Comment by klik99
11 hours ago
Yeah, the insane takes spread faster but it takes more time and resources to look into it than just come to conclusions early.
The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding. Otherwise this shit would never have made it into a newspaper, maybe outside of a really shitty yellow rag.
> The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding.
The BBC and Reuters can be posited as counterexamples to your assertion. They’re good journalists and well-funded (and not primarily by advertising either).
Hmm... but do you think that they would produce such an article, funding the research into it?
From what I can tell, they would report accurately once these findings were published but would not find a researcher to dig into the claims before publishing that someone (named) said that these chips are at fault.
Yeah, for a substantial fraction of people, this case will stick to their minds as "oh the chinese .. again" It's both sad and scary. It was even submitted to HN. Flagged by now, but still. Many people won't have read this follow-up, especially since it doesn't come as a 1-sentence TL;DR..
Hmm, why is it sad and scary?
It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story.
It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.
The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
Not the OP, but I think I get the "sad and scary" part. It seems as though there is some vilification going on and that's happened before with very sad outcome.