Just as often person 1 says something, providing no citations (but living in a world where we know that anyone can support/debunk with their own searches). Pers

Just as often person 1 says something, providing no citations (but living in a world where we know that anyone can support/debunk with their own searches). Person 2 comes along and posts a retort with a number of citations, properly linked in the footer of their post. HN upvotes person 2. Downvotes person 1 to the nether. Clearly they were debunked. Only person 2's citations were noise [1]. They were just marginally connected nonsense [2] to add gravity to whatever else they were claiming as a credibility multiplier. They were playing the crowd [3], knowing that extraordinarily few will ever bother reading anything, and just want to browse past and give passing judgments. This plays out on HN daily, and is spectacularly effective. ----CITATIONS----- [1] - https://processing.org/reference/noise_.html https://processing.org/reference/noise_.html [2] - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/inside-the-cult-of-trump-his-rallies-are-church-and-he-is-the-gospel https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/inside-the-cult-of-t... [3] - https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote-theres-a-sucker-born-every-minute-1db9a7220d34 https://medium.com/skeptikai/the-real-story-behind-the-quote...