Alex Jones didn't just say there are chemicals in the water turning the frogs gay. Alex Jones said the government was deliberately putting chemicals into the water as part of a chemical warfare operation to increase the homosexual population and reduce birthrates, and that the frogs turning gay was the proof.
It doesn't matter that he was a little bit wrong about the actual effect of the chemicals on amphibian sexuality, he was very wrong about his actual claim, that being that gay people are bioweapons in a secret program of mass human genocide.
While Alex Jones was undoubtedly wrong on that one, I believe the source of his misinformation didn't come out of nowhere. Which is exactly what the parent comment was trying to illustrate. Take a few pieces of truth, fill the gaps with wild imagination and emotionally charged responses, and you get Alex Jones and his content.
Back in the 90s, US Air Force Research Laboratory was indeed working on a halitosis bomb that would do exactly that - turn those impacted by it gay.[0] As far as the wikipedia page goes, it seems like they didn't succeed in producing an actual halitosis bomb (and I have zero reason to believe otherwise, but I bet some Alex Jones supporters might disagree with me here), however it was included on their 3 pages long proposal paper for possible nonlethal chemical weapons. Which proves that there was some research on it and that the intended purpose of the hypothetical "gay bomb" was to use it as a nonlethal chemical weapon.
Major news sources reported on the Bush Administration's claims that Iraq had WMD, which is what they should have done, and which is much different than the implication in your statement, that the source of those claims was the media itself.
Maybe does some actual investigative journalism or put emphasis on the fact that the Bush administration claims were unproven? US media wouldn't uncritically report the statements of the Russian government as truth and a similar standard should be applied to the US government. It isn't like this is something they wouldn't have been able to do. Nancy Pelosi admitted she knew the truth back then.
> I was Ranking Member on the Intelligence Committee even before I became part of the leadership of Gang of Four. So, I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn't there.
> They had to show us now - to show the Gang of Four all the Intelligence they had. The Intelligence did not show that that - that was the case. So, I knew it was a - a misrepresentation to the public[1][2].
I find a big reason to use DDG is because it has "!bangs" that allow you to redirect your search to other site's native search engines by appending/prepending them to your query. I can use "!pac" to search for Arch Linux packages, "!aw" to search the Arch Wiki, "!gh" to search Github, etc. So the quality of DDG's search may be lacking but I generally know the site I want to search and can use their native searches. Any way, if you want to get away from Google but can't get by with DDG, consider Qwant.
Apparently if SMS verification fails, it can fall back to a phone call where a robot reads you the verification code. This means you could set up Signal with a landline, Google Voice, Skype, or Twilio.
Just make sure you don’t lose access to that number. Or you’ll find yourself locked out of Signal completely if someone else verifies an account using that number.
> This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned out that the computer worked fine, but it was given the wrong inputs. There was an emotional investment that the engineers had made in the new technology, so it was inconceivable to them that it could be giving them the wrong answers.
I think "wrong inputs" here is an odd way of saying that the model was bad (presumably to distinguish that problem from outright bugs in the design software or computer hardware failure).
« The roof design was extremely susceptible to buckling which was a mode of failure not considered by in that particular computer analysis and, therefore, left undiscovered. »
That article contains the following claim:
« Computers, however, are only as good as their programmer and tend to offer engineers a false sense of security. »
which matches the "dark side of expertise" talk's bit about « There was an emotional investment that the engineers had made in the new technology, so it was inconceivable to them that it could be giving them the wrong answers. »
That seems to me to be a different issue to being misled by one's own expertise, and in any case neither source bothers to give any evidence that it's true (that is, that the computer's involvement was the cause for the unreasonable trust in the model's results).
No. In fact if they were misled by computers and they were not software engineers, which I had assumed they were not from them being called "Design Engineers" in the anecdote, it follows that they were not misled by their expertise but their assumptions of expertise from this unknown mysterious powerful new thing that a lot of money had been poured into.
They ignored the actual fact that it was sagging more than predicted and insisted the calculations were right. That might be ok, but someone allowed the project to proceed without explaining the contradiction. Real observations were dismissed in favor of believing in the expertise.
It seems like one difficulty is in knowing what expertise is important? Assumedly the contractors thought they had expertise, but were lacking. The firefighters assumedly thought they had expertise, but we're lacking. What expertise do I think I have, but am actually lacking?
Yeah, that's difficult. The only answer I've found is experience. Gaining experience for yourself is painful because it's slow, and part of the experience is consequences of your mistakes: in fields like fire-fighting (or rock climbing, which I love) your mistakes can literally kill you. So hopefully you learn form other people's experience and mistakes as much as possible.
