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Comment by xianshou | Hacker News Reader

"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'"

(spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell.

The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.

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Well, Perplexity sure believes George Orwell wrote it.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/who-wrote-The-UA.znXC3SXGjv...

(AI search engines are just going to get crappier and crappier as more junk is put in the web.)

Hilariously sourcing this article

The problem with quotes on the internet is that you never know if they are just made up.

- Abraham Lincoln

And the classic which has many memes

“Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it” — Abraham Lincoln

I know Orwell's work pretty well, and I read that sentence, and thought to myself: "Cant remember where he said anything like that, but what the hell, I haven't read everything Orwell ever wrote". So I just rolled with it.

The cognitive load to fact check everything is too great, so we decide which sources we think are reliable and just accept them. The solution is not to disbelieve everything you are told, but to accept that some of the facts you have not checked might be wrong, and be prepared to re-evaluate when contrary evidence appears.

About 10 years ago I accepted that I didn't know what was going on, and I also realized that even if I did, 98% of it doesn't affect me in the slightest way.

I used to watch the news every day and try to stay informed about politics and candidates and to some extent sports and celebrities and other current events. Now I don't. None of it affects me or my day-to-day life. I'm a lot less stressed about stuff and I have more time for stuff that matters to me.

I too want to be informed but have been very disappointed with the sensationalism of news sites.

One solution I found is this service that texts one sentence, fact based summaries of 8-10 current events every morning [1].

An alternative free solution is the Wikipedia current events portal [2].

[1] https://thenewpaper.co/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

> None of it affects me or my day-to-day life.

I think it affects you, and everybody.

Just after Russia started to attack Ukraine more intensely again in 2022, there was a chance that Hungary goes into a full blown dictatorship (without voting and such) on the side of Russia. Now, that would have affected me greatly since I’m travelling a ton, and I’m Hungarian, and I was there that time.

Also related to this, I need to pay attention to Hungary some level to tell my parents when to leave. Unfortunately, I started to fail with this, but it’ll be more important again, because the status quo which allowed to pretend democracy is under attack, and we could already see what happens then.

After COVID, it’s even more interesting your statement, because you were affected, and to be effective you had to know what are the “news”. In other words, how people fucked up things. Also, I should have been quite offended why my doctor didn’t want to see me, when I arrived sick from New York two days before the first lockdown there.

Also from the “news” it seems that the general trust between each others plummeted (shrinking number of real life connections, and increasing internet toxicity). That indicates the possibility that democracies are not the optimal strategy on individual level anymore. We need to prepare for that.

Because of the “news” I, my brother and his whole family, and about at least a quarter of my high school class left Hungary (whom I know about). None of these would have happened with the news of the 90s or early 2000s. So it definitely affects larger parts of population.

Since I’ve also started to not read daily news that much, I’m also quite sure that the lack of news is definitely good for my mental health. And I’m definitely more chill. But there is a possibility that I won’t predict something because of this, and I’ll loose money, time, health, or even friendships (I suck with remote connections with my friends).

Now I'm suspicious of your Emerson quote.

Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.

what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much.

If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation.

Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.

As soon as I read that quote I immediately searched to verify and stopped reading the rest of the blog post.

I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote:

"Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah

I love this comment. It succinctly pulls it all together!

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