Transcription
A Twitter post by Kylie Cunningham @kyyylieeeee that reads “today at the airport one of the drug dogs set off a false alarm and officers rushed over to find out the dog had alerted them for a piece of pizza. the handler just patted his head and goes “it’s okay buddy i know pizza always confuses you” and gave him his treat anyways.”
You
The post
It’s there literally in the article that the handler rewarded the dog for a mistake. Whilst I doubt that in this case it was the handler’s intention to incentivise the dog to make that mistake more, in practice by giving the dog a treat for making that mistake they were doing positive reinforcement of that behaviour.
What article? You mean the Internet meme? Memes are passing as articles nowadays?
Does me using the wrong word (“article” instead of “tweet”) alter the point that the previous poster’s absolute statement “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes” is just an opionated statement with no backing meant only to contradict the event related in that tweet?
In the face of two statements unsupported by evidence (the tweet and that post I replied to), what’s more believable:
It does, because a random person being humorous on twitter carries no presumption of truth. An “article” kinda implies that, unless it’s satire.
Naturally being an “article” carries some implied authoritativeness compared to “random social media post”.
However my point is about the believability of the content itself on two “random social media posts” (the tweet and the one I replied to), which carry the same level of authoritativeness (“random person on the internet says”)
As I wrote somewhere else, statements about things always or never happening, unless backed by evidence are generally false, if only because statistically there are very few things which are absolutelly so all the time and everywhere and this one is about a kind of human interaction, which is far from the kind of thing likely to be absolute.
So based on the content and assuming nothing about truthfulness of falsehood of the sources, I personally find a story about a working dog handler rewarding a dog for doing something silly but endearing is more likely to be true than a statement from somebody saying that they never do such a thing, if only because it’s unlikely that it never ever happens and if it does happen somebody might spot in and because it makes for a nice store, share the story.
Mind you, by the same rule I also think that the statement from the poster before the one I replied to about “them training the dogs to bark on command to get probable cause” is not believable on itself and without further evidence and does not logically follow from somebody noticing once a dog handler rewarding a working dog for doing somebody which is a work mistake but also is silly and enderaring
(Had I been in the same position as that handler, even knowing I would be reinforcing a mistake, I would be sorely tempted to reward the dog for the silly “detect pizza” behaviour if only because it’s funny and lovable).
I just think the poster I was replying to criticized the previous post in just as much an “opinion about everything everywhere unbacked by evident and stated as fact” way as the post they were criticizing.
It’s not an article it’s a random tweet that may or may not have been true.
In my experience descriptions of events (like the one in the article) are less likely to be false than absolute certainty general statements about things always/never happening (such as “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes”).
This is mainly because the absolute certainty general statements are pure opinion worded as fact (i.e. with no actual study or similar to back that assertion that something always or never happens) hence usually bollocks, whilst somebody describing an event would have to willingly, explicitly and activelly be lying for it to be false.
So purelly from the way you worded things, that random tweet is already way more believable than your post.
Then beyond that, what’s described in that post is the handler being nice to the dog for their quirky behaviour, which doesn’t at sound far fetched - I’ve often seen people unthinkingly reinforcing a dog’s negative behaviour because “it’s cute” - people like dogs and often end up doing dumb things with them because they like them, which is how you end up with dogs which are too fat (which is bad for the dog) because that dog is smart and good at begging for food.
I’m not even saying that the poster you replied to claiming that handlers were purposefully mistraning the dogs was right (frankly I have no idea as, like you, they just voice opinion as fact), I’m saying that the way you tried to counter argument that post is even more bullshit than that post and now you just doubled down of scoring own goals by claiming the tweet itself is possibly a lie.
I am not the same person that you replied to.
Fair enough.
Is the post of that other person I commented on any more supported by evidence than the tweet?
If not, wouldn’t the analysis I wrote in response to your post (mistakenly thinking it was the original post) not work as an evaluation of which one is more likely to be true?