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Comment by Cheezewheel | Hacker News Reader

>So not an entire miss, but not great either.

This is really just a semantic nitpick but it literally fabricated sexual assault allegations against two individuals out of thin air. I would consider that to be a miss. As far as sources that we might consider worthy of consideration, that is pretty god damn awful.

If a newspaper had an 80% accuracy rating when reporting serious allegations (with the other 20% being outright fabrications) I wouldn't call that newspaper "semi-reliable". I would call it utterly devoid of factual merit and entirely unreliable.

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> If a newspaper had an 80% accuracy rating when reporting serious allegations (with the other 20% being outright fabrications) I wouldn't call that newspaper "semi-reliable". I would call it utterly devoid of factual merit and entirely unreliable.

I'm having a hard time grokking this. Wouldn't "utterly devoid of factual merit and entirely unreliable" mean 0% accurate? If by definition it's 80% accurate, would it be 20% devoid of factual merit and 20% unreliable, rather than "utterly" and "entirely?"

Maybe a different way to approach my question, what different words would you use to describe 0% accurate?

The problem is you wouldn't know which 20% of it is fabrications! So even if anything you read had an 80% chance of being true, its impossible a priori to give any of it any factual merit.

Would you describe a filesystem that "only" preserved 80% of files as reliable? Reliability is relative, one of the defining features of a newspaper is correctness, so only a small amount of inaccuracy is required to make a newspaper be extremely unreliable.

I would describe a 0% accurate newspaper by reading it and using appropriate descriptors. Perhaps it is satirical news, a poem, propaganda, gibberish, or simply a newspaper that is never correct.

> Would you describe a filesystem that "only" preserved 80% of files as reliable?

Fair point

I'd rather read a 0% accurate newspaper than an 80% accurate newspaper.

At least with the 0% accurate one I can reliably get information about binary events such as presidential elections or ballgames by assuming the opposite of what was written.

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