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Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

The far more insidious manifestation of 'false memories':

"But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together. (We searched for them in Google Images and gave up after scanning 500 results.)"

That presence or absence on Google Images is sufficient to constitute proof. Which isn't to say Obama's secretly shaking hands in underground bunkers. I am, however, interacting more and more with people who seem to think that if they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist.

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In this case, I'd say the photograph would be newsworthy enough to be run all over the mainstream media, and indexed extensively by Google.

1) Hence the broader point that such 'verification' extends far beyond this picture, which I agree would be noteworthy;

2) The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around.

3) It ignores the broader social context in which Google is the funnel through which information exists. If the ministry of truth wants to rewrite history, they'll do so by manipulating what Google results are available. The entire point of the article is how history can be manipulated, and then succumbs to verification via a source that can, in fact, be manipulated. That is, imagine a picture was taken, and you're sitting here thinking, "I really thought those two met." If verification constitutes, "Is it on Google?" then the task of changing history is pretty easy.

"The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera was around."

I see what you're trying to say here, but you've picked a terrible example. The probability that these men would meet and there would not be cameras around is negligible. Non-zero, I concede, but in a Bayesian world absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence, under the right circumstances. (The conventional phrasing is wrong, it ought to read "Absence of evidence is not 100% proof of absence", which scans much less well but is actually correct; the phrase is intrinsically Aristotelian.)

You're still missing the point. Google has censored results before, and future censoring would lead to the types of dystopic scenarios outlined in the beginning of the article. I'm not about to get into a debate about the relative probabilities of a picture existing or not. In part, because just-so stories abound on either side. But more fundamentally: it's not the point of the selection in my first post.

I think you're getting carried away with the part of the article where it says that they verified they'd never met by checking google.

The historical fact is that these two have never publicly met. They already were pretty certain they knew this, but checked google just to be absolutely sure. Doing an image search is a lot easier than doing a text search since there's an awful lot of articles which mention them both and it would be too hard to sort through the guff.

That doesn't mean you can fool people into thinking that something never happened just by removing all pictures of it from google image search. (Removing pictures would of course be a necessary but not sufficient step for anyone wanting to remove something from history.)

I think that the probability that these men would meet WITHOUT cameras around is much higher than the probability that they would meet WITH cameras around.

If Obama and Ahmedinajad decided to meet, it would certainly be something Obama wanted to keep out of the newspapers. I certainly think that it is within the power of the President of the United States to arrange a secret meeting.

The fact that "it" is not revealed by google means without doubt... that photoshoppers are running behind.

As an example, the presence of an image on Google Images is exactly how the Vancouver Olympics gained a fifth mascot:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7187...

Interesting item here is how apparently newspapers with fairly large circulation see absolutely no problem in taking the content from other people and their websites but go absolutely hysterical when someone so much as deeplinks to an article on theirs.

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