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

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 ]