Too Good to Check | Hacker News Reader

Too Good to Check

nytimes.com

64 pointsKeepTalking19 comments

The brilliance of this tactic is that if you repeat some outrageous number, the only way to defend it is to produce the real number which is bound to still be quite large. You can't respond with, "It is only $5 million/day!" because that is still a lot of money.

It doesn't matter if every President does it to these people. What matters is that they get to demonize Obama.

Agreed, but $5 million a day is a lot for you and your family to take a vacation. It is NOTHING when the POTUS is on an international trip. Anyone who thinks that is a big number relative to what it's for is completely out of touch with reality, and you'll have a hard time arguing about ANYTHING with them when they don't even have a basic understanding of the way the world works.

It may be unrealistic, but personally I can't fault them for having a problem wasting that much money -- there really isn't a reason he should need thousands of people, 10% of that should have been enough.

But hey, if you don't have to pay the bill you might as well enjoy the show.

The "thousands" figure is part of the bullshit. Clinton did it with about 1,300 people. That is far from "thousands". They talk about this in the article.

And I'm curious what your experience and understanding of how that all works is to be able to say something like "10% of that should have been enough". I'm not being antagonistic. I'm genuinely curious if you understand the role that all people on this trip play, and how 90% of them could, in your opinion, be eliminated.

I understand that willful ignorance and propagation of false facts is an important issue. However, the reason that the story propagated so widely ends up being mostly political and doesn't really pique my hacker fancy.

I'd say on the contrary. Right-wing pundits have gotten very good at hacking the social system, of which this is an example. It's an unfortunate truth that humans tend to believe things they hear repeated, regardless of the context. This makes countering a lie very difficult, since every time you state that the lie is not true, you're just subconsciously reinforcing its truth in the minds of many people.

The best way to counter a lie is by stating the facts and avoiding mentioning the lie altogether, but in this case the White House refused to divulge a concrete number. The $200 million figure was allowed to propagate unchecked.

Agreed. There's this nice gray area about what is "politics" and what is "politics, but with a huge element of ..." (I really paused for a second looking for the right words, and not coming up with it, I'll take your words if you don't mind: "hacker fancy").

When submitting, it would be nice if folks asked the question Would you find this interesting if you were diametrically opposed to the political or religious elements of this article/post? If the answer is yes than it's likely fantastic, if it's no then it's likely to be seen as tea party/%palin%/%obama/SEIU/ACORN/Fox News/MSNBC/ZOMDL!

Hacker News does a pretty good job of weeding this sort of stuff out, and I'm guessing this one will float off soon enough.

200M Indian rupees is about 4.5M USD, that might explain the rumor.

I don't disagree with the general premise of this article but I find it ironic that Friedman says "Cooper also pointed out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing about $190 million a day and that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration, cost, according to the Government Accountability Office and adjusted for inflation, about $5.2 million a day," without mentioning that this CBO report specifically excludes the costs of the Secret Service and that the security costs after the 9/11 are likely significantly greater than what they were previously. $5.2 million/day is likely just as bad a number as $200 million/day, yet Friendman repeats is without stipulations, just like Bachmann did.

How on earth can you think that spending 40x as much money is just as bad?

You missed the point. The estimate is just as bad. I wasn't talking about the amount of money spent.

If you want to dispute the numbers, fine. But it's ridiculous to accuse Friedman of the same dishonesty as Bachmann.

First, he explicitly said he doesn't know the real cost of the trip, and explained how he arrived at his estimate. Second, his source is a lot more authoritative than Bachmann's: the GAO, a department of the U.S. government whose raison d'être is to monitor government spending, vs an unnamed Indian official cited by an Indian reporter. Third, he provides context that helps his readers understand the scale of the numbers being thrown around - are we really to believe that this trip is spending money faster than the war effort in Afghanistan? Do we really think Obama is spending 40 times as much as Clinton did for a similar trip?

Friedman may well be wrong, but I'll take his number over Bachmann's any day of the week.

No, it's not any better. This estimate is useless, because of the things I mentioned. The Secret Service costs are likely the bulk of the spending, so unless they release them, we won't know the real numbers involved. Clinton did not spend 40 times less than $200 million/day.

I'm not sure why you don't understand my point. Friedman cited a falsehood without saying that it was untrue. Clinton's trip did not cost $5.2 million a day. The CBO clearly specifies that the SS costs were excluded multiple times. Friedman did not mention this, so he is just as bad as Bachmann.

When (attempting to) think critically, you can't just choose to ignore the entire context. And when you're talking about both the kinds of sources and the order of magnitude or so difference, one estimate is not "just as useless".

One estimate is based on the retelling of a made up number by some anonymous source accompanied, with other information that was verifiably not true.

Friedman's estimate is based on real honest to god numbers produced by the accounting agency of the government in question minus an unknown amount. He did not mention the missing amount for SS, true. But given the context, I can see why he may have not -- it does't really matter when you're at least an order off [1].

Drawing a false equivalence here is not thinking critically.

[1] The budget for the entire year for SS protection was 689M in 2008 [http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Pa...].

Is a recap of a TV show really worthy of an NYT op-ed slot?

And is it really worth posting here?

IMO, no on both counts.

Then flag it.

Pretty smartly done - but the White House could easily have saved it if they had told the actual number, now they just look like idiots.

And if the right wing really wanted the story to stick, they should have invented a much, much more accurate number: $191.635.000 sounds much more impressive and accurate than $200 million.

The right wing will gleefully call a complex planetarium projector an "overhead projector".

They don't care about being accurate, and accuracy isn't needed for their stories to stick. They've pretty much checked out of reality and into World of GOPcraft.

What is interesting about this is that the huge numbers being thrown around by the gorvernment for the last three (or so) years have numbed us to the point where such an absurd number as $200M/day does not trip the BS meter at first utterance.

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