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I understand that willful ignorance and propagation of false facts is an important issue. However, the reason that the story propagated so widely ends up being
by carbocation 16y ago
I understand that willful ignorance and propagation of false facts is an important issue. However, the reason that the story propagated so widely ends up being mostly political and doesn't really pique my hacker fancy.
- colanderman 16y agoI'd say on the contrary. Right-wing pundits have gotten very good at hacking the social system, of which this is an example. It's an unfortunate truth that humans tend to believe things they hear repeated, regardless of the context. This makes countering a lie very difficult, since every time you state that the lie is not true, you're just subconsciously reinforcing its truth in the minds of many people. The best way to counter a lie is by stating the facts and avoiding mentioning the lie altogether, but in this case the White House refused to divulge a concrete number. The $200 million figure was allowed to propagate unchecked.
- reduxredacted 16y agoAgreed. There's this nice gray area about what is "politics" and what is "politics, but with a huge element of ..." (I really paused for a second looking for the right words, and not coming up with it, I'll take your words if you don't mind: "hacker fancy"). When submitting, it would be nice if folks asked the question Would you find this interesting if you were diametrically opposed to the political or religious elements of this article/post? If the answer is yes than it's likely fantastic, if it's no then it's likely to be seen as tea party/%palin%/%obama/SEIU/ACORN/Fox News/MSNBC/ZOMDL! Hacker News does a pretty good job of weeding this sort of stuff out, and I'm guessing this one will float off soon enough.