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Comment by neixidbeksoxyd | Hacker News Reader

I have a family member with a mental illness and they think they can talk to animals through telepathy. I was worried it was a sign of schizophrenia and tried to convince them that they needed help. Unfortunately when you google "animal telepathy" or any other query to get information on telepathic communication with animals, the top results are all absolute batshit crazy sites that confirm people can do that. Now I see how someone can start to believe all kinds of crazy things. Since Google probably optimizes for some type of engagement under the hood, all sorts of alternative medicine and crazy ideas end up as top results. I really think the whole "let's make all information/speech available with no filters except for sex because clearly sex is evil" approach from SV companies is causing huge harm. Most people don't grow up thinking they need to read several scientific, peer reviewed, reproducible papers to believe new ideas.

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I knew a guy that suddenly in his thirties started believing the earth was flat. His friends ignored it and tried to play it off. I tried talking to him to no avail.

One night I couldn't sleep and thought about how an average guy like him could do a 180 like that. I googled just to see what arguments the 'movement' tried to lean on. The following weeks I was bombarded with suggestions of more flat earth content, even after downvoting it YouTube kept recommending it for weeks if not months.

Who knows how many minds have been eroded already.

I worked with a guy in a position of considerable responsibility who seriously believes that reptilian aliens under the Denver airport are controlling the US government.

He's been brainwashed. Everyone knows the United States government doesn't exist. /s

Well, the "B.P. Richfield" character in Henson's 90s muppet show "Dinosaurs" satirized Trump, who had by then become notorious in the NYC metro area.

There is good open source alternative to youtube is newpipe. Since there is no ad in it you can't creator but by contributing with helps the creator.

What result do you think google should return for "animal telepathy"? I think there just isn't any reason for "animaltelepathyisimpossible.com" to exist, and so there is nothing for google to find.

For queries that fall in the realm of "conspiracy" like alternative medicine, flat earth, telepathy, anti-vax, etc. I think results from certain "high quality" sources like Wikipedia should be weighed higher even if the content doesn't seem as relevant. For that specific example, the wikipedia article on telepathy would seem more appropriate than many of the results. There is also plenty of literature from psychology that suggests a link between belief in telepathy and certain mental illnesses, so maybe that can also be surfaced more prominently than services that claim they can talk to your dead dog. However this is not about one specific example, this is about indirectly validating false information by simply making it more accessible. On the internet a lot of conspiracies have more "social proof" (through prominence on social networks and search results) than the boring reality so they spread faster than they should.

The most logical answer

This kind of thing can happen even if the search engine doesn't optimize for engagement. If we search for something that the alternative medicine people talk about much more often than the reputable sources do then naturally many of the top search results will be from the alternative medicine crowd.

I've noticed this kind of thing happening for search terms related to thyroid hormone testing. For example, if you search for "thyroxine"[1] the top search results are from reputable sources such as the Endorcine Society or WebMD. However, if you search for "reverse T3"[2] -- an esoteric test favored by the alternative medicine crowd -- then most of the top results are from naturopaths, herbal supplement peddlers, etc.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=thyroxine [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reverse+T3

Is non-verbal communication with an animal too crazy of an idea for you? Because animals don't speak or obey (looking at you cat) humans too well but can sense things and act on that information.

From there animal telepathy isn't too far of a stretch for someone to make.

I haven't seen scientific proof and I don't think anyone has. But I would still expect others would make sites and claims.

But you feel there is a harm in there. Because it is reenforcing what a mental ill person believes.

I'm not sure what the best compromise is. The core problem is the fact that there are communities who want to talk about animal telepathy doesn't work with your worldview. Asking sv to exclude them makes the web a smaller more corporate place. I'm not sure that's the best approach.

In your situation you need a censored google. A google to match your worldview. In fairness google has been trying to show you you-centric search results if you are logged in. In your case this is a one-time transaction so history wouldn't place a factor.

But I come back to why is this a sv problem? The root of the problem is your family member isn't taking his medicine or it is not working or he is right and you won't listen.

If I had a family member like that I would just go along with it. Things don't need to be 100% correct in life. People need to believe in something. No harm here.

The problem here is that false information spreads quickly and is validated though sites like Google and Facebook through higher exposure. This has real consequences like the rise of anti-vaxers and other anti-science movements.

Didn't anti-vaxers exist before facebook?

There are areas now facebook and google doesn't service like hacking/cracking sites but those sites still exist.

When you try to hide information and the person discovers the truth it becomes so much more powerful because you are telling them this is forbidden knowledge that only a few have heard exists, you were right.

Before facebook, anti-vaccine sentiment mostly spread through newspapers and TV. There were big scares, but they were only ignited after at least some "experts" found the anti-vaccine argument credibe, and public sentiment could be restored by the same experts declaring it safe. So the threshold for irrational/gossip-driven antivax sentiment was far higher, and mitigation was far easier.

See, for instance, the UK pertussis vaccine scare and whooping cough epidemic in the 1970s... [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy#UK,_pertussi...

By the way, don't overestimate the influence of suggestion. Someone who believes in telepathy may simply have experienced it[1] and therefore, as they say, you won't talk them out of what they weren't talked in to.

[1]I'm not implying it's real, just that people experience it exactly as they do real things, like hearing voices.

Sometimes I wonder if there's a parallel between how neurons interact during psychosis and how human minds interact over the internet under conditions of manipulation for engagement. Maybe in both cases, there's some damping/attentional mechanism that is missing/not functioning.

I think we're just regressing to the mean. Throughout most or all of human history we believed all kinds of crazy ideas, and it wasn't until very recently that we started really valuing teaching the scientific method and good education mostly based on facts. This required filtering lots of information and putting a lot of trust in many institutions. This worked extremely well right up until the internet became mainstream. Now unfiltered information is available everywhere again, and a significant portion of the population have a hard time distinguishing what is real or not. I grew up religious so I very well understand how for many (maybe most) the burden of proof is simply that it is written down somewhere. Of course the institutions aren't blameless here, and I don't know how to solve this without all the major SV companies agreeing to lose a lot of money.

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