I logged out of reddit for a month and now I see how boring 90% of it is.

I think there's something good to be said about usually avoiding /r/all and making sure your personal feed is set up to be a positive space. Of course one should be sure to stay informed, but 1. not all day, all the time, mindlessly, and 2. /r/all is not always the best source of information.

On point number 2, I always sorta knew there was inaccurate stuff on Reddit, but really didn't acknowledge it fully. A few months ago, I found a post that really made it clear. I found this post titled "TIL the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world," and I started thinking, how is that true? I started thinking about all the disasters in various states, but then started thinking about how we have pretty decent infrastructure, and how there's places like Haiti that gets bad earthquakes and floods and hurricanes and the Philippines, and wanted to look into the research because it seemed interesting.

So, I clicked on the link to the Wikipedia article, and found the sentence on the page it came from:

"Overall, the United States receives more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world."

Huh, not much data there, I thought. I'd really like to see quantified all our crazy weather. Luckily, there's a citation right there, so I clicked on it. It went to this article, which first of all is USA today, not some research paper from a university or from NOAA or something, and it's just an interview between two guys, and they're just wildly speculating. There's no data at all! There's no definition of what "high impact weather" means, there's no specification on specific weather events that we experience, aside from some details on tornadoes and severe thunderstorms in the US and China (again, no definition on what makes a "severe" thunderstorm severe,) and they talk about temperate plains as if they don't exist anyplace else in the world (Siberia would like a word with you!)

Anyway that's a sidetrack, but it taught me to really be careful about trusting Reddit. Do your own research! Don't believe headlines!

/r/nosurf Thread Parent