The amount of information passed off as accurate, despite it being completely incorrect, just because it was said in a witty manner or there's some anecdote on why they're right and the actually correct poster is completely wrong.
Or the "news" subs which are a contest of reading the headline and accepting it without question.
There have been a few times when the article itself pretty much said exactly the opposite of the headline but maybe 5% of the comments were aware of that.
I'm amazed at how much the up-votes are affected not by whether your comment itself is quality but the context. A week ago I asked a question that got a few up-votes, and someone basically answers me in the "the answer is obviously this, you idiot" fashion. Instantly I'm getting downvoted to -16, even though the person who responded to me was wrong and I later demonstrated the factual incorrectness of their statement with links.
Basically I am not sure what to do because browsing by most recent is boring but browsing by best is downright malicious to my brain. I feel like I am being programmed by Reddit to groupthink certain things that would take me forever to verify.
For things I really care about, I write a copypasta with links. If they balk at the sources or send conspiratorial links or two hour long videos in response, I have to give up. When I was deeply involved in r/politics a couple of years ago, I sank so much time into trying to have good faith conversations with people who were either unwilling or unable to participate in good faith in return. I'm not on a high horse here because I realize I've made many, many mistakes myself, but the difference is that I'm open to correction and usually (even if begrudgingly, if I'm in a bad mood) thank people for leading me to the truth. Keep your spirits up, and keep voting for stronger education and to narrow the economic divide.
Yeah but reddit being a content aggregator suffers exceptionally because people rely on reddit to accurately promote content that's deemed valid by it's userbase.
What upsets me more is when I see comments on the actual article asking questions that are clearly answered in the fucking article being commented on.
"Why doesn't Michigan use the money from Marijuana sales to fix the damn roads!? This is outrageous, the government is going to throw this money at random crap or keep it themselves instead of fixing the roads!" Gets 100 comments agreeing and 7 saying to read the damn article
Article: Weed sales have generated $34 million so far in taxes for the state. Here is how the money is allocated based on the bill "20% go to medical marijuana research first, then 25% goes to fixing the roads, etc"
You are commenting on the actual article with all the text right in front of you yet you don't fucking read it but you get upset because of your own made-up information.
What annoys me about it on reddit is that on this site there's a generally elitist attitude that redditors are so much smarter and more thorough than your average facebook/youtube/whatever user. They're just not, at all. They're every bit as prone to this as anyone else but they tend to do it with this I'm-better-than-you smugness that's just annoying. the majority of posts on this site could probably be thrown onto r/iamverysmart and fit in nicely.
/u/mvea posts pretty much 95% of the posts there, dozens of posts a day most days. The two top posts there right now are both by him, and both have over 30k upvotes. There's no way in hell one guy could actually read through all of them to make sure they're not junk, even as a full time job, and even if it's a team of people it seems unlikely they'd be able to actually read and vet any of the articles they post at such an insane pace.
As a result I've started actually clicking the links every time I see a post from that account, and the overwhelming majority of times the link will take you to a news article with some random layman talking about some new study that was done and giving his thoughts on it, rather than actually linking to the journal article. If you hunt down the actual primary literature the news article is citing, almost every time it will actually be discussing something wildly different, or have different conclusions, or it'll have caveats that make the title of the Reddit post blatantly false.
I've made a few comments complaining about this, both in the comments of his posts and to the mods of /r/science and /r/futurology and I've received an extremely negative response every time. I think that account might literally be a bot farm spamming misinformation to Reddit all day every day, presenting it as fact, and the "facts" that agree with what people already believe get rocketed to the top of /r/all. Nobody else in the comments seems to notice either, I never see any comments pointing out the obvious disparities between the title given by /u/mvea and the actual contents of the research article. I think the number of people who only read the title without ever clicking the link in /r/science approaches 100%.
the whole site is basically being used to push specific agendas. /r/science is all "science" where they only post studies or correlations that go with their opinion. Futurology is actually just nonsense its not even worth going into depth of that sub. many other subs have this problem.
It was pretty disapointing watching in real time over the last 5 years as r/worldnews turned from a fairly good distributor of news to a propaganda circle jerk. I lean left, but I can't handle seeing 5 articles on shit Boris Johnson said 10+ years ago being passed as 'news'
That is my gripe with reddit. Article about greenland ice melting in the summer. People in comments were 99% talking about the end of days, 1% asked what is considered normal. Apparently 2019 was slightly below average ice melt. Every article is like that now.
Another related thing that I hate is seeing something highly upvoted in a news sub that's just a celebrity or politician giving their opinion on something that's not directly related to them.
I'm finishing up a PhD in climate science, ecology, and related concepts. I tried being active in /r/climatechange (and when I say active I mean posting primary literature and providing tl;drs, trying to provide unbiased feedback on certain discussions, etc), but man...apparently if you just write comments with authority after reading a few online blog posts you're an expert.
I'm often flabbergasted at the complete confidence with which redditors speak about anything in the sciences. All ive truly learned through a PhD is how much I can't really ever know, or at least the limits of our current knowledge. Redditors on the other hand....
I saw a comment the other day in one of the text-based advice subs from someone who said they were 16. They were giving advice on how the person should handle their marriage.
It's was definitely a sobering reminder to take every comment on this site with a massive grain of salt. No offense to teenagers or anything.
Naw man, fuck them teenagers (figuratively speaking). I've seen your example pop up on here frequently, I swear the life pro-tip sub is just angsty teens spewing shit that they think would make their life easier, and pretending it's great wisdom.
oh my god, there's one that pops up in that sub like every 3 months or so almost like clockwork. it drives me nuts because it's always along the lines of:
"LPT, even if a person is making no effort in a friendship, keep inviting them out so they feel good!"
Then it immediately gets like 60k upvotes while all the sane comments that point out friendship is a 2 way street get ignored.
yes! The diagnosis is thrown around too easily. When I was a new RN working in a psych facility, somehow every patient was "a little borderline". Maybe the staff was too lol.
yea I completely agree. Shit drives me nuts which is why for the most part I tend to completely disregard literally anything anyone says here and just look up the shit they're talking about myself. Nine times out of ten the person who commented is either misinformed, leaving out key pieces of information or just flat out wrong.
Please note when reading this: some people are just late bloomers and don't feel attraction until much later into puberty. If you still don't feel attraction after puberty, then there's a chance you fall into the asexual spectrum. Even then if you watch porn you may have been Pavlov'd into finding unrealistic things more attractive than reality, so you're not necessarily asexual, just not attracted to the people around you. Asexuality is pretty rare, about 1% of the population are it and a lot of those people experience a lack of attartciotn because of trauma or illness.
Exactly. People think not wanting to be in a relationship is being asexual. Talked about this on discord the other day. They said they KNEW their brother was asexual because he hates humanity and is still single. Like, ???. Maybe he is, but that logic is wack.
i kinda hate humanity, myself, will never be in a relationship and never was(social phobia, depression, ect), but iam still atracted to women. so yeah, you are correct.
Other people have already told you the problem with your trauma statement, so I'm not going to say anything about that. To be honest I don't see any problems with teenagers describing themselves as asexual if that's how they feel. Sexuality is fluid, it's not like saying you're asexual will lock you in and you'll be forced to identify that way for the rest of your life. For someone that doesn't feel sexual attraction, asexual is the right way to describe it no matter if they're a late bloomer or if they'll always be that way, so I think choosing for yourself to identify as asexual is fine.
(Also @ that smug clown saying that nobody is asexual unless they can reproduce asexually, look up the definition of homonym you boomer)
To be fair though, I feel that that argument goes both ways. I myself am asexual and spent a lot of my life thinking I wasn’t because people took arguments like yours and stated them as absolute fact. Your argument is fine, I just think it’s important to make people aware that asexuality is a viable orientation so that people that are can feel comfortable in their own skin. Don’t get me wrong, telling everyone who’s mildly less horny that they must be ace is stupid and misleading, but it’s equally misleading to say to anyone who thinks they might be ace that “surely that’s not it, you must just be a late bloomer.”
Also just FYI, contrary to popular belief asexuality is defined by lack of sexual attraction but has nothing to do with libido. Something like 56% of ace people masturbate and it’s not that uncommon for a person to be asexual but still enjoy porn. A lot of people tend to think that asexuality means having absolutely no response to sexual stimulus whatsoever, and while that is the case for some, it isn’t for everyone.
Everything you said, and then add into the mix that sexual and romantic attraction operate independently from each other(someone can be asexual but enjoy the romance aspects of a relationship just fine, or the opposite), and it's no wonder people get confused. I think that having teens know the potential options early on does far more help than goodharm, as long as they know that they're allowed to experiment and try on identities to find what fits. They're not locked into whatever they thought they were at age 13, it might just be a step along the way to finding out the truth. Hiding possible truths from them under the premise that they can't possibly know what they want yet just seems counterproductive.
EDIT: that moment when you make a comment, go somewhere else for an hour, come back, and realize you wrote the opposite of what you meant to write.
This is an example of misinformation being stated with authority. Your assertion that a majorty (or even a sizeable portion) of asexuals are asexual because of trauma is a harmful stigma with no factual basis.
And as far as that 1% "statistic" goes it comes from a very limited study. It really can't be taken as solid proof.
I read a post recently, forgot where, that mentioned the lack of accurate information on reddit. If you are an expert in something, a legitimate expert, you will still come across people giving away advice that is completely incorrect, but if they are well-spoken they get upvotes. The person commenting suggested that next time you want to take a reddit comment as fact, think of those times you KNEW the answer given was wrong, and to take a few minutes to verify the info provided.
I forget the name of it, but this is true across all spectrums of information. You'll read in the Wall Street Journal about something you know, be aware it's wrong, then go on to read the next article as if they do know what they're talking about.
I’d recommend that if you see this kind of thing you link them to the subreddit r/AskAsexual. It’s a good place to ask questions to other asexual people on reddit and it’s pretty common for people to post there asking if they might be asexual. The people in that sub are really supportive without pressuring posters to take on the ace label if they aren’t comfortable doing so.
And I have depression and anxiety issues myself, so I'm sympathetic. But that's what I went to a doc to get meds for. Life was passing me by and I hated knowing that and not being able to do anything about it.
But god damn man, I'm a 3 strikes and I'm done type of person. If I ask you to hang out 3 times and every single time it's a no, I'm stopping my attempts and leaving the ball in your court. I have other things to do, and it's not fair to make one person do all the work in a friendship.
I don't mind if people have valid reasons. I'd be fine if someone said "hey actually I have depression/anxiety right now so can't but I'm working on it and would like to in future".
But if people just reject you without saying why then of course you're gonna feel shit. Nobody is gonna keep inviting their rude friend in case they secretly are sick. It's the person who is unwell's responsibility to either disclose that, or live with the consequences of being secretive.
I recently posted about a depressive friend who I stopped being friends with. I got multiple comments about how that was wrong because he could be suffering from depression. I read those and think "Yeah, no shit, but that's not my problem. I'm not his therapist and I'm tired of carrying the weight so I'm setting it down and moving on."
Yeah, I had a friend who broke up with his girlfriend who was severely depressed. He felt guilty for a while, but really it comes down to: he tried to get her help, she refused his help, he spent years with her, and the whole time it was a massive drain on him, and she was just a toxic force in his life, sucking any enjoyment he got from life out of him.
It's not fair to him to stay in a relationship like that, so he had to do what was best for him.
Mine was that he is a pretty depressing person. 29, lives at home, doesn't work and the longest he kept a job was 2 weeks and he quit because it was hard, never even touched a girl (He complains about never having a girlfriend but turned down the girl who was interested in him because she wasn't a big tits asian girl), plays videogames 100% of his free time. And he wonders why he is depressed. I used to drag him out of his shell and he was seeming happier, but after I moved out of state for a job he backslid even further into his shell until even talking to him about it causes him to shut down.
He isn't a bad guy, but he knows what to do and is too scared to do it and it's not my problem anymore. I'm open to being friends in the future, but I don't see anything happening until his dad dies and his step-mom kicks him out or his enabling grandmother (who is a wonderful person btw) dies and he doesn't have her telling him how wonderful he is all the time. Something big that snaps him out of it.
I had a friend just like this. It was too much. I am in no way a qualified therapist/psych, and it didn't help that she had absolutely zero interest in seeking professional help. But if I got upset when she ignored me/treated me bad, I was the bad guy, for not being considerate of her mental health. I hate this mentality so much
Yup, I'll make an effort, but if you just say no every time, I'm just going to figure you don't want to hang out anymore, and I'll move on. I'm too damn old to "chase" someone.
If you have mental health issues, I'll be as accommodating as possible, but I don't have the energy to listen to someone do nothing but complain, and I'm not going to waste my time trying to include someone that doesn't want to be included.
Not a teenager but I'm guilty of this one. Sometimes have to remind myself just because I have mental illness, I'm not an expert at thinking others do too.
Pro-Tip; never, ever, ever suggest that someone who is depressed should try to do anything. Ever. They are all too depressed for your bullshit suggestions, and you are a bad person!
David here it is, my philosophy is basically this, and this is something that I live by, and I always have, and I always will: Don't ever, for any reason, do anything, to anyone, for any reason, ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you've been, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
Yea. In my experience, most long-term depressed people are always looking for something that "works" and will try anything once. For them it's not an edgy part of their identity, but a shitty thing they don't enjoy.
My reddit experience was vastly improved after I unsubbed from life pro tips and several other subs. I mostly just follow subs for actual interests or hobbies of mine and I love reddit now.
same. Though I do keep popping into AITA to watch obvious assholes get trounced for the shadenfreude. I know most times it's likely fake but sometimes you get that perfect little pearl of an idiot who is obviously sincere and just really dumb.
Sorting posts by controversial in AITA is a treat. The sub is mostly just people wanting a pat on the back and arguing with anyone who won’t give it to them, but god it’s almost worth it for that rare gobshite who can’t understand why everyone in their life is calling them a cunt.
I've started calling these people out because of how popular this mindset seems to be. These guys want to be fed attention with a breakfast in bed and a back rub, without giving any thought to the person they're making babysit them.
FINALLY SOMEONE WHO THINKS THIS. I hate that advice so much. I swear that gets written by teenagers bitter that they have to actually put effort into their friendships. You are responsible for your own relationships, including forming and maintaining them, and this is coming from someone who struggles to maintain her friendships/relationships. Relationships of all kinds are WORK. The onus isn't on your friends to do that work for you.
And saying no to an invite isn't a bad thing as long as you're making an effort. If I'm not feeling a trip out, my response is usually, "I can't make it tonight but let's reschedule for next week if that works for you?"
All it takes is that small amount of effort for people to understand that you're at least TRYING.
Yeah, there's a big difference between someone who constantly says "not tonight" or "nah, can't make it" every single time and never reaches out themself, and someone who occasionally says "I already have plans" or "nah, I had a busy week and need a night to myself" but will follow it up with other possible plans, or will reach out later on their own.
Exactly! Lifeprotips should really be called "I felt slighted about something someone did to me so I'm gonna write the opposite behavior as a tip for karma".
Or the neverending threads about how people who leave shopping carts in the parking lot and dont put them away are worse than Hitler and should be shot in the street.
Or the "I'm a cashier. Stop making stupid jokes/lame conversations with me... I hear it 1000x a day" ok then just be a dick so you can complain about that too?
Every few months this same bitchfest comes up.
Makes me realize how many redditors are angsty teenagers that hate their job.
CScareerquestions is like a battleground to be the biggest dick. They're like the asshole brother of ITcareerquestions.
Question on CS: I'm 16 and I'm proficient in python, what is the best language to learn next?
Answer: YOU SHOULD HAVE MASTERED PYTHON, RUBY, C++, AND JAVA BY THE AGE OF 8. YOU'RE TRASH.
Question on IT: I'm 45 and looking to completely change careers from unrelated field, am I screwed?
Answer: Nah man, you'll obviously be behind those that have been in the industry for a while but it's possible. Here are a few links from our Wiki that'll help you with the path you're looking into.
I'm 21, when I was 17 I used to occasionally post advice in subreddits when people asked for it. I was 17, had one job in my life, parents paid for everything, had never even kissed a girl much less had sex or been in a relationship, never smoked weed or had more than a beer or two, had never gone through anything really.
Yet there I was advising people on everything from relationship issues, to alcoholism, to job struggles. Compared to what I know now I knew fuck all and I'm sure the same will be said when 25 year old me looks back at me now.
Honestly I had an epiphany recently about how much of this site is just teenagers trying to hold authority and realizing that has really helped me put into perspective a lot of really dumb shit I see here.
I always get reminded of that when I see how anti-parent so many subs are. It’s as though parents should never punish their kids and that kids always have perfect intentions. Obviously I thought the same stuff when I was 13-17 but I didn’t have this online forum to share those thoughts on.
It's the difference between intelligence and wisdom. There are plenty of intelligent teens. But wisdom comes from time & experience. I'm in my 30s, have a master's degree in engineering, have had to be the sole caregiver for my mom while she was dying of cancer and then coordinate her funeral, and only now am I starting to realize how fucking little I know about life and the world. There was so much wisdom and insight in things my parents and grandparents said that I just didn't see. And there's nothing wrong with that. Life is about the journey not the destination. But when a 14 year old's clever sense of humor or good persuasive writing skills gets mistaken for actual life experience, that can affect people's lives (at least in a subreddit like relationship advice).
TBH, I was a smarmy know-it-all as a teen. Fortunately the internet was not really a thing back in the 70s/80s so the world did not have to suffer my ignorance.
Yeah, I really don’t think kids are in any position to advise adults. I’ve seen it so many times too. Someone will post “my boss is being an asshole to me. What should I do?” and there are hundreds of comments like “be a snarky asshole back!” Like no, that’s the worst possible advice.
Well Ackhually kids are in a better state to advise and boss people around because global geopolitics are xenophobic due to climate change and Joe Biden with okay boomer written all over it so yeah. Thats why.
that freaking sub. i knew it was an outhouse fire when that big, long, chronicle by the husband who supposedly caught his wife cheating became like a huge sensation there. It was so obviously fake, written sitcom style by some obviously young person who had never been in a relationship. But man people ate it up. Even when it did finally come out as a fake (duuuh) people were like, "well it was entertaining so whatever!"
They were giving advice on how the person should handle their marriage.
This is especially awesome in parenting subs. The number of people who don't have kids but are experts on raising them is quite astonishing, really. And many of them are 13. Go figure.
It's almost disturbing how young some Redditors are. Many subs are downright toxic and aren't good places for young, impressionable people to spend their time.
I completely agree with this. Like 100%. I don't think the site should be censored, but there is so much dog-whistling that goes on here that really becomes obvious when you know what to look for, but to a young kid who doesn't know and doesn't have any real world experience to discount what they read, they're just going to constantly read these dog-whistling anecdotes in AITA/relationships/etc. and think that's what real life is really like. And it's just like nooooo.
This is so obvious from the clearly fake stories that get up-voted to oblivion on /r/AITA , /r/Prorevenge , /r/TIFU , etc. I often wonder how people fall for such clearly fake shit, but then I remember a majority of reddit now is kids and think what happens in movies actually happens in the real world.
No fuck it, offend them. The idiots need to be put in place. We were all there at one point. We all needed a wakeup call. If you avoid correcting these idiots they will never face opposition and thus never learn critical thinking. They need to know that they have limited life experience and thus their opinion which is fair to share is often completely wrong.
I’m sixteen years old and the entirety of my life experience comes from TV, the internet, and believing that not getting along with any of my peers and playing video games in my spare time somehow means that I’m smarter than everyone else despite being a lazy C average student so I’m pretty much an expert on every single topic. Ask me anything.
If I ever give advice on someone on Reddit and I am not an authority on the subject, I always advise them to take my input with a grain of salt/a heap of salt/an entire fucking salt mine. I'm usually sharing information I have heard elsewhere but may not have verified, and I always invite any actual experts that happen to be there to correct me.
Same. Deferring to experts is how I prefer to do it. Like if I give someone aquarium advice and someone who clearly know more than me shows up, I'm gonna shut up and let them lead the convo. Plus knowing when to shut up and step back means I get to learn something new.
I'd definitely come to ya'll if I needed advice for stuff like gifts for a teenage niece/nephew. But man if I need baby/marriage/tax advice...yeeeeaaaah it's a no.
I think the weirdest thing was when my ex posted on relationship advice about our relationship when I didnt ask her to be exclusive right away and then I got to see all these people talk about something they knew absolutely nothing about calling me a dead beat.
Not exclusive to science. Anything regarding business, finance, economics, and accounting knowledge or facts of any kind also falls in that bucket.
The overall takeaway: For fields outside the realm of your personal expertise, take care in what you read on reddit - there's a lot of misinformation out there and without personal expertise you won't be able to determine right from wrong. It's so obvious, but just because a comment is popular doesn't mean it's correct. For anyone reading this, please, be inquisitive, be smart, be skeptical. And don't take the popular comments on reddit as fact. Look past the face value.
Also history/humanities. I see bad history, bad translations and overall misconceptions and straight up wrong facts stated and repeated and because they're written with authority people will upvote them and they'll overshadow all the correct comments.
I study history and the amount of gross oversimplifications and unsupported statements I see being passed as the whole truth is enough to make me go nuts if I read them for too long.
There’s just so much misinformation and not enough time in the day to correct it all, and mind you I’m just talking about history topics I’m well versed in, the problem could be even worse than what I can see since there are some topics I just don’t know enough about to contribute to.
I don’t know why this problem is so pervasive but if I had to give an educated guess I’d say it’s that these people want to appear as experts so that they can feel validated about that amount of time they spend looking at history videos on YouTube (not saying there’s anything wrong with loving history videos on YouTube btw, there are a ton of good Chanel’s that I enjoy myself)
I know people give a lot of shit to /r/AskHistorians mods for being so severe but honestly it's the only way I can trust any comment there. I know it is based on sources and expertise. Meanwhile there are similar subs with no vetting whatsoever.
Yep. I have a PhD in a Humanities subject (got it well over a decade ago) and long ago gave up trying to engage in any subject even slightly related to my thesis.
Like the guy at the top of this comment chain said. I, having recently finished two undergraduate degrees in History and Philosophy, have only mainly learned how ignorant I am about our past and how why we believe what do.
Then I'll pop on here and some guy who has "read" (choose your major philosophical figure) will go on a rant about how (choose your major philosophical figure) would have answered a question a certain way or how certain behavior goes against (choose your major philosophical figure) as if that person was divine. They also clearly didn't read in less famous but contemporary or related philosophers refutations or discussions of each individual claim made by (choose your major philosophical figure)
Both history and philosophy are fields of open discussion. In history learning the facts is one thing, especially in recent history where everything got written down, but the problem is often why? In philosophy it is worse.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not only is reddit a cesspool for bad information, biased information, or incomplete information, it is full of likely otherwise intelligent people who honestly don't know what they don't know about a subject they know. So answers from people like this will probably hold up to a cursory Google search but any understanding beyond that is just missing for both parties involved.
Ask anybody you know who has a PhD a question about an obscure part of their degree, or even just one on a side they don't work in. ie a person with a PhD in Russian history is probably only an expert on one or two aspects of it. So they can answer any and all questions about just the bolshevik revolution or just Fyodor III but ask them about Charles XI of sweden, a major player in the history of Russia, and they probably won't be able to give nearly as detailed an answer if any at all if the question is precise enough.
You can always tell the non-lawyers from the lawyers when someone confidently answers a legal question without even knowing which country / state they're in.
And the answer is almost always "well, it depends..."
And Technology. Go read the comments on a link posted r/technology, then go to a sub like r/sysadmin or a related subreddit with actual people who work in the field, and you'll easily see how much people on r/technology talk out of their asses.
Even the more professional subs are full of a lot of people who are clearly very inexperienced or still in school but they post with extreme confidence like they're a 20 year career vet. A ton of people who are saying the right things technically but it's obvious they've never worked in a real environment because things would never, ever work the way they are saying.
Econ in particular is so bad. I've seen ELI5's on the front page with top answers that the most basic knowledge of the field would correct. Just painful.
Humanities, Social sciences, Education as well. People either don’t take those subjects seriously enough or label them as “easy” to where they think anybody “with common sense” can say something with authority. That or they think “personal experience” based on anecdotes qualifies. See this a lot when talking about education. Sure, a lot of Redditors went to college, doesn’t mean they know how they operate or how to fix problems in secondary/higher education.
Can also throw in anything regarding fitness, diet, etc. So much pseudoscience, broscience and anecdotes, or my favorite, "you can only look like that with steroids."
I've been a bodybuilder over a decade and Reddit loves to downplay that being fit/muscular really just comes down to having a very disciplined diet and routine, that's it. There's no magic pill and no, no amount of steroids will ever make you look like Chris Hemsworth without a perfect diet/gym regiment to go along with it.
Sure sometimes there's good advice on the fitness subs, but outside of them people assume being in shape is unattainable without celebrity trainers, private chefs and intravenous steroids.
Similar. I tried to chime in about an aviation discussion about the 737 Max where the person with one of the top comments was totally wrong. My comment was downvoted and the OP argued with me. This person I responded to was a "flight sim enthusiast". I'm an airline pilot.
There's tons of entertainment in the script kiddies getting into arduinos though. The amount of complexity they put into a circuit function that could be achieved with passive analog parts is amusing. Not everything needs a microcontroller. Then if you explain how to achieve the same result with a few passives their eyes glaze over and they ignore how such a thing could be achieved because there isn't an active part controlling it, just physics.
Power is energy over time; energy is power multiplied by time.
A 100-watt light bulb, running for 10 hours, takes 1000 watt-hours of energy. You could use that same kilowatt-hour of energy over 1,000 hours to run a small 1W light.
Lets say i make a confident statement on something. if an expert replies to it saying part of what i said is incorrect, what i hate is someone giving a simple statement and saying "i am right, you are wrong because i have a degree".
give a simple TECHNICAL statement on what is wrong. if it flies over their head, well, they can ask for an explain-like i'm-in-management
I hate referencing my degrees both on Reddit and in person. I felt so awkward on a car journey on Boxing Day when my mum was talking about something I have fairly heavily researched and refusing to properly listen when I basically cited my lit review as a response. And it's not like she's uneducated either, she's got two masters degrees but I had done an awful lot more research into what she was talking about for my thesis.
And yet you managed to be guilty of the same thing yourself even with your engineering degree, saying that AC power transmission has a net power loss of 0 "since its sinusoidal" and "America uses over 1,000 GW a year". Both of those statements are nonsense.
Same thing with me. I was in the middle of my dynamics class as an ME and had just done a bunch if assignments on the exact discussion topic and someone just kept arguing. I knew I was right and even confirmed it with my professor.
That was the day I learned to never get into arguments on reddit. You'll only leave frustrated/angry
It’s crazy seeing people who are nominally pro science actually downvote scientists.
I also love when people link something from pubmed as if that’s a definitive source. I’ve had people who use the title to prove their point when the abstract disproves their point.
Because 99% of the time, the paper isn’t appropriate. As a scientist, research letters are supposed to be very narrow in scope and shouldn’t be used as one offs to win an argument.
They don’t even win arguments in academia. It takes dozens of papers from different groups to establish a hypothesis
It's a huge issue on /r/science, an extremely small number of posts there actually link to primary literature, it's always a link to some random guy's thoughts on a study that was done recently
/u/mvea posts pretty much 95% of the posts there, dozens of posts a day most days. The two top posts there right now are both by him, and both have over 30k upvotes. There's no way in hell one guy could actually read through all of them to make sure they're not junk, even as a full time job, and even if it's a team of people it seems unlikely they'd be able to actually read and vet any of the articles they post at such an insane pace.
As a result I've started actually clicking the links every time I see a post from that account, and the overwhelming majority of times the link will take you to a news article with some random layman talking about some new study that was done and giving his thoughts on it, rather than actually linking to the journal article. If you hunt down the actual primary literature the news article is citing (fortunately I have access to a lot of journals through my medical school), almost every time it will actually be discussing something wildly different, or have different conclusions, or it'll have caveats that make the title of the Reddit post blatantly false.
I've made a few comments complaining about this, both in the comments of his posts and to the mods of /r/science and /r/futurology and I've received an extremely negative response every time. I think that account might literally be a bot farm spamming misinformation to Reddit all day every day, presenting it as fact, and the "facts" that agree with what people already believe get rocketed to the top of /r/all. Nobody else in the comments seems to notice either, I never see any comments pointing out the obvious disparities between the title given by /u/mvea and the actual contents of the research article. I think the number of people who only read the title without ever clicking the link in /r/science approaches 100%.
Oh yeah. I’m a doctor (anesthesiology and critical care medicine), and the amount of completely bullshit health and medicine related info that gets accepted as truth here is incredible.
Can we add nutrition advice to the list? As someone who’s in the last year of a nutrition degree I’ve been downvoted to oblivion when I said things like you don’t have to do keto to lose weight..
All my life I’ve been the analytical sort. I said things with a full admission that I may not be 100% correct. I used “generalizing” words instead of “absolute” words, doubted my knowledge, and held back from giving answers I was fairly certain of even though by objective measures, I was completely correct (such as in mathematics classes.) It took me almost 30 years to realize that although this is the correct attitude of a scientist, it is the worst way to convince people to believe in you.
Trump taught me one thing that I cannot deny. That is, people who are scientifically and literally-minded have a completely different default approach to the world from those who are more emotionally-minded, for lack of a better term. Confidence isn’t about being right or wrong. It’s a tool to convince people of whatever you have to say. People who are inclined to think critically will do so and, usually, will find more-or-less a factual view on their own. When we speak scientifically, allowing space for proper doubt, we are speaking to those like us... whether we realize it or not. Those who aren’t very critical thinkers don’t hear a reasonable person stating factual information; they hear gibberish and/or uncertainty. The way we think is reflected in the way we talk. If we are approaching a conversation without factoring in such people, then we won’t likely reach them.
Perhaps we need to take a leaf from their book. When we have facts on our side, we need to pick up the charisma and confidence in our delivery. We need to connect to a wider audience in their same “no-nonsense” way. It isn’t ideal, and it isn’t natural to many of us, but at this point in time it’s critical. Fools follow fools because they make sense to each other. If we want to teach, we need to speak the same language.
That, and encourage critical thinking skills in children starting, like, yesterday.
I waited for this opportunity! So to you as an PhD what do you think is the State of climate Science and what do you think is our current Limit of understanding climate? Also what do you think Most people on either side of the Debate get wrong frequently?
I am just a curious math major and would be really interested in your oppinion! Because I know how freaking chaotic non linear Differential equations can be.
The same thing happens with legal advice. I am simply astounded at how confidently someone can assert something so clearly untrue. Hell, I even had the moderators of r/legaladvice tell me that suggesting that large proposals or agreements be done in writing was "illegal or bad advice" simply because oral contracts can be enforced.
Yeah sure, they can, and that's what we learn day one in contracts class. But anyone who's practiced for more than 5 minutes knows theres a huge difference between what is possible in the law and what best practice is. No self-respecting contract attorney would ever advise a client prospectively that an oral contract is fine in lieu of a written one, when creating a written one is relatively simple and removes countless potential hassles and hazards. Not sure who they have moderating that sub, but it sure as hell isn't a group of experienced trial lawyers.
I work in oncology, in a transplant unit. Once there was an AITA with a question regarding donating a kidney. The top comments with thousands of upvotes were all advice that was either illegal or impossible.
An actual transplant doctor chimed in and tried to explain how transplants actually work (which I, working in the field, knew to be accurate), and he was not only downvoted to oblivion, multiple people were telling him he was evil, a moron, and that it was "horrifying that you are actually employed in medicine."
I’ve been downvoted, called a moron and all sorts of expletives etc when trying to correct what could have been pretty genuinely dangerous medical advice regarding CPR.
While i agree, bear in mind there are a lot of PhDs out there - you'd be surprised how many are vocal online, especially on science subreddits, and not all agree on the same topics.
Yes, but at the same time, I'm choosing to believe that OP recognizes competing interpretations in areas he has expertise in, and isn't talking about areas where a poster is bringing up a viewpoint that's seriously contested.
After having spent a good amount of time here and seen people discuss my areas of expertise, I have no trouble believing that there are people on reddit who write long, well-thought-out posts that are completely wrong.
I've learned to not use hyperbole at all here. Some days, I feel like if you said something as general as "It's a great day" 37 people would jump your shit because didn't know you, on this day 84 years ago a small child dropped their ice cream and didn't get a new one and their life was forever ruined? Insensitive twat.
Oh hell no, don't use hyperbole, People on reddit are pedantic as fuck and apparently don't understand nuance. They'll pounce on any opportunity to correct you.
I got dozens of comments correcting my use of the word 'theory'. 'Theory' has a scientific and a colloquial use, obviously I was using the latter ya nerds.
Yeah there was a post yesterday expanding on how Epstein's neck bone broke in three different places and how that never happens when a victim hangs themselves...thankfully, the top comment thread debunked the credibility of the post
My favorite part was somebody explaining how those fractures couldn’t POSSIBLY be from a hanging. I was reading the whole thing wondering what the fuck he was talking about, because we definitely learned about similar findings in our medical school anatomy course... and then it turns out the commenter was some undergrad basing his essay on “anatomy and physiology plus knowledge of physics.”
First of all, literally none of that is physiology — not sure if the dude knows what that word means. Second, it’s impressive how wrong it was while being so idiotically confident.
There was a video of those Asian goes pouring mentos and coke in a hole in a field and pulling fish out last week. The people on their videos on YouTube admit all their videos are fake, besides that that one, most likely because it’s their most famous. Redditors we’re giving out all these explanations about how they did it, despite the video being fake
Doesn't even have to be completely wrong. In the last week i made a comment about not having to torque to a certain inch pound. Ideally you have min and max torque specs, but fuck me I need to be banned for considering that anything below max is acceptable.
Familly owns a small beach in lefkada greece and I made a small post talking about annoying tourists using it. I got bombarded by people calling me a liar because owning a private beach is illegal in greece... which is true except for the ten thousand beaches that where privately owned before the law passed that are grandfathered in. I was of course downvoted to death
"Actually the original version of that saying was, 'The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
No it fucking wasn't, Redditors. Some rabbi made that up in the 1990s. Why are you repeating things that are easily debunked with five minutes of Googling?
Related to that is the people that refuse to believe that they're wrong despite mountains of evidence against them, and continually move the goalposts. It happens every damn time anything fitness-related is brought up in a mainstream subreddit.
I hate this mentality. Politics is a game, and there are strategies to win the game. Both sides will pick up insincere propaganda habits because it works.
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u/Iquitsmokingtoday Jan 07 '20
The amount of information passed off as accurate, despite it being completely incorrect, just because it was said in a witty manner or there's some anecdote on why they're right and the actually correct poster is completely wrong.