10 ms·

I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save

I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment: > The Pacific Northwest tree octopus is an Internet hoax created in 1998 by a humor writer under the pseudonym Lyle Zapato. Since its creation, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus website has been commonly referenced in Internet literacy classes in schools and has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility regarding online sources of information. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_tree_octopus

Planktonne 3y ago
> others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment But then they wouldn't learn anything about reading critically.
morelisp 3y ago
Unfortunately the campaign was unsuccessful and octopus paxarboli went extinct not long after the page first was published, before internet access was common and before smartphones could easily take pictures of it etc. Just because there's minimal evidence of something from before the internet, on the internet, doesn't make it a hoax.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Not to mention that 100% of all octopus fossils have been found on land. We have zero evidence of octopus fossils in the ocean.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Unfortunately the campaign was unsuccessful and octopus paxarboli went extinct not long after the page first was published, Largely, the campaign failed because of the joint US/Canadian invasion of the Republic of Cascadia based on (ironically, false) claims of Weapons of Media Deception (WMD) being deployed with imminent plans for use against North American civilian targets.
oatmeal1 3y ago
> I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment: I believed it too. The thing is, this is something no one is really incentivized to lie about. If some website says "politician did X", then your lie detector turns on, because it's worth it for lots of websites to lie or mislead about that. It would be very hard to go through life questioning the veracity of every inconsequential bit of information that no one has an incentive to lie about. I don't think it demonstrates much that students believed it. And I especially don't think it means anything about gullibility about information found online. Almost certainly, if it were printed in a book, they'd be even more likely to believe it.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  Add in that the animal world is full of wacky creatures that don't fit heuristic models for plausibility. People thought the Platypus was a hoax was it was initially discovered. It is real.
  - mc32 3y ago
    Add the propensity to colloquially grant newly discovered things names that borrow from existing things: sea cow, catfish, etc. so why couldn’t there be something called a tree octopus?
    - MattGaiser 3y ago
      Today I learned that a tree crab is a thing. I knew a tree lobster was a thing. There is something that could plausibly be called a tree clam.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > Add the propensity to colloquially grant newly discovered things names that borrow from existing things: sea cow, catfish, etc. so why couldn’t there be something called a tree octopus? There could be. The name of the animal isn't what gives the lie away.
cratermoon 3y ago
It's revealing that a substantial part of that wikipedia article is about Internet literacy studies.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
The poster at the bottom kind of gives away the parody. Pretty fun though, I wish there was a tree octopus now.
bantou_41 3y ago
I think part of the purpose of sharing this website without saying anything about it might be to show that, in the age of the internet and AI, we don’t really verify information before consuming it. It’s not just children who are gullible. A lot of what we read on the internet is second hand information, facts with subjective interpretations, opinions, or straight up false information.
- Hendrikto 3y ago
  > in the age of the internet and AI, we don’t really verify information before consuming it As if this had ever been different. I would even argue that, because it is simply much easier to do, people are more incentivized to fact-check imformation, than 100 years ago.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    I for one think it used to be very different. That is, there used to be some pretty universal, trusted sources of information. Encyclopedia Brittanica, for one simple example. And I'm not saying these sources never had errors or they didn't embed some of the societal biases in their reports, but they clearly had an institutional desire to report facts correctly, and pretty much nobody questioned that intent, regardless of political leanings. The ease with which anyone can publish anything on the Internet is a double-edged sword. It makes it more possible to challenge the status quo, but it also means that some crackpot can produce a slick video that, to many people, is just as valid as some well-researched documentary that at least attempts to be unbiased.
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  Sorry but you gotta be a special kind of retarded to believe this. If you believe this you probably think Jan 6 was an "insurrection", chemtrails are "just contrails" and that we need to ban hydrogen dioxide.
beej71 3y ago
It was good! I got to the end thinking, "I don't know if I've been had or not." The WP article is a great read--recommend.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
It's the Washington Oregon version of the Dropbear.
- stephenr 3y ago
  Droptopus?
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
Had it not been for your comment it would’ve definitely taken me longer to figure out, and I would’ve most likely made a fool out of myself by telling people about it. I was extremely susceptible to this story, because I absolutely love octopuses, and everything related to them. However I’m not an expert and it would not surprise me at all (given how surprising octopuses are generally) that there was a octopus group that could adapt to an extremely high humidity area, so it seems plausible! I like getting fooled like this occasionally cause it keeps you on your toes and shows you how vulnerable and easily fooled we all are.
- jmckib 3y ago
  I immediately thought this looked too absurd to be real, but I wonder if my lack of octopus knowledge helped me out here. I know octopi are pretty smart, but I don’t think of them as being too surprising in their capabilities.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
> has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility And not to make everything about this, but in light of this, interpret various currently fashionable and harmful pseudoscientific ideologies being peddled in schools and backed by the force of the regime. Children are very gullible. That's one major reason why they need parents, to protect them from predation and to guide them toward the minimum of adulthood. Worse still when parents themselves buy into these ideologies.
ortusdux 3y ago
To be fair, tree octopuses sound about as outlandish as land crabs, which I still have trouble believing are real. https://arthropoda.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/coconut-crab.jpg https://arthropoda.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/coconut-crab....
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  Not to mention the land shark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Shark_(Saturday_Night_Live) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Shark_(Saturday_Night_Liv... and the prairie squid: https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Prairie_squid https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Prairie_squid
  - MarkMarine 3y ago
    And drop bears
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I think this is a great point. It's easy to come back with a "hah, look how gullible you are" when someone believes hoaxes like this, but that ignores the reality that "truth is often stranger than fiction." I mean seriously, a coconut crab specifically evolved a special breathing apparatus to survive on land - why should that be any different from an octopus having "special adaptations" to keep it from getting desiccated when out of the water for extended periods? It's like when I used to read through Snopes feeds, and 9 times out of 10 I'd think "wow, that's so dumb, how could anyone believe that", and then the tenth time I'd think the same thing for a story that actually ended up being true.
petre 3y ago
I've always liked this one better: https://zapatopi.net/belgium/ https://zapatopi.net/belgium/ “Tourists, business travelers, and other visitors are allowed to "come" to the "country" in order to "witness" its "existence." In reality, these people are waylaid at the common borders of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and taken to NWO branch facilities where they have false memories of vast sprout fields and chocolate factory tours implanted.”
retrocryptid 3y ago
Meh. You have a parochial opinion of facts.
01100011 3y ago
It was obvious when the page mentioned rainforests, which are on the western flank of the Olympics, but had a map showing only the eastern flank.
parentheses 3y ago
I scanned it and thought. HN post. Must be legit. Good reminder to RTFx.
tejohnso 3y ago
Well I for one appreciate it. I was drawn in after a couple of paragraphs, and then started to doubt and figured I'd check the comments for exactly this kind of thing before I run off and tell my child about an amazing animal I just heard about. Thank you. After reading about parasites that turn ants into zombies to do their bidding, I'm pretty much all out of "that's just a nonsense story" when it comes to nature's variety. I'll be skeptical, but I tend not to outright dismiss immediately.
greggsy 3y ago
The article lists as bald eagles and Sasquatch as natural predators…
- fourthark 3y ago
  That's when I finally caught on!
pschastain 3y ago
Reading the headline I thought it was going to be an article about the octopus tree: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/octopus-tree-of-oregon https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/octopus-tree-of-oregon
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
A little similar to Birds Aren't Real.
RajT88 3y ago
Another one like this, which you have to dive a bit deeper to find the give-aways: https://objectiveministries.org/ https://objectiveministries.org/ (But once you've gone down the rabbit hole, there are some spectacular give-aways)
1024core 3y ago
I saw the photos of snow and immediately realized it was fake.
andreskytt 3y ago
Oh, but dear sir, you forgot about the AI!
swsdsailor 3y ago
Damn. I wanted to believe!

Planktonne 3y ago

> others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment But then they wouldn't learn anything about reading critically.

morelisp 3y ago

Unfortunately the campaign was unsuccessful and octopus paxarboli went extinct not long after the page first was published, before internet access was common and before smartphones could easily take pictures of it etc. Just because there's minimal evidence of something from before the internet, on the internet, doesn't make it a hoax.

civilitty 3y ago
Not to mention that 100% of all octopus fossils have been found on land. We have zero evidence of octopus fossils in the ocean.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Unfortunately the campaign was unsuccessful and octopus paxarboli went extinct not long after the page first was published, Largely, the campaign failed because of the joint US/Canadian invasion of the Republic of Cascadia based on (ironically, false) claims of Weapons of Media Deception (WMD) being deployed with imminent plans for use against North American civilian targets.

oatmeal1 3y ago

> I don't mean to spoil the fun, downvote me if this is not in the spirit, but it took me way too long to figure this out and others may be as slow as me and save some time by reading this comment: I believed it too. The thing is, this is something no one is really incentivized to lie about. If some website says "politician did X", then your lie detector turns on, because it's worth it for lots of websites to lie or mislead about that. It would be very hard to go through life questioning the veracity of every inconsequential bit of information that no one has an incentive to lie about. I don't think it demonstrates much that students believed it. And I especially don't think it means anything about gullibility about information found online. Almost certainly, if it were printed in a book, they'd be even more likely to believe it.

MattGaiser 3y ago
Add in that the animal world is full of wacky creatures that don't fit heuristic models for plausibility. People thought the Platypus was a hoax was it was initially discovered. It is real.
- mc32 3y ago
  Add the propensity to colloquially grant newly discovered things names that borrow from existing things: sea cow, catfish, etc. so why couldn’t there be something called a tree octopus?
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    Today I learned that a tree crab is a thing. I knew a tree lobster was a thing. There is something that could plausibly be called a tree clam.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > Add the propensity to colloquially grant newly discovered things names that borrow from existing things: sea cow, catfish, etc. so why couldn’t there be something called a tree octopus? There could be. The name of the animal isn't what gives the lie away.

cratermoon 3y ago

It's revealing that a substantial part of that wikipedia article is about Internet literacy studies.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

The poster at the bottom kind of gives away the parody. Pretty fun though, I wish there was a tree octopus now.

bantou_41 3y ago

I think part of the purpose of sharing this website without saying anything about it might be to show that, in the age of the internet and AI, we don’t really verify information before consuming it. It’s not just children who are gullible. A lot of what we read on the internet is second hand information, facts with subjective interpretations, opinions, or straight up false information.

Hendrikto 3y ago
> in the age of the internet and AI, we don’t really verify information before consuming it As if this had ever been different. I would even argue that, because it is simply much easier to do, people are more incentivized to fact-check imformation, than 100 years ago.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I for one think it used to be very different. That is, there used to be some pretty universal, trusted sources of information. Encyclopedia Brittanica, for one simple example. And I'm not saying these sources never had errors or they didn't embed some of the societal biases in their reports, but they clearly had an institutional desire to report facts correctly, and pretty much nobody questioned that intent, regardless of political leanings. The ease with which anyone can publish anything on the Internet is a double-edged sword. It makes it more possible to challenge the status quo, but it also means that some crackpot can produce a slick video that, to many people, is just as valid as some well-researched documentary that at least attempts to be unbiased.
mikrotikker 3y ago
Sorry but you gotta be a special kind of retarded to believe this. If you believe this you probably think Jan 6 was an "insurrection", chemtrails are "just contrails" and that we need to ban hydrogen dioxide.

beej71 3y ago

It was good! I got to the end thinking, "I don't know if I've been had or not." The WP article is a great read--recommend.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

It's the Washington Oregon version of the Dropbear.

stephenr 3y ago
Droptopus?

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

Had it not been for your comment it would’ve definitely taken me longer to figure out, and I would’ve most likely made a fool out of myself by telling people about it. I was extremely susceptible to this story, because I absolutely love octopuses, and everything related to them. However I’m not an expert and it would not surprise me at all (given how surprising octopuses are generally) that there was a octopus group that could adapt to an extremely high humidity area, so it seems plausible! I like getting fooled like this occasionally cause it keeps you on your toes and shows you how vulnerable and easily fooled we all are.

jmckib 3y ago
I immediately thought this looked too absurd to be real, but I wonder if my lack of octopus knowledge helped me out here. I know octopi are pretty smart, but I don’t think of them as being too surprising in their capabilities.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

> has been used in multiple studies demonstrating children's gullibility And not to make everything about this, but in light of this, interpret various currently fashionable and harmful pseudoscientific ideologies being peddled in schools and backed by the force of the regime. Children are very gullible. That's one major reason why they need parents, to protect them from predation and to guide them toward the minimum of adulthood. Worse still when parents themselves buy into these ideologies.

ortusdux 3y ago

To be fair, tree octopuses sound about as outlandish as land crabs, which I still have trouble believing are real. https://arthropoda.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/coconut-crab.jpg https://arthropoda.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/coconut-crab....

UncleSlacky 3y ago
Not to mention the land shark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Shark_(Saturday_Night_Live) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Shark_(Saturday_Night_Liv... and the prairie squid: https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Prairie_squid https://subgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Prairie_squid
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  And drop bears
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I think this is a great point. It's easy to come back with a "hah, look how gullible you are" when someone believes hoaxes like this, but that ignores the reality that "truth is often stranger than fiction." I mean seriously, a coconut crab specifically evolved a special breathing apparatus to survive on land - why should that be any different from an octopus having "special adaptations" to keep it from getting desiccated when out of the water for extended periods? It's like when I used to read through Snopes feeds, and 9 times out of 10 I'd think "wow, that's so dumb, how could anyone believe that", and then the tenth time I'd think the same thing for a story that actually ended up being true.

petre 3y ago

I've always liked this one better: https://zapatopi.net/belgium/ https://zapatopi.net/belgium/ “Tourists, business travelers, and other visitors are allowed to "come" to the "country" in order to "witness" its "existence." In reality, these people are waylaid at the common borders of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg and taken to NWO branch facilities where they have false memories of vast sprout fields and chocolate factory tours implanted.”

retrocryptid 3y ago

Meh. You have a parochial opinion of facts.

01100011 3y ago

It was obvious when the page mentioned rainforests, which are on the western flank of the Olympics, but had a map showing only the eastern flank.

parentheses 3y ago

I scanned it and thought. HN post. Must be legit. Good reminder to RTFx.

tejohnso 3y ago

Well I for one appreciate it. I was drawn in after a couple of paragraphs, and then started to doubt and figured I'd check the comments for exactly this kind of thing before I run off and tell my child about an amazing animal I just heard about. Thank you. After reading about parasites that turn ants into zombies to do their bidding, I'm pretty much all out of "that's just a nonsense story" when it comes to nature's variety. I'll be skeptical, but I tend not to outright dismiss immediately.

greggsy 3y ago

The article lists as bald eagles and Sasquatch as natural predators…

fourthark 3y ago
That's when I finally caught on!

pschastain 3y ago

Reading the headline I thought it was going to be an article about the octopus tree: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/octopus-tree-of-oregon https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/octopus-tree-of-oregon

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

A little similar to Birds Aren't Real.

RajT88 3y ago

Another one like this, which you have to dive a bit deeper to find the give-aways: https://objectiveministries.org/ https://objectiveministries.org/ (But once you've gone down the rabbit hole, there are some spectacular give-aways)

1024core 3y ago

I saw the photos of snow and immediately realized it was fake.

andreskytt 3y ago

Oh, but dear sir, you forgot about the AI!

swsdsailor 3y ago

Damn. I wanted to believe!