Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

What's "naïve" is you or anyone else thinking they have the power to "nudge people into better patterns", which is exactly what the kind of behavior you're promoting attempts to accomplish.

You can't, and you never will. Culture evolves slowly, and humans even slower.

View on HN

> What's "naïve" is you or anyone else thinking they have the power to "nudge people into better patterns" > You can't, and you never will. Culture evolves slowly, and humans even slower.

There is ample evidence since at least World War I, that both 'positive' PSA type information and 'negative' propaganda/counter information/psy ops absolutely have an effect.

Reminder that the Wakefield fraud in 1998, on M.M.R. vaccines and autism, started a negative sentiment towards vaccination and is directly attributed to the measles outbreaks (and deaths) across the developed world (Amplified by Oprah's platform). [1]

Reminder that still today many people will claim carrots give you better vision (they are indeed healthy). This was a counter-info operation from the British, claiming they were providing Air Control with carrots, in order to hide the existing of newly invented RADAR technology against German Bombers. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...

I know about psyops, but what is "PSA type information"? (What is "PSA" for?)

(Agreed btw that most humans are easy to manipulate. How interesting about the carrots, I like to eat, for the eyes partly)

I made the mistake to assume the acronym PSA was known.

Public Service Announcement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service_announcement

Ok thanks :-) (I guess it is in the US)

The argument isn't that false information doesn't have an effect. It's that your attempts to manipulate people through censorship has the opposite effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

So we just be happy with the every growing cult that the children who were murdered were crisis actors? Nah, think we can do better than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com