A story of three identical strangers | Hacker News Reader

A story of three identical strangers

historicflix.com

16 points555562411 comments

I believe this story, and particularly the documentary, "Three Identical Strangers", is fake. I watched it years ago and became increasingly suspicious.

The three triplets are often interviewed on 80's style talk shows, but the verisimilitude is simulated; there were no such shows. At one point they open a restaurant as business partners. This "iconic" restaurant seemed to never exist, except for one "closed" marker in google search with no other reviews, and one picture, which was a small screen shot -- from the "documentary".

I investigated a little further and found that one of the producers was a professor of media bias at a university. This article, which was probably written by AI, is regurgitation. I would be happy to be proven wrong and I challenge anyone to come forward with any evidence for the truth of this subject that comes from outside of the documentary itself.

Here's a 1988 Washington Post article about the restaurant: https://archive.is/t0CCH

And a UPI story from 1980: https://www.upi.com/Archives/1980/09/26/Eddy-Galland-Robert-...

This memorial page for Eddy has some very-low-res scans of contemporaneous articles and includes numerous citations in the body text: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/79439251/edward_scott-ga...

The Guardian article the AI article seems to pull from is better, but aside from the links to Desperately Seeking Susan, I agree proof is limited. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/nature-or-nu...

That said, relying on web searches for research on the 80s doesn't work that well.

At least the AI-ness of the article is very clear. It's a horribly repetitive read with very little content.

Why is nature vs nuture always posed as this weird holistic binary. Anyone who has thought about it for more than 3 seconds should understand that not only is it not binary, but also so much of our behavior is shaped independently.

Have you ever been able to change your own behavior? That's nurture. Have you ever had a hard time changing your behavior? That's nurture.

It's like asking is the air carbon dioxide or oxygen? It's both and they do different things.

I’m not so sure both would be nurture. I also don’t believe the premise has anything to do with something as mundane as habits.

You could be a hardcore $political party member, but nothing about that is nature. That’s entirely a result of your environment.

As far as I understand, nature vs nurture is more designed to explain/blame academic performance, ability to manage money, pressure, etc. I remember hearing an old friend explaining it as “a way for the rich to justify why poor people shouldn’t be making financial decisions“.

I guess I explained that poorly, I mean both are both. But the act of changing your behavior is nurture. And the fact that you have a harder time on some things can be nurture or nature.

> “a way for the rich to justify why poor people shouldn’t be making financial decisions“.

And yes, I believe your friend is right.

Stupid AI slop.

Did the article come off as generated to anyone else? The tone and pace felt… off.

How many ads and generated ai text is possible on a website? Yes this one.

Informed consent in research is relatively modern.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com