The Importance of Fact-Checking

Posted by NaOH 4/1/2025

The Importance of Fact-Checking(lithub.com)

186 points | 130 commentspage 3

acidmath 4/5/2025|

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MrMcCall 4/5/2025||

I understand the importance of fact-checking, but the problem is that it loses its value when much of the readership dont care about facts.

We live in a world where many, many people are not only too stupid to know how stupid they are, but don't give a shit that they're stupid AND think they're the smart ones.

Dunning-Kruger is incredibly instructive.

mantas 4/5/2025||

On top of that, quite a few fact checkers seem to be cherry pickers too. I’ve seen too many fact-checks where with some knowledge of the topic it was obvious that fact checkers either didn’t do due diligence or pushed a narrative on purpose.

huhkerrf 4/6/2025|||

Ironically, your comment would be illustrative of Dunning Kruger, if it really showed what you're claiming.

The Dunning Kruger study never said that stupid people believed they were smarter than smart people, or that they outperformed the high performers. All it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance, but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.

You don't have to believe me. It's clearly shown on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

MrMcCall 4/6/2025||

> it said is that the underperformers overestimated their performance

True.

> but they still believed they did worse than the high performers.

Fair point, but if they can't understand their own unexcellent performance, how can they understand excellence? They never did.

They thought they were expert enough, which was simply not true.

And they had ZERO understanding of what it takes to be an excellent performer, which was precisely why they thought they were excellent.

I read the study itself. It shows "the overconfidence of fools".

Does DJT think he's a dipshit? Of course not. He believes the exact opposite, because he's a lying fool, just like the underperformers of DK. Whether a person knows they're lying or is just mistaken is not as important as the fact that they're just not capable nor do they even know what it takes to be capable. They are trapped in the fiction of their own capability.

The key takeaway is that honest, humble hard work is the way to achieve expertise, and that many people have chosen to lie to themself and the world instead.

I do concede that they didn't believe they were better than the true experts. Thanks for the correction, but the overconfident fools of the world still think they're smart, and often they think they ARE smarter than intelligent people, even though that's not in DK.

lazyeye 4/6/2025||

Honestly you could well qualify yourself as one of these overconfident fools you speak of. You seem awfully judgemental of people you know very little about.

lazyeye 4/6/2025||

It also loses value when the fact-checking suffers from the same biases it is supposedly trying to rectify.

One way a govt can circumvent the first amendment, for example, is to fund a grant for "misinformation" research unit at a prestigious university. Where the entire staff are political fellow travellers who, not surprisingly, find everything the govt disagrees with to be "misinformation" and then applies pressure to get it taken down.

kelipso 4/6/2025||

And then people figure out that the supposed fact checkers are politically biased and so don’t believe their “facts” anymore. And then people who believe the supposed fact checkers say that people who don’t believe their “facts” are stupid or don’t care about facts.

It would have been hilarious to have a Department of Truth though. Every change in administration, everyone in the Department gets replaced by a new set of people dictating a new set of “facts”.

cantalopes 4/5/2025||

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tomhow 4/6/2025|

Please edit swipes out of comments on Hacker News. We're trying for curious conversation here. If you could remind yourself of the guidelines that would be appreciated: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ctrlp 4/6/2025|

So, basically, regarding journalism: they had learned nothing and forgot nothing. Something died in me when I realized TAL and NPR were largely just bullshit factories. Glass isn't even coy about his motives being to tell/sell stories. He admits that truth is secondary to theater, and he's pretty unapologetic about dressing up performance as journalism. So unconcerned about it, in fact, that he's proudly teaching such ethics to students at prestigious journalism programs when he should be teaching at the performing arts school.

ripe 4/6/2025||

It's quite a leap from "TAL discovered their mistaken story and added fact checking" to "TAL and NPR are largely bullshit factories".

You need to present evidence for your extreme claim.

ctrlp 4/6/2025||

The producer of the show is admitting he is going to subvert facts to fiction if it helps tell a good story and you're demanding evidence?

paulryanrogers 4/6/2025||

Is it fair to lump all of NPR in with TAL? They have quite a few different shows run by different people.