Liar McLieface:
Stop!
Political speech is about changing people. I like me just fine thanks. Now if they want to question the premise of my beliefs, I’m all for that argument. But that knife cuts both ways, and political speech is not a full duplex system of communication, nor does it operate from a persistent base of reason. Which is what make the phrase: “political science” an oxymoron. In short, regarding “politics” as an honorable trade is self evidently an indication of corruption. Which is fine too. We are all hypocrites from time to time. Prosthelitizing to the contrary typically being contra-indicating. So no I wouldn’t trust this source, and I would trust it even less if I agreed with it.
Investigate!
According to wikipedia: the Gateway Pundit is a fake news site. Politifact gives it a 59% false rating. Reading it comes off as gradeschool fingerpointing. So the mark-one-eyeball, and an ounce of empathy is generally all that is needed here, but we have gone the distance for the sake of propriety.
Find Trusted Coverage?
I generally regard anything that holds itself out as “coverage” to be untrusted. But if I can find the full event, well that allows me to size things up for myself. I see nothing different about the Presidents exit than what I’ve seen from many other presidential speeches. The exit is uneventful, and apparently there is some communication to persons in the wings as he is exiting. This may suggest being “lost”, but that conclusion takes quite a lot of assumption to make that leap.
Trace
As for the joke. Yes he said it. Yes it does make one cringe. Searching for “Biden” and “Don’t Jump” reveals that this is a standard joke he uses at a lot of speeches. Such as a para-olympics event and a speech to the 82nd airborn. And yes, it is a cringe fest both other times. But the guy has been in politics for decades, so some things probably stick with him that maybe shouldn’t.
So this part of the article actually true. But I don’t care. Frankly I like the fact that he says some knuckleheaded stuff sometimes. The guy never made any promises about being superhuman.
Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light. –George Washington
Stop!
An article in the Huffington post asserts that teens can’t tell the difference between real and fake news. Generally I would regard the title alone as enough to avoid reading the article. Main stream news talking about itself is typically self agrandizing, which is a filter pattern unto itself. However I have read a few well cited articled from the Huffington Post before (and others just as debased), but on the whole the Huffington Post cites sources more often in my experience.
Investigate
The Huffington Post (HP) is regarded as a a liberal leaning newspaper based on mediabiasfactcheck. Similar web gives it a only readership of 1.M per month, which is not that high compared to some other content providers.
I baselined mediafactcheck by checking the Washington Post against the Washington Times, which were predictably mischaracterized. Strangely HP was regarded as more liberal that the Washington Post. Which is really funny considering they are both conservative newspapers. (It isn’t who you preach at, it is who you preaching for) The HP is owned by Verizon, and the Washington Post hasn’t been liberal since the Beez took it over. So both are typical corporate ganda’ rags separated by various degrees of factual ambivalence.
Find Trusted Coverage
For me this is this is virtually impossible in this case. I regard truth as state. (as in stateful) which makes it an exceedingly rare thing to actually observe. It also means that I have to care quite a bit to persue it because the associated time allocation can be severe.
In this case what I really must say is that I don’t have a solid enough understanding of psychology to know what I don’t know. So even if I read the whole scientific paper, the odds of me intepreting it correctly would be a crapshoot. Which is cool; I like reading things way over my head. But: “It is the mark of an educated mind that it can consider something without adopting it” –Aristotle.
So no, I wouldn’t trust any coverage until I had enough puzzle pieces to at least identify a few edges. Which seems to be a rare view.
Trace
One thing I found a little interesting is the “article impact” header on the journal that published the original paper. This is a little suspect to me. This suggests a regard for distribution metrics over peer review.
The majority of the Bibliography references seem to be focused on creating metrics for consumer trust and belief. I have a personal bias about this subject that states (more or less) than if you are that obsessed about figuring out how to make somebody believe you, then you probably aught to suffer some for good measure. It is like politics. Wanting the job is a pretty good indicator you shouldn’t have it. Now maybe there is some raw science that may have some future use, but that was also true of the Manhattan Project.
