One of the ways I pass my free time is to scroll through Twitter or Reddit looking for interesting or controversial articles to read. Occasionally, I only make it a paragraph or 2 in before I decide that I don’t trust the author, and that I can’t take anything they write seriously. This can happen even if the article is taking a position I already agree with. Sometimes there’s just something about the article’s style that seems like it can’t be trusted. I was originally going to write a post that contained all the pet peeves that would cause that to happen. However, after I got part-way through, I decided that if I included everything, then this entry would be too long. So instead, I’m writing about each one separately. Pet peeve #1: Portraying your opponent as a caricature.
The thing that inspired me to write about this topic was an article I saw on twitter. It’s an article about a proposed regulation that would force companies to make cancelling subscriptions easier. More specifically, it was about those companies’ reaction to it.
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
It begins:
The Federal Trade Commission’s recent proposal to require that companies offer customers easy one-click options to cancel subscriptions might seem like a no-brainier, something unequivocally good for consumers. Not according to the companies it would affect, though. In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Those were some of the points shared by groups representing major publishers and advertisers during the FTC’s recent public comment period ending in June. Consumers, according to the Wall Street Journal, generally appeared eager for the new proposals which supporters say could make a dent in tricky, bordering-on deceptive anti-cancellation tactics deployed by cable companies, entertainment sites, gyms, and other businesses who game out ways to make it as difficult as possible to quickly quit a subscription. The News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing publishers, tried to refute those customers in its own comments to the FTC. The Alliance claimed its members actually receive “very few complaints” about cancellations. Consumers, according to the Association of National Advertisers, may actually benefit from annoying cancellation friction.
To be clear, I absolutely hate difficult to cancel subscriptions. I also hate so-called “free trials” that bill you if you forget to cancel. Some cancellation processes I’ve encountered were so difficult that they certainly seemed criminal. When I first heard about this proposal, I thought to myself “Finally, someone is going to do something about these predatory practices!”
I agree with the with the article’s apparent position on the proposal. The new rule is a good idea, and it’s needed. Even so, something about the article still managed to rub me the wrong way. Even before I started reading the article, I already disliked it just from the headline alone. By the time I had finished it, I was already trying to find out how the article was deceiving me.
The first sign of trouble was the headline:
Companies Think Their Idiot Customers Will Accidentally Cancel Their Subscriptions if It's Too Easy
This reads like a headline from the onion. You can tell just from reading it that it’s caricature of what they actually said. Companies don’t call literally their customers “idiots” like this. At least, certainly not out in the open.
The article continues:
In their view, the introduction of simple unsubscribe buttons could lead to a wave of accidental cancellations by dumb customers. Best, they say, to let big businesses protect customers from themselves and make it a torment to stop your service.
Again, this message is nothing like what you’d expect a large company to put out. Large companies don’t openly insult customers like this. Large companies also don’t refer to themselves as “Big Business”. This passage even has a little of embedded argument in it. It tells you that it’s a torment to stop your service. Nobody embeds counterarguments in their statements just so you can use it against them. This is supposedly based on what the companies said, but it’s been warped in obvious ways, and it’s hard to tell what the actual statement probably was.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article is full of this kind of thing.
Caricature itself isn’t bad if your audience already knows the subject matter, but it’s not a good way to introduce your audience to an opposing position. A caricature, by definition, distorts it’s subject by exaggerating it’s most ridiculous attributes. A caricature of someone’s argument is an exaggerated version of the most ridiculous parts of that argument. In their real statements, there may or may not be nuance and context that make the argument work, but if there is, I can’t expect to find that nuance and context in a caricature. Including it would undermine the idea of caricature itself.
A caricature of a statement is more than just a Straw Man, it gives a sense that the author doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to even check for context. Perhaps they don’t even think context can matter.
Some authors try to weasel their way out of such straw-man accusations by telling you “it’s just a joke”, even though they’re clearly trying to persuade you. A humorous poorly-reasoned argument is still a poorly-reasoned argument. If you have to fall back on “it’s just a joke” in order to defend it, then your point might not be on solid ground to begin with. Saying “It’s just joke” might as well be outright admitting that your argument is without merit.
If you want to actually be convincing, then you should instead, steel man your opponent. Essentially, you provide the best version of their position that you can. Include the nuance and context that makes it work. Then, you can explain why it is wrong.
This way might not feel very good. After all, why help out your opposition by presenting the best version of their argument? But doing so is actually helpful for you. It shows confidence in your own position. If it looks like an argument a real person would believe, then it doesn’t trigger as much skepticism. Perhaps more importantly, it protects you in case your reader learns the real argument from somewhere else. Learning your opponent’s real position won’t sway them as much because you’ve already told them about it. It gives your argument more sticking power.
You can still joke around about the opposing position. Just make sure that I know what that position actually is first. I don’t want to have to guess what their real position probably is.
About Half-way down the article, the author finally included an actual quote,
“If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click,” the Association said in a statement.
But at this point, it was too late, the distrust had already started to creep in. The author had already shown that he didn’t care very much how the companies’ actual statements worked.
I looked a bit further into it to figure out what the companies’ real statement was. The quote above, comes from a statement made by the Association of National Advertisers Their full statement can be found here.
This is the part where they talk about “click to cancel”
Requiring “simple” cancellation is a difficult standard for businesses to implement, as there is little detail provided to guide them to understand its meaning and how to comply with this ambiguous requirement. If sellers are required to enable cancellation through a single click or action by the consumer, accidental cancellations will become much more common, as consumers will not reasonably expect to remove their recurring goods or services with just one click. Such accidental cancellations could cause consumers to miss out on essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products, and could create the inconvenience of requiring the consumer to register again for a service they did not intend to cancel in the first place. The possibility of accidental cancellations could be greater in the mobile environment, which may be less optimized to manage complex processes such as account administration. Consequently, in many instances, it may be reasonable for sellers to require some form of customer authentication, or redirection of the consumer to a medium that best facilitates account administration, before processing a cancellation. As a matter of public policy, permitting reasonable customer authentication prior to cancellation helps to minimize mistaken or fraudulent cancellation actions, which lead to customer frustration and undesired lapses in the provision of needed goods or services. Several state-level negative option laws permit reasonable authentication procedures prior to cancellation,17 and the proposed amendments to the Current Rule should similarly allow companies to verify consumer identities prior to effectuating a cancellation choice.
This statement does make some reasonable points about why you might not want a literal 1-click cancel button. If I click a “Cancel” button in the navigation, at minimum, I would expect to see a confirmation page first. One that says “Do you want to cancel your subscription?” and a button that says “Confirm Cancellation”. That’s at least 2 clicks, one to get to the cancel confirmation page, and one to cancel. If my account was cancelled out of the navigation bar, that would be very surprising to me. Something like that really would lead to unintended cancellations. It also makes total sense to force users to log in, in order to cancel. I don’t want some random unauthenticated person messing with my account settings!
There is, however, one major problem with this statement. The proposed rule doesn’t actually require you to make a 1-click cancel button. “Click to cancel” is just a nickname. The actual requirement is a cancellation process that is at least as simple as the sign-up process, and through the same medium:
The proposal also requires sellers to provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium used to initiate the agreement, whether, for instance, through the internet, telephone, mail, or in-person. On the internet, this “Click to Cancel” provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll ( e.g., if the sign-up call is toll free, the cancellation call must also be toll free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.
This rule requires a 1-click cancel only if you had a 1-click sign up in the first place. If a company requires authentication in order to sign up, then they can require authentication in order to cancel. If it takes you more than one click to sign up, then it can take more than 1 click to cancel. I sure hope these companies don’t have literal 1-click confirmation-less signup buttons, and I certainly hope they aren’t signing you with no authentication either!
But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on the The Association of National Advertisers for this oversight. The author of the Gizmodo article apparently didn’t catch it either. That would have been quite a good opportunity to make fun of the original statement, and it would have addressed the real statement too.
I’m not very forgiving when it comes to deceptive tactics. Once I get the sense that you’re trying to deceive me, I become suspicious about the whole thing. After all, if the author has already revealed that they don’t care about informing me accurately, how can I trust anything they say? Even if I already agree with their position, I can’t use it as a source. It’s just too unreliable; the people I’m citing it to would, rightly, mock me for it. It’s just not very useful, and mostly makes me dislike the author and maybe even their publication.
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Notes -
Always a topic I find interesting and I hate to nitpick, but the spelling and grammatical errors ("it's" vs. "its", "iceburg") are really distracting. Strongly recommend getting another pair of eyes to proofread before posting part 2. If it's not too long I'd do it myself free of charge.
Lmao that's embarrassing.
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Infinite money glitch.
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I fixed "Iceburg" and I found 2 bad "it's".
If you want to let me know of anything else, feel free.
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I had my red-pill moment in 2015, after reading about these absurd things Trump was saying, deciding to watch the primary source for entertainment. I noticed that the second hand reporting was taking things out of context, or reporting things in the worst possible light.
I wonder, why not have a news source that is just primary sources? Maybe because, Hansonian style, news isn't actually about news, it's about being entertained, or about learning the 'correct' opinion on things. Maybe because the value of news in the in the added context it provides, but journalists are not capable of adding unbiased informed context, thus it's simply a skill issue. Maybe because there's no real market for such a thing, and people want simple articles they can glance at for 30 seconds, or a headline they can retweet.
It's called C-SPAN, and nobody watches it because the vast majority of primary sources are unfathomably boring.
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I've done that through https://www.canada.ca/en/news/web-feeds.html.
You get utterly boring articles like this when the journalists don't spice it up by highlighting the most salient parts of the most interesting events.
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One trigger I've noticed recently is blatant logical or physical errors.
Is it a shit test? Do they think they can actually get away with it? Or (worst of all) are they honest and making a mistake? I don't know, but it's another mail in the coffin for their reputation.
I think what the first author meant was that the increase in prices would be compensated by the potential savings from using electric cars, since - by their opinion - the TCO of the electric car is lower than the TCO of the gas car. I'm not sure it's true (I guess with enough taxation is could be made so) but at least it doesn't sound insane. The second claim about the grid I have no idea what could be meant.
As for AC, technically it is true - any AC would waste energy as heat (thermodynamics commands us so) and thus, inevitably, heat up the city. I am very much in doubt that heating would be noticeable though - and basically any activity, from breathing to walking, also produces heat, so short of total death of all living things, this is unavoidable. The addition there "is being pumped back out into the city, which is already hotter than surrounding areas" is a kind of dirty trick though - cities are hotter, but AC has nothing to do with it. Removing all AC would not do a thing to change that.
There would be even bigger savings if the price of electricity didn't go up, though. Also, they didn't mention "more economical" or anything like that, they mentioned "powered by the grid". If that's what they meant, then they should have at least alluded to it.
The process's waste heat isn't heat from homes, though. It's brand-new heat that is generated within the machine.
Even if I agreed with the factual contents of your comment, it wouldn't substantially change my mind. It would change it from "blatant logical or physical errors" to "blatantly deceptive presentations of logical or physical systems", which is hardly any better.
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That second example is another thing I don't really take seriously. I often get the sense that people are scraping the bottom of the barrel with some of the arguments they use.
I very frequently see people rely on weak arguments like that, I also too frequently see people rely on arguments that are just tangential the core issue at hand. It's almost as though they think that the number of different-sounding arguments is the important part instead of the collective magnitude and quality of the arguments.
You can kinda see this when the Association of National Advertisers talks about "essential deliveries of food, water, or medical products". I get the same feeling when people talk about the "handicapped accessibility" arguments with regards to why Reddit shouldn't increase the price using their APIs.
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Journos operate on that strange vibes-based niveau where there's no distinction between honest mistakes and malicious deception. "Sounds plausible and can't point out if wrong or wouldn't be too embarrassing if wrong" is the criterion. Being able to link a source is a bonus.
They never had any intent to tell you the truth, they had the intent to persuade you, and decided to make the best mouth noises (or keypresses) they could find that do that. If other arguments fit better, they would have picked those, with no regard for truth. If the full truth is easy to state but would ruin your argument, state a partial truth. "Truth" is an inconvenient obstacle that makes some attacks easier than others, but plenty of other factors make some attacks easier than others, and they pay the same amount of attention to those. Claiming you want to hurt minorities or that hurting minorities doesn't matter, for example, weakens any attack, so you put that in the article by default - any fact of the matter about whether the thing-you-don't-want actually hurts minorities is thus made irrelevant.
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cbc is very dishonest in general. One would think that something reliant upon the buy-in of the demos would be less likely to be ideologically captured than something which is requires on only a handful rich guys to fund it (NYT, WaPo).
The AC example is striking, on the net it takes less energy to cool than to heat. Thus if the Earth is truly getting warmer due to human energy usage, it is a self correcting problem. But the horn effect is at play, thus climate change can't have any positives (such as reducing energy needed to maintain indoor temperature comfortable for human).
| The AC example is striking, on the net it takes less energy to cool than to heat.
So, I was going to tear into you for what I thought was obvious physics nonsense. (Cooling, after all, goes against entropy, whereas heating is 100% efficient.) But after doing a little research I realized I didn't know what I was talking about - AC systems and heat pumps move heat around, and can do so more efficiently than simply pouring energy into the system. And, for whatever reason, it looks like AC typically has higher SEER ratings than heat pumps' HSPF (both being a measure of BTUs/Watt-hour). Whoops. I was about to be Wrong On The Internet.
Thought I'd post this reply anyway, rather than just being an anonymous person who learns something from your post but doesn't say anything. (Internet forums need more positive reinforcement...)
If you're still confused about this, there are several reasons for it.
First is that heat pump efficiency depends on the difference between high and low temperatures. It takes more energy to pump heat to a higher temperature, just like it takes more energy to pump water uphill. The outside in summer is maybe 30-40F hotter than inside (100F to 70F). The outside in winter might be 60F colder than inside (10F to 70F). The heater has to do more work to push each unit of heat "further uphill."
The second is that heat pumps need to heat up air to much hotter than room temperature for comfort. A 65F breeze in a 70F room feels like heaven in the summer. A 75F breeze in a 70F room feels like a cold draft in winter, so they pump the outlet heat all the way up to 100F or so. That can mean a 90F difference between inside and outside temperature, so even more energy per unit of heat moved.
Third, a lot of house temperature in the summer comes from sunlight on the roof. And cooling a 100F house down to the same 70F as the outside is very efficient (if you had a thermodynamically perfect heat pump you could gain a tiny amount of energy from it). In caveman days we used something called an "electric fan" for this.
Countering all this, heat pumps get a +1 to their efficiency ratio because they can use their waste heat as an output (like a regular electric heater), while ACs have to reject their waste heat to the hot outside air. That's the "+100% efficient" thing you talked about. It doesn't make up for the rest of it.
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The New York Times Company is publicly traded, so its annual report is online. In 2022 it reported subscription revenue of $1.55 billion and advertising revenue of $500 million.
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I'm going to decline to approve this until you add a submission statement. I dislike clickbait links that basically convey zero information about what the topic actually is.
If I posted the content of the article in here the thread would that do?
Yes, that's fine.
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