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".
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
I'm such a buzzkill when people show a graph that does not say what they think it says.
> "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..."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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 know what reference you're making, I just like to be a pain. :)
Edit to add: a link that I know for sure you won't be able (or will be very difficult for you) to provide.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The emptier cans rattle loudest.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.