Hacker News Reader

Comment by ausbah | Hacker News Reader

I don't have the domain expertise nor the time to address everything you've posted - and maybe these aren't valid reasons to distrust what you've shared - but I'm skeptical of your conclusion bc many are unreviewed studies from over a year ago by authors who don't have relevant background, and few are straight up right wing rags full of conspiracy theories & other nonsense.

View on HN

Since COVID, I've noticed a "quantity over quality" strategy deployed en massé by the pseudo-intellectual right. It allows one to give the impression of a well-researched response without doing any of the needed work.

It's almost as if they realize that posting a wall of links will daunt most into not questioning them, even if most of the links wouldn't survive a hint of scrutiny.

Maybe it's a Gish gallop, but with source material.

As someone who studies propaganda (especially disinformation), I'm amazed that I've never encountered the term "Gish gallop" before. Having researched it now, I'd say you've described the phenomenon perfectly.

I'm happy to have added a nuance! I know the term from my Rationalwiki binge, although it's even found on the regular Wikipedia. I don't know how much Rationalwiki is up your alley, they have several articles on propaganda and logic & rethoric, I personally found them enlightening (and entertaining!).

Very up my alley - I've encountered it in the past scouring the web, but haven't spent too much time there. I'll make a point to frequent it more.

So why bother to judge something that you refuse to read? Are you serious?

Graphs from EU data about excess mortality are conspiracy theories now?

> So why bother to judge something that you refuse to read?

They did read it, and concluded it wasn't useful.

> Graphs from EU data about excess mortality are conspiracy theories now?

Excess mortality, by design, does not say anything about causes. In the USA for example, you can hypothesize a variety of plausible reasons for continued high excess mortality, pandemic-related and otherwise (increased crime, lower incomes, decreased access to non-Covid healthcare, increased highway speeds, et alia), but the excess mortality number itself cannot tell you the relative strengths of those causes.

"They did read it, and concluded it wasn't useful.“

Response was few minutes after post. No wonder that answer is not even related to content of links.

This is a wildly disingenuous response. If you claim that you saw Bigfoot, and your evidence is a sketch on the back of a napkin, I don't need to carefully study the sketch to reject it as useful evidence.

Posting charts reflecting excess mortality during a pandemic and attributing that to the vaccine gives the game away a bit, no?

tbh, I didn't see any establishment of causal relationship with excess mortality. This is like debugging a program by looking at the git history, without actually seriously thinking about what the bug actually is. It could be something recent. It could be something that was messed up ages ago and is only coming to rear its head now.

I never mentioned the dashboards, I'm on mobile so they weren't loading for me. Also yes, I think I can give a pretty good judgement on the quality of a piece based on simple heuristics like the quality of the hosting site, or the background credentials of the authors.

Be more specific. What background of which author? What quality of hosting site?

You should see the trash that gets posted in anti-vaccine groups. There are whole nutritional and supplement protocols meant to counteract "vaccine damage", and these pseudo-science studies get paraded around like religious texts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com