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by nostromo 2149 days ago
> The nudge towards reality is easily overwhelmed by a thumb on the scale of the wrong answer.

What’s the evidence supporting this?

I've noticed this trend of all sides of every political debate declaring that the other side has fallen for "fake news." In actuality, it's often that people with the "wrong answer" just have a different value system than the people with "right answer."

1 comments

I provided a link. You don't get to sea-lion me by just repeating "evidence" until you've demonstrated that you've at least read the sources I gave you already.
The wikipedia article you linked doesn't make this claim.

The primary example, that cigarette companies tried to hide that smoking causes cancer, doesn't prove this point -- the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

You are missing the point: there's an entire field of study about the claim and the various ways that it's true. The wikipedia article is about that field of study. Hence, the only way the claim would be false would be if that entire field of study were completely junk (e.g. homeopathy or neurolinguistic programming), which from the wikipedia article, it doesn't look so.
> the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

The vast majority of people know this now, but it was just as much a subject of motivated doubt in its time as climate change is now. It's only because of a massive counter-propaganda effort (in a good cause, but it's still propaganda) that it seems so obvious to us now, and so inevitable in retrospect that people of sense would see the truth.

> You don't get to sea-lion me

Was this really necessary? You point would be just as strong without it, and the degree of hostility would go down.