yes, i thought the article substantiated the quote pretty well, though i get the feeling that i did not interpret the "lies" in the title the same way you did. i read it more as "something incorrect" than as a necessarily deliberate falsehood, and what the title was saying as "if you want 'certainty' then you need to be simplistic and reductive enough that you are discarding any hope of an actually correct answer".
Re:Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies
by fenomas on Tuesday September 26, 2023 @11:27PM
(#37669633)
To me the title reads very differently - it's saying that if you demand certainty you'll wind up treating something uncertain as certain, and hence believing something untrue.
For reference incidentally, the title is a callback to the last line of a previous post[1] by the same author, on an unrelated topic. So it's presumably meant to be less a statement about Ngrams, and more a recurring theme in the author's views on language.
This is admittedly a subtle point, but I’d be perfectly fine with starting the article with the same quote, attributed to someone, as a decorative introduction. That’s a pretty common writing device. (And importantly in that case, the quote doesn’t need to be substantiated.) It’s just using it for the title in this case that rubs me the wrong way.
Using the word “lies” is almost never good, especially when you are explicitly criticizing someone or something. IMO using “lies” is more or less equivalent to your example “number 4 will shock you”, use of that word is designed to invoke the same response. They stopped a hair short of literally stating Google is lying, but the implication combined with the first line of the article is very strong. One real problem with such an implication is that it may itself be wrong. It’s presuming active dishonesty when the problem could easily be a mistake. When putting these things together with the article’s misuse of the Y axis to again make emotional but not necessarily accurate points, I still think “clickbait” is warranted here - this writing is being a tiny bit manipulative.