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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?

> People who’ve been hurt by others don’t need to be legally scrutinized for saying so.

The point is that not every person who makes an accusation is someone who has been hurt by others. If there is no scrutiny allowed, how are we supposed to tell which is which? You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.

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> So is there any point at which you would say it matters whether an accusation is true or not? Is it only if there’s a criminal investigation?

It always matters whether an accusation is true. Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.

> You're looking at this from the perspective of the person making the accusation, where you can know with certainty that is true. Someone on the outside doesn't have that ability.

You’ve completely misunderstood my perspective. I’m looking at it from the perspective of the person afraid to make an accusation.

Nobody is saying we should penalize people for making accusations. Being asked to substantiate your claims is not a penalty. It should be understood that people will ask that when you make a public claim, especially if you are asking for something to happen as a result of that claim.

I'm not sure what we gain by encouraging people to make unprovable accusations. From the outside perspective, people will be predisposed to believe one way or another, and in the absence of any evidence they'll just go to their predispositions and a lot of irrelevant argument will take place back and forth with no possible resolution, because there is no real evidence. Why is this helpful or desirable?

> Penalizing accusers doesn’t produce fewer false accusations. It discourages true accusations.

Why would the rate of true accusations go down while the rate of false accusations remain the same? My intuition is that they'd both go down, with false accusations decreasing more than true accusations.

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