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.
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.