Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

One of the problems with trust is that people see corrections and admitting ignorance as signs of unreliability and confidence and stubbornness as signs of reliability.

I can't count the number of times someone arguing with me has dug up a correction or retraction page on something unrelated as proof that a source is nonsense.

If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."

View on HN

> If they did issue a pile of corrections and changes, this post would instead be "the thousands of errors the NYT has made."

Which would still be valid, because making tons of mistakes is still a sign of unreliability regardless of whether or not you admit to them.

Nobody is infallible but a larger number of mistakes is worse than a smaller number. And it is by no means impossible for a publication to have higher standards or a better record.

Instead of trying to engineer trust, why not actually be trustworthy, admit your mistakes and become better?

Because for many people, the making of mistakes is what makes you unreliable and untrustworthy.

Superficially, they have a news agency with seemingly no errors in one hand and one with a thousand corrections in the other. Unless you are willing to consider that the errorless news agency is just not admitting it, one seems nice and consistent and reliable and one seems clumsy and stupid.

This is only the case until it comes to light the one not admitting mistakes has been making them, at which point all trust is lost.

But people are getting their information from those sources, so how would it come to light for them?

There probably are outlets out there doing that rather than engineering trust. It's just that you haven't heard of them because guess what...definitionally hardly anyone trusts them!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com