Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Douglas2's Law

Frequent AVI commenter Unknown/Douglas2 weighed in over at a post of James's at I Don't Know, But...

I liked it well enough to reprint it.

I've even postulated versions of "Douglas2's Law", which are:
a) if you can't get to primary sources within 3 clicks of hyperlinks (such as to a transcript or video of the talk or interview, the actual court decision, or the journal precis of the scientific paper), they are intentionally lying to you.
b) sensational articles will include links but trust that very few of their readers will actually click and read what is linked, as it nearly always contains the refutation of their headline claim.

2 comments:

Douglas2 said...

In hindsight, I'm not sure that saying "the reason I don't change my mind when presented with new information is because I'm always right" was really a positive contribution to the discussion there.

But I'm happy to have my "laws" see wider distribution!

Assistant Village Idiot said...

That would be the negative framing. That you find you are still right even after rechecking would be better. A lot of us around here think that about ourselves, and many of us are also right, largely because we actually do recheck. That skill seems to have gone out of fashion, if indeed it ever was the fashion.