Far too often I’ve seen people post screenshots of what are supposedly news articles with the name of the source cropped out, or someone will claim that a news event happened without citing an actual source. When I call them out on this they often respond with “Just google it”.

This isn’t the early 2000s anymore, and yet people are still saying variations of the phrase “Do your own research”. So I’m going to explain why you should always cite a source when talking about the news, and why telling people to “just google it” doesn’t work.

First the algorithm that Google uses, like the algorithm that all other major sites use, gives different results to different people. That’s why people disagree so much about the facts. When someone claims that shapeshifting reptiles control the world, they’re using the same thought process to come to that conclusion that most people use. It’s just that they’ve been given different “evidence” by the algorithms. This is how echo chambers work.

Conspiracy theorists aren’t any dumber than most other people, they’ve just been hit with results that other people haven’t been hit with. So it really doesn’t make sense to tell someone to “just google it” and expect them to form the same result you did.

Secondly the people who post these stories on social media often make them up entirely. It can take time to debunk a claim, but it takes no amount of time to come up with a story, especially when most people have a flimsy understanding of what kind of stories seem realistic.

This is a huge problem with community notes. It offloads the thinking to selected people, and it normalizes the idea that you should just believe any story you come across on social media so long as it doesn’t have a community note.

It’s not the skeptic’s job to debunk stupid claims. It’s the job of those making the claim to back it up with something. In the time it takes to debunk one claim ten more can take it’s place.

The burden of proof lies on the one making the claim. It’s not my job to test your claim for you. Anyone who’s serious about resisting propaganda should disregard any news stories that don’t, at the very least, have a link to the news story.

People should know better by now than to just believe everything they see on the Internet. It’s especially frustrating when there isn’t even so much as a screenshot of the supposed news article, or when the screenshot cropped the name of the source out.

People will literally believe something they read just because they think it sounds true. So they come to the conclusion that the world is secretly ruled by shapeshifting reptiles, they’ll come across a claim that someone on the news had their reptilian cloak malfunction, there won’t even be so much as an image attached to the post, and then people will mentally add that to their list of “facts” that supposedly prove that reptilians exist.

It’s not just conspiracy theorists, of course. People are convinced that America is some kind of rape culture, because they keep seeing people posting stories about people having been raped. Many have even gone so far as to claim that we should just automatically believe any woman who claims to have been raped regardless of if there’s evidence.

They claim that false reports are rare (without ever citing a source) and they expect us to literally just automatically believe these claims made by complete strangers.

One would think that it’s obvious that we shouldn’t just blindly believe every claim we come across on the Internet, yet I’ve seen people in arguments bring up a story about something that supposedly happened as evidence of what they’re saying, and then the other side will seemingly just assume that it’s true and try to come up with explanations for why the story happened that makes it seem like it’s not very good evidence.

“Just googling it” doesn’t work, not just because the search engine is giving different people different results, but also because these stories often don’t provide the details needed to even search for them. I cannot stress to you enough why “just google it” is intellectual laziness.

The people posting this propaganda know damn well that most people won’t “just google it” anyways, so I take it upon myself to call into question these claims so other people can see my posts and realize that they shouldn’t just blindly believe propaganda.

People say “trust the experts” and yet they don’t seem to understand how experts operate. Citing sources is not optional.
As Carl Sagan put it “Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence.” He didn’t say “Extraordinary claims call for you to just look it up to verify that it’s true.” as that would be obviously absurd.

The next time you see someone not post a source do the right thing and, at a bare minimum, don’t just believe what they’re saying.

You can’t. The questions “Is this account run by a bot?” is undecidable. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeQX2HjkcNo ) is a really great introduction to what the term “undecidable” means though it talks about a different undecidable problem. Basically it means that, while it is often possible to tell if a given account is a bot, and it may even be possible to sometimes automatically prove that an account must be a bot, there will always be accounts out there that may or may not be bot accounts and you cannot possibly know for sure.

One trick you can use to tell if an account is a bot is to look at the rate at which they’re able to make posts. If they can make posts faster than a human could then it’s a bot; however all that means is that the human programmers who make these bots have to do is add a small random delay between each tweet to hide it’s true nature.

You could try checking to see if it always posts at the exact same times right down to the second, but again that method for checking can be thwarted. You can check to see if they’re posting at all hours and never taking time to sleep, but once again, the bot can be programmed to only tweet during the daytime for whatever time zone it’s pretending to be in.

As for the text itself in the message, there’s no magic that can be used to tell if a given piece of text was generated by AI or written by a human. Humans can write text that seems like it was made by something like chatGPT (this is usually done by people making fun of it), and you may be surprised by how well an AI bot can pretend to be a person.

Once upon a time it was easier. I found in the 2010s that many chat bots couldn’t answer the question “What was the last thing I said to you?” in the middle of a conversation, but now bots are more than able to give a good, clear answer to that question.

Modern AIs mimic how the human brain works more closely than previous AIs were able to. Ever since the invention of AI transformers in 2017 it’s been possible to build bots that can keep track of much longer conversations rather than only being able to remember the last thing that was said to it.

I’ve seen people on Twitter fall for bots that were far simpler than chatGPT. The “Dr. James E. Olsson” account comes to mind. That account merely generates the same randomly selected tweets over and over again. It takes a randomly selected message from a file, tweets it, waits a while, and then tweets again over and over like clockwork. It also deletes it’s old tweets at regular intervals like clockwork to avoid suspicion. I’ve seen what seem like actual people fall for this account before.

To be clear, there are ways to tell if an account is spewing propaganda, but both humans and Ais can do that. It’s also generally easy to develop an AI that can detect spammers by using machine learning, but spam, like propaganda, can be done by both computers and humans.

Of course modern bots aren’t very good at coming up with new ideas, but neither are most people. At the end of the day, there’s nothing we will be able to do to be able to tell if something is real or not.

Stupidity is everywhere, and it seems that people don’t quite get how to think. So here are seven things to NOT do if you want to have some shred of intelligence.

7. “Gathering evidence” by reading a bunch of anecdotes off of the Internet.

The logic of science made a great post about why stories and anecdotes are not really scientific evidence. You can see their article here. That post assumes that the people posting those anecdotes are being honest and not just making those stories up. The truth is that stories can be, and frequently are, completely fabricated by propaganda accounts.

It’s amazing how often people will see a tweet with a story in it that provides no proof or even evidence that the story is true and the replies will be full of people automatically assuming that it must be true. Stories are not proof of wider societal problems. They are propaganda.

If the news posts a story about the president murdering every member of congress and declaring martial law then that’s one thing, but when the media posts ten different stories about school shootings that does not imply that school shootings are a common problem. Ten data points out of 300 million people should not, under any circumstances, be seen as convincing.

6. “Proving” things by looking at a bunch of your “evidence” and the impressions you get from them

I can’t believe I have to point this out, but there are no degrees to how proven something is. It’s either proven or it’s not. Far too many people think that proof comes from gathering anecdotes until it seems convincing enough. It’s so bad that even the legal system uses the word “proof” wrong.

To prove something means you’ve shown that it has to be true, and that there’s no way for it to be wrong (so long as the assumptions we’ve used are correct). One could argue that there’s degrees to how proven something is based on how few assumptions were made to get to that proof, but that’s a very different kind of fuzzy logic from using real world evidence.

We don’t generally prove things about the real world. In order to prove something you need to make assumptions. In math we prove things based on as few assumptions as possible, and sometimes we’ll use math to prove things about the real world based on assumptions about physics (these are called “the laws of physics”). What we generally do to establish truth about the real world is use theories. We come up with explanations for things.

Proving things in Math isn’t easy. You need to come up with arguments that aren’t any kind of logical fallacy, and make as few assumptions as possible. Proving things about the real world is about gathering actual evidence and trying to come up with explanations for said evidence.

5. Arguing with and then blocking anyone who came to a different conclusion

There are quite a few problems with this mentality. For one, the people who came to a different conclusion are typically looking at a different set of anecdotes. Of course they’re going to form a different conclusion. It’s not necessarily them being any more ignorant than you are. It’s them not having heard the “evidence” that you did.

Blocking doesn’t do anything to help. Just because you can’t change someone’s mind over the course of a single conversation doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. All that blocking does is make the problem worse because now neither you nor the person you’re arguing with are able to see any counter-arguments from the opposition.

People often agree that we shouldn’t ignore evidence that we’re wrong, but where do you expect to get the evidence that you’re wrong? The evidence fairy? If you’re not using google to debunk your own views then you don’t have a choice but to rely on people bringing evidence up in conversation.

4. Straw-manning opposing viewpoints based on the snap judgments you’ve made from arguing with people.

Remember earlier when I said that people never see opposing arguments? Well that wasn’t 100% accurate. There are accounts on social media that seek out the dumbest arguments that the opposition makes, take screenshots of them, and then show them to their own side to create the impression that the opposition is stupid.

This is straw-manning. The accounts doing this know damn well that they’re helping to maintain echo chambers. That’s the entire reason they’re doing it. Echo chambers don’t just happen by accident. They’re deliberately created by people who have ambitions of building a cult.

Debunking stupid arguments isn’t a bad thing so long as the people using those arguments can see the debunk, but if you’re not making sure that they see it then you’re just preaching to the choir.

3. Have a mob mentality that tries to punish other people for disagreeing.

Sometimes people will do shitty things like pressuring businesses to fire “racist” employees. These tactics do more to piss people off than persuade, and they also persuade people watching all of this unfold that these “activists” are just a mob (hence the term “the woke mob”).

Another thing they’ll do is block people who don’t agree with the zeitgeist strongly enough. These kinds of pointless purity tests make the group weaker since this is, by definition, infighting. Splitting the group into pieces makes a bunch of small groups that are each less effective at creating helpful change.

2. Never trying to disprove your own conclusions.

Disproving your own conclusions is how critical thinking works. Just because something has been established, that doesn’t mean you should take it as absolute, unquestionable truth. What that means is you should try to disprove it. The more you fail to disprove it, the more certain you can be that it’s true. Scientific evidence is not based on anecdotes, and it’s usually not based on proof. It’s based on disproving things.

1. Wondering why your pointless purity tests don’t do anything.

How on Earth anyone can wonder why these methods don’t work is beyond me. It’s obvious that they don’t work because, since Trump first ran for the 2016 election, there has been almost no progress at all in politics. Trump managed to stay in office for an entire term, and nearly managed to become a dictator, and he’s still got the potential to be a dictator.

If you want to solve the problem then you need to be willing to make sacrifices. I know that breaking these bad habits is a counter-intuitive solution to many people, but counter-intuitive is not the same thing as wrong. The sacrifice you have to be willing to make is that you must give up these idiotic habits. Progress will never happen so long as you’re trapped in the cycle of ineffective problem solving.

You can whine, and moan, and bitch, and complain all you want about how people who disagree slightly on one tiny thing are literally fascists, but that doesn’t do a damn thing to defeat actual fascists.

It’s time to do better.

I recently came across a tweet on Twitter (I’m not calling it “X”) which claimed that the AI art crowd was being dishonest.

My first gut instinct was that the person tweeting this was the one being dishonest. This was, after all, a straw-man argument. I even made a reply tweet. However I’ve said in the past that you should never draw a conclusion based on just one piece of evidence (I know, I know, I should have thought it out more before responding). There’s always another explanation when you only have one piece of evidence. So what’s the alternative explanation here?

I think it’s possible that this person doesn’t quite understand some of the arguments that the AI art crowd are making. So let’s dive into exactly how programmers think, why so many of them think this isn’t copyright infringement, and what kinds of misunderstandings people might have.

First let’s start with the basics. I made a blog post on the main blog here: https://noahs-blog.net/?p=422 about the basics of computers, but to make a long story short: computers are machines that follow basic instructions which tell them how to think in any way that’s possible.

When programmers think about programming, we think in terms of how we’re shaping an artificial mind to think. That’s why so many people use the argument “It’s mimicking the human brain”. To them it sounds like a convincing argument because not only is this just a machine thinking, it’s even thinking in a way that’s kind of like how humans think.

You wouldn’t call it copyright infringement for someone to look at and remember what a piece of art looks like, would you? Of course not. That would be insane.That’s absolutely comparable to what the computer is doing. In order for it to imagine Pikachu caught in a mouse trap, it first needs to know what Pikachu, and mouse traps look like, and it needs to have some idea of what it means to be caught in a mouse trap.

The only way to do that at this level of technology is to show it a huge number of images with accurate descriptions of what’s in those images so that the machine can learn the pattern. That way it can learn what Pikachu looks like (from images with Pikachu in them), what mouse traps look like (from pictures with mouse traps in them) and what it means for something to be caught in a mouse trap (from images whose descriptions say that something was caught in said trap).

In my opinion computers should have to follow the exact same rules that humans do. We shouldn’t have a separate set of rules for bots because bots are thinking systems much like humans.

Nobody that I’m aware of is claiming that publicly available is the same thing as public domain. The idea is that it’s okay for an AI to look at images and learn the patterns behind them because that’s what humans do all the time. Why shouldn’t machines be allowed to do that as well?

While artists tend to care a lot about intellectual property laws (for some reason), programmers tend to dislike things like copyright and patents. That might be in part because of vendor lock-in (which I’ve described here: https://noahs-blog.net/?p=383 ). STEM related stuff tends to be done better when it’s done openly without worrying about things like patents and copyright.

This is possibly why artists freaked out at the thought of automated tools downloading massive amounts of drawings off the Internet and learning from them. To programmers this is far less big of a deal. Nobody on the programming side of this debate sees it as “stealing art” (whatever that’s even supposed to mean). They’re getting data samples so the computer can learn the patterns behind it.

As for those who think that AIs shouldn’t be allowed to learn the pattern behind art pieces that are publicly available: how SHOULD they learn the patterns exactly? It’s not exactly practical to pay a huge number of people to draw all that art for them. At the end of the day, this was really kind of inevitable.

Hello, this is my second blog. My main blog is noahs-blog.net/ which is supposed to be about explanations for how to engineer things and (hopefully eventually) figure out how to invent everything from scratch.

If you want to contact me my email is: noahmartinwilliams@gmail.com. Also I’m active on twitter if you want to hang out with the username @noah_anyname. I’ve also got this youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB9Bmy34jTl0wx9Kz3cjWEQ I don’t post there very often, but I do have tons of playlists that may be worth checking out.