Ultimately, if two people are at odds over something and I'm coming in blind, the one trying to keep me from hearing the other side has already discredited themselves.
How is that even debatable, barring an appeal to authority or something equally as tiresome and/or fallacious?
On HN I trust someone who's inviting nit-picking by saying "this is SOP, google it your damn self" a lot more than I trust someone citing their sources because there are a fair number prolific commenters who form an opinion and then back it up with cherry picked links as a debate tactic (moves the debate from one of their opinion to one of source credibility).
In synchronous communication or another context where I can't reasonably "just google it" the suggestion to do one's own research is a lot more suspect.
> On HN I trust someone who's inviting nit-picking by saying "this is SOP, google it your damn self" a lot more than I trust someone citing their sources [...]
There's the old "trust but verify" saying that's relevant here. The person that cited their sources at least did some of that work for you, whereas the other person might have based their claim on random shit they overheard on the subway.
I don't understand this idea that showing less of your work is somehow more convincing.
Random searches for this phrase on Twitter seems to back this up somewhat. From the first about 100 which I was made, about 2/3rd was about some obvious misinformation, and a deeper analysis would probably take it higher. However, there is definitely a bias here, because I’ve only encountered with this phrase before from people “backing” obvious COVID, vaccine or Trump misinformation.
Sounds like you just did your own research, no? And you sort of cited your source.
Now someone can look at what you said and decide how confident they are with what you claim. From my perspective, I can take what you wrote as someone's honest opinion based on stuff that comes across their social feeds. I wouldn't treat it as ground truth, but I can feel confident that at least one person in the world has had that experience.
If someone makes a claim and points to a few studies that I can cross check, even if I'm not qualified to evaluate the studies, I can have some confidence that some domain experts have given evidence for the claim. I can also look for studies that contradict the claim, and in their absence, I can know that some experts believe xyz and I can't find any experts that disagree.
That's about the best I can do as a layman, and I think it's a lot better than nothing.
So you've come up with a heuristic that says 1) doing your own research is fine, and 2) people who tell you to do 1) are suspect?
If so, I can't imagine thats very effective. You're probably better off just assuming strangers don't know what they're talking about unless you have some good reason to believe otherwise.
