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Comment by themitigating | Hacker News Reader

Why would anyone believe a story posted by one person that had no evidence?

Ultimately, it's normal to believe what people tell you when there's no obvious reason for doubt. If my coworker says they're late because they got stuck behind an accident, I'm not gonna demand photos and a police report. So to people who haven't acquired a high degree Internet literacy, saying "don't believe what you read" sounds like some kind of trick.

I remember a passionate argument I had about some unsourced story of poor Stripe customer support. The other guy was genuinely baffled why I would question the poor merchant who was being so cruelly mistreated.

The interesting thing about this story is that the details are so unlikely that there are "obvious reasons for doubt"; from a 17% mostly negative reply rate to a 87% mostly positive reply reply rate on name only is a huge difference and very unsubtle.

I think it should be obvious that this person never actually ran the experiment, and merely reported what they expected the difference to be.

"It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it could have been true" is a particular kind of reasoning I've seen a few times over the years, from different ideological perspectives.

"I'm late"

"I own a real dinosaur"

People will do anything to confirm their narrative.

Because it agreed with their priors.

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