Do Corrections Matter?
Does correcting factual errors make any difference?
Not quite two years ago @stetson posted this:
At the time I pointed out that the lawsuit in question was about more than just the Puffnstuff/McCheese similarities and that the Kroffts actually won that suit. I know @stetson saw this because he responded and thanked me.
So here we are nearly two years later and we get this post in a different thread:
This time it was @ChastMastr who issued the correction, touching on the same points I did, and I wondered if it would have any more effect than my own correction did back in 2023.
This may seem like small potatoes, a poster on small discussion board repeating the same falsehood almost-but-not-quite verbatim after being corrected on it, but it seems like a part of a broader movement towards conspiracism and ignoring facts that are inconvenient, even if it's just inconvenient to something small like a story you like to re-tell on the internet. I'm sure we can all think of various political figures who keep repeating the same falsehoods after being corrected, simply because the facts aren't to their liking. This seems socially corrosive. On the other hand there are some indications that correcting misinformation can actually spread rather than diminish misinformation, so maybe it's simply human.
I wasn't sure where to put this so I picked Purgatory. If the Hosts feel differently, please move this thread.
Not quite two years ago @stetson posted this:
A few years back, I saw an interview with the Kroffts on YouTube, in which they discussed unsuccessfully suing McDonalds because they thought Mayor McCheese was a rip-off of Puffnstuff. Gotta say, I woulda side with McDonalds on that. Mayor McCheese looks the way he does because he's a hamburger, not because he's a copy of Puffnstuff.
At the time I pointed out that the lawsuit in question was about more than just the Puffnstuff/McCheese similarities and that the Kroffts actually won that suit. I know @stetson saw this because he responded and thanked me.
So here we are nearly two years later and we get this post in a different thread:
I watched an interview with the Kroffts a few years back. They seemed to have pretty different dispositions, and the one guy seemed rather impatient with his brother.
One thing they mentioned was that they had once launched a lawsuit against McDonalds, claiming that Mayor McCheese was a rip-off of Pufnstuf. They lost, and I'm sorry to have to say I side with McDonalds. Mayor McCheese looks the way he does because he's an anthropomorphized hamburger, not because he's a copy of the Kroffts idea of a dragon.
This time it was @ChastMastr who issued the correction, touching on the same points I did, and I wondered if it would have any more effect than my own correction did back in 2023.
This may seem like small potatoes, a poster on small discussion board repeating the same falsehood almost-but-not-quite verbatim after being corrected on it, but it seems like a part of a broader movement towards conspiracism and ignoring facts that are inconvenient, even if it's just inconvenient to something small like a story you like to re-tell on the internet. I'm sure we can all think of various political figures who keep repeating the same falsehoods after being corrected, simply because the facts aren't to their liking. This seems socially corrosive. On the other hand there are some indications that correcting misinformation can actually spread rather than diminish misinformation, so maybe it's simply human.
I wasn't sure where to put this so I picked Purgatory. If the Hosts feel differently, please move this thread.
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Now, that being the case, no, I was not deliberately ignoring the facts in question, since I had forgotten them, and I am not obsessively wedded to any particular outcome of the Krofft vs. McDonalds narrative, and would find it an interesting story to tell either way.
(FWIW, on a personal level, I find the Krofft Brothers more appealing than I find McDonalds, so in that sense, I'm happy they won, and if the evidence was in their favour, so much the better.)
There's undoubtedly research on why, once we've adopted a story we are reluctant to change it.
Thanks, I live and learn!
We can forget things, just being human and all that—no worries! ❤️
Quite. You can take the girl out of the undergrad eng lit, but you can't take poetical conventions in 17th C poetry out of the girl.
Sounds like something a Platonist would say.
Not this one, certainly.
No. Not every Platonist, or even most. But the idea seems rooted in Platonic philosophy, more than any other philosophy I can think of.
If someone doesn't want to learn, no sense trying to teach them, but I can use their errors to teach someone else.
But in general, I think that political conversation cannot be merely intellectual. Most people are more concerned with their lives, investments, and beliefs than they are with pure information. You have to look at what drives the beliefs if you would have the courage to actually try to change someone's mind on something. Logos, ethos, and pathos. And probably some other stuff too.
I can see why a mathematician might consider it a failure and in my experience many mathematics are functionally Platonist. But I don't see why the attitude to moral failing is a function of them being Platonist.
I suppose the reason it's a moral failing is that a lack of logic within pure mathematics indicates that the mathematician is sloppy or hasn't tried hard enough. But surely the point about the pure mathematician engaged in the activity of uncovering Platonic Forms which underlie the structures of the universe is that they still exist even if the individual makes a makes a small typographical error which makes the proof incorrect.
If someone else proves that the new proof isn't proven as the first mathematician suggested, then that doesn't change the underlying structure of the universe and the mathematicians just have to go back and try again.
First, people generally have unreliable memories. As someone who tends to remember details others don't, I've realised from people's feedback that my memory is unsual, and other people forget the things I remember. And even so, I forget too, and more so as I get older.
Plus the kinds of facts people remember can differ, as people's brains work differently. I notice and focus on details and patterns, and so I remember them. I remember topics I'm interested in.
I normally relish learning new facts about something I'm talking about, though the extent to which I take them in will also depend how they are presented - if they are presented in a hostile way, I'm likely to disengage. Or if it's a huge infodump, I might switch off. Or if the fact doesn't feel relevant to the main point I'm making, I won't engage with it much. We are bombarded with hundreds of facts each day, they are often couched in opinion, and they are rarely the whole story, and I think it's quite normal not to absorb them all.
Sometimes friends on Facebook repost a memory from a few years ago, I will comment, and then I will find the original post and see I commented that too, and my original comment is almost exactly the same as my new one. Then I joke how predictable I am, and I wonder why I don't remember commenting the first time. I clearly found it interesting the first time. But realistically, I make and read plenty of Facebook comments every day - I won't remember them all.
I would interpret Stetson's comment in terms of him remembering and visualising the whole experience of watching the TV show and analysing it in his mind, and liking the logic of the anthropomorphised hamburger - I would imagine it was a satisfying thought process, and all part of this narrative memory that is clear in his mind. Narrative memory is different from memory of facts - it's stored differently and is recalled differently. He didn't make a narrative memory of you correcting him. He probably will have a narrative memory of you featuring his comments in a thread though.
It was pretty much reverse engineering. I agree there is no syllogistic connection between the tenets of Platonism and the idea that errant mathematicians are morally corrupt. However, presented in the first place with the latter idea, I immediately thought it was something that would emerge from a Platonic milieu.
My reasoning was that Plato taught that a) people only do wrong out of ignorance, ie. they just haven't been able to learn the Truth of morality, and also that b) mastery of mathematics is the ultimate sine qua non for entering the class of people regarded as having access to the Truth.
So, I figured that maybe somewhere along the way some later neoplatonist gnostic witchypoo posited a full merger of the two forms of knowledge, or at least a full submersion of the one into the other.
I also recall from my ancient philosophy class that the pre-socratic Pythagoreans had previously taught that numbers are not only a universal unit for measuring reality, but they are the basic building blocks of reality itself. Not sure how, or even if, that applied to morality, though.
My God, that’s a jarring image. Does that make H.R. Pufnstuf an Aristotelian? Is Dr. Blinky a Thomist? Is Freddy the Flute the Magic Flute, with a connection to Freemasonry and Enlightenment Absolutism? Oh my God, does this make Witchiepoo The Queen of the Night?
… carry on… 😛
If someone doesn't know that they're not competent to drive a car, that's less of a big deal when they're not speeding down the street, endangering everything in their path.
Generally choosing to push the pilot of a commercial jet out of the air and deciding to fly the plane oneself with only guidance from those on the ground would be a morally awful decision, particularly for someone who had never flown a plane. It would be ignoring all the people whose lives one is risking. That is not ethical unless no one is being risked who wasn't already at risk, for instance if the pilot has a medical emergency and is incapacitated.
That's for providing the correct spelling of "Witchiepoo". Clearly, I had failed in my perception of the Form of her name.
As for the possible Magic Flute connection, I honestly don't know enough about the Kroffts, or Mozart, OR what knowledge the former would have had of the latter, to know if that's plausible. Wouldn't surprise me if it was, actually, as an in-joke for any opera-loving parents forced to watch the show along with their kids.
Not "That's for providing..."
Thanks. I'm assuming Mozart's magic flute wasn't anthropomorphized?
Thanks. I think I was more of a Lidsville kid("once upon a summer's day, just a dream from yesterday", I seem to remember), but honestly the only thing I remember from that pairing of shows was the character of Pufnstuff himself. I had to be reminded of Witchiepoo when I was in my 20s, and up until this discussion I think I thought she was from the Super Show.
In general, I'm actually pretty dubious about the anthropomorphization of manufactured objects. I can't suspend disbelief as easily as I can with animals.