5 ms·

It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling tru

by xattt 7mo ago

It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.

coldtea 7mo ago
The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.
- drcongo 7mo ago
  Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
  - xattt 7mo ago
    It’s no Spishak Mach 20.
justin66 7mo ago
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy. Wild.
- bsenftner 7mo ago
  Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
  - justin66 7mo ago
    I bet. Holy hell…
- shoxidizer 7mo ago
  > hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy. Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".
FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence. If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
- ern_ave 7mo ago
  I'm interested to see any studies you can find on this topic. Here are some studies that I have: Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias [1] - in study 6, liberals were shown to be ...pretty racist. You claimed the Right believes fake news. I wont dispute that. I'll just reply that there's a lot of that going around. Here are some examples that debunk fake news you yourself might fervently believe: Girls Who Code: A Randomized Field Experiment on Gender-Based Hiring Discrimination [2] - leftists tend to believe that women are discriminated against in STEM. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force [3] - debunks the common belief, on the Left, that police are more likely to shoot people of color. Quote: "we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, ocer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics" [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitarianism_A_Source_of_Liberal_Bias https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitar... [2] https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley.senior_essay.pdf https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley... [3] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...
  - FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
    Sure. Everyone is biased some. Going all the way back to the "1951 Princeton–Dartmouth football game" The Right, just happens to be in a bit in a slump right now with its anti-science religious activism. "Doing worse" Garrett & Bond (2021), Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions, Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc... Sultan et al. (2024), Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=... Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc... Lyons et al. (2021), Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=... Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc... summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...
bko 7mo ago
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political. For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy. Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie? It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa... https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-shooting-plotline-in-the-super-mario-galaxy-movie/ https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-sho...
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
  I'm not in the USA, but I think the issue is not so much the joke getting tiresome, but the repeat school shootings. Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings, then the joke wouldn't keep getting repeated.
  - bko 7mo ago
    First and foremost you should attempt to be funny or original. This is neither. It's political. I would love headlines like: > Illegal Immigrant Finally Caught After 20 Years of Successfully Contributing to Society but instead you get non joke headlines like: > ICE Agents Hurl Pregnant Immigrant Over Mexican Border To Prevent Birth On U.S. Soil It's just cringe.
    - 7mo ago
21asdffdsa12 7mo ago
The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proofs anyone could invent your life ordering fiction.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  That is... so very nearly a sentence.
  - red369 7mo ago
    A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while. Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction. Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    I think it's read like this: >The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proves that anyone could invent your life-ordering fiction.

by xattt 7mo ago

It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.

coldtea 7mo ago

The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.

drcongo 7mo ago
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
- xattt 7mo ago
  It’s no Spishak Mach 20.

justin66 7mo ago

I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy. Wild.

bsenftner 7mo ago
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
- justin66 7mo ago
  I bet. Holy hell…
shoxidizer 7mo ago
> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy. Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".

FrustratedMonky 7mo ago

There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence. If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.

ern_ave 7mo ago
I'm interested to see any studies you can find on this topic. Here are some studies that I have: Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias [1] - in study 6, liberals were shown to be ...pretty racist. You claimed the Right believes fake news. I wont dispute that. I'll just reply that there's a lot of that going around. Here are some examples that debunk fake news you yourself might fervently believe: Girls Who Code: A Randomized Field Experiment on Gender-Based Hiring Discrimination [2] - leftists tend to believe that women are discriminated against in STEM. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force [3] - debunks the common belief, on the Left, that police are more likely to shoot people of color. Quote: "we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, ocer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics" [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitarianism_A_Source_of_Liberal_Bias https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitar... [2] https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley.senior_essay.pdf https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley... [3] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...
- FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
  Sure. Everyone is biased some. Going all the way back to the "1951 Princeton–Dartmouth football game" The Right, just happens to be in a bit in a slump right now with its anti-science religious activism. "Doing worse" Garrett & Bond (2021), Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions, Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc... Sultan et al. (2024), Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=... Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc... Lyons et al. (2021), Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=... Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc... summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...

bko 7mo ago

I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political. For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy. Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie? It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa... https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-shooting-plotline-in-the-super-mario-galaxy-movie/ https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-sho...

ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
I'm not in the USA, but I think the issue is not so much the joke getting tiresome, but the repeat school shootings. Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings, then the joke wouldn't keep getting repeated.
- bko 7mo ago
  First and foremost you should attempt to be funny or original. This is neither. It's political. I would love headlines like: > Illegal Immigrant Finally Caught After 20 Years of Successfully Contributing to Society but instead you get non joke headlines like: > ICE Agents Hurl Pregnant Immigrant Over Mexican Border To Prevent Birth On U.S. Soil It's just cringe.
  - 7mo ago

21asdffdsa12 7mo ago

The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proofs anyone could invent your life ordering fiction.

IAmBroom 7mo ago
That is... so very nearly a sentence.
- red369 7mo ago
  A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while. Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction. Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  I think it's read like this: >The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proves that anyone could invent your life-ordering fiction.