[jamestimmins]

I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.

Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.

[walkabout]

One of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type.

They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)

[mm263]

Michael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the Maintenance Phase podcast: https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/

[hathawsh]

I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.

[Daishiman]

The statement "most of the internet seems to be down" is somewhat easy to verify without too much research.

Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.

[hnuser123456]

So many things are actually concentrated on the "cloud" providers now that significant chunks of "the internet" can all go down at the same time for everyone in a way that was supposed to be impossible with the many-fault-tolerant mindset the internet was originally engineered with. Laypeople don't need to understand any technical topics to understand "a bunch of websites/apps broke for everyone on Sunday". Some are even noting that this is happing more often and affecting more apps at once.

anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.

Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.

Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.

[parliament32]

But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".

If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".

[hooch]

Actually the internet was not down at all. It was perfectly up.

[vharuck]

>I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.

I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."

[triMichael]

I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and it will show two bands. This is false.

One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.

Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.

In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.

[tome]

Until I learned about the Bohmian interpretation of QM (though a comment here on HN) I found QM mathematically sound but physically muddled. BM changed all that. Now I think it's physically sound too. It's remarkable how a change of perspective can shift understanding.

[dooglius]

The Wikipedia article [0] cites some work of the experiment being performed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment?useskin...

[antisthenes]

Now you understand where the "Wise man under the mountain" trope comes from.

Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.

Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.

In many cases it's insurmountable.

[pnathan]

> I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.

This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.

[dlcarrier]

There's a book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53317475-the-quick-fix

[taeric]

What sucks is when the information wasn't necessarily misleading, but still overwhelmingly misleads people.