Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post 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.
Posts and comments 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 non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally 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.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
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.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
view the rest of the comments
I wouldn't go as far as to say extremely misleading. The graph there does show foreign aid per capita after all with a selection of western countries.
The title of this post is wrong and should either focus more on Luxembourg/Norway or say that US is behind some other country in foreign aid per capita.
It isn't titled "foreign aid per capita among western countries" though. The fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also in the top 20 paints a very different picture of what placing highly on the list actually means.
Furthermore, it doesn't say "among western countries with greater than 8.5m population except for Norway which is much smaller". The caption says "among countries with large populations", where a large population is defined as greater than 8.5 million. That's extremely misleading and arbitrary. And then Austria and Saudi Arabia are omitted anyway, despite fitting all the above criteria.
So yeah, I would definitely go so far, and in fact I considered going further and calling it outright misinformation.
I'm with you that the title and ranking of US as #10 is wrong. The graph is still just a graph of a select few countries with a large population as an illustration.
The way OP presented it is misleading as if those are the top ranking countries and that this is the entirety of their development aid. The article is specifically for aid provided by the state for DAC/OECD members which excludes private aid where it doesn't contain ranking and only contains a short list of countries.
The post is misleading, the Wikipedia isn't.
Austria, Ireland, Denmark, and Finland are all DAC members and aren't included in the graph. The graph is unequivocally misleading, which is my original point.
The article itself does have a more comprehensive table, but it uses outdated figures from several years ago. The title of the article is "List of development aid sovereign state donors" and yet it excludes major ODA donors such as Saudi Arabia, not only from the DAC list but also from the second list.
I don't understand why people keep defending this when I outlined like 10 separate errors already. Are you even reading my comments or am I responding to bots?
Thanks for the passionate criticism, it's needed.
Thanks. At first, I just happened to notice that the graph didn't match up with the table below. And then when I pulled up the source I realized there were many more errors.
And it's terribly important to share this type of stuff. Most people doomscrolling want the short adrenaline hit which corresponds with preexisting beliefs.
And that's cool.
But for me it's important that people don't take things at face value and actually look at sources.
So I figured I'd not only important to upvote, but also personally thank people for doing that stuff, as I saw what happened to Reddit and people got flushed away with underbelly driven doom peddlers.
So thanks again!
"I didn't read past the title, therefore misinformation"
The irony 🫠