Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. They do not mention Wikipedia, but the CIA book kind of had information about countries for a very long time. I get that Wikipedia would objectively make more sense; so while it may make sense to stop investing resources into the CIA book, I still think it would be better to keep tabs on the content of Wikipedia. Kind of like a secondary quality control. It may not be hugely important here, but if 100.000 other websites vanish, I still think it may be an indirect problem for Wikipedia, as all its presented facts may become increasingly more and more circular to itself - which is made worse by AI slop spamming down the global quality.

View on HN

Kids who grew up playing Carmen Sandiego will definitely remember it fondly

I played a bunch of that too, was that a cited source for it? Don’t remember. I do recall that the very-early-90s geopolitics simulation game Shadow President contained large portions of the fact book in its in-game information system (with citations, which is my first recollection of ever knowing of the thing by name)

I later leaned on the Web version of the factbook quite a bit for basic country stats in undergrad.

I don’t know of a replacement of comparable quality. Damn good resource. Not that you can necessarily trust a government source, and especially one from an intelligence agency, but most of what it covered wasn’t exactly useful for the kind of propaganda you’d expect the US government to push, so you could expect it to broadly be a sincere attempt at describing reality (it didn’t hurt that it wasn’t a super-widely-known resource outside certain academic disciplines, so lying about e.g. the major exports of Guyana or whatever wouldn’t have much effect anyway, lowering the likelihood that anyone would bother)

Whoops, I was mistaken, I was thinking of The World Almanac and Book of Facts that was included in the original version of the game as a player reference.

As it stands you only need a few friends or likeminded journalists at a few major publications to repeat the same falsehood, and it becomes a properly cited fact on Wikipedia and in the public eye for as long as you need it to be. If it’s later proven to be a falsehood and the underlying sources quietly issue retractions it doesn’t matter.

How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?

Given how all that vanished once Trump won, the propaganda having served its purpose, it seems my decision to write it off as chaff was vindicated.

Remember "lock her up?" Remember how that vanished as well and there was not, in fact, any effort to lock her up?

(the problem of submarining stuff into Wikipedia is real though, and a by-product of it being the most trusted reference)

How what vanished? The concerted effort to censor it on social media and dismiss it everywhere else as a hoax? 51 individuals in the “intelligence community” put their names to a letter saying it was Russian disinformation, which was used as evidence that it should be suppressed.

If you don’t realize now that you were lied to even though it’s trivial to confirm now that all the institutions that lied to you have since quietly issued retractions, corrections, or since wrote that they were misled…

Russia had 0 involvement. The laptop and all the controversial material and evidence of corruption on it were legitimate. Wanting to believe otherwise is doing yourself a disservice, even if it means conceding that those you disagree with aren’t always lying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com