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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

There are about 30% of the population that are totally ignorant not just about facts but about how to even ascertain what the truth is. I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless. There are a lot of people who can be helped by that kind of thing.

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It's a little ironic you made up a statistic about how people are ignorant about facts...

It's a lovely round number and suitably situated in a comfortable minority position; it's thus inoffensive, aesthetically pleasing, relatively benign and allows one to feel reasonably smug when repeating it. Seems to be factual to me!

;)

I think it's pretty clear from context that that is an opinion/estimate and not a fact.

We absolutely should not throw up our hands. To some extent, I appreciate that Google and Facebook are at least aware of the issue and want to act on it. My skepticism is that as a result of these efforts, Google and Facebook will be considered to be biased, inaccurate, and no longer trustworthy. There is already a lot of animosity towards Silicon Valley companies as it is.

I certainly hope that if there is 70% of the population this can still help, that it accomplishes that goal without making the other 30% even worse.

Google of all companies has no moral authority to be "filtering" anything based on "facts", given that they were shown to manipulate search auto-completes with political bias.

If you're referring to the Soros thing you've both:

* Drunk the Kool-Aid

* Ignored doing the most rudimentary test of replacing his name with any other and matching results.

Not true. http://www.snopes.com/google-manipulate-hillary-clinton/

Maybe Hacker News needs fact checking integration also.

[Refutation of bias] [link to biased refutation]

Snopes is definitely ideologically biased. http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/16/snopes-facebooks-new-fact-...

Looks like we're stuck in a loop here.

If I prove to you how 2 + 2 is 4, is my political leaning relevant?

Look at proof, not at people.

prove the above mathematically then.

> I'm not sure we should throw up our hands and give up because a sizable percentage of people are hopeless.

I hope you're not excluding HN with 'we' and 'our'. I see a lot of tech people, actually most people in general (including myself), just as clueless and ignorant about the facts. The supporters of Linux and open source claiming "superiority" vs competing tech comes to mind.

In general, Linux is faster and more secure than most closed source alternatives, including Windows and macOS. In terms of moral "superiority," some users appreciate that Linux does not collect information about its users, does not install updates without permission, and is open source. There are downsides to Linux however, such as shorter battery life and a potentially harder user interface.

Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?

>In general, Linux is faster and more secure than most closed source alternatives, including Windows and macOS.

Not that I feel the need to prove anything about myself, but I have been using Linux since 1995, so I have had a fairly long-term experience with using Linux, and I personally have never found it to be faster. To that end, I will concede that the word faster is not a measurable metric. We'd have to define a workload - one that isn't biased towards an OS design, provide an argument that it is a reasonable workload to compare OSs with wildly different design goals, etc, etc.

>Your claim that supporters of Linux who claim superiority over competing tech are clueless and ignorant about the facts is not supported by evidence. Do you have any?

Yes. I've been reading Slashdot since it started. There isn't a single story about Windows or Microsoft on Slashdot that doesn't contain false information.

Better education + a chance for everyone to travel the world and get to know "the other side" would solve a lot of your problems.

It would take a couple of generations though.

There are weird enough breakthroughs reported pretty regularly that I'm not sure anybody can reliably know what's real outside their area of expertise. It would be nice if better education were the answer, but to be honest, I'm not sure it is.

When my brother was in medical school, one of his textbooks had a sidebar that claimed many doctors would believe in quack medicine. In that case, though, it appeared that they thought they were too smart to be fooled.

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