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The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions of sources, how many have actually been verified?
by Loughla 9mo ago
The problem is who checks the sources. Of the what billions of sources, how many have actually been verified?
- lazide 9mo agoAlso, when there are conflicts, who decides what the ‘facts’ are, eh? is is the Gulf of America or not?
- hk__2 9mo agoNobody, you just mention the different points of view that are in the sources.
- lazide 9mo agoWhich nobody does (really) because it turns into a giant narcissist shit fight then for who can come up with the most absurd ‘truthy’ answer for publicity. Everyone has to end up filtering at some point or it’s all just noise.
- philipwhiuk 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico_naming_controve... There's an entire article on it.
- lazide 9mo agoNow imagine that for toilet paper over the top, or over the bottom, or sitting on top of the toilet tank. And everything in between. We have plenty of bits, at least.
- philipwhiuk 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation Drowning beneath your inability to Google.
- Isamu 9mo ago>who checks the sources I do, when I’m reading something and accuracy matters. Anybody who cares about accuracy will investigate the sources. I know people will complain that “nobody” does this, but it is essential, without checking sources you are just casually reading. That goes for books and all media consumption. If a book or any media (ahem Tucker) doesn’t give you enough information to be able to look something up, that is rather a red flag of obfuscation.
- philwelch 9mo agoThe thing is, there’s really no good way to check a lot of the numbers you see in sources like the World Factbook. Take population estimates for instance. Much of the world either doesn’t have the state capacity or can’t be trusted to maintain accurate, publicly known population figures. There are some countries where they haven’t had a census in decades and their official population figures are entrusted to numbers provided by regional governments which receive national funding on a per capita basis. Every region has an incentive to inflate their population numbers and, in a system where they’re all competing for funding from the central government, this eventually becomes common practice. Even national governments have little incentive to share honest figures with the rest of the world, and national governments that aren’t even accountable to their own people like China and Russia are also well practiced in keeping secrets. And population is probably one of the easiest things to measure. The problem is that some people just accept the first number they find and are militant about not thinking beyond that point. If you tell them the radiation meter tops out at 3.6 roentgen, they say “3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible”.