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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- dbt00 6mo ago2004, actually, with a minor update in 2008. This was the same principle I used coincidentally at the same time to also disbelieve the same thing.
- nkurz 6mo agoI think the standard is that the parenthesized date shows the last update, not the original. Is this not correct?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- derrak 6mo agoMakes me think of academic papers that overhype their contribution. Also makes me think about AI hype.
- rawgabbit 6mo agoFor me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?
- mememememememo 6mo agoOt worse because it didn't hallucinate, and they are coming for you, as a free thinking "radical". They can tell from a long deleted blog post you made in 2005 about green energy.
- asdff 6mo agoWhy bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century). Put it this way, if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jews? I don't think so. I think they would be screwed no matter what.
- mememememememo 6mo agoBecause you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.
- asdff 6mo agoStill not convinced that AI is offering anything new here. Especially when the statistics you'd reach for are often like 100 years old or more. Bayes theorem is older than the united states. I think among lay people there is a lot of conflation between AI and statistics, and also a lack of understanding of the state of that field and how mature it is. Nazi Germany of course heavily used statistical modeling and even contracted with IBM to quantify Jewish populations.
- pixl97 6mo agoThis your point of view is kind of silly when you think about it. They used the modeling going after jews, but going after the people that were German but hid jews was much more difficult. With moden AI/statistical modeling they'd take all those people too.
- dragonwriter 6mo ago> Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.
- jazz9k 6mo agoAnother danger I see is job loss. Who wants a world where the wealthy control AI and completely destroy the middle class.
- yunnpp 6mo agoThe wealthy.
- asdff 6mo agoThe thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.
- bluefirebrand 6mo agoThis is all true, but surely you can see how automating the authoritarian bent of the government still makes things worse than before?
- flextheruler 6mo agoYou're confusing autocratic with authoritarian. Total war reached its most recent zenith in the 20th century. If governments have always been able to control people to the same degree, why was not until Napoleon that we saw the beginnings of nationalism? I say this rhetorically, as it is quite obvious that it was technology and industrialization. When we look at ancient Empires and see their territory on a map it would be much more accurate to only highlight population centers not the entirety of the land. Illiterate farmers, who made up the majority of the world, resided in small towns and villages and their daily lives were largely unaffected by conquerors.
- asdff 6mo agoThere was nationalism pre napoleon. Arguably east asia is a better example than european history IMO. I would say there is strong sense of nationalism among han chinese both now and in history. Likewise for Japan and Korea. Pre islam Persia as well. I guess the source of this was consistent centralized authority over a large region vs any technological change. You had that in east asia. You didn't have that in europe after roman times. Even larger empires like kingdom of spain were not really seen as "spain" as we know it but a unified monarchy over the kingdoms of castile, leon, aragon, sicily, and napoli. Interestingly you didn't really have that in india either, no one controlled the continent until mughal times and by then the religious and cultural regional differences were pretty set in stone.
- 0x3f 6mo agoHuman law enforcement hallucinates all the time. This is a bit like a poor argument against self driving.
- achierius 6mo agoThe last line of GP's comment is key here: "Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?" This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.
- 0x3f 6mo agoI think you're confused about the mechanism involved. It's hard to get satisfaction due to e.g. qualified immunity. The fact they use technology is largely irrelevant. You couldn't sue the NSA for spying on you before AI either.
- pixl97 6mo ago"Computer says no", look it up. Cars measure success by not hitting things. Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Note, not the number of people found guilty, that's the prosecutor. Cops will gladly use a hallucinating computer system to beat the absolute fuck out of you with qualified immunity.
- 0x3f 6mo ago> Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Simply not true. Police KPIs tend to focus on crime rates. Regardless, they can mistreat you with or without AI backing.
- pixl97 6mo agoThe elected officials like chiefs get judged on crime rates. Individual officers are on arrests and tickets (regardless of rules against quotas)
- nostrademons 6mo agoInteresting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treating them as an expense weren’t even really necessary, but it took a few years. It wasn’t obvious in 2002 that this is how it would play out. And relevant to the title quote: maybe it should be amended to “good ideas do not need a lot of lies to gain public acceptance eventually”. The dynamic here is that a significant part of public opinion is simply “well, this is how things work now, and it seems to be working”, and any new and innovative idea by definition is not going to be how things work now. The lies are needed to spur action and disturb the equilibrium of today. But if you’re still telling lies a few years in, you’ve failed and it’s a bad idea to begin with.
- peacebeard 6mo agoSo in your view, even a useful innovative idea cannot gain traction without being overhyped?
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoAlmost any useful innovation is going to have a right tail of people who overhype it. They shouldn't, and I wish they wouldn't. But if your strategy for evaluating new ideas is to find the biggest sources of hype and fact check them, you're going to systematically undervalue innovation.
- 6510 6mo agoThe problem is that many care more about presentation than substance. The irony gets overwhelming where boring is usually the best solution and the least exciting.
- indymike 6mo agoThere was a body of evidence far before 2002 that dealing employees in was a good move.
- sublinear 6mo ago> My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim At the risk of missing the point, I have to say that knowing what we know now, this is a very poor heuristic. Predicting a lack of WMD was not only correct by mere coincidence, but also irrelevant to the decisions made about the war in Iraq. What is this blog post even saying? When you can't distinguish a lie, trust the room vibes? Seeking comfort won't give you any answers or get you closer to the truth. Not enough people ask "why". They instead argue about effectiveness or correctness. At some point you have to determine whether you're chasing the truth to make a decision or just for its own sake. In the vast majority of cases what you want is a decision that will produce the desired results. That's the real reason why lies happen and why merely knowing the truth doesn't get you anywhere and often nobody cares. EDIT: for the sanity of any late replies. My bad. I replaced the part about AI with something I thought was more interesting.
- awesome_dude 6mo ago> Right now, we have a similar situation with AI. Not enough people are asking why AI is being pushed so hard. Instead they pointlessly bicker about its effectiveness. We know why it's being pushed so hard - people need a return on all that money being burnt. It's effectiveness is argued about because it's not clear one way or the other where things are, where they are heading, and where they will end up. There has been a strong push for AI/AGI since before computing, so every time there's a breakthrough to the next level there's a hypewagon doing the rounds, followed by a "oh, actually it's not there yet" - and this time, like every other time, we go through a "is this the time? It's so tantalisingly close" Are we actually there now? Emphatically no. Are we at a point where it's usable and improving our lives - yes, with a PILE of caveats. Edit: I wanted to add There's always "True believers" whenever there is a fork in the road, and con artists looking to take advantage of them, but that happens whether there is a genuine breakthrough, or not - the hype is never a guide on whether the breakthrough exists OR not, so purely being a sceptic isn't worthwhile (IMO)
- projektfu 6mo ago
- appstorelottery 6mo agoHaving worked in public advocacy advertising, I’d frame it like this: “Good ideas don’t need lies” is a compelling ideal but in practice, public acceptance isn’t a reliable signal of truth or societal benefit. It depends on incentives, narratives, and how information is presented. History shows that even harmful or suboptimal ideas (like coal power) can gain widespread support if presented persuasively, while genuinely beneficial ideas can struggle if they’re complex or unintuitive. A useful heuristic is: if an idea relies on misleading claims to survive scrutiny, that’s a warning sign. But public acceptance itself is not proof of goodness or correctness. In short: persuasion and truth are related—but far from identical.
- amarant 6mo agoI think you just reinforced the articles point. Coal power needs lots of lies to justify it, as per your own statement. That is in fact because coal energy is a terrible idea. It has 0 upsides compared to renewable alternatives, and is on the whole worse than even other non-renewable alternatives. If you have to lie to make it sound good, that's probably because it isn't actually good
- appstorelottery 6mo agoI think we’re still talking past each other. I’m not arguing that any specific idea is good. My point is just that public acceptance itself isn’t reliable evidence either way: ideas can gain support (or fail) for reasons other than their actual merit.
- amarant 6mo agoThat's true. The inversion of the quote is that good ideas require lies to lose public acceptance. Well, there's a lot of lies flying around lately. So it happens.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- harikb 6mo agoSomewhat counter quote... "Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats." -- Howard Aiken ...to mean that, usually, the good ideas are the crazy sounding ones...
- jayd16 6mo agoWell there's a survivor bias that I think plays into the quote. If its a good idea that's obvious, it's already used widely. If its not obvious, you'll still have to convince people. None of that requires lots of lies, though.
- didgetmaster 6mo agoThis is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible. To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'. There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate and going in the right direction, before setting it loose on the public.
- jcgrillo 6mo agoI guess a counterpoint might be Apple's "strategy". Scare quotes because I truly don't know if it was deliberate or just a happy accident. But somehow they've managed to not get so intensively exposed to the downside risk--if the wild claims about AI don't pan out they're not going to lose very much compared with the other megacorps.
- Gigachad 6mo agoApples plan has been pretty obvious. They invested in small locally running features that provide small utility rather than massive hosted models that cost a fortune and aren’t profitable. There also doesn’t seem to be much risk in falling behind. If you wait longer you can skip buying the now obsolete GPUs and training the now obsolete models.
- strongpigeon 6mo agoThey invested a ton in their Private Cloud Compute though, but are barely using their capacity. https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-reportedly-sitting-unused-on-warehouse-shelves-due-to-low-apple-intelligence-usage/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
- eleveriven 6mo agoWhen companies are spending that much capital, they almost can't help becoming unreliable narrators about what the technology can do right now versus what they hope it will do in two or three years
- mnmnmn 6mo ago[flagged]
- ForHackernews 6mo agoGood maxim with general applicability: cryptocurrency, wars in the middle east, online age verification checks.
- roenxi 6mo agoIt is also a useful trick to keep in mind the opposite of critical thinking - following the herd. Just copying everyone around you is often a great strategy. So good that even if everyone around you are making mistakes it can still be the dominant strategy (there is a reason a lot of people who don't like war are cowed into silence when war fever descends). Most people are using it. That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. People aren't trying to be right. Any sort of principle-based analysis easily outperforms the herd. When leaders in society start lying that is indeed one of those situations. Pretty much any situation where everyone knows something and the hard statistics are telling a different story is. The more pressing problem is how to go from a lovable Cassandra to someone who can preempt major events and convince the herd to not hurt itself in its confusion. Coincidentally that is how markets work, people who have a habit of being right are given full powers to overrule the mob and just do what they want. Markets don't care if everyone believes something. They care if people who got the calls right last time believe something. In this case, the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII and even there they waited until the war was mostly over and the major participants in the European theatres were exhausted before getting involved. The record is pretty bad. Iraq was an easy call to anyone who cares about making accurate predictions.
- pinkmuffinere 6mo ago> That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert you “hey the herd is wrong right now, take a closer look”, that would be great! But we have no such magic eight ball.
- wredcoll 6mo agoVery often the fact that the herd is going in that direction causes it to become the right direction, e.g. the stock market.
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- rc_mob 6mo agomy opinion is that lies have no relevance to if the idea is good or bad. liars lie and honest people are honest. ideas are not people and do not care who it is that thought them up.
- whackernews 6mo ago> This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse. I’m kind of conflicted and confused faced with this message on this site, especially with the content of the post. Can someone explain why I’m feeling annoyed?
- 6510 6mo agoIt's a generic blogger blogspot cookie banner. It's a free blogging platform but you can attach your own domain to it. (not sure about hosting) For example: http://fototour.blogspot.com http://fototour.blogspot.com
- convexly 6mo agoThe flip side is that good ideas with honest framing often lose to bad ideas with better marketing. Being right isn't enough if you can't communicate it and most people don't have the patience to evaluate the honest version.
- KennyBlanken 6mo agoIs "better marketing" a euphemism for "more willing to misrepresent the other side, turn a practical issue into an emotional one, and generally trot out every logical fallacy they can think of"? Because that's what I see constantly on social media in response to progressive ideas the rest of the world has largely accepted but apparently just can't possibly work in the United States...
- shake_head_pig2 6mo ago[dead]
- cm11 6mo agoI'd add (not saying you said otherwise) that marketing bad ideas well isn't quite the same as good communication. I guess a funny thing is that the more naive or blind or optimistic one is, the more one might wiggle their way out of some definitions of “liar.” If they're good at lying to themselves, maybe it doesn’t count as lying to others.
- eleveriven 6mo agoYou still need rhetoric, timing, emotion and narrative. But I'd say the lesson is "good ideas need good communicators" not "good ideas need lies"
- altruios 6mo agoYou are correct that ideas do not compete based on how true they are but how easily they are remembered.
- georgeecollins 6mo agoThe point the post is making not that good ideas win or lose, its that if you need to lie (that's not better marketing) to persuade your idea probably isn't good and your predictions about the outcomes are false. The context is deceit about the second Iraq war. I think the reason why this post is returning is because we are in the middle of a war where the goals and justifications are being misrepresented and yet people accept predictions about the outcome. "The straight will open itself." ? Right or wrong, an interesting (and ironic) historical analogy.
- phpnode 6mo agothe author of this post has a book called Lying for Money which I'd definitely recommend.
- black_13 6mo ago[dead]
- ValveFan6969 6mo ago[dead]
- fn-mote 6mo agoDate is actually (2004). The (2008) was just a single paragraph update (now immaterial) added at the top in response to making the news back then.
- idontwantthis 6mo agoSomething interesting about my experience with the Iraq War was that, as a 9 year old living in DC at a wealthy, liberal private school, everyone knew from the beginning it was all a lie. I only learned fairly recently that a vast majority of the country thought invading Iraq was a good idea.
- mlazos 6mo agoIdk I think they kind of do, tackling climate change is a good idea and at this point I’m ready to lie if it will make ppl do something
- r14c 6mo agoI think addressing climate change is more of a policy issue. I think most people are onboard with addressing climate change (modulo some cranks who are open to idea that the earth is flat and oil company ceos ig). It just doesn't translate into policy due to corruption.
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- pmg101 6mo agoI'm not sure. Don't underestimate the power of inertia. I bought an EV last year and it's definitely been a "good idea" for me. Luxurious ride, fuel costs a tenth, doesn't stink. Seems such an obvious upgrade it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home.
- IshKebab 6mo ago> it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.
- Tepix 6mo agoWhat‘s the source for the 20 years? Seems unlikely to me. b) You can also buy used EVs. I bought one last year, 2 years old, for 56% of the original price.
- zigman1 6mo agoHow is the battery?
- Sohcahtoa82 6mo agoI roll my eyes at this question because it's often framed as good faith curiosity, but it's often asked in bad faith by people that think it's a "gotcha" question, because they have this incorrect notion that EV batteries need to be replaced frequently. They see the warranty is 100K miles/8 years or whatever and think that means they have to replace the battery after 100K miles/8 years, yet fail to recognize that they don't apply that same logic to combustion engines with 30K mile/3 year warranties.
- antonkochubey 6mo agoIn my country it is 8y/160k km for batteries and 5-10y/150-200k km for ICE cars. That being said, when a battery fails, it’s a €20,000+ whole unit replacement (e.g. for Audi e-tron 55 it is €26,500 in my country), while ICE failures very rarely need a whole unit replacement, usually it’s a €1700 turbocharger or a €400 injector or something of that caliber. Personal anecdote: my 12 year old 262k km BMW did not need any engine repairs until now, except for free manufacturer recall on the EGR cooling system. And it still has 1000 km highway range in the winter.
- austin-cheney 6mo agoI completely disagree with the title. Good ideas should be either self evident or at least become clearly apparent with strong evidence. Typically that is not the case. People are social critters that typically fear originality, and not by just a little bit either. Most people find originality repulsive no matter how well qualified a good idea may be. Instead, most people look towards social validation. A socially validated bad idea has vastly superior acceptance for most people as compared to any good idea. We all like to think we are rational actors, but most of us aren’t and never will be.
- renewiltord 6mo agoThis explains why Fauci lying to the American people about masks so that they'd be "available for healthcare workers" landed so poorly.
- genie3io 6mo ago[dead]
- zameermfm 6mo ago"Any idea"
- eleveriven 6mo agoIt is a bit overstated as a universal rule, but as a practical heuristic it is excellent
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ghtbircshotbe 6mo agoWith the current moon mission I'm reminded of how whenever someone from NASA is interviewed they like talking about how the billions spent are justified because of the practical results of the research - Velcro, Tang, etc. It always seemed like a stretch, but I have the unpleasant feeling the US is going to lean the true value of being the research leader when it's gone.
- spiderfarmer 6mo agoThere are so many areas where the US lead, but lost the plot. And what did we learn from them losing that leadership status? We learned that the average citizen will never accept that as fact. And even if they do: they’ll say it never mattered much anyway. Like life expectancy, happiness, social mobility, literacy, student performance, global soft power and their overall reputation.
- amadeuspagel 6mo agoThis is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.
- altruios 6mo agoIdeas do not compete based on how true they are but how easily they are remembered.
- ada1981 6mo agoTerrence McKenna said something similar… “The truth doesn’t require your participation, only bullshit does.”
- xinan 6mo agoSo, why does Anthropic need so much aggressive marketing lately?