Snopes Beclowns Itself

[jadebox]

They then resorted to a load of "Hey, but it could be true" nonsense.

Citation?

 

[blutoski]

Actually no, a claim shouldn't be considered False unless that there is clear evidence that it is, it shown be considered unproven and demands for more prove be made before concluding one way or the other.

This is also related to Beyesian vs ancient binary deduction methods.

It's 2019, and we've learned that prior probability actually matters when we have plausible but unproven events.

This is why the discussion about known true thefts of intellectual property are relevant: they're positive probability input to the chain of reasoning that spits out whether the claim is true, falsified, or still unresolved.

 

[blutoski]

Snopes didn't hide the fact that they can find no proof for any element of the claim. They couldn't find "Miss Childress." They couldn't find any evidence that Sanders "stole"/bought her recipe. The correctly identified the supposed image of "Miss Childress" as being cropped from an advert for a different product.

That certainly shows the the Facebook meme in particular contains falsehoods/errors. But it's downstream from an older claim, which is also being examined.

They then resorted to a load of "Hey, but it could be true" nonsense.

Is it nonsense, though? Prior known true examples in the same genre should up the probability.

 

[Horatius]

They then resorted to a load of "Hey, but it could be true" nonsense.

Snopes also has a history of putting these sorts of claims into their historical context - that is, why would someone make up such a story in the first place, and why might people believe it? The "nonsense" you cite does just that:

Despite the absence of documentary evidence to support the “Miss Childress” theory, Williams-Forson outlined the reasons why it should not be dismissed, writing to us in an email:

“This is not to say it did not happen. I am saying I did not find this evidence. And where might this evidence be uncovered? Would Sanders have acknowledged it? Might the African American family have kept a receipt? This is a needle in a haystack because it happened so often to African Americans, who were denied the opportunity to read and write, and thus were unable to document their culinary practices.”

Although we have found no evidence to support the claim, it is possible that Sanders did directly steal his fried chicken recipe from a specific African American woman, who may or may not have been named Childress. If he did, it is also plausible that no documentary evidence of that act of plagiarism ever existed, or that if it did, it has not survived.

Alternatively, Sanders might have borrowed and taken elements of several fried chicken recipes, perhaps some of them invented by, or passed down or shared between, African American women — in the way that many recipes evolve and change over the years. “Miss Childress” might simply be a stand-in or symbolic victim in the wider legacy of appropriation and intellectual property theft that characterized much of the cultural relations between whites and blacks in early 20th-century America. Until and unless we obtain concrete evidence that clears up that uncertainty, we are issuing a rating of “Unproven.”

In fact, you can see similar "context setting" passages in other fact check articles. Here's one:

Given the inherent ambiguity of meaning in wearing the T-shirt, as well as Thunberg’s subsequent explanation and deletion of her tweet, it is difficult to support the characterization of the photograph contained in the meme, which claimed Thunberg had “aligned” herself with Antifa.

The description of Antifa as a “terrorist organization” is also questionable. In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) does not currently list Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, but the summer of 2019 saw increasing calls for such a designation.

In July, Republican Senators Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) and Ted Cruz (Texas) introduced a U.S. Senate resolution calling for “groups and organizations across the country who act under the banner of Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations.” In August, President Donald Trump warned, in a tweet that “Major consideration is being given to naming Antifa an ‘organization of terror.'”

Aside from the lack of any official designation, no fixed, universally accepted definition of “terrorist” or “terrorist organization” exists, so the question of whether Antifa — which is more a transnational movement than a traditional, hierarchical organization — should be labeled as such is ultimately a matter for subjective argument.

Why include this in a discussion of a photo of a shirt? Is this relevant to the truth or falsity of the claim she wore the shirt? No. It's included to provide the context in which these sorts of claims arise.

 

[Information Analyst]

Sure there are records, and there are also lots of people who just kind of show up or vanish from them too. So it isn't weird to run across people who you can't be sure exactly where or when they were born, so clearly they must not have been born but popped up full grown. Without a clear birth record associated we must assume they were never born.

But this isn't someone who appears of disappears from the records, but rather someone there is no evidence for whatsoever. It doesn't make sense for someone to have attached this name to this rumour somewhere along the line, but the reason for that attachment to remain obscure subsequently, unless it was simply made up.

 

[Information Analyst]

Citation?

Read the Snopes page.

 

[Information Analyst]

That certainly shows the the Facebook meme in particular contains falsehoods/errors. But it's downstream from an older claim, which is also being examined.

Is it nonsense, though? Prior known true examples in the same genre should up the probability.

That's the sort of reasoning that conspiracy theorists usually indulge in.

 

[Cavemonster]

That's the sort of reasoning that conspiracy theorists usually indulge in.

I'll bet conspiracy theorists wear shoes too. Better go barefoot.

 

[jadebox]

Read the Snopes page.

I did. You said that the article contains "a load of 'hey, but it could be true' nonsense." Please cite examples of what you think is untrue.

 

[Information Analyst]

I did. You said that the article contains "a load of 'hey, but it could be true' nonsense."

You obviously missed the sub-heading: "An intriguing rumor about cultural theft and fried chicken lacks concrete evidence but alludes to a deeper"

Please cite examples of what you think is untrue.

I already did. If you scroll back I'm sure you'll be able to fine them.

 

[jadebox]

Okay ... You are welcome to interpret "deeper truth" however you want, I guess. But the article really isn't slanted the way suggest.

I think it is pretty obvious that someone just made up that story. It is especially obvious after reading what Snopes discovered while researching it. But, they hold themselves to a higher standard than just calling it BS. They actually do research. In this case, they did things like ask an historian if it could possibly be true. If the historian had said "absolutely and here's documentation to back it up," then they would have labelled it "true." If the historian had said something like "no way, fried chicken didn't exist back then" or "there were very few cases of white men appropriating recipes from black women," then they could have labelled it "false."

But, the research they did failed to lead to an answer that is that straight-forward. So, they labelled it "unproven."

 

[ponderingturtle]

But this isn't someone who appears of disappears from the records, but rather someone there is no evidence for whatsoever. It doesn't make sense for someone to have attached this name to this rumour somewhere along the line, but the reason for that attachment to remain obscure subsequently, unless it was simply made up.

Without record of it we must call it false though. If we have no record of their birth we are forced to assume they were never born. Otherwise it would be liberal bias.

Here is the thing, he likely had many sources that he learned/stole from over the course of his life, I mean who seriously claims he invented frying chicken? The importance and identity of these inspirations is lost to history, so clearly like the supposed birth of I was citing before it must be assumed to be false.

But if you start then adding in probabilities like even if we don't have records it is far more likely that someone was born than that they popped up full grown as soon as we have records of them, then it becomes a lot harder to say how much of his learning process was from black people. So unless we have good evidence that he was so racist he would never listen or pay attention to any black person, we can not fully discount that he used techniques appropriated from a black person.

 

[blutoski]

That's the sort of reasoning that conspiracy theorists usually indulge in.

Absolutely. As do Skeptics. Which is why Skeptics evaluate some conspiracies as 'true', and some others remain 'unproven' rather than 'false'.

It's a description of reality.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

I think he’s parodying the argument to show it can lead to a bad conclusion.

and if you throw in a racist statement as a fact, it can support a bad conclusion and perpetuate the racist statement.

 

[CaptainHowdy]

Yeah, I've honestly never seen a post from CH where he didn't bring the Jews up out of nowhere. Granted, I haven't seen that many of his posts, but I really doubt it was a parody. Unless they're all parodies, which is possible.

"Jew" didn't come up out of nowhere any more than "white" came up out of nowhere in the Snopes Col Sanders story. The question was "did col sanders steal the recipe for his chicken?" Race has nothing to do with it, until Snopes threw that into the mix.

Similarly, the ethnicity of AG Barr and Epstein has nothing to do with whether or not Barr visited Epstein in jail. I could've made the argument that although there is not any real solid evidence that Barr visited Epstein in jail, there is a long history of wealthy white people using their money and influence to get out of trouble so the claim is unproven instead of false because 'it alludes to a deeper truth.'

I chose "Jew" because Epstein was Jewish and Barr's father was born Jewish and because it's easier for some of the slower members of our forum to see why something can be perceived as offensive when it is said about Jews than when it is said about whites.

Point being, though - the very fact that we are all discussing this evidence demonstrates that Snopes provided it. That's why I truly don't understand the people who are faulting Snopes. They hid nothing. You (general you) have all the facts - why does it matter if you like the label?

This is stupid.

Snopes insinuated that there is a long history of white people taking credit for the accomplishments of PoC and then used that "fact" as the basis to bolster their claim that Col Sanders might've stole the recipe from a black woman. That is where Snopes failed.

 

[Butter!]

^Well, fair enough as far as your explanation goes.

I still don't really agree with your interpretation, but I understand what your point was now.

 

[Venom]

Having read Snopes since the mid 2000s, for this particular article I would have marked it false, and the "alludes to a deeper truth" is a fair enough addition to the fact check. It's standard procedure for Snopes to talk at some length about the background behind the urban legends.

 

[Checkmite]

Sure, but the idea that a "family" could just sit on such a letter/knowledge for all this time and say nothing doesn't seem even remotely plausible. They'd have been shouting it from the rafters for decades (cf. Henrietta Lacks).

That's not a credible argument. You cannot say what this family, whom you don't know and have no connection with, "would have done" based on something a completely different, wholly unconnected family facing an entirely different situation has done.

 

[Brainster]

BTW, since we're talking about strange rulings at Snopes, has anybody mentioned the "Mr Ed was a zebra" post?

It's a very weird post. First, they state that the claim they are researching is "Mister Ed, the talking equine of television fame, was a horse." Okay, so maybe that was the way they found it on the internet back in 2000. Their ruling? Lost Legend. So I looked to see what lost legend meant:

These legends aren’t really lost — we’ve known where they were the whole time! We created The Repository of Lost Legends (TRoLL for short) for those of you who don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. If you have a taste for the unusual and arcane (and can suspend your disbelief just a little), sample some of these precious gems.

So it's a gag? But if you read the article, it goes to great lengths to convince you that yes, Mister Ed was a zebra:

Zebras are noticeably smaller than horses, so the set used for Mister Ed’s stable was constructed using forced perspective (the same technique employed on Disneyland’s Main Street) to make it appear larger than it really was (and thus make Mister Ed appear larger than he really was as well). This gimmick also helped to mask the fact that Alan Young, the series’ star, was only a diminutive 5’4″ tall. Since a zebra’s gait is distinctively different than a horse’s, the rare episodes that called for scenes of Mister Ed running were filmed in long shots using real horses, a practice which has lead to the mistaken claim (cited in several fan-related publications and web sites) that a zebra was occasionally used on the show as a “stunt double.” (In later years a Palomino horse named Bamboo Harvester would often be erroneously identified as having been the Mister Ed, but this horse was in fact only used for promotional appearances and publicity stills; it never actually appeared in the TV series.)

Gee, I can't see any problem with having spoof pages on a supposedly authoritative "truth or fiction" site.

 

[Checkmite]

Snopes' explanation of the Lost Legends section of the archive

What is the point of the Lost Legends section, you say? Is it merely an exercise in creative writing, perhaps a way to blow off steam when the pressure of having to be mind-numbingly factual about everything gets to us? Does it provide us with a gratuitous opportunity to guffaw at how easily folks are duped into believing outrageous things? Or are we suicidally intent upon giving our valued readers good reason to doubt the credibility of everything else on the site?

Granted, a small part of the motivation to create such a section stems from our need to let a sense of whimsy get the better of us once in a while, and yes, some days the grind of having to be utterly factual about everything does weigh on us a bit. But the Lost Legends actually serve a higher purpose than merely existing as an out-of-the-way pasture a couple of writers can occasionally have a good frolic in.