Is there a useful heuristic for detecting rationally-challenged texts (as in Web pages, forum posts, facebook comments) which takes relatively superficial attributes such as formatting choices, spelling errors, etc. as input? Something a casual Internet reader may use to detect possibly unworthy content so they can suspend their belief and research the matter further. Let's call them "text smells" (analogue to code smells), like:

1. too much emphasis in text (ALL CAPS, bold, color, exclamations, etc.);
2. walls of text;
3. little concrete data/links/references;
4. too much irrelevant data and references;
5. poor spelling and grammar;
6. obvious half-truths and misinformation.

Since many crackpots, pseudoscientific con artists, and conspiracy theorists seem to have cleaned up their Web sites in recent years, I wonder do these low-cost baloney detection tools might be of real value. Does anyone know of any studies or analyses of correlation between these basic metrics and the actual quality of the content? Can you think of some other smells typical of Web baloney?

Sometimes I run into people that have rather strong opinions on some topic, and it turns out that they are basing them on quite shallow and biased information. They are aware that their knowledge is quite limited compared to mine, and they admit that they don't want to put in the effort needed to learn enough to level the field.

But that's not really a problem. What is bothering me is that, sometimes, that declaration of ignorance is expressed with some kind of pride. 

This behaviour is noticeable on other levels too, in politics or in the sciences-humanities culture clash.

I came up with several hypotheses which might account for this:

1. Being opinionated on a topic you know little about is a sign of confidence and bravery. Any fool can play it safe and carefully form opinions based on solid knowledge, but it takes a real man to do it quickly and decidedly, with only partial information.
2. Knowing something is an identity badge. In-depth knowledge of science, or computers, or any number of other fields is a sign that you are a geek. People are proud of not being geeks, or are a proud member of some other group that does not care for that particular knowledge.
3. Knowledge is relative and/or unimportant. Not caring about concrete knowledge is a sign of post-modernist sophistication, or an avant-garde, non-mainstream thinking, which is something to be proud of.
4. Displaying pride overcompensates for shame one normally feels when forced to acknowledge one's ignorance.

Do you notice this behaviour too? What do you think causes it?

EDIT: formatting, style, grammar

I can't seem to get my head around a simple issue of judging probability. Perhaps someone here can point to an obvious flaw in my thinking.

Let's say we have a binary generator, a machine that outputs a required sequence of ones and zeros according to some internally encapsulated rule (deterministic or probabilistic). All binary generators look alike and you can only infer (a probability of) a rule by looking at its output.

You have two binary generators: A and B. One of these is a true random generator (fair coin tosser). The other one is a biased random generator: stateless (each digit is independently calculated from those given before), with probability of outputting zero p(0) somewhere between zero and one, but NOT 0.5 - let's say it's uniformly distributed in the range [0; .5) U (.5; 1]. At this point, chances that A is a true random generator are 50%.

Now you read the output of first ten digits generated by these machines. Machine A outputs 0000000000. Machine B outputs 0010111101. Knowing this, is the probability of machine A being a true random generator now less than 50%?

My intuition says yes.

But the probability that a true random generator will output 0000000000 should be the same as the probability that it will output 0010111101, because all sequences of equal length are equally likely. The biased random generator is also just as likely to output 0000000000 as it is 0010111101.

So there seems to be no reason to think that a machine outputting a sequence of zeros of any size is any more likely to be a biased stateless random generator than it is to be a true random generator.

I know that you can never know that the generator is truly random. But surely you can statistically discern between random and non-random generators?

I was reading the "Professing and Cheering" article and it reminded me about some of my own ideas about the role of religious dogma as group identity badges. Here's the gist of it:

Religious and other dogmas need not make sense. Indeed, they may work better if they are not logical. Logical and useful ideas pop-up independently and spread easily, and widely accepted ideas are not very good badges. You need a unique idea to identify your group. It helps to have a somewhat costly idea as a dogma, because they are hard to fake and hard to deny. People would need to invest in these bad ideas, so they would be less likely to leave the group and confront the sunk cost. Also, it's harder to deny allegiance to the group afterwards, because no one in their right minds would accept an idea that bad for any other reason.

If you have a naive interpretation of the dogma, which regards it as an objective statement about the world, you will tend to question it. When you’re contesting the dogma, people won’t judge your argument on its merits: they will look at it as an in-group power struggle. Either you want to install your own dogma, which makes you a pretender, or you’re accepted a competing dogma, which makes you a traitor. Even if they accept that you just don’t want to yield to the authority behind the dogma, that makes you a rebel. Dogmas are just off-limits to criticism.

Public display of dismissive attitude to your questioning is also important. Taking it into consideration is in itself a form of treason, as it is interpreted as entertaining the option of joining you against the authority. So it’s best to dismiss the heresy quickly and loudly, without thinking about it.

Do you know of some other texts which shed some light on this idea?

I'm reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and I've stopped on this:

90% of the students who saw the CRT in normal font made at least one mistake in the test, but the proportion dropped to 35% when the font was barely legible. You read this correctly: performance was better with the bad font.

This seems like an important finding, but I can't find references in the book (Kindle) or on the Web. Does anybody know any real evidence for this claim? EDIT: I found the original paper

Do you think that people could behave rationally with such a simple intervention?

simple intro to CRT

EDIT: fixed spelling in title