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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, every article on Reuters included the phrase "claimed without evidence" in regards to election fraud. For me, trusting Reuters, that is sufficient information.

From a believer's perspective, articles mentioned affidavits, eye-witness testimony, court cases being filed, and important, trusted people saying something along the lines of "there is evidence the courts are not even considering!" Presumably if that same believer dug deep enough into individual court cases and affidavits and statements by the judges dismissing cases, they may have changed their mind.

But I don't dig that deep, and obviously neither do the believers. We are wired to our inclination of confirmation bias. When we are already programmed and motivated to find evidence of what we already believe, we do not tend to exhaust every option possible to validate it. We stop when we cross the smallest of hurdles of validation.

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The utility of (and general lack of consequences for using) these dishonest rhetorical strategies is unlikely to go away as they are a culmination of the general obstructionist political environment of the DNC/RNC duopoly since (at least) the early 90’s.

We are in a tough place.

I really don't trust Reuters, CNN, the NY Times, or whoever. I think people exaggerate and misidentify the source of their beliefs, but being honest about why you take a side is a better way to convince.

What I trust is that if Trump had serious allegations with evidence, that Republican election officials in Georgia would treat them seriously rather than debunking them in the midst of death threats. Or that some Republican judge, especially one of those nominated by Trump would have allowed a lawsuit to get traction.

Reading the transcript of the call to the SoS, and reading a couple of the legal opinions on one of the lawsuits, is worth more than a million news articles to me. Trump said there were thousands of dead people who voted; the SoS said there were two, in the face of people calling for his execution as a RINO. That's compelling.

I don't really spend any time on CNN, and NY Times requires me to jump through hoops sometimes to read articles, as I do not have a subscription. I'll take Reuters and AP News at face value unless there's something spectacular that needs investigating (which would not be the norm.) So unless there's a claim such as that all across the nation, poll workers, election officials, appointed judges, etc. are all coordinating a well-concealed attack on the integrity of an election... well conspiracy theories need considerable evidence. That is, I mean, they need evidence that is clear, falsifiable, verifiable. Then I have to dig deeper.

I also trust peers with a similar threshold. If none of my intelligent friends and family members with a history of digging deeply into fantastic claims believe the current fantastic claim, I don't tend to feel the need to do such digging myself. If one of them was suddenly making a grandiose claim, I would sit up and notice and have to investigate further.

I don't see any news source as having blanket credibility. In a wider context, I feel like the cycle of building and then strip mining a brand has been accelerated. As soon as there is credibility and trust, it's exploited. But also, I don't see all the different people who write for an organization as having much if anything in common. My favorite general news source at the moment is Bloomberg, but I remember one or more people who used to bring up a particular article as evidence Bloomberg was not to be trusted.

I choose things to read based on my perception of their average reliability, but I don't assume that something is true because it comes from a good source. If I did, how could I know the source was good in the first place? The causality goes from good articles -> good source, not the other way around.

I just don't think you can give anyone any benefit of the doubt. If you're not forming your opinions bottom-up, you risk getting drawn into a divergent reality like so many people these days.

I'm also reminded of how some people on HN like to mention the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect". You can't expect that smart people automatically know about any random thing, if it doesn't impact their life whether they are right or wrong.

they may have changed their mind

I disagree. There's no way they would have changed their minds. It's just an excuse. A thin veneer of plausible deniability while they willingly keep their heads in the sand. The simple explanation is no one is that stupid, that fascist, but, maybe they are. Maybe this is the effect of a decades long campaign by conservative politicians & pundits to constantly gaslight America & try to keep the electorate uneducated.

Either way, people clinging to these obvious falsehoods are seditious at worst or useful idiots at best.

I don’t think most of them are fascist or extremely dumb.

People generally don’t like to change their minds on deeply held beliefs, and all the falsehoods Trump and Qanon are spreading have become deeply held beliefs for many of those people.

They end up supporting fascists but they won’t realise it until too late.

Many have felt the dagger stab in the back throughout his entire life.

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