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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

>> It's also useful to corrupt people's belief in the possibility of getting accurate news

That's the point. Accurate, impartial news does not exist and there is no benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists. All news is fake to some extent because there is always room for an agenda. The only reliable way to stop elites from setting the agenda is for people to believe in stuff which conflicts with the agenda. Whether it's fake news or not is a detail which doesn't matter.

People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

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Sure, all news is fake "to some extent," but giving up entirely is like running Windows XP in production because all software has security vulnerabilities to some extent.

There's an important difference between people who are genuinely pursuing the truth and those who are genuinely pursuing deception. There's an important difference between a well-intentioned developer who writes a buffer overflow and one who adds a backdoor.

And fake news itself has an agenda: to convince people that there is no such thing as truth, that nothing that the elites say can ever resemble truth, and that caring about what the elites do is futile because the truth is unknowable. Your approach effectively endorses that agenda above others.

> People should be encouraged to trust their intuition

The proliferation of fake news doesn't do that. Fake news just reinforces people's biases as they self-select to read a fake news outlet that they agree with, killing any remainder of sceptisism and critical thinking.

> People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

That's how it works with real, good-but-not-perfectly-impartial news. Fake news on the other hand is almost entirely lies that remain unquestioned by its consumers, resulting in many many more "mistakes".

I am really confused by the use of “elites” in recent times. What is actually meant by the term? Am I an elite if I have finished my PhD? Do I need to be in the 0.1%? It’s such a broad term that it basically becomes useless as it means totally different things to different people...

From my perspective I am not really afraid of elites per se but false information (or lying people) spreading which enables unsocial and unethical behavior not only to continue but to thrive.

You can compare humanity to a human body... what you are describing is an auto-immune disease where your own anti-bodies are attacking your own body... just because there are cells which are “higher up in the nevous system and decide what the body should do”?

If the cells are working healthily in your interest, let them be... if they are misfunctioning and causing harm, by any means, try to replace them. Throwing around with general terms is not helping anyone in this situation.

"Elites" means people that are actually competent at their chosen profession. So real journalists, politicians and the like.

> no benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists

How can democracy operate if the levers are broken? What are you voting on if you don't believe that any of the information about candidates is real? Or the content of the laws passed?

The levers are broken, it's really hard to debate that at this point. Maybe they were always broken and the internet has helped shed light on the true state of things or maybe due to crumbling business models the media has become more dishonest than ever. That definitely impacts the effectiveness of democracy. Thankfully the internet is still open enough that large media companies are having a hard time monopolizing the narrative.

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