this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
352 points (89.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
2 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.

It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion -- let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.

But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it's the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways...so really no difference).

What's the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there's people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don't see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Of course I'm not "immune" - nobody and nothing is perfect.

But I pay attention and weigh and analyze and review and question, which beats the shit out of slavishly believing whatever I read.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?

Where would you put yourself as a percentile? Let’s get granular here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The only competition here is between relying on ones own judgment vs. relying on a third party.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.

I am just asking for an honest assessment of how you perceive your own judgment. So are you going to answer or not?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.

Okay

So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?

Where would you put yourself as a percentile?

Right there. Obviously. In fact, that's the exact point of a percentile - it's a ranking system, which is to say, a competition.

So are you going to answer or not?

No.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I knew the % for my height and weigh growing up as it charted my growth, pretty basic stuff when going to the doctor. I wasn’t competing against anyone, it was just information. It seems you’re the one who is just narrow minded here. If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.

Bye

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.

Right - you'll just assume that I see it as some sort of competition that I'm winning.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

But I pay attention and weigh and analyze and review and question

and you do all that based on facts.

you can analyze, review and question facts and then form an opinion, but first step is to be able to trust the facts you read and that is where the rating of the source may be useful (if you are not already familiar with said source).

unless "using your own brain" is euphemism for discarding facts which doesn't fit your opinion, then you indeed don't need to know anything about trustworthiness of the source 😂

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No - actually I do the bulk of it based on presentation.

"Facts" fall into two categories - ones that can be independently verified, which are generally reported accurately regardless of bias, and ones that cannot be independently verified, which should be treated as mere possibilities, the likelihood of which can generally be at least better judged by the rest of the article. In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.

Rather, if for instance the article has an incendiary title, a buried lede and a lot of emotive language, that clearly implies bias, regardless of the nominal facts.

That still doesn't mean or even imply that it's factually incorrect, and to the contrary, the odds are that it's technically not - most journalists at least possess the basic skill of framing things such that they're not technically untrue. If nothing else, they can always fall back on the tried and true, "According to informed sources..." phrasing. That phrase can then be followed by literally anything, and in order to be true, all it requires is that somebody who might colorably be called an "informed source" said it.

The assertion itself doesn't have to be true, because they're not reporting that it's true. They're just reporting that someone said that it's true.

So again, nominal facts aren't really the issue. Bias is better recognized by technique, and that's something that any attentive reader can learn to recognize.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.

Double facepalm.