alt Hacker NewsMy interpretation of the newspaper image-counting experiment is quite different from that of the author.
My view is that unlucky people don't trust the system (for a good reason) so they don't trust the text; given the nature of the experiment, it is reasonable that they would think the text is a trap to mislead them. It actually mirrors reality perfectly because most people are constantly misled about everything... But a few lucky 'chosen' people are not. In terms of the experiment it would be like showing unlucky people text which shows an incorrect number and the lucky people would see text showing the correct number. That's what's actually happening in real life.
What lucky people don't understand is that merely surviving, without receiving special treatment, is actually very difficult and it requires constantly jumping over all sorts of hurdles and deceptions and you can't afford trust third-party information because every time you did, you ended up losing everything or wasting years of your life. Lucky people are wrong to trust third-party information. They only learn how wrong they were when they stop receiving special treatment; then reality comes as a shock!
What is shown to the majority is what the media wants to show them. The media's purpose is to mislead people. Only a small handful of people are actually lucky enough to have mentors who will tell them "The media is misleading, I know because I influence the media; here is reality: ..."
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Fair to say unlucky people are skeptical/pessimistic/realistic and lucky people are naive/optimistic?
If yes, the question is why? What came first? Their luck or their perspective? Maybe a couple instances of things working out tips the scales early in life!
The reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.