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Comment by smhost | Hacker News Reader

this also isn't the type of thing that governments tend to lie about. it's not like a scenario where a contractor overpromises and underdelivers and government media has to do damage control. they're also not announcing some new leap in scientific understanding. it's old science.

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> this also isn't the type of thing that governments tend to lie about

This is the sort of thing governments lie about, IME - big, sensational achievements that enhance their status.

maybe in movies. governments mostly tend to lie about things they did badly, not about long-term accomplishments that can be fairly easily measured against their previous record, currently level of expertise, etc.

> maybe in movies

No, I said "IME". Don't try to dismiss other people.

I think some citations and evidence are generally preferable to broad sweeping statements prefixed with "in my experience" - I'm not saying you're wrong but you've given me no reason to believe.

I agree, though it seems hard to find evidence that would support this as a general trend (not just a few examples). It would require finding existing research, I think.

However, the dismissive response also has no evidence.

For the time being, I am going to dismiss you until you provide some actual evidence to support your claim.

Lies about industrial progress? About industrial capacity? That is exactly the sort of thing that China has lied about in the past. There is a great video of Putin laughing as a minister talks about all the pork they export to indonesia. These sorts of lies are normal for such nations. Nobody takes them too seriously, especially those telling them.

if by "sort of thing" you mean anything related to industry, then maybe you're right. but this is a claim about a particular technology, not a claim about aggregate capacity. if you're using russia as a point of comparison, this is maybe the one area where it might not be to your advantage, since one of the few things russia excels at is producing and selling nuclear technology. people might not take russia's claims about pig exports too seriously, but people do take seriously their nuclear claims (such as announcements about nuclear icebreakers, or whatever).

> “These sorts of lies are normal for such nations”

“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”

-Mike Pompeo, former CIA director and U.S Secretary of State [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/6RmEsPE7iq0?t=9

> teleSur is funded in whole or in part by several governments of Latin America.

Didn’t know that was a thing.

It's the sort of claim thats fairly meaningless to the average person, but becomes meaningful and embarrassing if its exposed as vaporware (and the sort of person that's more impressed by this than any other announcement about power stations is the sort of person that's really interested in the detail of how it'll work).

During the Cold War the US and USSR made all sorts of tendentious claims about the superiority of their socioeconomic systems, their military prowess and mendacious things the other side was supposed to be doing and denied all sorts of things they actually did, but they didn't try to lie their way to the front of the Space Race.

> It's the sort of claim thats fairly meaningless to the average person,

We're talking about it, aren't we? I've also seen this news on Reddit. Propaganda doesn't have to be a one size fits all. Targeting armchair experts and tech enthusiasts can still be useful. The point is that people are talking about how awesome your country is. Real or fake, I'd call this news story a success for China.

I'm not saying this technology is vaporware or not, I don't know. I'm just saying that the argument I'm responding to isn't great. I'd also like to mention that propaganda doesn't even imply that something is fake. Sputnik was real and also a great propaganda machine because it got people talking about it but so were other niche things like Russian Chess players and Russian mathematicians. We have international math competitions, you think those aren't used by propagandists? The average person cares nothing about a math competition.

> but becomes meaningful and embarrassing if its exposed as vaporware

I’d argue that almost no claim like this is even remembered, let alone becomes ‘embarrassing’.

On the other hand when people see them it definitely creates the propaganda or marketing value of China being ‘ahead’ in some way.

I'm next door to them. They are really good at spinning stories to their people. However embarrassing.

Recent flood, one of the state media headlined an outright lie that US govt states that China earned respect from around the globe through its flood rescue effort. Lied about the amount of rainfall and the capabilities of their dams. Some TV news station just never show flood footage. Any challenge to the effort is branded as foreign influence.

For story like this if turned out to be vapor, the blame would be easily placed in thousands of places but themselves.

It would be incredibly stupid, at many levels, to lie about something that is so public and scientifically scrutable. There's almost no benefit, at a national level, to lying about this, and when the world eventually learns of the lie, which it would quite quickly, China would be the laughing stock of the scientific world, which is the opposite of what the CCP wants.

So no, this is not a lie, because it would be both obviously stupid, and obviously not in the best interest of China to do that; not even an amazingly shitty and disorganized government would be that stupid, and the Chinese government is quite coherent, and very good at acting I it's own interests.

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