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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Is fighting fiction with fact really propaganda?

I think this ties into the negative connotation I mentioned: propaganda does not have to be false, it just has to be biased.

One thing I noticed in the article was that all of the rumors being discussed were negative rumors. The goal was to take rumors that might bring down morale and "set them right". I wonder if positive rumors were treated the same way.

Technically true, but popular connotation matters, and in this case I’d argue it matters more than the dictionary definition.

It’s a bit like “racism” : I honestly have no idea if the current academic definition is “prejudice + power” or just “prejudice” - but to a significant extent it doesn’t really matter since the common understanding is the one that matters when communicating.

In reality, it’s often cherry-picked facts fighting each other.

I'm sure that's how literally everyone wants you to view their propaganda.

Facts can be paired with other facts in a way deliberately designed to mislead.

That's true but I think it's disingenuous to say that countering enemy propaganda must also be propaganda. It doesn't have to be.

Nobody is forcing you to call it anything—you could just as easily call it "marketing" or "news". Anyway, "fact" is a convenient fantasy in most cases when you actually mean "strong belief grounded in sources you trust".

Words are all the same or meaningless and there is no truth or facts? Thanks for imparting some wisdom comrade.

I think that "strong belief grounded in degrees of trust" is a much more powerful concept than "fact" in practice, not to mention one that's much more difficult to attack from a theory of knowledge perspective especially in a post-Wittgenstein world, but I understand why this is such a controversial concept when there's such a focus on folks actively undermining this.

Yes. Facts are often used as propaganda and in fact can serve as the most potent form of propaganda because they often lack context and humanity. The rise of science and statistics in the 20th century was accompanied by the most racist and evil regimes for a reason.

Most of the genocides, eugenics, racism, etc of the US, Britain and Germany in the 20th century was pushed by progressives wielding facts and science as blunt instruments.

...mixed with a large part of fiction, because genocidal movements are corrupt well beyond the "power of science."

> because genocidal movements are corrupt well beyond the "power of science."

Science was central to the genocidal movements in the US and Germany. In many ways, science was the cause of the genocidal movements. Eugenics was a scientific movement championed by scientists. What changed wasn't science. It was culture and politics that changed. The horrors of the 20th century led philosphers, politicians and ordinary citizens to lose their blind faith and trust in science and progress.

The rise of science and social darwinism of the early 1900s is similar to rise of AI and technocracy. Hopefully we won't as foolish to place blind trust on it and history doesn't repeat itself.

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