Contriving

Speculation that bacteria have developed resistance to our antibiotic of last resort…

There's a fully-general counterargument widely used in online discussions that I think is pretty weak.

It goes like this:

1.  Jane shares article from Goodtown Daily Journal to support her argument, or just merely to share some information.
2.   Larry who disagrees with the gist or conclusion of Jane's article says "oh that's from Goodtown Daily Journal, you can't get accurate information from there".

Larry may or may not be right.  But the problem is that this argument can be used against anything Larry doesn't like.  If Larry has a point of disagreement with the article, Larry needs to engage that point of disagreement.

Let's take political ideology here:

In the US, this fully-general counterargument is used against Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.  The problem is that not every single thing these places post is subject to whatever your accusations of bias are getting at.  Every single thing in the NYT isn't a lie or a subtly slanted piece of propaganda designed to further the liberal agenda.  Every single thing Fox publishes isn't a lie or a subtly slanted piece of propaganda designed to further the conservative agenda.

Now, maybe there's The Journal of Some Political Ideology's Propaganda that publishes nothing but things designed to further an nefarious agenda.  The problem is that, I'm just not going to listen to you when you use the fully-general counterargument I discussed in this post because the fully-general counterargument is mostly used by lazy ideologues.

 This post is related to my post earlier this morning about headlines and article content (https://blog.contriving.net/2015/11/22/scott-alexander-highlights-how-hopeless-it-is-to-try-and-easily-get-accurate-insight/).

Vox headline:  *5 things to know about Democrats' stunning win in the Louisiana governor's race*
Second sentence in article:  *The outcome was predicted by the polls, but still counts as fairly surprising given the drubbing Democrats have taken in state politics, especially in the South.*

I dunno about you, but it seems to me that "stunning" is different from what that second sentence is describing.

We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinved themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature.

—Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

—Daniel Dennett or Rose Kennedy.  

The internet is a little unclear where this quote comes from.  

In his book The Raising of a President, Doug Wead attributes this to Rose Kennedy.  There's random people all over the internet attributing it to Daniel Dennett, but I can't seem to find an original source for that.

If it's raining outside, that's training in the rain. Snowing? Awesome, snow running! Too hot? High-temperature training. Too cold? Low-temperature training. I'm too tired? Fatigue training. I also try to look at things from what I call a "mediative" point of view. So let's say I'm out running my regular route but it's cold, windy, raining, etc, and I feel miserable. I try to remember how I felt running the same route on a beautiful day and bring my mind back to that state. Or if I'm fatigued, I try to remember a day when what I was doing felt easy and set myself the challenge of trying to regain that mindset. Again, it's about turning problems into opportunities: fatigue is an opportunity for fatigue-mastery. It helps to take an interest in the mental element of training, sports, etc, so you can think of mastering mental adversity as part of your training.

—scientism

Does anyone  know how to prevent getting G+ notifications like "Joe added you back."?  

I don't see an option for that in the notification settings.

Scott Alexander highlights how hopeless it is to try and easily get accurate insight into scientific issues.

I frequent a forum where laypeople ask questions about physics all the time, and people are often led awry because of the idea in this paragraph:

To make the ideas easier to explain, people will often tell you to imagine something more familiar, like a big flat sheet with weights on it. These pictures are good, but sometimes they make you think of new questions, and when you try to use the picture to answer the new questions, you get answers that don’t fit with each other.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist jerk.  Notably, he was racist even by the standards of the early 1900's.