Hub of Reason

ChrisW

00:48

Nevermind, I found the theory/theorist you were referring to: Robert McNair Price

user35386

07:56

@Sklivvz People are confused about notability at skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18737/…

Sklivvz

09:48

@Articuno thanks

@Oddthinking @larianlequella @madscientist @jamiec @borror0 @konradrudolph we need to clarify the notability rules

the "if one person doubts it, it is the onus of the asker to provide notability" is royally backfiring

ultimately it is up to the asker defend their question, but that said, it's up to the community to verify notability before harassing anyone with requests of proof

the "up to the OP" rule must be clearly identified as a tiebreaker, not as something we need to community enforce at all

the unspoken rule was always to google a question if in doubt about notability first. This seems to have been forgotten and now, even for clearly notable doubts, we are harassing people.

That will not do. It is hostile :-)

@Oddthinking @larianlequella @madscientist @jamiec @borror0 @konradrudolph please ping in once you read (so I know you are alive!) :-)

ChrisW

10:19

1

Q: Must every questioned 'notable claim' include a referenced citation with a quote?

Welcome to New Users links to What is notability and how should we enforce it? in which the accepted answer includes the following: It is not required to have an explicit cite for a claim in questions, though it is very helpful if the notability of the claim is questioned. and If you su...

^ That was a meta-topic on the subject.

0

Q: How effective is self-punishment?

Some self-help gurus recommend punishing yourself for not achieving a personal goal. How effective is this?

psychology

^ That was one recent example of a question being closed.

Sklivvz

3

A: How should we enforce notability?

When is a claim notable? The definition of notable claims is provided by another FAQ answer. How should we enforce notability? The easiest way to demonstrate notability is to explicitly cite a notable source containing the claim, e.g. a newspaper article. It is not required to have an explicit...

^ this is pretty much what I am saying, it has been our rule from the beginning...

> It is not required to have an explicit cite for a claim in questions

> If you suspect that a claim is not notable, you should perform a minimum amount of research before acting.

@ChrisW that should have been closed as "unclear what you are asking"

ChrisW

IMO there may be two distinct reasons for asking for a reference: a) to demonstrate notability ("does anyone believe this?"); b) to clarify the question ("what topic is the OP asking about?"). You're saying we shouldn't be excessively strict about a). IMO it's still worth being strictish about b).

Sklivvz

Ok but that has nothing to do with notability

(and I have reservation on that, but it's a separate discussion)

ChrisW

I didn't vote to close the self-punishment question, but I did ask for a reference.

Sklivvz

it doesn't need a reference, it needs clarification. Asking for a reference is not correct imo.

ChrisW

10:29

IMO a reference clarifies/defines what the question is asking about.

Jamiec

@Sklivvz read and thinking

Sklivvz

for some types of claims, it clearly does. for some others it restricts the claim to something someone said, which might not be what was intended.

in this particular case, the question is too broad and generic to be answerable and needs to be restricted, but not to the point of taking something someone said to the letter

ChrisW

meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/2499/2703 are examples of claims which don't need a reference to define the claim (and where any specific reference may be too restrictive).

Sklivvz

@sklivvz Cannot log into SE chats (grr!) but I essentially agree with what you’ve said.

Tweeted by klmr on December 18, 2013 at 10:29 AM

@ChrisW yes, i think those cases are way more common than we think

ChrisW

Anyway I think there's some overlap between a) asking for a reference, b) proving notability, c) asking the questioner to narrow/clarify/defining the topic. Sometimes I ask for a reference to clarify the topic. Maybe there's a better way of asking than to ask for a reference. But when I ask it's because of ignorance (of the subject) and my subjective judgement (that the topic seems to me vague or open-ended or inviting too many different replies).

In that case, asking for a reference is an easy/objective way to criticize the question.

Sklivvz

10:44

if a question is only unclear you should ask the OP to clarify it. Notability proof is but one way to do so and it does not guarantee the question will be clarified even if the user doesn't simply walk off. We should help people to fix their question how they prefer or think it's best.

ChrisW

Anyway, IMO the main point of your current convocation is not to redefine the rules or to define perfect rules which we can all apply objectively to every future question and all come to the same 'correct' close reason. Instead, you want to ask people to be less strict about requiring references as proof of notability.

Sklivvz

I've clarified the closure of the self-punishment question (I nuked your comment and replaced it with mine. if this is a bad thing, please add it in again!)

ChrisW

If the question is unreferenced and unclear, but is nevertheless seems as if something like that might probably be notable, maybe you want users to comment instead of VTC.

@Sklivvz No that's fine, yours a better comment than mine; both clearer (in meaning), and softer/warmer (emotionally). IMO Oddthinking is skilled/patient in his comments: it's not easy to criticize warmly, I admire his ability/attempts to do so.

Sklivvz

once you have a diamond people get really ugly with you if you don't become soft-touched. we learn that through self punishment

ChrisW

11:05

So you learn through experience, eh? But anyway,
http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/2497/2703
^ The relative voting on those answers made it clear to me that references are not always required for proof of notability (and that users like me, therefore, should not unconditionally/automatically demand references).

Sklivvz

yes, however I think the top answer should be edited to include a link to the other meta which clearly says "google first" and maybe a bit reworded so it avoids phrases like "status quo" which are too subjective

Mad Scientist

@Sklivvz Then we'll just throw that sentence out. The idea was more that users would question the notability if they had some reason to doubt it, not as a default assumption that a question without a quote is not notable, which is what is happening now

Sklivvz

Agreed. I also think that proposing that notability citations clarify the question is being interpreted as the "best" or "only" way to do so

so maybe we can find a better wording there too

Mad Scientist

I've also a much higher tolerance for vague claims than many, as the vagueness is rather common (and sometimes even a deliberate strategy) when you encounter such claims in the wild. Putting too much of the burden of specifying the claim on the asker is not always good, often the answerer is much better qualified to clarify the ambiguity in the claim

Sklivvz

Agree

ChrisW

11:15

@MadScientist I'm very inclined to tolerate vagueness in a referenced claim, much less inclined to tolerate vagueness in a claim which is only a paraphrase by the OP.

2

For example if "vegetable are good for you" is what/all that is published somewhere (and/or is an exact quote of what everyone has heard from their mother) then that's not too vague.

But for example if an OP paraphrases, "self-help gurus recommend punishing yourself for not achieving a personal goal" then (even though that may be more precise than the previous claim) I find it a bit too vague for me.

^ part of the vagueness with that is also the topic: e.g. psychology as opposed to medicine. Neverthless, IMO vagueness in a referenced claim made by some else (who , the author of the claim, cannot be reached for questioning/clarification) is par for the course or fair game, whereas I find vagueness in an OP's paraphrase of a claim less tolerable/worthy.

@MadScientist I agree that the OP isn't required to understand/explain/clarify a referenced claim.

^ That's a reason why I (perhaps wrongly) ask for a reference, if I find the OP's paraphrase of a claim to be vague.

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11:36

The statistical work in both answers to the Swedish question is incredibly poorly done.

Nonsensical even.

But also quite irrelevant. So, how to convince the answerers to remove the population statistics?

Looking at you, @Oddthinking. :)

ChrisW

@Transmissionfrom Oddthinking's answer needed to show that less than 100% of people in Sweden are immigrants, in order to say it's unlikely that 100% of all criminals are immigrants.

Oddthinking

I'm aware I have been pinged, but no time right at the moment. Will get back to you.

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@ChrisW Yes, but if we are talking about a county (not country), with 300 reported under-15 rapes. They could quite easily have been perpetrated by much less rapists. It is even conceivable that there was some kind of very-localised outbreak, say on a few schools in a particular neighbourhood (by a cluster of perps). And that the reporting was "encouraged" by the news on the outbreak. The lack of such outbreak would be much more convincing than general population statistics by themselves.

Of course, I am not saying that this speaks for the claim (which seems total and malicious crap), but rather against the use of inconclusive statistics, which possibly undermine the credibility of the essence of the answers.

Oddthinking

13:21

[I am catching up, so sorry for the reference way back.] The Orson Scott Card question was closed by me because:

1) It read as though it *wasn't* notable - it was just this folk etymology the OP made up having watched a movie/read a book.
2) It wasn't clear whether he was referring to online forums only, or any use of the word forum. I genuinely wondered if he had never heard the word forum used outside of online forums. I almost left a comment to this effect, but it was hard to word politely.

I did spent a trivial amount of time googling it, but was swamped by forums ABOUT Orson Scott Card.

I also looked in an etymology dictionary, but it spoke only of the Middle English version of the word, not online forums.

@Sklivvz I agree with the idea that we shouldn't dismiss notability without trying to find it first (but I will add a caveat to this in a second.) Are there any examples you want to share where we handled this poorly?

I'll note that I have backed off a little on the enforcement of notability from a recent discussion on the topic. I feel that we've already had two or three questions explode in our faces recently because the question wasn't clear, and I am reconsidering whether early closure might not have been right in the first place.

@ChrisW I originally closed this question. (@Sklivvz re-opened and reclosed it to clarify the reason, which I support - further discussion below.) I was keen to put it on hold quickly, because it had very quickly earned a (now-deleted) facetious answer about suicide being effective. If silly answers were addressing the question, the question was too broad/vague/unclear.

Sklivvz

@Oddthinking yeah i can provide examples

This question was notable without example and the community reacted by asking for an example without googling

2

Q: Can hot-plugging an HDMI cable damage the HDMI port?

I found this site on the Internet saying something to that effect: Warning!!.....Never connect and disconnect HDMI cables and equipment while your devices are powered on (hot plugging cables). The hdmi cables carries a low DC voltage while connected. You will damage your equipment and the HDM...

computers electronics

This one received two close votes about notability, even though it's clearly notable

3

Q: Do over 80% of day traders lose money?

I've heard multiple times that the vast majority of day traders, sometimes given as "over 99%", lose money. What's a realistic number? For specificity, use a one year time-frame. For example, here are references to two such claims: Do Individual Day Traders Make Money? Evidence from Taiwan ...

statistics money investment

The notability proof was added afterwards

Oddthinking

13:37

@ChrisW @Sklivvz: I concur with Chris: Many of the requests for notability are really, at heart, requests for clarity, giving a hint about the simplest way to achieve it. I'm open to preferring the "Unclear" close reason in these cases, but I have to admit I wonder which would tend to provoke a usable question edit more often.

Sklivvz

The point is, imo, not about the rules. It's about hostility.

people should not ask notability without checking first. that has been the rule for a long time. people are not googling first, and people are misusing notability rules to address unclear questions

Oddthinking

@Sklivvz I'd support that edit. Go for it.

@ChrisW I hate the "Are veggies good for you?" claims, but I am alone in that: meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2508/…

Sklivvz

> * Demonstrates that it is worth the effort to solve.
* Avoids *rewarding* unsubstantiated speculation - we shouldn't jump to research every hypothesis thought up in bar sessions.

these two bullet points are incorrect: they refer to notability not to proof of notability

or am i misunderstanding?

> As agreed in that [answer](http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/1491/2703), it is essential that a claim be notable. It is important, but not essential, that the claim be represented with an example.

For all the reasons you give, and more, it is important to have a notable reference:

* Makes the question more specific, which in some cases it's necessary
* Helps identify strawmen, where the OP has misunderstood the original claim.
* Demonstrates notability in borderline cases

Therefore, it is *better* to have a notable reference. Where a question without a notable reference suffers …

Oddthinking

13:53

@Sklivvz I can see that point. It's a subtle one, and will be tricky to express clearly.

I'm happy with the change.

Again, I suspect one issue is that I don't see On Hold as a hostile act, where new users might, because I know we get harder to deal with when an answer is posted to a question.

(See the debacle with crops in Bronze Age Britain)

Sklivvz

no no, this is not about putting stuff on hold

this is about people putting comments like "notability proof is required" pretty much on any new question without an example, then VTC as Not Notable

if you google it first, find a specific problem, etc. do vote to close and point out the problem. don't leave crap hanging around. However, no example doesn't mean crap

what about changing the VTC reason as something like "it has been impossible to find an example of this claim"?

Oddthinking

@Transmissionfrom The controversy on the Swedish question is a little surprising to me. I feel like I answered a question "Did Einstein say 'God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.'?" and I said "No, Shakespeare wrote that." and I got pushback that Einstein might have also said it and I have proven nothing.

I think my answer demonstrates the original source of the claim fabricated it. That it could be coincidentally true in some sort of longshot scenario, based on hypothetical data that has never been gathered, seems rather moot. It didn't seem appropriate to let the claim stand unchallenged, despite its hoax (or at least blatantly false) evidentiary support.

The HDMI hot-plugging question bothers me because I can't see how the answer is going to be anything but "Maybe". There are off-the-shelf circuits to protect HDMI against static, but hat doesn't mean every device will use it, will use it correctly and will handle every situation... but it probably means in practice you can ignore the risk.

Oddthinking

14:27

@Sklivvz Interesting.

Current text is "This question doesn't identify a specific notable claim. Please add a reference to and quote from the published text which contains the specific claim you want to question." (Plus links)

What if it changed to "We could not find a specific notable claim. Please add etc."

So it became a reflection on the Voters-To-Close rather than the OP.

(Maybe it should be clearer that the place we couldn't find it in was the universe of the interwebs and our bookshelves, not that we couldn't find it in the text of the question.)

ChrisW

OTOH there's a problem with users googling to find a notable claim. E.g. skeptics.stackexchange.com/posts/17427/revisions where someone added three references as evidence of notability, with each reference claiming something slightly different (so that the topic seemed to become broader, or three possibly-separate questions).

Or skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/18697/2703 where I added references to prevent the question being closed. Otherwise one of those references might have instead been used as an answer. And then the comments degenerated into asking what specific timeline (6 months? at least 1 year?) the claim is about, instead of answering the (originally broader) question. It ought to be easily answerable in general; but data may not exist to answer ...

... the skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18697/… version of the OP's question.

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14:47

@Oddthinking I appreciate that. But implicit in your statistical argument is the presupposition that there is no reason for extreme correlation between rape and (loosely speaking) ethnicity. It might however be argued that that is the whole point of the maliciously fabricated claim: that there is such extreme correlation. So, effectively, you're just denying that point, without providing evidence against it. (Note that I'm only referring to your 3rd paragraph.) But, never mind. :)

Sklivvz

@ChrisW there's no way around question being bad from time to time. In some cases we will need to close them even though we can find examples - but not for not being notable. In some other cases, specifically, one can't find a real claim example, because all the claims are followed by debunks... I would say they do not count as claims in that case.

ChrisW

@Transmissionfrom The other answer tried to address that correlation, with evidence that an immigrant is (only) five times more likely to be charged than a non-immigrant is.

Oddthinking

@Sklivvz I've always felt slightly guilty - of kind of reverse cherry-picking - when I filter through potential notable examples trying to find one that actually makes the claim, rather than debunks it. In such a case, it is hard to justify we are making the Internet a better place when anyone searching for an answer will find many.

ChrisW

@Sklivvz It was in order to use the close reason to VTC unclear/ambiguous questions that I phrased it as "This question doesn't identify a specific notable claim." instead of for example "There's no evidence that this claim is notable".

Sklivvz

@ChrisW does it need to identify a specific claim? How specific?

reminds me of the "John Carmack said probably billions" versus "billions"

yes, one is more specific. I wouldn't want to have that argument as a new user of this site

Transmission from

14:58

@ChrisW What I have in mind is, e.g., the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_sex_crimes_case. 83 victims by 1 perpetrator kind of distorts any statistical independence assumptions.

ChrisW

@Sklivvz IMO if it's referenced then it's specific enough - if the reference is chosen by the OP (which shows that the referenced claim is the claim which the OP wants to question).

Sklivvz

what i meant is: sometimes we make stuff too specific for the sake of referencing. For example: if the claim is that vaccines cause autism, we shouldn't restrict the claim to a single vaccine

it's not great to have 10 questions, one for each vaccine someone had to complain about

it's better to have one question with a great answer

ChrisW

I agree. Still, as you know, when the claim isn't IMO specific then I ask for a reference, either as a comment or using that VTC reason. The VTC reason is (deliberately) ambiguous: it does double-duty for "not notable" and for "not specific".

And IMO you're saying that we want the question to be as general as possible ("but, not more general than that", I'm thinking), and unconstrained by a specific reference ("unless necessary", I'm thinking).

user35386

18:10

I agree that when there is ambiguity in a claim that happens to be quoted and referenced, our approach should be "so be it", and deal with ambiguity by committing to particular interpretations in our answers, or, if it's too ambiguous to even do that, close as "too broad".

user35386

Perhaps we should change our wording. Notable has connotations inconsistent with our usage. "Believed" is more in line with what we're looking for. We want to examine claims that are believed or professed as fact.

user35386

@Sklivvz What if something is notable, but that can't be gleaned by searching Google?

Sklivvz

18:41

From the point of view of the community, it would be indistinguishable from a non notable claim unless they personally know it is, no?

user35386

Right, but I thought it only matters that a claim is notable, not that is demonstrably notable

user35386

I just read your edits here: meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2497/…

user35386

It seems that if I search Google for examples of the claim and find none, then we can require the asker to provide a reference? Is that correct?

user35386

That seems to be returning to our standard of requiring evidence of notability.

user35386

(sorry, I used the wrong word: demonstrably. I meant "i thought it only matters that a claim is notable, not that there is evidence online of its notability")

user35386

18:53

(Oh, wait, nevermind, there is a sense of "demonstrably" that means capable of being demonstrated...)

user35386

19:06

wow... extracting 4096-bit RSA decryption keys using sound

user35386

put mobile phone down beside a computer doing decryption... record acoustic signal of the computer doing its work... enough info is in that signal to recover the keys

Sklivvz

21:20

Can someone edit skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18753/… so the question is not about a claim nobody is making?

user35386

22:53

Actually, nevermind about all that that I just said. We should just be reasonable. If we have reason to believe that a claim isn't notable, vote to close (and explain why, so that others in the community can try to convince you otherwise). But don't imply in that comment that it's the asker's responsibility to provide evidence of notability. The burden is on the community to evaluate a question's notability. Might be hard to do if evidence of that notability is not online, but so what?

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