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0 pointspessimizer3y ago0 comments

> Human brains are fairly bad at detecting non sequiturs.

I think it's more that we automatically try to fix them. If you asked somebody to recall and reproduce those sentences after reading them, they would unconsciously add information to what they recalled until it turned into a reasonable defense.

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joveian3y ago

I suspect another part is just that people only have so much time to read and consider such stories and all they really need to do is make it seem like the situation is more complicated than it seems (which sometimes is actually the case). I tried a quick search for any studies on what people actually think about these company statements but couldn't find anything; another possibility is that people do easily recognize them as BS but that so few people ever see any particular news article that it doesn't really make any difference.

I think printing BS company (and politician, etc.) statements as is, often at the end of an article, is a major issue affecting the reputation of journalism. I don't know the full history but it is related to defamation issues that need to be taken into consideration in some way. I think the situation is something like: printing the company's response makes it much harder for the reporter/publication to be sued for defamation and so the easiest thing to do is to just attach the response as-is without further consideration. They could (and IMO should, and occasionally do) ask questions like "how does this statement relate to the question we asked you" but companies mostly will just ignore such questions (they can print that and I think usually do if they actually ask the question). There can potentially be unexpected complications that arise if they press the company that make the story more difficult to write and/or defend legally. I don't know how much of it is legal considerations if there is a lawsuit vs a kind of unwritten agreement not to push to hard to avoid lawsuits. It partly relates to these quick stories that publications don't want to put much effort into, but even long expensive articles don't seem to have a good record IMO. They do seem to just hope that people will recognize it as BS but even when that is the case printing BS affects their reputation as well.

The Forbes article that voidmain0001 mentioned linked to this routers article:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/madison-square-g...

It seems the lawsuit that prompted the ban is minority shareholders suing the wealthy family who were the majority owners of two business they recently combined.

jerf3y ago

There's an interesting idea you can look for which has the deeply unfortunate name of System 1 and System 2 thinking. I hate it when people use bare numbers to name things like that, I can never remember which is which. Considering it's just "fast" and "slow" thinking we could have used those terms instead. But the idea is you have fast heuristic thinking, and slow rational analysis. Fast heuristic thinking probably generally assumes that a "because" statement is sensible. The slow thinking can penetrate that, perhaps even easily. But one generally misunderstood thing about slow thinking is that it is legitimately expensive. Even geniuses do not have the cognitive firepower to run through their entire lives subjecting everything to the full power of slow thinking, to say nothing of normal people.

You can try to train your fast system to see a "because" and flag it and/or discard it entirely, though. You do enough of this and you start looking "cynical", but in the hostile epistemological environment we live in now, if you're not "cynical" you're being taken advantage of. Even as a cynic I advise against it as a philosophical position; there are good things in the world, there are reasons for hope and charity and love. Cynicism can be a corrosive philosophical position. But it's simply a necessary intellectual posture nowadays.

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