Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

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> still has the ability to fool people into thinking she is something else

I recommend you sit back and review how you arrived at this conclusion. I have personally never interacted with Elizabeth Holmes and everything I know about this person has come through the lens of first media, then courts, and then media again.

It is the media, including the New York Times, that is creating this impression, is that not the case?

So, correctly your sentence would read “still has the ability to fool the handful of people who interact with her directly and then share accounts with us”.

So now, having established the actual state of affair in this ‘information graph’, the next question naturally is: “are these people really fooled or are they fooling me?” I.e. Do we have gullible people in positions that require inquisitive and thorough mindsets, or, even more “actors” pretending to being journalists, a sort of “dissociative [professional] identity disorder”.

Your position implies that there is no way to determine the difference between reputable media and disreputable media; that all stories must be considered with equal weight in the equation that is "the media". I can form an opinion of something without personal experience by considering the reputation of the source(s), and when reputable sources tend to agree and only the low-value sources dissent, I can have a confidence in my opinion that is better than just plotting all points on a graph with equal weight.

Once I feel that I have a good view of an issue, using information weighted by reputation, I can make a statement like "This article appears inconsistent with the likely narrative, but consistent with someone who has been conned by a conman" without needing to justify my position directly, or abstracted away from the story. If you have a real alternative, you need to present it, but simply questioning someone's methodology is somewhere between irrelevant and disingenuous. At the very least, it adds little to the discussion of the issue at hand -- even more so in casual conversation where people are expressing a personal opinion of little or no real importance beyond this tiny little puddle. I mean, who is really going to respond to something like your comment with a couple of paragraphs to justify one sentence? ;)

And your position is fallacious, since you presume that the reputation of a source correlates to a greater likelihood of truth.

That's a classic fallacy: appeal to/argument from authority. It's especially problematic, since who/what one presumes to be 'reputable', other people may not agree with.

Moreover the opinion of a majority of 'reputable' sources, agreeing to something, does not make it true. Reportage and stories are to be considered chiefly on the basis of what is reported and the likelihood of it being true, and should not be so staked on the reputation of the person/entity reporting it.

Independent sources of information with a reputation for accuracy and unbiased reporting generally agreeing on something is literally the best we have for being informed about something we did not personally witness. Refusing to accept consensus positions from good sources should be done VERY carefully and has a high risk of reaching conclusions that are wildly inaccurate. You'd need a very good reason to reject consensus - one that's based around the available facts, not just negative personal impact or discomfort.

Declaring, without an argument that is not circular, that a collection of respected sources are all wrong (or lying) and that the truth must be something different is, by definition, a conspiracy theory.

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