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If you don't know who Daniel Ellsberg is, you probably don't know what the Pentagon Papers are either.
by px43 3y ago
If you don't know who Daniel Ellsberg is, you probably don't know what the Pentagon Papers are either.
- Karellen 3y agoI'm not familiar with that many details of USA political history, I didn't really know who Daniel Ellsberg is (the name sounds somewhat familiar, but I might be getting them confused with someone else?), and I didn't know what the Pentagon Papers are. But "the Pentagon Papers" sound important (kind of like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, and may even be the trope namer?) and "who leaked the Pentagon Papers" sounds like an interesting story that I might want to learn more about. "Someone who is famous in some way but you've never heard of has died" is a much weaker pull. Yeah, there might be something interesting there, and if it's someone whose death has hit the top of the HN front page then the odds of me finding it worth reading are somewhat higher than if it was a headline almost anywhere else (hence why I'm here). But there are a bunch of other headlines on HN, and I could have easily skipped past it. "who leaked the pentagon papers" would have been a much stronger signal that this was someone I wanted to read more about.
- derivagral 3y agoNot true for me. Also https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/