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Comment by Nowado | Hacker News Reader

Anyone interested should just Google 'Elizabeth Loftus'. She convinced people of a bunch of things that never happened, some of them very quickly. Standard example is getting people to tell stories about meeting Bugs Bunny in Disneyland, but there was also some crime stuff, I think past trauma as well.

Law enforcement has their quotas and they'll use any garbage they can to fill it, but it's kind of hilarious that people just trust their memories for important stuff they can control.

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Argh! The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

Commentary: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-...

Rebuttal: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/04/25/the-new-yorkers-hi...

It does however mean that if you're trying to manipulate someone to reveal or recall something, you need to be careful that you're not just making them fabricate it.

Agreed; there should be no manipulation, but evidently that's too high a bar for most people most of the time.

Wow, that New Yorker article really is something. She hires private investigators to obtain sealed court records about an allegation of child abuse and de-anonymized the child. Then when the university reprimands her for this and tells her to turn over the documents, she calls that an "Orwellian nightmare". Orwellian? Who's the one doing the spying, procuring documents they have no right to possess? Loftus herself was the Orwellian nightmare but she saw herself as the victim in this. Even if Loftus's hypothesis about the case is correct, she clearly caused a great deal of emotional anguish for this person but was more concerned with the university telling her to leave it alone. The whole of this article paints her as a narcissist if not a psychopath.

The whyevolutionistrue rebuttal is insubstantial, it doesn't address this at all.

> The fact that false memories can be induced does not mean that all memories are false.

How is this even slightly relevant?

If some memories are false, and other memories are true, and none of us can tell which is which, then according to our principles of justice we must act as if all memories are potentially false.

"Memory as evidence" crumbles at that point.

Loftus has also been involved with the cases of [Robert Durst, Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, Jerry Sandusky,] Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Oliver North, Martha Stewart, Lewis Libby, Michael Jackson, the Menéndez brothers and the Oklahoma City bombers.

Completely normal. Absolutely no reason to question her work.

She did some CIA consulting, too.

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