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rimantas | 9 years ago

Repeating a statement will not make it a fact.

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Red_Tarsius|9 years ago

I wrote this comment before the one above. I'm open to other points of views if you write them down. I can't tell you for certain whether my statement is an absolute fact, but there seems to be some truth in it that is worth thinking about. Are you aware of any thriving, long-lasting society that rejects monogamy?

throwanem|9 years ago

You probably need to explain Iceland, for a start.

Pica_soO|9 years ago

Actually, due to a brain bug, in the species brains, repetition equals truth. Was in hacker news recently, so im only repeating that..

alexvoda|9 years ago

Actually, that HN thread left a mark on me. Before that I was vaguely familiar with the concept. "History is written by the winners", the concept of superstitions, marketing, appeal to the majority, etc.

But I was mostly dismissing it, considering that rational thought would in the end triumph. Considering that, in the least, each repetition should bring extra information for the effect to manifest.

That thread prompted me to give some though to the subject and the answer I arrived at so far does not make me happy at all. Realizing that repetition by itself is enough, clarifies some things I did not understand and simply classified as reality not making sense.

I feel ever more justified in my energy consuming efforts to fact-check information I receive and in my strides to present information as opinion/personal thought/conclusion based on sources/mere reproduction of sources instead of truth. I am more aware of this than before but at the same time it causes a lot more stress to me now than it did before.

I am less willing than I was to engage in live discussions where I receive information, because that places a burden of fact checking on me and I can not always do that at the speed of real life. And depending on the interlocutor I can not rephrase the discussion in terms of hypothetical statements.

rimantas|9 years ago

This bug can only make you believe something is true, but not make that said thing true (except in some cases where the two overlap).