> The problems I've run into is both people giving fake citations (the citations don't actually justify the claim that's being made in the article), and people giving real citations, but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank.
Citations have become heavily weaponized across a lot of spaces on the internet. There was a period of time where we all learned that citations were correlated with higher quality arguments and Wikipedia’s [Citation Needed] even became a meme.
But the quacks and the agenda pushers realized that during casual internet browsing readers won’t actually read, let alone scrutinize the citation links, so it didn’t matter what you linked to. As long as the domain and title looked relevant it would be assumed correct. Anyone who did read the links might take so much time that the comment section would be saturated with competing comments by the time someone can respond with a real critique.
This has become a real problem on HN, too. Often when I see a comment with a dozen footnoted citations from PubMed they’re either misunderstandings what the study says or some times they even say the opposite of what the commenter claims.
The strategy is to just quickly search PubMed or other sources for keywords and then copy those into the post with the HN footnote citation format, knowing that most people won’t read or question it.
Citations have become heavily weaponized across a lot of spaces on the internet. There was a period of time where we all learned that citations were correlated with higher quality arguments and Wikipedia’s [Citation Needed] even became a meme.
But the quacks and the agenda pushers realized that during casual internet browsing readers won’t actually read, let alone scrutinize the citation links, so it didn’t matter what you linked to. As long as the domain and title looked relevant it would be assumed correct. Anyone who did read the links might take so much time that the comment section would be saturated with competing comments by the time someone can respond with a real critique.
This has become a real problem on HN, too. Often when I see a comment with a dozen footnoted citations from PubMed they’re either misunderstandings what the study says or some times they even say the opposite of what the commenter claims.
The strategy is to just quickly search PubMed or other sources for keywords and then copy those into the post with the HN footnote citation format, knowing that most people won’t read or question it.