*sigh* You made a statement about *me* in the first line of your post. You tell me that researching fake news makes *me* more likely to believe it. This is not a statement about statistical averages; as phrased, it's a statement about me - and about all your other readers, individually.
I find this absolutely non-credible. If I "assume good faith", I can explain your choice of phrasing in terms most common in literature classes, that deny that you meant what you said, or expected any reader to understand it as you said it.
But most of the time, when randos say things like that, they mean what they said. Their statement applies to everyone, or at least everyone worthy of treating as human. Moreover, the evidence for their statement is usually "I want it to be true", though they probably expect to be believed primarily because of credibility granted to people of high status, however clueless and/or dishonest they may be.
Several paragraphs later, you explain what you mean. Of course it wasn't what you said; that explanatory paragraph was consistent with statistical explanations, and says nothing about your individual reader. It was, however, incomplete, so I clicked through to find out whether the "19% increase in probability" was evenly distributed across all subjects and topics, or whether it clumped - perhaps some people were incompetent at evaluating sources, and others were not.
I got more than I bargained for. The headline claim in that Nature article appears to be that using online searches brings up enough poor quality information that people "informed" by this source may well become more misinformed than before they started looking. (I haven't yet read far enough to see what their data supports.)
Sadly, that fails to surprise me. Search engine results have gotten worse and worse at giving the kind of results I generally want. Some of this is a lowest-common-denominator problem; I'm not the average search engine user. But a lot of it is simply that search engine providers quite naturally prioritize their own income, which comes from advertising, including having their search results send people to sites run by paying customers. And some of it, I think, is that people in tech management - at least those supporting a mass market user - put very little emphasis on quality.
But you may need to give some thought to being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
*sigh* You made a statement about *me* in the first line of your post. You tell me that researching fake news makes *me* more likely to believe it. This is not a statement about statistical averages; as phrased, it's a statement about me - and about all your other readers, individually.
I find this absolutely non-credible. If I "assume good faith", I can explain your choice of phrasing in terms most common in literature classes, that deny that you meant what you said, or expected any reader to understand it as you said it.
But most of the time, when randos say things like that, they mean what they said. Their statement applies to everyone, or at least everyone worthy of treating as human. Moreover, the evidence for their statement is usually "I want it to be true", though they probably expect to be believed primarily because of credibility granted to people of high status, however clueless and/or dishonest they may be.
Several paragraphs later, you explain what you mean. Of course it wasn't what you said; that explanatory paragraph was consistent with statistical explanations, and says nothing about your individual reader. It was, however, incomplete, so I clicked through to find out whether the "19% increase in probability" was evenly distributed across all subjects and topics, or whether it clumped - perhaps some people were incompetent at evaluating sources, and others were not.
I got more than I bargained for. The headline claim in that Nature article appears to be that using online searches brings up enough poor quality information that people "informed" by this source may well become more misinformed than before they started looking. (I haven't yet read far enough to see what their data supports.)
Sadly, that fails to surprise me. Search engine results have gotten worse and worse at giving the kind of results I generally want. Some of this is a lowest-common-denominator problem; I'm not the average search engine user. But a lot of it is simply that search engine providers quite naturally prioritize their own income, which comes from advertising, including having their search results send people to sites run by paying customers. And some of it, I think, is that people in tech management - at least those supporting a mass market user - put very little emphasis on quality.
But you may need to give some thought to being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.