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"Citation needed" is intellectually lazy. It is middlebrow dismissal's slightly more popular cousin. "Citation needed" is never a counter-argument, but often s

"Citation needed" is intellectually lazy. It is middlebrow dismissal's slightly more popular cousin. "Citation needed" is never a counter-argument, but often stands in place of one. It is the rhetorical equivalent of burying your opponent in discovery: it is a challenge that consists solely of expecting someone else to do more work than they would like to. If you have a question about something, ask. If you disagree with something, then make your argument. Never simply post "citation needed" and think that you have contributed anything to a discussion. (Just FYI, it's also a "tell" -- some people will avoid engaging you if you post nothing more than "citation needed", just as some people avoid engaging others that end every sentence with "lol".)

baddox 14y ago
If you're a skeptic (i.e. scientific skeptic), then you default to not believing a claim until evidence is introduced to support it. Is it intellectually lazy to say "citation needed" to someone that is accusing someone else of being a witch? I firmly believe that I have no obligation to prove that I am not a witch, and moreover that such attempts would be impossible. The person who makes a claim that has not been widely observed empirically is the person who needs to present evidence. In the case of user interface analysis, I thought most of us agreed that real data is much more important than a single user's anecdote. If someone makes the anecdotal claim that since they dislike a certain UI feature it must perform worse in general, that person needs to present actual evidence. Unless I have done my own research, the only thing I can do is request evidence and remain skeptical until I see some. It is equally fallacious for me to counter with my own anecdotal evidence. Saying "citation needed" is precisely the appropriate response to baseless claims.
- delluminatus 14y ago
  Thoughtlessly saying "citation needed" is a recipe for an insidious confirmation bias. It is always intellectually lazy, in the same way that blindly accepting provided claims is intellectually lazy: it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. Citing a study is not a panacea for bad ideas, and lacking citations is not a death sentence for truth. Hacker News saw an article just the other day on how many conclusions drawn by science are incorrect. Don't be so eager to avoid thinking critically that the presence or absence of a citation dictates your response to an essay.
  - baddox 14y ago
    > it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. There is nothing to think about when there is no evidence, except how to gather or find reliable evidence. No amount of solitary mental rumination will yield a revelation about how effective certain UI features are with users. My own anecdotes are just as useless as my opponents'. This isn't laziness. I'm not being lazy when I ask accusers to provide some evidence that someone is in fact a witch. And sure, the scientific community may be out of date or downright wrong, even half of the time. That's not an argument against the need for evidence. It's an argument for thoughtful analysis of evidence after it is presented, and more and better techniques for gathering evidence.
  - ebf 14y ago
    > It is always intellectually lazy, in the same way that blindly accepting provided claims is intellectually lazy: it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. I did think about the statement, and I thought it was untrue. Then I asked for evidence to support the claim. Is that intellectually lazy, or is the original post intellectually lazy? Regardless, 5-10 minutes after I posted "citation needed," I backed it up with examples, and followed up on subthreads with more points.
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Do you really expect "citation needed" to prompt a useful discussion? How often do you think that happens? Here, click through the search results for comments with "citation needed" and tell me how many great discussions followed from it: http://hn.shomisearch.com/#comments+with+citation+needed http://hn.shomisearch.com/#comments+with+citation+needed Don't you think it's boring? Don't you think there might be a better way of asking a question about a claim than merely throwing down "citation needed" after a comment, like an e-peen on the dinner table? Now that I have replied with a comment lacking a single claim, preventing another stupid use of "citation needed", do you see how ridiculous and twisted that vapid phrase could make conversation in forums full of silly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlike this one? Should we all begin using Platonic dialogues just so that we can avoid having to bring a database of references along for any claim, lest we get molested yet again by people so intellectually lazy that they hilariously refer to themselves as "scientific skeptics" despite lacking the curiosity to research a claim on their own? edit: Bah, I can't put quotes around "citation needed" in the search link above, and I don't feel like fixing the parsing for %codes tonight. You'll have to put the quotes in yourself to get the appropriate results.
  - baddox 14y ago
    > Do you really expect "citation needed" to prompt a useful discussion? Not really, and that's not the point of the statement. Until there is evidence, the only thing to discuss are your own predictions of what the evidence would show, or your own useless anecdotes. The point of the statement is to challenge the claimant to provide evidence, and as a side effect, to remind other readers to be skeptical of claims until they see evidence. Sure, it might be boring, especially relative to baseless assertions that make a complex problem sound easy. Again, staving boredom is not the goal of most conversations—for that I turn to cinema or video games. Witch trials, while unscientific and horrifying, were certainly not boring.
ebf 14y ago
If someone pushes a statement as a fact and not as their opinion then they better be prepared to back it up it with evidence. End of story.
- delluminatus 14y ago
  Do you have evidence to support this claim? Citation needed.
  - ebf 14y ago
    Do you have any evidence to support that you don't need evidence to backup facts or are you just being facetious? If you said the world was flat, and someone asked for evidence, would you also ask that where is your evidence that you need evidence?
    - thaumaturgy 14y ago
      > If you said the world was flat... Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me such a beautiful piece of clay to work with. If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was around 400 BC, you, being an educated fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Pythagoras then?" If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was circa 100 BC, you, being a clever and worldly fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Eratosthenes then?" If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was the 1400s and you were friends with sailors or were yourself a sailor, you might say, "well, then why do the sails appear before the ship on the horizon?" If I said, "the world is flat!" and it was the 1600s, you would think I was an idiot, because by now Magellan's voyage was well known and trade had begun to circle the globe, so you might just bite your thumb at me or ignore me. But if I say, "the world is flat!" and you say, "citation needed", that is the stupidest possible "skeptical" response. See, I'm not saying it's wrong to ask for a citation for a questionable claim. I'm saying that we should do better than that -- a request which you are arguing so vehemently against that, by now, if you actually were interested in whether or not "the design can be flat!", you could have come up with some examples to argue with. Every time you, or anyone, says merely "citation needed" without further thought or consideration or argument or inquiry or contradictory evidence, what you are actually doing is holding an enormously loud sign which says, "I am not smart or curious enough to ask you a good question about this, but I am suspicious of it anyway." And that's really lame.
dredmorbius 14y ago
"Citation needed" is anything but intellectual laziness. It is a calling out of intellectual laziness, in the form of an unsubstantiated assertion, and need not be a dismissal. If someone's going to make extraordinary claims, I'm going to request extraordinary evidence (or any evidence at all). It's even possible that I'm interested in the proposition and would like to pursue it further, but with the benefit of a bit of directed guidance from the author to a specific starting point. And if it's an absolute bullshit claim, well then, the onus is on the bullshitter to back themselves up (trivially done if they're not bullshitting), not on me to spend my time digging up countervailing evidence. Citation: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/01/extraordinary-c.html http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/01/extraordinary-c.h...
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  Everything I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972943 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972943, plus: If you're actually interested in a claim and you need help finding further information about it, then say so. And if you think it's obvious bullshit, then say so by pointing out why. "Citation needed" is a meme. First it was just a good practice on Wikipedia, then Randall Munroe made a comic with it (http://xkcd.com/285/ http://xkcd.com/285/), and then because lots of geeks like xkcd and it was political season the joke spread everywhere, and now, just like every other stupid meme, it is old and boring and misused and needs to be put out of its misery. It's "lol" for pretentious people.
  - TeMPOraL 14y ago
    > And if you think it's obvious bullshit, then say so by pointing out why. How about: I (honestly) don't believe "putting stuff on one plane makes them difficult to read", nor had I ever any trouble with understanding flat interfaces. So how can we reconcile our opinions? You assert a general statement, I have a counterexample (i.e. myself) that seems to go against it. You can't assert general statements without supporting evidence and expect people to believe you just like that. You can either mark it as opinion ("I believe ..."), or expect to hear requests for citations. Yes, "citation needed" is a meme. Yes, it came from xkcd, which is so popular among geeks[0] not only because it's funny, but mostly because it's smart and accurate. It's not just another web comic out there. > just like every other stupid meme, it is old and boring and misused and needs to be put out of its misery. I'm sorry you say that. You see, you are in the Internet right now. It's an another world inside the real world. What you call "stupid", "old and boring and misused" memes are - for better or worse - the cultural and historical heritage of this place. They are equivalent to proverbs or adages of real world. You cannot get rid of them, they are product of culture. [0] - and especially HN crowd; just search for "Relevant xkcd" or "Obligatory xkcd".

baddox 14y ago

If you're a skeptic (i.e. scientific skeptic), then you default to not believing a claim until evidence is introduced to support it. Is it intellectually lazy to say "citation needed" to someone that is accusing someone else of being a witch? I firmly believe that I have no obligation to prove that I am not a witch, and moreover that such attempts would be impossible. The person who makes a claim that has not been widely observed empirically is the person who needs to present evidence. In the case of user interface analysis, I thought most of us agreed that real data is much more important than a single user's anecdote. If someone makes the anecdotal claim that since they dislike a certain UI feature it must perform worse in general, that person needs to present actual evidence. Unless I have done my own research, the only thing I can do is request evidence and remain skeptical until I see some. It is equally fallacious for me to counter with my own anecdotal evidence. Saying "citation needed" is precisely the appropriate response to baseless claims.

delluminatus 14y ago
Thoughtlessly saying "citation needed" is a recipe for an insidious confirmation bias. It is always intellectually lazy, in the same way that blindly accepting provided claims is intellectually lazy: it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. Citing a study is not a panacea for bad ideas, and lacking citations is not a death sentence for truth. Hacker News saw an article just the other day on how many conclusions drawn by science are incorrect. Don't be so eager to avoid thinking critically that the presence or absence of a citation dictates your response to an essay.
- baddox 14y ago
  > it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. There is nothing to think about when there is no evidence, except how to gather or find reliable evidence. No amount of solitary mental rumination will yield a revelation about how effective certain UI features are with users. My own anecdotes are just as useless as my opponents'. This isn't laziness. I'm not being lazy when I ask accusers to provide some evidence that someone is in fact a witch. And sure, the scientific community may be out of date or downright wrong, even half of the time. That's not an argument against the need for evidence. It's an argument for thoughtful analysis of evidence after it is presented, and more and better techniques for gathering evidence.
- ebf 14y ago
  > It is always intellectually lazy, in the same way that blindly accepting provided claims is intellectually lazy: it allows the reader to avoid thinking about the claims in question. I did think about the statement, and I thought it was untrue. Then I asked for evidence to support the claim. Is that intellectually lazy, or is the original post intellectually lazy? Regardless, 5-10 minutes after I posted "citation needed," I backed it up with examples, and followed up on subthreads with more points.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
Do you really expect "citation needed" to prompt a useful discussion? How often do you think that happens? Here, click through the search results for comments with "citation needed" and tell me how many great discussions followed from it: http://hn.shomisearch.com/#comments+with+citation+needed http://hn.shomisearch.com/#comments+with+citation+needed Don't you think it's boring? Don't you think there might be a better way of asking a question about a claim than merely throwing down "citation needed" after a comment, like an e-peen on the dinner table? Now that I have replied with a comment lacking a single claim, preventing another stupid use of "citation needed", do you see how ridiculous and twisted that vapid phrase could make conversation in forums full of silly^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlike this one? Should we all begin using Platonic dialogues just so that we can avoid having to bring a database of references along for any claim, lest we get molested yet again by people so intellectually lazy that they hilariously refer to themselves as "scientific skeptics" despite lacking the curiosity to research a claim on their own? edit: Bah, I can't put quotes around "citation needed" in the search link above, and I don't feel like fixing the parsing for %codes tonight. You'll have to put the quotes in yourself to get the appropriate results.
- baddox 14y ago
  > Do you really expect "citation needed" to prompt a useful discussion? Not really, and that's not the point of the statement. Until there is evidence, the only thing to discuss are your own predictions of what the evidence would show, or your own useless anecdotes. The point of the statement is to challenge the claimant to provide evidence, and as a side effect, to remind other readers to be skeptical of claims until they see evidence. Sure, it might be boring, especially relative to baseless assertions that make a complex problem sound easy. Again, staving boredom is not the goal of most conversations—for that I turn to cinema or video games. Witch trials, while unscientific and horrifying, were certainly not boring.

ebf 14y ago

If someone pushes a statement as a fact and not as their opinion then they better be prepared to back it up it with evidence. End of story.

delluminatus 14y ago
Do you have evidence to support this claim? Citation needed.
- ebf 14y ago
  Do you have any evidence to support that you don't need evidence to backup facts or are you just being facetious? If you said the world was flat, and someone asked for evidence, would you also ask that where is your evidence that you need evidence?
  - thaumaturgy 14y ago
    > If you said the world was flat... Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving me such a beautiful piece of clay to work with. If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was around 400 BC, you, being an educated fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Pythagoras then?" If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was circa 100 BC, you, being a clever and worldly fellow, might say, "but what do you make of Eratosthenes then?" If I said, "the world is flat!", and it was the 1400s and you were friends with sailors or were yourself a sailor, you might say, "well, then why do the sails appear before the ship on the horizon?" If I said, "the world is flat!" and it was the 1600s, you would think I was an idiot, because by now Magellan's voyage was well known and trade had begun to circle the globe, so you might just bite your thumb at me or ignore me. But if I say, "the world is flat!" and you say, "citation needed", that is the stupidest possible "skeptical" response. See, I'm not saying it's wrong to ask for a citation for a questionable claim. I'm saying that we should do better than that -- a request which you are arguing so vehemently against that, by now, if you actually were interested in whether or not "the design can be flat!", you could have come up with some examples to argue with. Every time you, or anyone, says merely "citation needed" without further thought or consideration or argument or inquiry or contradictory evidence, what you are actually doing is holding an enormously loud sign which says, "I am not smart or curious enough to ask you a good question about this, but I am suspicious of it anyway." And that's really lame.

dredmorbius 14y ago

"Citation needed" is anything but intellectual laziness. It is a calling out of intellectual laziness, in the form of an unsubstantiated assertion, and need not be a dismissal. If someone's going to make extraordinary claims, I'm going to request extraordinary evidence (or any evidence at all). It's even possible that I'm interested in the proposition and would like to pursue it further, but with the benefit of a bit of directed guidance from the author to a specific starting point. And if it's an absolute bullshit claim, well then, the onus is on the bullshitter to back themselves up (trivially done if they're not bullshitting), not on me to spend my time digging up countervailing evidence. Citation: http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/01/extraordinary-c.html http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/01/extraordinary-c.h...

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Everything I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972943 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4972943, plus: If you're actually interested in a claim and you need help finding further information about it, then say so. And if you think it's obvious bullshit, then say so by pointing out why. "Citation needed" is a meme. First it was just a good practice on Wikipedia, then Randall Munroe made a comic with it (http://xkcd.com/285/ http://xkcd.com/285/), and then because lots of geeks like xkcd and it was political season the joke spread everywhere, and now, just like every other stupid meme, it is old and boring and misused and needs to be put out of its misery. It's "lol" for pretentious people.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  > And if you think it's obvious bullshit, then say so by pointing out why. How about: I (honestly) don't believe "putting stuff on one plane makes them difficult to read", nor had I ever any trouble with understanding flat interfaces. So how can we reconcile our opinions? You assert a general statement, I have a counterexample (i.e. myself) that seems to go against it. You can't assert general statements without supporting evidence and expect people to believe you just like that. You can either mark it as opinion ("I believe ..."), or expect to hear requests for citations. Yes, "citation needed" is a meme. Yes, it came from xkcd, which is so popular among geeks[0] not only because it's funny, but mostly because it's smart and accurate. It's not just another web comic out there. > just like every other stupid meme, it is old and boring and misused and needs to be put out of its misery. I'm sorry you say that. You see, you are in the Internet right now. It's an another world inside the real world. What you call "stupid", "old and boring and misused" memes are - for better or worse - the cultural and historical heritage of this place. They are equivalent to proverbs or adages of real world. You cannot get rid of them, they are product of culture. [0] - and especially HN crowd; just search for "Relevant xkcd" or "Obligatory xkcd".