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Comment by nhchris | Hacker News Reader

> What about non-sensitivity revisions, wouldn’t those also be Orwellian erasures of history?

In as much as they change more than minor spelling or punctuation mistakes, absolutely yes. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union...

> Is someone taking all the old copies from the used book store and destroying them?

"We haven't yet falsified everything, and there are still non-falsified copies remaining, so why worry?" - original versions in some dusty corner of an old book store are no good if the great majority of people is only exposed to fakes, and one in ten people who read those fakes eventually, possibly years later, learns their version was altered in unspecified ways.

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This is an example of the slippery slope fallacy. In this case, the outcome is being wildly exaggerated for the purpose of inducing fear. The citation is a work of fiction.

I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.

The slippery slope fallacy turns out to be accurate far more often than the people who resort to invoking the slippery slope fallacy would care to admit.

> I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.

Of course not. This is just one nudge, one of many, not towards downfall, but towards change, in whatever average direction those in positions that create or edit culture push. It's just your history, slightly altered, one little lie at a time. So slowly you won't even notice. They used to make new works for this purpose, but now they've moved on to editing old ones. The slippery slope is a fallacy only until a trend line emerges from the data.

[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” - https://www.themarysue.com/steven-moffat-on-doctor-who-diver...

Change happens, whether we like it or not. It’s the one certainty in life. Live in the present, brother. Attachment is the root of suffering.

When that change is predicated upon lying about our past, I suspect it is not to our benefit.

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