Comment by yanderekko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yanderekko | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with Poe's Law is that the person invoking it is often just revealing their own biases. It's not impossible to imagine any number of people writing any number of things, it's a failure to calibrate your expectations about the likelihood of parody properly that's the issue.

Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture..

>Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.

If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?

But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire. I hold the prior that most people writing on the internet are not doing it merely to get a rise out of liberals. I have also known men who became violent and angry when a women they had sex with decided to get an abortion. What’s different about this Reddit post? What’s supposed to indicate to me that it’s obviously in jest? Genuinely asking.

ok but I wrote some of it and it was explicitly intended to be satire for the purpose of ridiculing people dumb enough to believe it

I understand it was intended as satire. What I don’t understand is why anyone would be surprised that you fooled people. People are notoriously easy to fool! Smart people, dumb people, brilliant scientists. Happens all the time. I would go so far as to say that being fooled, and being a gigantic dumbass, is the state of nature of human beings.

It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.

Subs like transpets illustrate more how ridiculous it is people are fooled. Thousands of upspergs on posts about dilating dogs or castrating cats. People are absurdly gullible and it’s really just terrible.

> People are absurdly gullible and it’s really just terrible.

Have you considered how far we would have gotten as a species if we had a pervasive assumption of bad faith in our interactions with other people? Complex societies depend on assuming good faith. People who assume others are always acting in bad faith are often traumatized or suffering from other forms of mental illness. I don’t find it “ridiculous” that people believe stupid things. I believe stupid things, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s certainly bad, but I’m not quite sure how your contributions improve the situation. Mostly they seem calibrated to reduce social trust and push people towards assuming bad faith. What if you wrote about how to identify satire instead?

There _is_ a pervasive assumption of bad faith. People almost always consider the possibility of bad faith when they don't know the other party, at all levels of society since the beginning of recorded history. A bad actor can have a massive (sometimes irreversible) negative impact; it's an important behavior that we should encourage.

People default to assuming bad faith if they're from a different tribe. Just look at the social media loops.

> Complex societies depend on assuming good faith.

Maybe stuff like this exposes the fact that the media are not as reliable as we think. If they are propagating this fake news, what other fake news are they propagating?

Yeah, it’s problematic that there are so many gullible people and also pretty problematic that there are so many useless people looking to exploit that.

>But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire.

It doesn't cut equally both ways because there's an obvious ground truth that exonerates those who believe it's satire. I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure. But the deflection of "can't blame me, Poe's Law" doesn't hold when plenty of people are able to see through the ruse.

All I’m saying is I think it’s forgivable to take something like this seriously, especially without full context. Doubling down after learning it’s a ruse, not so much. My observations on this issue are hindsight, this article is the first I learned of it.

> I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure

You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?

> You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?

Not the op, but it clearly was detached from reality. 1) It was false, therefore not reality. 2) The people who believed it were journalists, who should know to check first and also should know not to believe everything you read.

The story is supposed to indicate that you should adjust that prior. If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick? (When I first learned this lesson, I spot checked a few old controversies I was mad about, and a few of them had indeed been proven false without my knowledge.)

> The story is supposed to indicate that you should adjust that prior.

Sure, I get that.

> If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick?

I appreciate what you’re trying to say, and indeed I am well aware of how many times I have been wrong. It has happened several times a day, at varying scales, for my whole life so far. It takes a lot to make me mad. People acting in bad faith and creating a hostile information environment just to prove that other people are gullible is one of the things that does it.

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