Recovering skooma addict.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

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  • The Featured Snippet quoted an article from the Mayo Clinic, highlighting the words “Caffeine may cause a short, but dramatic increase in your blood pressure.” But when she looked up “no link between coffee and hypertension”, the Featured Snippet cited a contradictory line from the very same Mayo Clinic article: “Caffeine doesn’t have a long-term effect on blood pressure and is not linked with a higher risk of high blood pressure”.

    On the one hand, Google sucks. On the other hand, if people are unable to a) understand how those two snippets are not contradictory, and b) read at least one very short simplified-for-laymen Mayo Clinic article about the topic before thinking they’ve learned anything at all about medicine, it’s hard to see the problem as being primarily due to Google. There is something deeper, and worse, going wrong when people habitually take that kind of extreme shortcut to thinking that they know the right answer about almost anything, and it has little to do with whether any one-sentence snippets they’re given are biased or accurate.

















  • This airport tried to be cutesy and put up a sign limiting “hug time” instead of a more generic time limit. Have you ever heard of a “full English breakfast”? We’ll tell you all about it. There’s a café in Tokyo which discourages socializing. Find out why! People in China have pets. Isn’t that cute! Here’s a great tourist attraction in Turkey! Not into that? How about a video game museum in Kyoto instead? Or a theme park in Orlando? But why stop there? Here are some other links to random news tidbits.

    It’s like one of those daytime TV talk shows in text form.