Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Poe's Law is that the person invoking it is often just revealing their own biases. It's not impossible to imagine any number of people writing any number of things, it's a failure to calibrate your expectations about the likelihood of parody properly that's the issue. Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincen…
But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire. I hold the prior that most people writing on the internet are not doing it merely to get a rise out of liberals. I have also known men who became violent and angry when a women they had sex with decided to get an abortion. What’s different about this Reddit post? What’s supposed to indicate to me that it’s obviously in jest?…
Re: Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
#61The story is supposed to indicate that you should adjust that prior. If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick? (When I first learned this lesson, I spot checked a few old controversies I was mad about, and a few of them had indeed been proven false without my knowledge.)