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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

While it is possible that they hire surrogates to post on HN, the simpler explanation is that they have rabid fans that stick their necks out for a trillion dollar company. The proof is that this behavior has been around Apple even well before their re-rise to dominance.

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It would be very interesting to pull a history of complaints about e.g. Apple’s white power cords and their failure rate from reddit and then examine the self-similarity of the “what are people doing, this has never happened to me” responses.

Of course to do this properly you also have to realize and account for the idea that others are just as incentivized to fund artificial critiques as Apple is to artificially defend themselves.

The even more simpler explanation is that it's both.

I disagree, the fewer assumptions means the simplest. I'd argue it's not worth the risk for Apple to hire people to shill for them, when there are so many who do it not just for free, but do it genuinely. Imagine if Apple hires shills, then they spill their guts to the NYTimes, that overall makes Apple look far worse.

We're both making the same number of assumptions. The difference is that yours is in the negative and mine is in the positive. Your example about the risk of someone leaking to the press shows we simply live in completely different realities, thus argument is impossible. Which is fine! In my reality people are leaking to the press all the time about such things and simply being ignored by most who don't want to confront how dark corporate and government PR and marketing has become.

> We're both making the same number of assumptions

Assuming BOTH Apple has surrogates AND rabid fans is one more assumption than just there being rabid fans.

Again, you're assuming they don't have surrogates. This is still an assumption. The miscommunication here is that you think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, and I think you're naive. But so what? Sure, maybe I'm seeing phantoms where they don't exist. We've clearly had different life experiences though. To me the basic calculus of a multi-trillion dollar company perhaps throwing out a few million bucks a year to pay "surrogates" to influence opinion on popular online forums is not the claim that carries the burden of proof. I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't doing this. But again, there's no way we can even argue if you think the burden of proof goes in the opposite direction. But at least understand that neither of our claims are "simpler" than the other. My original comment saying "more simpler" was a bit of sarcasm in case that didn't come through.

> you're assuming they don't have surrogates

That's the null hypothesis.

Yup. My hypothesis is unambiguously verifiable, and I've verified it to my own satisfaction through my personal experiences. Your hypothesis is not unambiguously verifiable, only statistically so (whatever that means). At least it's falsifiable, but there's a deep challenge there because falsification would unveil aspects of our society that most people don't want to know about.

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