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by knowuh
3035 days ago
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Spoiler: A possibly delusional Minister misleads a wife and child into moving across Canada repeatedly because "the mafia is trying to poison them". How Very "You won't believe what happens next". WHY is it here on Hacker News? 20 Points??? |
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1. it demonstrates human brains can break in very weird, specific, long-term ways. Same reason HN loves Oliver Sacks.
2. it provides an interesting case-study of a self-consistent worldview which could convince several people for decades and had explanations for all its anomalies, and yet is totally absolutely wrong. Like religion, but more novel and modern a delusion.
3. the way she rationally broke out of it is interesting: not by reading a book on the Mafia and realizing that they would never engage in a persecution like that (far too expensive, requires capabilities they've never had, huge distraction from their many more pressing problems, and goes wildly beyond anything they've actually done hunting the most harmful defectors), but by running a very simple experiment with a negative control. It would not be going too far to say that scientific methodology saved her life.