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I’ll Take ‘White Supremacist Hand Gestures’ for $1k
- spankyspangler 5y ago"How hundreds of “Jeopardy!” contestants talked themselves into a baseless conspiracy theory — and won’t be talked out of it." This particular theory is not baseless, but it is based on a lie. The big mccarthyesque lie that countless politicians and journalists including some at the NYT have peddled, which is that white supremacists are everywhere and you can spot them with certain signs they make or other things they do (which are not racist but might be something a racist would do, according to someone on twitter). And if you make one of these gestures and fail to have known beforehand that it is one of the verboten signals, then that's no excuse, you're still a white supremacist or at least deserve to be treated as one just in case. It's not that there are no white supremacists or racists, it's just that half the population (including 10-20% of black and hispanic people) are not white supremacists, and their secret grand master plan is not to go around on TV shows flashing the "OK" sign or other such things.
- kleer001 5y agopareidolia, plain and simple, shame it wasn't mentioned in the article
- sigmaprimus 5y agoThat does seem to be the correct term for what happened. I had never heard of "Pareidolia" before, thanks for sharing. Actually it's definition might make a good Jeopardy answer!
- kleer001 5y agoHehe, it would! In the Ai world it's called overfitting. Great term, happy to illuminate :)
- deathlight 5y agoIt seems less simple than that since there is a political angle, which is mentioned in the article.
- kleer001 5y agoHmm, I guess you can add in there a hand full of cognitive biases if you wanted. Reactance bias, negativity bias, loss aversion, etc...