Heuristic: distrust any claim that’s much memetically fitter than its retraction would be. (Examples: “don’t take your vitamins with {food}, because it messes with {nutrient} uptake”; “Minnesota is much more humid than prior years because of global-warming-induced corn sweat”; “sharks are older than trees”; “the Great Wall of China is visible from LEO with the naked eye”)
What do you mean by “retraction”? Do you just mean an opposite statement “sharks are older than trees” --> “sharks are not older than trees”, or do you mean something more specific?
Assuming just a general contrasting statement, my gut feeling is that 1. this heuristic is true for certain categories of statements, but generates wrong intuition for other categories 2. this heuristic works, but rarely because of memetic reasons, instead it is just signal to noise ratio of the subjects.
Currently I am thinking about counterexamples from statements that roughly equates to a recommendation “Twitch is the best streaming platform” (I know it isn’t very fitting as a memetic statement), which heuristically sounds plausibly true to me because 1. I know there is a very small number of streaming platforms 2. people who talk about this is likely to know what they are talking about
Heuristic: distrust any claim that’s much memetically fitter than its retraction would be. (Examples: “don’t take your vitamins with {food}, because it messes with {nutrient} uptake”; “Minnesota is much more humid than prior years because of global-warming-induced corn sweat”; “sharks are older than trees”; “the Great Wall of China is visible from LEO with the naked eye”)
What do you mean by “retraction”? Do you just mean an opposite statement “sharks are older than trees” --> “sharks are not older than trees”, or do you mean something more specific?
Assuming just a general contrasting statement, my gut feeling is that 1. this heuristic is true for certain categories of statements, but generates wrong intuition for other categories 2. this heuristic works, but rarely because of memetic reasons, instead it is just signal to noise ratio of the subjects.
Currently I am thinking about counterexamples from statements that roughly equates to a recommendation “Twitch is the best streaming platform” (I know it isn’t very fitting as a memetic statement), which heuristically sounds plausibly true to me because 1. I know there is a very small number of streaming platforms 2. people who talk about this is likely to know what they are talking about