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A comment on Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious.

Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by btrettel on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:39AM (#23897686)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by marcusverus on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:32PM (#23900549)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by streb-lo on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:45PM (#23900665)
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).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by HillRat on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:22PM (#23900996)
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.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by streb-lo on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:35PM (#23901109)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by jquery on Monday July 20, 2020 @07:12PM (#23902856)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by edanm on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:36PM (#23901118)
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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by tracker1 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:41PM (#23901164)
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).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by c3534l on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:15PM (#23899265)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by cogman10 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:12PM (#23900921)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by CM30 on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:36AM (#23898844)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by ballenf on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:56AM (#23899074)
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".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by btrettel on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:29PM (#23899401)
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%...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by elliekelly on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:10PM (#23900373)
Has anyone ever seen this in the wild? I didn’t even know it existed. Who knew there were so many different status codes.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by LukeShu on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:07PM (#23900878)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by spc476 on Monday July 20, 2020 @05:10PM (#23901945)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by tracker1 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:44PM (#23901190)
I use it for APIs when an item gets marked as deleted, vs actually deleted... depends on the underlying data though.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by btrettel on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:30PM (#23900537)
Seems that I edited my comment to add an example at the same time you posted yours.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by irl_zebra on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:20PM (#23900973)
GitLab does it for links to deleted repos!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by komali2 on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:56AM (#23899078)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by t0mas88 on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:04PM (#23899158)
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...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by WrtCdEvrydy on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:27PM (#23899995)
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...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by kardos on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:03PM (#23899148)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dqpb on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:26PM (#23899363)
They also have an inherent information theoretic advantage over non-outrageous claims when consumed by someone who is unable to discern their veracity.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Buge on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:55PM (#23901802)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dqpb on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @01:54PM (#23909101)
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)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by malaya_zemlya on Monday July 20, 2020 @07:12PM (#23902855)
"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...)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by brlewis on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:53PM (#23899634)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by closeparen on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:58PM (#23899684)
Make the opposite of your claim with an alt account. Then challenge it for evidence. Now your position wins by default.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Buge on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:52PM (#23901781)
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).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by kardos on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:14PM (#23900402)
I think this is the part that ain't nobody for time for
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by brlewis on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:59PM (#23900807)
If nobody's going to answer you, your position wins regardless.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Buge on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:57PM (#23901824)
To prevent a position from winning by default it only requires a very simple reply: ask for evidence.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Goronmon on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:15PM (#23899267)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by nitrogen on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:35PM (#23899458)
Many news sites will do this to keep you on-site instead of bouncing elsewhere.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Goronmon on Monday July 20, 2020 @04:04PM (#23901337)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dgellow on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:40PM (#23900621)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by 13415 on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:04PM (#23900319)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by tomayac on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:40PM (#23899496)
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...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by brlewis on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:48PM (#23899580)
How is it different from this bookmarklet?

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by bokan on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:01PM (#23899728)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by brlewis on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:13PM (#23899866)
The extension needs to be installed by both the creator and the receiver of the URL with the original intended text encoded into it?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by bokan on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:26PM (#23899986)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by throwayws on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:20PM (#23900448)
Ohh nice! I wondered where scroll to fragment did lead to.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by arp242 on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:16AM (#23898622)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by TazeTSchnitzel on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:29PM (#23900525)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by melvinroest on Monday July 20, 2020 @09:56AM (#23897857)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by tW4r on Monday July 20, 2020 @10:49AM (#23898358)
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”

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by smt88 on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:35AM (#23898826)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by Taek on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:31PM (#23899420)
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)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by smt88 on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:16PM (#23899896)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by marcinzm on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:30PM (#23899411)
Axioms can also be mutually contradictory and this may not be obvious initially. Then you can prove and disprove everything at the same time.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by smt88 on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:19PM (#23899917)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by marcinzm on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:59AM (#23899111)
Don't Gödel's incompleteness theorems show that this approach is impossible even for a domain as simple as arithmetic?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by melvinroest on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:38PM (#23900090)
Science doesn’t need to be complete. It needs to be useful (that’s what I value in it).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by adrianN on Monday July 20, 2020 @11:40AM (#23898885)
Now you only need to convince the scientists to write proofs in their papers in Coq or Isabelle so that you can check them.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by btrettel on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:02PM (#23899751)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dqpb on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:29PM (#23899400)
or Lean
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by kens on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:58PM (#23899685)
> 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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by site-packages1 on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:54PM (#23899641)
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!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by beervirus on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:59PM (#23899704)
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.)
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by koheripbal on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:17PM (#23899282)
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...)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dqpb on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:20PM (#23899307)
Do you think reputation can be manipulated?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by TeMPOraL on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:39PM (#23899489)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by mishu2 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:05PM (#23900862)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by shishy on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:06PM (#23899792)
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 [email protected] if you have any thoughts)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by ducaale on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:37PM (#23901129)
A youtuber demonstrating how hard it is to verify a citation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjlKIjLWq-Y
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by AnimalMuppet on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:23PM (#23899331)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by michaelmior on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:55PM (#23899654)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dane-pgp on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:10PM (#23899838)
> I've seen that here on HN, too.

Oh yeah? Give us an example then.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by agustif on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:11PM (#23899843)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899838
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by dane-pgp on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:31PM (#23900028)
Thank you. ;) That was the response I was hoping for.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by sixstringtheory on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:33PM (#23900554)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by agustif on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:34PM (#23900052)
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
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by hn_check on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:47PM (#23899565)
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...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by vkou on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:30PM (#23900017)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by hn_check on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:42PM (#23900119)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by enchiridion on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:17PM (#23899907)
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by modzu on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:56PM (#23900253)
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
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by btrettel on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:06PM (#23900338)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by clairity on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:06PM (#23899177)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by AnimalMuppet on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:24PM (#23899340)
Citations can give data, though. If your ideas are based on more than just your own experience, you need external data.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by clairity on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:35PM (#23899460)
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.)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by TeMPOraL on Monday July 20, 2020 @12:41PM (#23899508)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by clairity on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:01PM (#23899730)
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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by tracker1 on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:38PM (#23901141)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by hinkley on Monday July 20, 2020 @02:03PM (#23900310)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious by autokad on Monday July 20, 2020 @01:45PM (#23900158)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]