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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I love the sheer number of hacker news commenters saying “Well I tried it, seems to work”. At what level do you guys go “I’m just going to assume those 10 other guys aren’t lying”

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> At what level do you guys go “I’m just going to assume those 10 other guys aren’t lying”

For something easily testable? Never.

Edit: Account just got locked, lol.

I am actually pondering if I should do this to lock my account.

You get it back in 12 hours, so it is not a big deal.

This claim requires testing.

If you break the twitters infinitely vague rules 5 times your account will get banned permanently. So it is a big deal.

Anyone interested in testing the 5 times limit by using the Memphis?

Exactly this. I’m also afraid that it sets a flag somewhere that “this person has been banned at some point” which will affect something down the line.

Post a link to the right Marc Cohn song and you'll be banned for a good month! </j>

I think I should put up a lever that gives people an electric shock, charge admission, and set up a live stream.

I bet the lever will be popular.

I can imagine the reaction video tiktoks already!

Definitely will be, with the people of a more scientific mindset :).

https://xkcd.com/242/

Me too. Also I decided to repeal the ban with the comment "Memphis" just for giggles. I visit Twitter maybe once a month(when an interesting link pops up here), so it's not like I absolutely need that account.

"Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure."

That's simply not true, evangelization is hard and requires connection to personal experience much more the convincing people of wet paint does, and it requires connecting it to personal experience for which people haven’t already accepted a better explanation, which is a lot harder than with “the paint is wet”. You don't just tell people “God exists” and they're like “Oh, sure, thanks.” (Well, except perhaps sarcastically.)

It’s a cute quote, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Yup. Getting someone to switch their religion is just changing a final link in the long, long chain of beliefs, most of which was created thousands of years ago, and which almost everyone internalizes in their formative years.

The belief in "invisible men in the sky" is older than human civilization. Even getting an atheist to convert to a religion is just a matter of convincing them about a bunch of details about a particular invisible man in the sky, and that they should pay attention to them. The majority of the work - convincing them that the very idea of an invisible man in the sky is something one can believe in - was already done by that person's family, all of whom had it done to them by their families, all the way back to neolithic.

Yes you do, that's how children get indoctrinated.

> Yes you do, that's how children get indoctrinated.

Children may take parental guidance more easily on the existence of God than is the case with evangelization generally, sure (though still not as easy as the quote suggest is true of people taking such inputs generally.)

But then, they also, at the same ages where they’ll accept parental guidance on that, accept parental claims on more prosaic material fact, too. So, even then, the contrast suggested by the quote is bogus.

correct and that's why you have to change the rules to be more amenable to it, such as

"telepathically wish for a vague outcome and retroactively ascribe something to that wish and validate your beliefs"

more powerful than you might think

Those are not comparable

Getting blocked from using Twitter is a productivity hack :)

Deleting your Twitter account is an even better one.

Same heuristic applies to HN accounts.

I just had to make a throwaway to test it out, so no biggie.

But admit I tricked a twitter friend into answering what the full title of "walking in ..." was

This is neat to look at from a psychological perspective. I bet there's a pretty good correlation between the people who see everyone else go, "yep, works as reported" and decides to try it for themselves anyway, and people who aren't easily convinced by research or science in other subjects.

To be fair, that correlation would probably cut both ways. For example, the people who don't decide to try things for themselves being more susceptible to being swayed by propaganda.

Interesting to look at, as you said. I assume that different personality types evolved because that made us more robust as a species.

Right, like all the intrepid outsider-scientists that are resilient to the propaganda of a round Earth. Sadly, many of the commenters here are still somewhat susceptible to propaganda, since they locked their account and then believed the results of the experiment. For maximum resilience to scientific propaganda, they should perform the experiment repeatedly and refuse to accept the results each time.

Sorry, maybe I didn't do a good job with my comment. A better more specific example of what I meant might be all the people who drank the cool-aid at Jonestown. They bought the cult propaganda hook line and sinker, and died for it. Sometimes people are too sceptical, sometimes they are not sceptical enough. I didn't mean that the twitter lockout was propaganda.

And my closing thought was that it probably make us better as a society that we have both sceptical and non-sceptical people.

that's actually consistent with a hacker attitude

Whenever there is a bug, half the time the next question is "how do I replicate it?"

Any easy testable critical claim should be tested. Science in action IMO. Nothing like empirical data collection.

At some point you may find a data point that deviates and doesnt lock the account and might be able to reason how/why it happened. If nothing else you can at least quickly verify with high confidence and not just take a small conesus' word.

It's called peer review ;-)

Hey, it's hilarious. It's too tempting not to join the banned people party.

That big block of ice -- don't lick it or your tongue will stick to it ...

I did it too.... I saw someone post about it in my TL and promptly tweeted.

I tried it...seems to work

I wonder if that happens every time. ;)

https://xkcd.com/242/

Edit: oh noes, folks - this was an innocuous compliment on your adventurousness! :)

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