Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how you'd explain to someone from the 19th Century why the public is perhaps even more gullible for snake oil and miracle cures now as it was then, despite having vastly greater literacy rates and access to information. I have a hard time putting my finger on a particular reason this should be the case, other than human nature being what it is, and it's one of the things that makes me feel like we got switched to the wrong timeline.

View on HN

I believe that people themselves aren't as gullible, but rather that we now know how to manipulate people much better. Huge companies like FAANGs only exist because of human manipulation, there's entire fields dedicated to manipulating us, the obvious being marketing, but data science is also used for this.

I love this answer. It implies that manipulation and reason/common sense are in a kind of arms race. If humans are actually getting better at spotting B.S., just not as quickly as orgs are finding new ways to manipulate them, then maybe what's programmed can be de-programmed.

I wonder what would have to be done to turn it around. The B.S. detectors seem to be less effective during panic and stress, so marketing must be booming right now thanks to the pandemic.

Remember also that roughly half of any given population is approximately below average, on any axis you care to measure.

Combine that with majority in many democratic systems being 51%.

And we’re in for a hell of a mediocre time.

Majority in most democratic systems (almost anywhere outside the US) is well below that. Closer to 35% in many democracies.

Yeah good point.

I could see fewer being better. If everyone in the US was forced to vote on election day, I think Elvis would be president for life. (Or death. Or just forever.)

We have better access to disinformation now, too, though. There have also been great strides in the fields of convincing someone to buy something they neither want nor need.

Even if there's only a sucker born every minute, the web makes it easier to find them than hoping they come to within earshot of you or read your pamphlet.

This is kind of what I mean. Let's say we could quantify "suckers" - some gullibility curve that goes from 0 to 1 over percentiles of the general population. Say that ads and propaganda techniques keep pushing that curve left, and education and broader advancement push it right. Has it moved? Or are you saying it just looks like it's moved because we have more Florida Man articles, i.e. more visibility into the far end of the gullibility spectrum?

Some theories have been posted and I agree with those, and think there's also a subset of people who assume if a product is being sold in a store or by some company that it is automatically safe and works because they assume the government or Walmart, or whomever wouldn't let them sell it otherwise.

Oddly though, at least anecdotally these are often the same people who harbor conspiracy theories about both governments and large corporations. A lot of these "holistic" products seem to capitalize on appeals to being an alternative to approved or widely accepted treatments. You could even say that the people who rely on crystals for medical purposes believe that everyone else is gullible and they're not. That's the sales pitch, even though the thing is sold at Walmart. So... hm. Hard to deprogram that, I guess.

Reminds me of when I was a kid.

My dad's mom, who I rarely visited other than for brief trips (his folks were avid dancers and would always show up at OUR house on Saturday evenings), watched my sisters and I so that my parents could go to a class reunion. Usually this would fall onto my mom's folks, but they were on some sort of vacation trip.

Anyway, my grandmother apparently really enjoyed reading tabloids. I had spent significant amounts of time at my other grandmothers' house reading Ripley's Believe It or Not books from cover to cover, and so I just started doing the same at my other grandmothers' house while eating Violets, a perfumed candy that was apparently popular amongst women at some point in time. Anyway, I thought that everything I was reading was true, including giant ants that were eating corrugated aluminum.

I spoke up to my grandfather, asking him whether he had protected his shed against these monstrous incursions, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. It wasn't until my mom saw what I was reading when she returned that she understood what was happening.

Heheh. When I was a kid in the 80s standing in the checkout aisle I convinced my Mom to buy me a little booklet about "Ancient Aliens". (She usually would let me get a crossword booklet or something, so she didn't really notice what it was). I believed this stuff. Blew my mind. Only aliens could have built those pyramids. Some years later, I found myself listening to a guy named Alex Jones. Believed that the government was going to put us all in concentration camps. Went out and looked at some of the expected FEMA concentration camp sites, took pictures of the barbed wire, stuff like that. Um. I'm not proud of this, I'm just saying I bought into a lot of hooey in my life before I realized that the people selling it were completely full of shit. In fact, every time I did, I felt smarter than everyone else, because I thought I knew something they didn't know.

What woke me up to the scam? It wasn't some Dostoevsky mock-execution come-to-Jesus moment. It was a gradual realization that none of these claims made as much sense as other explanations. And a slow but building sense of anger at the assholes who had made all this bullshit up to line their own pockets.

despite having vastly greater literacy rates and access to information

The information available now is also vastly more watered-down, subjected to marketing-infused misinformation, and almost designed to keep people from gaining more information.

From that perspective, literacy is really just making it easier to convince people of lies.

Dark. I don't know. I find it hard to believe that literacy doesn't engender at least a little bit more skepticism / rationality than illiteracy.

People were incredibly gullible in the 19th century, so I’m not sure your premise is true. I think 99% of people are equally gullible and 1% of people are notably less gullible and so there is a small improvement between the 19th century and today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com