‘Headline’ clicks or ‘rage baiting’ for clicks???
BL:UF
If you’re NOT sure, do your research before you react!
Beware of what you do with either one…
Things like the one HERE could be assumed to be either. But this one is more about ‘breaking news’ than rage baiting, IMHO.
We had a discussion about various things on the livestream yesterday, but Cedar made a key point.
ALWAYS check the references before you go down the rathole! Especially with Wiki…
I’ll be the first to admit ‘I’ am not perfect. I’ve posted things that I thought were right, but were, in fact. wrong. And when I found out, I posted the correction, because I ‘try’ to be right… sigh…
Cedar had actually done a couple of deep dives on things, and found that either-
- The reference/link didn’t exist.
- The reference/link linked to another link.
- All of the references/links linked back to a SINGLE source without correlation.
- There were no sources that correlated or corroborated the premise in the article.
Of course one of the ‘issues’ with the article above is that it comes from a Pub, not a Dem, so it will immediately be ‘suspect’. Some will say it is rage baiting, and you can bet the MSM will be doing everything they can to cover up/deflect from the issues, if they cover it at all.
There is also the whole what the word ‘means’ now… Merriam-Webster and AP have both changed meanings to words to ‘reflect’ current usage, as we’ve all found out.
Money is another factor. Money buys ‘ad’ time, journalists, and lawyers…
Note that I haven’t talked about AIs/LLMs at all. That is because ‘I’ don’t believe they are a factor yet…
Not that they won’t be in the future, but not yet.
So do your research. And learn who your ‘trusted’ sources are. When in doubt, refer to the old printed encyclopedias, not the new online versions, as they are all suspect, IMHO.
What say you???
Hey Old NFO;
I know what you mean, I try to be accurate as much as I can on my blog. With Wiki, if it ain’t political, 95% of the time, Wiki is accurate, if it a political issue, Wiki leans left. I have had to use “Duck, Duck, Go” and other search engines that don’t start with “G” to get sources that are balanced and not the first 25 links go to the DNC press releases, “Actblue” or any of the other NGO’s that carry their water. I have actually used my own books as references, and take pictures of what I am referring to and post those.
The general rule for behavioral type research should be a) if you might care about it then b) trace the sources and check the methods. If the methods or the sample are not persuasive, treat it as invalid. Ignore it, and do not care about it.
It is easy to talk about the universities having changed, but this is only part of it. The general public, and the faculty, may have been wildly overconfident in universities fifty or a hundred years ago as well.
The ideal view has long been too clean to be reality. There is a lot of magical thinking about smart people being able to produce correct answers, like a Ford production line of scholarship. The actual processes and people were always going to fall short if someone decided it was a good idea to ask them to fix human nature. Hubris begets nemesis. Engineers fifty years ago could give good answers to appropriate engineering tasks, but which ones were appropriate was not always obvious from outside, or before trying. The really bad stuff came from doing things like insisting that engineers never arrived at wrong answers.
Beyond that, a lot of modern scholarship is trash, obvious trash, that almost must be deliberately wrong.
Bob and BobTR- I don’t disagree with either of you. You both make excellent points!
Back when the blogosphere was a lot bigger than now, I noticed a lot of #’s 2&3 on leftie blogs. Sometimes #4.
Which probably started that one April fools joke on conservative blogs that had you chasing links for the next part of the story.
Many news articles are out there , I find it handy also to click on the “about us” somewhere on the page , many are tied in some way to foreign governments and NGOs and such . I also find it odd that many small articles maybe 4 paragraphs long have four authors , or collaborators . It is not like the subject matter is complicated or going into the New England Journal Of Medicine , must be some dipshit writers out there . The Ukraine War is a perfect example of convoluted reporting since day one from both sides involved , pick your poison I guess . I gave up on following that topic about four months ago . Sometimes I feel like somebody is pissing on my leg and telling me it is raining in following the current Iran engagement . Yeah I know….the Smith Mundt Modernization Act blah blah….