that marriage benefits men? Or does the same data show that healthy men with jobs are more likely to get married? Yet, I will stubbornly say that citation makes the conclusion unequivocal.

9/10 times the disagreement isn't data/citations but conclusions or criteria.

Agreed.

What the article actually means / we should think about it is a big part of it.

For a while there were some accounts on reddit (and even HN) posting the same collection of links with regards to a particular topic. The links even came in the same order each time ;) It always came up with regard to a particular nation and a specific topic. (for the record they're long since gone, at least with those links)

Anyway one of the articles was a US university professor who said something about some other countries actions and so forth.

To the astroturfers that was supposed to mean something, X.

What it really meant was a university professor said that if the data supplied by that country is true that it means that they maybe did Y.

The article was was miles and miles away from X.

Granted those were astroturfers, but I see the same issues with folks who honestly believe a rando quote means something significant.

I often find myself asking people about their links "What do you feel that article means?"

> 9/10 times the disagreement isn't data/citations but conclusions or criteria.

Or assumptions behind the cited data, and effect size.

What I've seen very often (particularly around sketchy nutrition discussions about "natural" things and "evil chemicals") is that quoted research seems to support a given conclusion, but under assumptions that do not apply to the argument at all, or significance is so low as to make the result useless.

Some study showing that a bunch of mice got cancer after getting injected with more artificial sweetener than you'd drink in a year does not show that artificial sweetener causes cancer in men. A study that says you get 0.003% greater chance of cancer from eating red meat every day has an effect size so small it's probably bullshit, but even if, 0.003% increase is not something worth caring about at all.

I've seen even people who will attempt to discredit the data you've shown with kind of reasonable points like "the data is biased too, because it was collected by people who have the same bias". Well, yeah, that's possible, I guess... but if that's the case, then no discussion is possible at all and we have to rely on the feelings and intuitions of the people involved... and we all know how reliable that is.

Data interpretation is pretty hard and we get it wrong so often.

I'm such a buzzkill when people show a graph that does not say what they think it says.

You are getting close to just saying it's impossible to know anything and giving up.

The point of citing studies is to have some kind of empirical starting point for discussion, beyond just anecdata or ideology. Not as a declaration of absolute truth.

> 9/10 times the disagreement isn't data/citations but conclusions or criteria.

If it's not a good faith discussion, it's best to avoid those interactions entirely, or end them as quickly as possible to not waste your time.

furthermore, calling for citations is primarily an expression of disbelief, not a furthering of discussion.

either the argument was indeed faulty, in which case the responder should call out the weakness directly, or the responder has no specific objection but wants simply to object. it's lazy and should be discouraged (e.g., downvoted). another lazy response is providing links without summarizing the linked content, but i digress.

citations can buttress but never make an argument.

this of course is different from the memes that the author seems to be targeting, which don't make sound arguments in the first place, and no citation will make them rational. it's best to simply ignore those.

Why is expressing disbelief less furthering of discussion than citation-free expression of belief?

because in the first instance, all you're saying is "prove it", implying that the prior reasoning was deficient without specifying the insufficiency. that's vague, lazy, and ultimately unproductive/stifling. at least point out the deficiency, thus furthering the discussion.

the counter is not a non-furthering "citation-free expression of belief", but rather a rationale, a chain of observations leading to a reasonable conclusion, which can largely stand on its own and also furthers the discussion.

A full rationale is a nice ideal, but if you don't have time to research and compose a full rationale, silence is not always the best alternative.

agreed, no one expects footnoted essays in discussion forums, but just saying "prove it" is lazy and no rationale at all. folks have to put some effort in to further the discussion. they shouldn't expect a response otherwise.

Memes can be used for disinformation, so sharing only what you can verify makes you a good citizen.

One of the chief benefits I find to providing links when in a discussion is - I get to realise I'm wrong before I've posted. I'll have some half-remembered quote or statistic in my head and I want to provide a link to evidence it. But after finding a decent source I find that I've misremembered something - usually it's a minor detail but sometimes not and sometimes it undermines the point I was going to make.

That kind of self-fact checking is enormously useful since i) I look less of a fool and much more importantly ii) Less bullshit is propagated overall.

I'm not sure how you can know that "nobody is really reading [your links]" - on most forums the number of people reading a thread will heavily outnumber the people participating. Who knows how many people are reading your links, perhaps months later?

Even when not in a discussion/debate I think providing a link is just good manners. Searching for something might only take 2-3 minutes but why should every single one of your readers have to do that? Isn't it more efficient that I do it once and provide the link? This is especially true when there are multiple versions/editions of (for example) videos with very similar titles but different quality or subtly different content. A URL helps to say "This is the specific thing I was talking about".

That's a really good point. That does happen to me when I go looking and find I misremembered some details and it turns out... yeah I'm wrong.

I find it useful to provide sources even to just make sure I don't misrepresent something myself. Many times when I felt like posting an outraged comment to disagree with someone, after looking for sources for my points, I just gave up because apparently, I was wrong.

Sometimes you just misremember things... sometimes you're just ignorant on a topic and what you've heard is all secondhand (and wrong). Providing sources is not something you do only for others, you should do for yourself.

There are a lot of documented rhetorical devices that can deflect your opponent, and one of them is sometimes called "assigning homework".

A URI that is a 3 minute read is fine. But you'll see people say they won't even entertain a discussion with a person until they have read a book, and that is not a road to dialog.

This seems to be more an argument for avoiding internet discussion altogether.

I think it makes sense to put links for those who read. I disconsider a lot of stuff because I can't be bothered checking. If your goal is having a great discussion, then the links may have little effect. However, if your goal is to inform (including all the people who will not reply), then providing links is great.

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 just see a URI and go "OK, I am convinced ty" and automatically pick up the pitchforks against those without. I doubt even newspapers did this. It sounds like a good idea but only on an open internet and not what we have today.

>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.

I don't think you even need a large graph! People have observed this happening with just two nodes, where one of the nodes is Wikipedia [1] — some website states information they learned on (or copied from) Wikipedia, and then Wikipedia cites that website as a primary source.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/wikipedia-citogenesis-c...

Then hundreds of websites cite the wikipedia article, some without revealing their source, then become additional citations for the Wikipedia article.

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.

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.

I didn't want to imply we automatically trust it more, but just skimming through a thread I realize that thats what usually happens. It is likely because I don't consume content in such a way (I am guilty of just reading the headline sometime and jumping to personal conclusions) but to even go through a normal thread it will feel very tiring to go and validate all claims.

It sounds very lazy of me but I usually just don't trust the web in general. I don't really have anything valuable on my computer but I still get scared some site will serve me malware. So now to get through a normal discussion we will have linked sources and discussions about the sources (with more required sources ofc). When do we get to the meat of the content? I realize HNers are more capable in digging through sources, but I'd like to think the rest of the users are more lazy-scared like me, so I am going off of that experience.

And ofcourse wild claims without any sources will always be ringing bells for me, I just want to hear the same amount of bells with the sourced claims as well.

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.

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 wouldn't just want to suppress dissidents.

I have no facebook account and people say it is really bad there, but I also think major news networks spread bullshit in regular intervals. Doesn't mean everything they report is bullshit, but the normal citizen would be cancelled already.

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 check sources.

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.

What are you basing that on?

My understanding is that text messaging is rarely used for knowledge sharing, and is primarily used for social bonding[0]. In my own experience, I never receive such messages from individuals that aren't aware that I already agree with their intended interpretation.

0: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221270858_A_large_s...

Searching and (mostly) debunking the things my mom forwards me has been a long time hobby of mine. Snopes has made my job so much easier, now I can just hit reply and paste the Snopes link back to her.

The internet is filled with so much easily accessible information, it's incredible, but you need the basic skills to determine what claims to believe in order to make any sense of it.

Now if only my family could believe Snopes. They are too set in their thoughts to believe not everything is some conspiracy theory.

Now when I debunk stuff off Facebook they continue to disagree with me because I don't have "all the facts", not like they do either.

Sometimes a simple thing is just too simple for them, those coin shortages really are some sort of mass government takeover and not just caused by people not paying with coins as much & places being shutdown and less likely to redistribute coins back into the economy. sigh

... Now for my actual rant.. While I feel pointless I like to show for contrast.

Now if I actually bring up the attorney general for the US state of Oregon suing the Feds for actually kidnapping people eh... That's apparently not an interesting story and protesters or rioters in their eyes deserve it. I understand I don't know the whole story, but I think there is something there to follow.

As someone said to me recently, this is basically Vietnam story wise. Extremes on both sides.

Lol, my URL links, despite not thinking it helps much because I start off with the bias thinking this is wrong, because of the many different videos across the country showing protesters are not all rioters. And the freedom to protest is a right in my eyes. Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence.

And yes, I know Obama signed this into law so legally the Feds have the right to randomly nap you but I still think it's a very questionable law.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6997452-Markpettibon...

https://twitter.com/stoggrd/status/1282432033533210625?s=20

https://twitter.com/TrumpIsApandemc/status/12847377794239037...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53460495

They need to understand that Snopes is not an authoritative source on its own. It provides links to other sources that provide information about the claim.

People also need to understand that those links are also not authoritative, and that what links are provided (and ones that are not) are a result of human choice, and humans are known to be fallible in many different ways.

Sorry, maybe I am burned on that already, but that is what I often hear when people bring up misinformation. That is the feedback legislators often give on that topic.

Certainly a good idea to search for some background. I think the velocity of social media might encourage people to skip that step, made the mistake myself too. People want to be the first to share this "hot" news with their peers.

I think reducing expectations of users towards content on the net could help as educational measure. Treat it as false until you know better yourself.

I feel that the whole misinformation thing is overblown too. Like you, I do not have a facebook account, so maybe our s/n ratio is better than most.

I used to get a lot of chain emails that had misleading or exaggerated information. I suspect that channel dried up and moved to facebook.

That would make sense for anyone who doesn’t think democracy is worth preserving, or doesn’t know the dependency it has on the degree to which citizens are informed. Brandolini’s Law implies that there is a latency between disinformation and its disinfection via sunlight that can be exploited to tip elections. Some of us aren’t so eager to see the whole world turn into a collection of authoritarian mafia states.

That conclusion is reaching and in my opinion can become anti-democratic as well.

You don't get informed citizens through content control, you get them through education and being critical. It isn't a huge leap to suggest information should be distrusted by default.

The problem with authority on truth is almost obvious. So there is just the alternative to educate your fellow citizens in the hope that they don't fall for populism.

Otherwise you don't just have people trying to manipulate the public against you and instead those that like freedom of opinion and information. Both are hard requirements for democracy.

Also anti-democratic can be to conjure at threat that can only be defeated through x, in this case stricter content control.

The majority of “misinformation” I’ve seen (entirely on reddit) isn’t straight up lies. It’s more like reposting an old article on a current topic or leaving out information.

When Harvard announced remote class plans, Reddit had a front page article on r/all about it - but it was an article that was a month old about their old plan.

It would be so easy for people to read that title (old info), have their friend ask if they saw the news about Harvard, and then have basically been manipulated by misinformation.

Well, that's a bit broad interpretation of 'manipulated'.

If someone legitimately didn't know that there was more recent information, and made that post, it would be reasonable to post the more up to date info in whatever way makes it most helpful.

Any information you get from anywhere but your own senses needs to be checked in proportion to its timeliness, relevance, sources, bias, all the usual.

It's only that the current Internet speed has so much potentially coming at you that makes it a more complicated triage plan.

> The majority of “misinformation” I’ve seen (entirely on reddit) isn’t straight up lies. It’s more like reposting an old article on a current topic or leaving out information.

IIRC, that's a key tactic for spreading disinformation. It's most disruptive when it contains 1% truth and 99% lies than when it's 100% lies.

Take PizzaGate for instance: the pizza parlor in question exists, has a lot of connections to various politicians, and was directly talked about in the leaked Podesta emails. Those facts add a little bit of believability that makes it easier to suck people into the big lie.

It is even more insidious when it include 90% Truth, omitting a critical 10%.

So like the classic game of "telephone", but amplified by a million by the Internet.

You make a good point, in that this is likely the source of even more disinformation than deliberately placed "fake news".

> Doesn't mean I want a babysitter cleaning everything up, even if I thought they wouldn't just want to suppress dissidents.

No, but it is critical that we start educating our citizens to the point where they no longer need babysitters to evaluate truth claims for them, but can do basic research and fact checking on their own.

Completely tangential, I never understand why people use URI instead of URL. He obviously means URL and goes an abstraction lower. You could also say without the corresponding internet uniquely scheme or whatever.

Sorry for the rant. But I am missing something?

The difference between URI and URL is practically meaningless except to a very small circle of specialists. Noone uses the name "URI", even when they are talking about one. Except if they explicitly want to signal their membership in that circle of experts.

Am I wrong to suppose that L is locator and I is indicator, thus I being a more broadly term and a somewhat nerdy term for Source?

L is locator, I is identifier. URLs are a subset of URIs. Both start with a schema (something:...), but URIs lack the information about the location and way to get at a resource. The canonical example for identifier-but-not-location is an ISBN or DOI. That interpretation however requires a very peculiar interpretation of "location", because imho "where can I read about that" can precisely be answered by "ISBN ...". The usual copout "but you don't know where the next library will be" also makes all the traditional URLs non-locations, because you then also don't always know where the next browser is or how to operate it.

The rest of the responsible RFC is also not very useful: https://danielmiessler.com/study/difference-between-uri-url/

URIs can lack the information. Not necessarily.

Being too lazy to go ready RFCs on a Monday morning, is what a valid schema consists of spelled out? Is `isbn://0441569595` a valid URI? If so, is there a standardized list of schemas?

Read the article, someone already read the RFC for you. To your questions: Yes. Almost, urn:isbn:123-4567-89 (URNs are something I neglected to mention to keep things simple). Yes, the IANA maintains a registry.

I is Identifier.

It's broader in the sense that every URL is a URI, but the converse is not true.

URI somewhat nerdier because it's lesser known.

uri encompasses/superset of both url and urn (there was also urc that went no where). urls have a "scheme" (http/ftp/gopher/etc) to access the resource, while urn is a persistent non-location based type of name identifier e.g. urn:ietf:rfc:2648

I'm the author of the blog post. It's a good question but, yes, you are missing something. Mostly me being an idiot.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/it-is-spelled-url/

I usually spell it upper-u upper-r lower-L specifically to annoy both sides of the argument.

(I'm not sure why the submitter substituted the l for I.)

> (I'm not sure why the submitter substituted the l for I.)

Sounds like they fell victim to your deliberate trolling. Is that not an expected outcome?

I, for one, am amused at the implication that we should trust an inaccessible file:// link...

LOL! That's hilarious, love the URl, you could take it a step further with UR1.

Anyway, digged your article, hope I didn't come off as pedantic, thanks for taking it with humor :)

Probably because the blog url does as well: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/07/any-claim-without-a-uri-sho...

In the general case of an old newspaper which may not be scanned and online, a URI (i.e., an indentifier) is called for; in the case of an old newspaper which has been scanned, a URL is called for.

The distinction is that an identifier identifies a resource; a locator states where it is located.

'My grand-father's diary, 4 July 1930' is a resource identifier (but not a URI); urn:isbn:0-486-27557-4 is a URI, but not a URL; https://news.ycombinator.com/ is a URL.

All URLs are URIs (as other people have noted), but the distinction is less important as time goes on. I think W3C's "URIs, URLs, and URNs: Clarifications and Recommendations 1.0"[0] does a good job explaining the reasons why. Additionally, it mentions the proposed, but never accepted, Universal Resource Citation (URC). Sounds like just what social media needs these days!

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/#classical

Saying URI instead of URL may be technically correct sometimes but it does seem needlessly confusing.

Almost like it's done intentionally to get smug satisfaction when being asked "what's a URI?" I guess that can be a bad faith interpretation but come on who doesn't know plenty of people like that in real life.

Any claim with a URI should also be treated with suspicion.

There is plenty of reliable information locked away in offline books and government documents and all kinds of other non Google-able locations. This is true even for brand new information (which is why we continue to have “leaks”). Meanwhile there is plenty of misinformation with URIs.

I would go so far as to say online status is almost orthogonal to accuracy, except that in theory at least online information is more readily disproven.

(Never mind that the whole core example of the article is off. The sketchy unsourced image also has a URI.)

> Any claim with a URI should also be treated with suspicion.

Agreed. I've noticed a huge uptick of "here is a random YouTuber's 45 minute rant about X" used as "evidence" in discussions. Opting to not watch it in its entirety is then dismissed as being unwilling to discuss; watching it and picking it apart leads to "oh, but you haven't seen his OTHER videos".

Sounds like run-of-the-mill bad faith discussion :/

Not a URI -- a citation, which may or may not include a URI.

Not all academic literature has been digitized, you know. (As someone who hunts down a lot of citations, you can trust me on that.)

Also URI's break, while citations include enough information (publisher, title, author, etc.) that the source can be found regardless.

I begin to think about how to build a linter/scorecard for this sort of stuff.

Example linter rules:

  This article does not have a source.
  This article has no sources from a known resource [this community] find reputable.  
  This article has a source from a source known to this community to be non-reputable.
  This article has a "shallow" source such as a blog (tumblr, medium, blogspot, youtube)

Probably would need a mechanism to build/aggregate/crowdsource reputable source lists.

edit: formatting

I can really recommend having a look through the blog Yesterday's Print that's mentioned in the post [1]. It's an excellent collection of some interesting, relatable, and humorous snippets from ca. a hundred years ago.

This one they posted about a year ago stuck with me [2].

The saying, "Life is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap. -- The Cincinnati Enquirer, Ohio, February 21, 1947.

[1] https://yesterdaysprint.tumblr.com/

[2] https://yesterdaysprint.tumblr.com/post/176557878119/the-cin...

Can we "pin" this to HN front page in perpetuity?

I'm joking but I'm also serious. It's (IMO) basic hygiene at this point.

The Internet used to be like Burning Man, today it's more like Bangkok.

Flipping it around what this really means is that taking any particular assertion made online seriously without some "certificate" (same root as "certain") as to who stands by it, is wildly, childishly, naive. (Including that one, and this one.)

The real question (as alluded to in TFA) is, "Whom do you trust?"

> 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.

While I agree, what does the URl in this particular case tell us? Is it a true quote? Does the new context change its meaning? Can someone please elaborate, I don’t get it.

> Treat any claim without a URl as suspicious.

This assumes that the web is the only information source you should be using as a reference. You definitely should cite your sources if you can, but saying they have to be web soruces is a pretty limiting requirement.

The tumblr page that gave the print citation did just fine.

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 clearly not meant to convince, only entertain.

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.

It’s strange, because a mask can mask identity, so why would you be embarrassed if few can recognize you?

I ranted about one of these on facebook yesterday. Attached to a stock photo of an Amish lumber worker:

> I had a conversation with an Amish gentleman yesterday while I was loading at a mill, and at the end of the conversation he asked me one question that should really get one thinking. He asked "Do you know why this virus hasn't affected us yet?" no "well because we don't have television"

The good friend who posted this was like, "this really got me thinking!"

(I presumed the subtext was that this virus is just blown out of proportion.)

My response was -- WHY? Why do we even assume this quote is TRUE? And why would you let fake things like this give you something to think about?

These are no better than the junk faxes people used to pass around claiming Proctor & Gamble worshiped the devil. I was kind of glad I stopped getting them in email from relatives because they moved to facebook instead, but ... so much of our society's ... gestalt? mindset? ... is formed by these junk memes being passed around as truth. (And this isn't unique to one political persuasion.)

The best evidence that Facebook and Twitter are drugs I think is that for some reason brains turn off when consuming media on them.

Where has our critical thinking gone? We’re hopeless as a society without it.

On a somewhat related note, here's an enjoyable read about how citations in scholarly papers can sometimes mask shoddy thinking and spread "Academic urban legends":

> Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. Some of these rumors appear so frequently, and in such complex, colorful, and entertaining ways that we can think of them as academic urban legends. The explanation for this phenomenon is usually that authors have lazily, sloppily, or fraudulently employed sources, and peer reviewers and editors have not discovered these weaknesses in the manuscripts during evaluation. To illustrate this phenomenon, I draw upon a remarkable case in which a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron. Through this example, I demonstrate how an academic urban legend can be conceived and born, and can continue to grow and reproduce within academia and beyond.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063127145356...

I agree, but even that isn't any kind of guarantee.

I have noticed that many sites simply repost single-origin garbage, so it can easily look like it's multi-sourced.

Scammers and politrolls use this all the time. Marketers work really hard to get talking points pushed out to as many outlets as possible, so the "origin" may be different, but the text all came from one place.

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet." -Benjamin Franklin

I believe that there are two things at play here: 1. epistemology (a.k.a. ToK - Theory of Knowledge) and 2. emotion vs rationality.

What the author says should be completely natural to a person who is has studied ToK and who is in a rather rational state of mind.

A person who doesn't understand the problem of ToK would simply be oblivious.

A person who is under the influence of emotion, well, would be unable to help themself from believing whatever fits their emotion.

The ultimate evidence of truthfulness need not be a URL, depending on the claim. Nor is a URL necessarily sufficient. After all, how do you know the ultimate URL of origin is trustworthy? All you can do is to recursively ask yourself "how do you know?", either until you accumulate enough doubt or until the question sounds absurd.

A lot of the comments here focus on claims made in bad faith. But the biggest value of citations is when one is trying to make or check a claim in good faith. Many times I find that my own long-held beliefs turn out to be incorrect or partially incorrect or misunderstandings when I fact-check them with a reliable expert source.

As for claims made in bad faith? Don't trust these whether they have citations or not. Because there are a variety of primary sources on every topic and most things in life are uncertain, it is frequently possible to cherry pick an expert opinion that aligns with yours if you look hard enough. This makes fact the servant of opinion rather than the other way around.

This really connects with the "Cool URIs don't change" mantra.

If you're curious about what a forum would look like if it required URL citations, you can take a look at http://old.reddit.com/r/neutralnews. It has pretty strict modding e.g. rule #2

> 2) Source your facts. If you're claiming something to be true, you need to back it up by linking to a qualified and relevant source. There is no "common knowledge" exception, and anecdotal evidence is not allowed.

I wish this sentiment were even stronger when it comes to screenshots, e.g. screenshots of purportedly deleted tweets/articles. As we get closer to deepfake-video-on-demand becoming a thing, I'm still astonished at how the vast majority of people don't understand how trivial it is to create pixel-perfect fake web content. My default response to a screenshot is to assume it's faked unless there's an accompanying Wayback Machine/archive.today URL.

For a few years, I was looking forward to newspapers embedding navigable links to the sources of their reporting. I figured that we just had to wait for the pre-Internet generation of journalists to retire and the next generation would cite better.

But now it is apparent that newspapers have no interest in doing this as it would encourage readers to go to another site and deprive them of advertisement revenue.

I would really love to subscribe to a newspaper that prioritized readers/subscribers.

Surely "don't trust everything you read on the Internet" is just a given at this point, especially if it originates on Twitter.

That was such a great, prescient quote by Abraham Lincoln.

16 + 26 = 42 [1] [2]

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=16+%2B+26

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)#The_Hitchhiker's_G...

This is something more online media outlets should taken into consideration, especially for their own articles. Too many think linking out to potential 'competitors' is a bad thing, or make it too difficult to find the source for their data/conclusions.

Newspapers and magazines are especially bad for this, as are YouTube channels and other video format content creators.

I think the key lesson in this story is the author's willingness to do the work. IMO it's not enough to be skeptical; you also should have a set of criteria by which you'll be satisfied, and be willing to go try to satisfy those criteria yourself. I don't think that merely pointing out a lack of citation is sufficient as a counterargument.

In general I do agree citations are a good thing. But in this case and ones like it, does it really matter? Someone is making a humorous statement, it’s not of particular importance to me if it was made 100 years ago first or not, so why should I care to look it up?

Rephrased: what would change if you found the image was “fake”?

A timely quip from the same 1918 newspaper page:

"Why don't you wear your influenza mask?"

"I'm afraid I might look funny."

"Suppose you do. Wouldn't you rather introduce a little comedy into your household than subject it to tragedy?"

>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)

Now that you mentioned it I can’t unsee it ;-)

I understood it to be searching the page with the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut.

You have successfully ruined the formerly innocent and inconspicious image of this phrase in my mind.

Have an upvote.

I think Ctrl+F seems to be more popular than 'grepping' these days, although I would very much be in favour of bringing 'grepping' back.

there's just so few people who still grep through website code directly. :P

In Firefox the / key is bound to quick find, so it's there in spirit.

Firefox also allows to search without bringing up the search bar first by setting "accessibility.typeaheadfind" in "about:config" to true. Reducing the timeout for the search bar to disappear after the last keypress is very useful as well. This is hidden behind "accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout".

Caveat: is messes with pages that use normal letters as keyboard inputs, like WASD as movement keys. One might need to disable it temporarily if that happens.

I use Firefox developer edition - I assume that's set up by default. Though I've learned to work around it, it has driven me mad for so long - I didn't know you could turn it off! Finally, it's fixed! Thank you!

Everyday a good deed - I'm glad I could help ;)

TIL - Thanks!

You mean you don't `curl | rg` web pages?

Well it depends which one you do. Nobody greps PDFs. And even if you have the article as plain text file you woulnd't grep to see nearby text, you would use your editor's equivalent of ctrl+f.

ctrl+f is about finding the context of something

grep is about filtering out the irrelevant information

Linux utility "less" which is the best tool to browse logs ever has both ctrl+f equivalent(/), and grep equivalent (&) and both are useful.

Control + F will resonate with a far wider audience than the term 'grepping', which I assure you on many other social media spheres, would be met with blank stares. Most people I know in the real world have never interacted with a terminal.

How do I unread your last sentence? Now I want a T-shirt with 'Go away,or I'll CTRL-F you'.

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

I misread it as 'ctrl-fsck'.

control-freaking is what I saw.

Even source data itself is not free from contexts and biases. Just treat everything with suspicion. And treat people with extra suspicion if they always provide a URL, especially if the URL is to somebody's interpretation of an interpretation etc.

This should go for almost everything written in a newspaper. We all know about the the intentional spin and unintentional failure to understand technical topics but, when written in a newspaper, hearsay is treated as factual secondary source.

And any claim with one, doubly so. -- Abe Lincoln abe@I-chopped-the-cherry-tree.gov

Or perhaps, any claim with a URI and without a physical card in a library card catalog should be treated as suspicious... Just sayin'...

Site down... Shows ReCAPTCHA in an infinite loop...

>Site down... Shows ReCAPTCHA

I suppose this is cloudflare + their new captcha provider. This behavior is annoying / suspicious. They know the site is down, yet make people solve captcha repeatedly before finally telling them that the site is down.

They're incentivised to do this. hCAPTCHA pays them for it.

Well, the site may be active once you are finally able to solve the CAPTCHA.

Curious... The page I saw was actual Google Recaptcha...

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

I do not think so. Most of my ipfs bookmarks from 2 years ago are offline now, everything gone because no peer has the content.

FileCoin just recently launched and it aims to fix this exact problem.

How does adding crypto fix this problem? I presume it's to incentivize peers into retaining and serving the content, but who's going to pay? The author? The viewer? How is either going to work for long tail content that's been abandoned by the author?

Wait, hmm... maybe if we use the blockchain here we can solve those problems too?

Or machine learning?

It doesn't fix the problem yet, it attempts to solve the lack of incentive to contribute to networks like ipfs/tor. All blockchain with reward based storage solutions I've tried so far don't meet expectations.

To this day, the Internet archive project is the most contributing solution to persistent Web information.

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.

Any system that is that resistant to censorship will have to deal with it being used for files that the government most works to censor. That sort of relation will drive other people away and you'll find government increasing their power to be able to take it down (or at least identifying those who access it and take them down). Until society is willing to tolerate such material as the cost of a system that cannot be censored, the majority will continue to go for systems that give government the ability to censor what the people cannot tolerate, under the pinky promise that government won't use their powers for evil.

A great number of people, even smart ones, have been tricked into believing the Truth can be found on the Internet. It can't.

To quote a friend of mine: But then I would have to doubt and question everything.

It kept me laughing for many years.

Hmmm, I don't see any URI supporting the original claim. I find it suspicious.

Every viral social media fake news story spreads from URI to URI ...

We're going to need to issue some Verrit cards for this link.

I thought this was about all those gpt-3 gifs demos on twitter...

Maybe GPT-3 can just do our fact-checking for us...

Why isn’t the L in uppercase for the URL acronym?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier

Isn't this just a submarine post to put a quote about masks and people who don't wear them on top of HN?

CitationLint is needed.

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

I think this is the core issue with this post. There is an intersection between how much this new claim would update my mental model and how much time it will take to prove. The idea of "how much time it will take to prove" is important, because we all have a limited amount of intellectual bandwidth that we use to receive and integrate new information.

Intellectual bandwidth means we need prioritization. Without prioritization we have two suboptimal states that are available. The first is where we are being DDOS'd in bad-faith by low-value claims, that have some amount of work to prove. The second is that whichever claims we do resolve are likely not the set of claims which result in optimal utility; updating our mental model results in utility, assuming that our update function only accepts "good" updates.

One strategy, that I think I use, is to break things into four categories: (1) A claim close to my current mental model (2) A claim not far but not close to my mental model (3) A claim far from my mental model (4) A claim unrelated to my mental model.

If a claim is close to my mental model (1), I'd probably just accept it out of hand. This newspaper clipping is one example, because proving that the clipping is real does not update my mental model (Nor does disproving it, honestly), so it is low value. This is the cheap filter that reduces redundancy.

If a claim is far from my mental model (3), I'll probably just dismiss it out of hand. I'm not going to go to the work to prove or disprove something, insofar. There are exceptions here, wherein the statement is so orthogonal to the mental model that it might have high value and is therefore still with looking into. In my experience, claims of high value that are completely orthogonal from my mental model tend to be rarer than claims of low value. One case I can think of is an article on oil prices I read, where there was a claim that the breakeven oil price was ~$200 a barrel as support for Iran having a broken economy. This didn't make sense, as it would mean Iran is not a viable economy even with oil, but then why are western nations wasting political capital embargoing an unviable product? So I spent time investigating it (Investing intellectual bandwidth). In the end, it seemed like a bad-faith argument as it assumed that the oil price would be the only thing to balance the Iranian national budget and didn't speak to the fact that Iran is subject to artificial export constraints via embargoes. Engaging with claims in this category seems to result in finding a lot of gravel and maybe a piece of gold from time to time.

The medium category (2) is where I think most of us should be spending our time, the frontiers of our mental model where things are both foreign as well as familiar. When you can take different parts of evidence and see that some of it makes sense and some of it doesn't. I think this area is ripe for bad-faith disruption, as I'm much more willing to engage with this type of premise. I remember reading and putting down a book lately because it proposed an interesting question, around what has changed in the America of my parent's and of today. It was asserting, without even worrying about supporting evidence, that traditional family values were the cause.

The last category (4) is not an unimportant one, which is just the area where you might say "I don't know" or "Why does that matter". If someone claims Charles II was born in 1629, I also wouldn't derive much value by looking it up and saying "No, he was actually born in 1630". In that sense, it is low-value information because it doesn't intersect with meaning for me.

Overall, I think the problem with the line of thinking I quoted is that it puts a lot of burden on the individual for what usually has zero or negative value to that individual. That work exists whether or not a URI is included, and is possible exacerbated by there now being "evidence" provided even insofar as the linked context provides no value.

Aside: The phrase "ctrl+f'ing" written out is a bit humorous.

How are citations not the fallacy of "appeal to authority"?

Citations are basically an attempt at X.509 or Certificate Authority "root of trust": follow the certs until you find one we all agree is "trustyworthy".

Except in this case, that "someone" may or may not be provable, because the root of trust could potentially go back centuries.

I'm not impugning the work of historians, I realize this is part of what they do: follow the citations, cross-correlate, and seek "the truth" through painstaking research.

But outside of extensive historical effort, it seems like a pretty flimsy strategy for contentious topics.

If the citation contains data then using a citation is not an appeal to authority.

We can no longer really know what the truth is, honestly. This is why the political foo-ha about "facts having a liberal bias" and all that was so poignant - it was an admission that the Internet had won.

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