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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you've dredged up are accurate and truthful.

You've always needed to do this. The internet just drives that point home hard. Because when I was growing up 50 years ago, I just assumed that all the good things said about Christopher Columbus (to pick an easy example) must have been true because they wouldn't print it in a book if it weren't, right?

Years later, thanks to that same lie-spewing internet Discovery Magazine warns me about, I find out that Columbus guy was a real prick. That, and an idiot who thought he was the first to cook up this "round Earth" theory (only to be beaten by 2000 years by, eh, the Greeks was it?), and got it massively wrong at that.

The article overall, though, is surprisingly even-handed, lacking in ridiculous hyperbole so rife in such articles, and amazingly spot on.

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Exactly - those 50-book encyclopedia sets your parent owned had a surprising number of factual errors, and still required cross-checking to verify their facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encycl...

  Even today the english wikipedia has articles that are full of lies, like for example the Gamergate article.

> an idiot who thought he was the first to cook up this "round Earth" theory

If this is an actual claim (as opposed to just an example of the erroneous things the internet can tell you), do you have a source? AFAIK Columbus never claimed he came up with the idea of a round Earth; the sphericity of the Earth was common knowledge at the time. Where he went greatly wrong was in underestimating the size of the Earth (and then got lucky by running into the Americas instead of his intended target of east Asia).

Apologies, confusion between childhood books and fact. According to the books, Columbus thought the earth was round in sea of unbelievers who took it as almost religious fact that God made the earth flat. Or summat.

Anyway, as you point out, everyone who gave it much thought knew the Earth to be round. Columbus' error was being bad at math.

Not just childhood books, this is actually what I was taught in elementary school.

The contemporary Behaim globe had a rather narrow ocean, too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel

I find out that Columbus guy was a real prick

Interestingly, if you read contemporary accounts from the time of Columbus and shortly after, you discover that the allegations of his atrocities were actually mostly made up by his former first mate who had him dragged into court on made-up abuse charges in order to get control of his ship. This is the reason the history books of the last century didn't paint him as a horrible person.

But political correctness isn't about finding the whole truth. It's about finding the easiest, most profitable truth.

So, I see you're being downvoted and I fundamentally don't know if you are spouting well know misinformation or simply telling a slightly different truth.

I don't know what the %'s of certainty of either version is, I just know that someone on the internet thinks you're wrong.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that in two comments I've established that it really is hard to read things on the internet and make any judgement without spending 30 minutes doing some research.

I fundamentally don't know if you are spouting well know misinformation or simply telling a slightly different truth.

It doesn't take 30 minutes of research to realize when someone is making shifty claims without giving any sources and using said dubious claims to conclude a non-sequitur about "political correctness".

I don't know what the %'s of certainty of either version is, I just know that someone on the internet thinks you're wrong.

I'm OK with people thinking I'm wrong. I based my statement on an English translation of a book from the 1800's that I personally read. I'm not just repeating a talking point I saw someone spout on the internet or the television, so I'm comfortable with my assertion.

Could I be wrong? Sure. But on certain topics, I trust older sources more than newer sources.

Here, you can check out this guy:

http://origins.osu.edu/milestones/july-2015-bartolom-de-las-...

And read his book:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20321

Since it was written in the 1500s by an eyewitness, I trust you will find it satisfactory. For those who don't feel like clicking through, de las Casas describes a great deal of roasting people alive, chopping off their hands, noses and other body parts, all for the purpose of extracting the most gold from the New World in the least amount of time.

Written by an eyewitness to the Spanish abuse of the natives, true. But an eyewitness of abuses by Columbus, or by those who came after him? (The only mention of Columbus in the article is an address in Ohio.)

Don't blame Columbus for the sins of all of Spain.

How do you know you're not repeating a talking point from the 1800s? Taking history from one source is drawing a line through one point.

Why would age of the source be relevant here? (Beyond the obvious "it's a literal first person account"?)

The closer to the source the reference it would generally have a less chance of suffering from the "game of telephone" which most history suffers from...

It's literally 300 years after the event. Would another hundred years or so make a huge difference?

The writing of his own hand made Columbus out to be a prick. I'm sure his journal, or excerpts of, can easily be found online.

But political correctness isn't about finding the whole truth.

Ah, blow it off as political correctness. But your version is the truth, I take it, and unsullied by the need for popularity? See? Discovery Magazine was right.

Regardless, Columbus still couldn't do the math taken for granted by 12 year olds.

The story I've heard is that Columbus botched unit conversion, in that he translated degrees to miles using a formula that recorded Arabic miles and assumed it used Roman miles instead (neither of which is particularly close to the statute mile used in the US today).

Regardless, Columbus still couldn't do the math taken for granted by 12 year olds.

I read once that the quantity of knowledge of the average person in the mid-1700's was equivalent to the content of one Sunday New York Times.

Was that average person going around asking for the use of three very expensive ships?

do you have a reference for this? not arguing, just curious.

Perhaps the prediction must be seen in the context of people predicting that the internet would give people easy access to all the information there is. I guess both predictions were true in some sense.

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