• JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    23 hours ago

    You’ve fallen for a random shit poster who shit posts on a blog instead of tiktok or instagram or reddit or WSJ/WaPo Op-Eds.

    You have been bamboozeled not by lies, not by damned lies, but by an idiot attempting to do statistics.

    I thought I made it clear I didn’t necessarily agree with it, but I guess I wasn’t. I’m not saying this article is correct, just that it’s likely what they were thinking of when they said it was “disproved” since it made the rounds a few years ago.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      17 hours ago

      Sure, fine, but this is exactly, precisely how misinformation spreads.

      People who lack the sufficient knowledge set to evaluate a complex and technical claim present what appears to a layman to be a plausible idea as being roughly equivalent to the ideas that actual experts have, another brand name worth considering in the free market of ideas, more or less just another neutral option, with no strong feelings either way.

      This is (unintentionally) subversive, because it elevates a ludicrous notion to a degree of plausibility that it absolutely does not deserve.

      I do not mean to attack you as a person or say that you should feel bad or anything like that, I am simply here to be the counterforce, to try to explain how and why this is very silly.

      Part of doing that effectively is crafting an engaging narrative.

      Making punny jokes and being a bit vitriolic is engaging for other readers; again, not meant to attack or demean you as a person, but meant to mock this specific notion/idea/“theory”.

      After all, at the end of the day, we could stand to be a little more capable of intellectual humility, eh?

      There’s absolutely no problem with being wrong sometimes, understanding when why and how one can be or is wrong is how people learn, which should be celebrated, imo.