It if funny to phrase it like that as if you weren't one of the people in that thread arguing against those skeptical people pointing out issues with the accusations.
Anything using Ockham's razor is a statement about what's more likely when you don't know the truth. Those priors were obviously wrong. I also said we'd find out shortly if it was faked, and now we're here.
Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
You're doing it again here with the passive voice. You weren't wrong, it was "Ockham's razor" and "those priors" that were wrong.
>Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
Your responses here show that you aren't actually doing that. You aren't taking any responsibility for your prior incorrect assumptions and therefore you are likely to continue making similar wrong assumptions in the future. How can you learn from this experience if you can't admit that you did anything wrong?
Yes, my speculation on incomplete information was wrong. That's obvious to anyone who can read. I haven't hidden it, I haven't said I was ever correct, and even in that thread I explicitly said there are two possibilities and here's the one I find more likely.
Yet you're acting like I kicked a puppy and need to apologize for my moral failings. Chill, it's not a big deal. I'll probably be wrong about something else in the future too. All I can do is update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
>update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
The first step in that process is examining your prior mistakes so you know what not to repeat. Your comments have shown an unwillingness to do that work. You're treating this as a mistake that you just happened to fall into through no fault of your own and not a mistake caused by your own actions.
Being wrong and making a mistake are very different things. A weather forecaster, for example, can be wrong about the weather without making a mistake in forecasting it.
Yes, that was the point being made. Immediately believing the authenticity of this video was not just wrong, but also a mistake. Anyone who believed it initially should take this as a lesson to learn to recalibrate their levels of naïveté/skepticism when it comes to random social media posts.
It's the opposite of the point you want to make. This is obvious if you simplify the example to something like flipping a biased coin. If the coin will come up heads 50-eps% of the time, and tails 50+eps% of the time, then the correct prediction is tails. Tails will often be the wrong prediction, but is still the correct prediction to make.
The outcome of this one event simply doesn't imply anything about the correctness of AlotOfReading's model. The model might actually be mistaken, but that's not an argument you've made.
Sorry for piling on here. To be clear, I don't think you've done anything terrible that requires an apology, and I think it's admirable that you are here after the hoax was debunked and willing to admit you were wrong and discuss it openly. It's just interesting (and somewhat rare on HN) to be able to go back and pick apart your comment less than 24 hours later with perfect hindsight.
You comment was:
> What's the alternative here? A rapper went to the effort to publish an MV, then figured out how to display a fake disabled message in the vehicle, then faked a C&D, knowing that these actions would give Tesla a very legitimate claim against them?
> Ockham's razor is not favorable to the alternative.
I think the issue is that you greatly underestimated how far people are willing to go for likes. There are billions of people online, and while most would not bother to do what you said, some of them are indeed willing to go to incredible lengths for views. The YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane, for example [1]. This stunt with the Cybertruck feels relatively low-effort by comparison.
Or as my favorite response to your comment summed it up:
> "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"
I don't typically like sarcasm in a thoughtful discussion, but in this case it felt warranted.
You also failed to apply Occam's razor to the other side, and consider the legal and reputational risks that Tesla would face by remotely disabling someone's car while they were driving on the expressway. Yes, Musk has done brash things before, which certainly increases the believability of this hoax. But this would be new ground even for Musk. And you have to weigh Musk's capacity for doing brash things against the entire internet's capacity for generating fake news and hoaxes.
You probably should have known better than try and apply Occam's razor to determine the likelihood that an instagram post is a hoax. There are just too many irrational people out there (and rational people acting in bad faith) for Occam's razor to be applicable. And the fact that you were able to overlook the overwhelming number of counterexamples to your application of Occam's razor suggests to me that there may have been some confirmation bias at play.
I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true, and using it as an opportunity to rail against corporate abuse in full generality, just like every HN thread about a negative story about a tech company. It was only later that the skeptical comments started to rise to the top.
> I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true (...)
I think you're trying to fabricate an alternative version of reality while being aware that the facts (i.e., the actual posts in the thread) are not on your side.
You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail. That said, at 30 comments I think the comments section as a whole was still credulous. Here's my attempt at recreating what it was like then: https://ameliaquining.neocities.org/tesla-hn-comments
Note that I put all the comments in reverse chronological order because historical vote data isn't available, so which comments are at the top here isn't necessarily reflective of which ones were at the top at the time.
You can judge for yourself whether my summary was misleading.
Agree that while the skeptics eventually won out, the thread was very credulous for a while. I recall that at the time I made my skeptical comment, there was almost no skepticism in the thread at all.
> You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail.
I think you didn't even bothered to read your own citation.
The first comment literally leads with "This isn't real".
The bulk of replies are questioning the questionable claims, and asking for their sources.
There are indeed a few comments from gullible people, but to frame this as gullible people being prevalent in the thread is outright wrong, as your own source shows.
"First comment" here merely means the most recent comment, not the one that was at the top at the time, because, again, that data isn't available.
By my count, five comments expressed some kind of overt skepticism, and another four included a "if this is true" disclaimer without indicating any particular grounds to disbelieve it. The other 21 all either explicitly accepted the story as true, or implicitly didn't care whether it was true or not (e.g., piling onto criticism of Tesla without mentioning the specific controversy).
The best part is that if the alleged reality is true it's an even bigger condemnation of the community.
"no, they didn't believe it, they were engaging in strategic trolling and vote gaming" as if that doesn't imply a way more malicious frame of mind than some hapless idiot looking at the message and going "yup, seems legit, upvote we go".
(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
>(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
As someone who did see that thread evolve, let me help you out.
HN (being largely comprised of redditors) were more than happy to amplify pure misinformation because it was politically expedient. The evidence that it was fake was given fairly early on; a lot of people ignored it.
It's certainly a condemnation of the userbase on this forum.
Since HN is manually unflagging political posts, and not enforcing the 'uses HN for political advocacy' guideline the site is generally more combatative and there's a lot more hoaxes and conspiracy theories on the front page.
The problem with having a site-wide rule against complaining that the site is becoming Reddit is that when it actually becomes true you're prohibited from telling the truth.
There is no site-wide prohibition - which is obvious since these comments would be prohibited.
There are guidelines and each guideline is mostly loosely encouraged by the community here by downvoting - in effect becoming community standards. However a well written exception can receive upvotes (even though strictly against guidelines) because it is a community and individual judgement mostly gets priority.
Flagging is different because it is a much stronger signal of violation of norms, however it is still mostly a signal from the HN user community.
The moderation balance on HN appears to be quite functional to me (although I'm happy with many guidelines that others fight against).
Just because you don't consciously believe something to be true, doesn't mean you don't care about its veracity. The null hypothesis is that people are willing to treat things as true based on their priors — which could be informed by things as simple as "this was posted on a website not known as a den of misinformation, and shared on HN" — while not actually devoting thought to an investigation of the truth.
Yeah I have peeked into both and have never seen such a strident collection of vituperation, misinformation, and hatred. For people who claim to have left Twitter due to supposed toxicity, they definitely seem unacquainted with mirrors.
Well I see it's flagged for now, and I was one of the flaggers.
IMO, at least by the time I saw it, there were more than enough red flags raised to say that having it on HN before more evidence is available is only flamebait.
If Tesla weren't constantly attacked as a supposed shady company by NYT and the rest of the psyop propaganda machine it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes.
If Tesla's owner didn't have a history of lying, and the company didn't have a history of attempting to evade legal disclosure obligations, people wouldn't think of it as a shady company.
It really isn't. I said as much in the previous thread, but the part that elevates this past the typical petty Musk behavior was the accusation that the car was bricked while it was being driven. That goes way past anything Tesla or Musk has done before and could easily have killed someone. Doing that doesn't just require an asshole CEO, it would require incompetence of both the legal and technical folks at the company who would actually implement this type of haphazard remote disabling.
Pretty clear this was faked, but continuing the previous discussion, a vehicle lock doesn't have to be as dangerous as you're thinking.
I've implemented limp modes before and the easiest way is to prevent acceleration to over a certain speed without enabling regen. If you're already at highway speeds, you'll simply coast down to the limp speed and have plenty of time to pull over.
I suspect that wouldn't fall afoul of FMVSS either, but it's never come up for me.
Yet you were saying the opposite in that previous thread.
>I've implemented limp modes before and the easiest way is to prevent acceleration to over a certain speed without enabling regen. If you're already at highway speeds, you'll simply coast down to the limp speed and have plenty of time to pull over.
The video had the car stopped in the middle of traffic, so this wasn't the accusation being made. You are creating a hypothetical scenario in which the accusations are plausible rather than actually engaging with the accusations as they were made.
"Because it is on-brand with Musk behavior. If for example somebody would write that Mercedes bricked a car to an influencer, people would be skeptical because that would not be how Mercedes usually operates."
The paraphrase:
"Yeah I fell for the bait, but that says a lot about my political enemies."
More like it's on brand with the fantastic delusions people have about Musk. In reality Tesla and Musk are very good about privacy and leaving control with the user. But, you do you.
This statement "Tesla and Musk are very good about privacy and leaving control with the user" is pretty clearly false [1]:
> between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
Claims of privacy and user control are mostly "trust" based. A car that can be controlled and surveilled remotely, will be controlled and surveilled remotely. To dissuade potential customers of that notion they require faith in independent public or private institutions and their ability to verify that attacks on their privacy and autonomy are not possible. That doesn't seem possible in the zero trust environment people like Musk are promoting. Musk is his own worst enemy.
>A car that can be controlled and surveilled remotely, will be controlled and surveilled remotely.
Fair point. The examples given elsewhere here are limited and very explainable cases of this, but I’d argue the overall stance of current management is good. Future management, it’s anyone’s guess, but I am just commenting what I see with current management as an owner of their cars.
Reminded of all those times that Musk had Tesla release crash details on X pinning the blame on the driver when it was in Tesla's interest to shift the blame for crashes. Yep, great commitment to privacy there.
You know what automakers don't do that? Literally every other automaker. When they release those kinds of details, they do so in response to a court proceeding as part of the legal discovery process so that privacy concerns, etc. can be dealt with before the information is released.
Plus, they supposedly had it turn off the automatic features just before it detected an imminent crash, ensuring that they could always correctly tell everyone that "Auto Pilot was off at the time of the crash". Of course, that doesn't mean that it wasn't used in the 20 seconds prior.
So, those details weren't actually insightful. They were just PR bullshit.
Everyone else is giving you examples as to why you have to be delusional to believe this so I'm not going to pile on but I've seen no evidence that Tesla and Musk are good in regards to handling privacy and user data but I've seen many examples that they are bad with it.
The examples given are easily explainable but I won’t bother. You’ve seen no evidence but you’ve heard a lot of anecdotes is unfortunately the normal case for the mainstream population.
As I said in that thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860077), seems like a slam-dunk defamation case for Tesla (assuming they want to pursue it) if the whole thing was fabricated.
Nothing new under the sun. Remember when NBC admitted to rigging a truck to burst into flames in a crash for Dateline, because it wouldn't do it on its own? Or when a jury found that Consumer Reports lied about how easily an Isuzu pickup rolled over on turns?
But hey, the media probably wouldn't lie these days, and Musk bad man.
One of the richest people in the world has a billion dollar short position on Tesla.
You can bet there is enormous might trying everything to rank the stock
Tesla's autonomous driving solution is 10 years overdue and the stock's PE ratio is almost 200. If Gates still has a short position, I am sure he is waiting silently.
I'm not sure which is more concerning: how easy it was to fall for it in the first place, or the mental gymnastics some are going through to place the blame outside themselves.
A lie is a lie, it does not matter how plausible it is. "No smoke without fire" is complete bullshit that leaves room only for cascading hatred.
In this case, there's definitive proof of it being a hoax, and news of it seems to be spreading. But how many more subtle falsehoods are being spread, ones that aren't as easily disproven? And how many perfectly plausible lies does it take for a narrative to become self-sustaining?
There is no shortage of real and verifiable things to be outraged about (Tesla-related or otherwise). Don't waste your headspace on anything less.
It really is concerning. I have a friend who went off the rails in the past couple years and is constantly sharing twitter rage bait. When things are proven to be fake news, it doesn't even phase him. It's like reality doesn't even matter, and maximizing outrage is the end goal.
> Tesla tweeted about the video, saying, “This is fake – that’s not our screen. Tesla does NOT disable vehicles remotely.”
I think the “does not” stands out to me more than “can not”. I’d rather keep my dumb car knowing it can’t be disabled remotely at all without something like an emp.
Dumb cars are like dumb TVs; you arent going to find any on the consumer market. All modern connected cars can be controlled remotely. Ford has even filed patents for remote shutoff for reposession purposes.
Ramzan Kadyrov got his hands on a Cybertruck, and it was disabled remotely. Asides from the trade embargo with Russia, Kadyrov also trolled Elon by thanking him personally, Telsa found it and turned it off: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/business/chechnya-kadyrov-mus...
The implication is that Elon is a massive hypocrite for complaining when these dishonest tactics are used against him because he uses them all the time.
The original post made front page of HN for a good while, whereas this correction post was dropped almost immediately to page 3, and now on page 4. This post is/was more recent, with more upvotes, than almost everything currently on the front page, yet it's hidden all the way down on page 4.
Lengthy comment sections full of flame wars, which controversial topics like fake news against Tesla often result in, tend to make the threads less visible on HN.
This is why fake news is such an effective propaganda tool.
There are to this day many people who honestly believe untruths because the media repeated lies and half truths loudly, followed by quiet retractions when they got caught.
The fact that this deactivation feels possible is still a telling sign of where we’ve been heading. Update fail. Subscription lapsed payment. All sorts of new failure modes.
"The lie has value because it feels true" is one of the more disturbing trends I have seen gain traction on the internet in recent years. People are now unironically turning themselves in the Stephen Colbert character from The Colbert Report[1].
Yeah. I have noticed a disturbing amount of people believe fake stories, tweets, videos, propaganda etc. because it confirms their worldview or is otherwise fun. For example, the amount of people who thought dumb Republicans were dying from eating horse dewormer was way overblown. Or that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.
I have adopted an extremely skeptical view of almost all content on the internet now. Fun videos that are staged aren't particularly harmful. Something like "a crazy coincidence or wild prank" made to look real and genuine is not particularly sinister. I personally have briefly put way to much stock in a screenshot of a Tweet from an unattributed anonymous poster alleging X happened. Simply because "it feels true" and confirms my bias. Be careful out there kids!
I think it is troubling to say “the lie has value”, but it is worth thinking why certain stories and hoaxes resonate. It’s similar to how sci-fi and horror can reflect the anxieties of their contemporary society
How about, "10-15 years ago such a scenario was completely implausible/impossible, and I find it disturbing that it is now completely plausible and possible"?
It’s funny you bring up Colbert on this topic. His own narrative of why his show was cancelled is a lie that felt true to his fans.
It felt good to martyr him and say that he was cancelled for saying truth to power against President Trump. The truth is that his show was losing $40 million a year and only had traction with viewers that were outside the target advertising demographics.
This sort of thing has to be illegal, right? Not sure what it’s called, but it’s basically libel against a corporation. Can you just do that and it’s fine? If so I would expect it to happen all the time via competitors hiring agencies to lie in this sort of way, and AFAIK that doesn’t happen broadly, so it seems like something is preventing it, such as it being illegal.
I frankly have very little sympathy for Tesla here. If you're going to "sell" people a computer and not give them root it's impossible for everyone else to tell if you're screwing around with it like that.
You want to be the admin for everyone else? Well you get the responsibility and emotional demands from everyone else too.
It is possible to dislike (or even hate) someone, without allowing yourself to be exploited. Apart from anything else, you are giving ammunition to the other side by doing so.
It's crazy that people would believe Elon's salute meant exactly what he wanted them to think. /sarcasm
Self-professed Nazis are probably the best judges of Nazi symbols, and they approved it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#F... The only other place it could have come from is a "Roman salute" which was used by other fascists who killed hundreds of thousands; is that any more defensible than Nazi?
I'll grant you he is probably not a Nazi in any organized way. And he probably meant it more as a troll than an earnest profession. But if he talks like a Nazi, salutes like a Nazi, donates to the party cheering on concentration camps for minorities and crying about fake Nazi-esque "white genocides"... maybe he's just a Nazi in denial that he's a Nazi.
If he's at the shore of the pond and tells the crowd a series of Nazi-themed puns, you can skip the dunking. He's so committed to making you think he's a Nazi, it doesn't matter any more whether he thinks he's being ironic; he's a Nazi supporter either way.
Is this how people are going to water down and re-brand "dog-whistle"? Get it to stop meaning "coded political messaging" and have it mean "indicator"? Regardless of whether you agree with GP or not, there was nothing coded about what they were saying.
> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell, 1984.
You've been told that Trump and Musk are Nazis for almost 10 years now. Drip-fed for ten years as the "evidence" of your eyes and ears.
It turned out that in the late 2010s, the "party" wasn't a monolith. It was every identikit left of centre news organisation saying exactly the same thing in lockstep for years. And then finally the newest "evidence" appeared and so everyone thought "I knew it!" When in fact they didn't know it. They just believed everything they saw and heard on a television screen.
Not sure what you're even talking about, but you should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
You should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
It's hilarious how that's pretty much true, only you have to define "bad" as "ideologically different" and you're set. Anyone disagreeing with the userbase in any contentious topic, well, they are just evil, that's all.,
That is very much not the current situation in the USA. You need to take a long break from politics; this is just another administration. In 2028 we will have an election, there will be a new president, and things will be just fine.
... except for all of the destruction wrought on our societal and government institutions. The other half of the problem is that the milquetoast "liberals" have stopped building things as well, and so it's not like our institutions are going to be getting rebuilt after this. We will have a new "president" in name mostly, with even more of our rights ceded to the unaccountable corpos. And then when people are bored of the relative stability in another four or eight years, they'll vote in destructionists again and we'll be back to the performative spectacles of cruelty.
Surely there are more than two stances that can be had on issues?
Plus I still remember that time a certain journalist entered the platform and people completely lost their shit, making up pedophilia allegations, demanding him to be banned, publishing the location of his residence and instigating violence against him.
Nazis weren't bad because they saluted in that way. They were bad because they were a high-authoritarian, socialist, racism bunch of warmongering killers. Their salute is the silliest thing to worry about. It's like thinking if someone grew a Hitler moustache that that would be the worst thing ever. It's actually the most superficial thing ever, for superficial thinking only. The next evil won't look like the last one. In fact the next, and greater, evils were Stalin and Mau, and it's somehow fine to salute like them, or call your kid Joseph, or peddle communism in universities.
Fakes become believable when they are on-brand and match people's existing expectations, in this case about a company. I would totally expect petty, retaliatory behavior from a company run by a petty, retaliatory guy. So a forgery totally bypasses my usual "bullshit detector". This is a human weakness that a lot of people, admittedly including myself, are vulnerable to.
Yes, and the comments would have been nearly the same less the ones specifically referring to Musk.
That said, if you'd hav picked Toyota or Volvo when writing your comment you'd be correct. Those OEMs could literally put coal rolling diesels backed by Nissan CVTs in Yugo chassis and the "everything I know about cars I learned from internet comments and car-mags in my dentist waiting room" crowd would defend them.
You're ignoring the "X" and "Reddit" and focusing purely on Bluesky. Your post here is a good example of confirmation bias in itself, and it's sad that you're not realising it.
I do realise it. I agree they also have this; every group of people of size 1 or greater has it. But X and Reddit are much broader churches with fewer universal biases than BlueSky.
> It's telling on the users in question and their relationship with reality.
It’s telling to Tesla’s brand reputation. This will take decades and billions of dollars to repair, if it even can be fixed.
Tesla may become synonymous with cars-as-internet-of-shit. Same as how Italian cars to this day are the butt of every reliability joke. This reputation has followed them since the 90’s. British cars are synonymous with cheap construction – a reputation they built in the 70’s.
The question is why certain people found believable in the first place. "May become synonymous" implies they're not already, in which case this instance wouldn't be believable.
In reality, people who believed this probably think Elon is a petty tyrant and don't like his politics. I agree with them, especially on the first point. The difference is that they either allow this to overwhelm their critical thinking skills, or never had any to begin with.
> why certain people found believable in the first place
Because Tesla’s brand perception is that of a shady company who would do something like this and nobody would be surprised. How they built that reputation I don’t know, lots of little things over the years.
There's something of a difference between the abstract presentation there and the much more tangible brand problem Tesla has. If this was a Ford nobody would believe it. They might argue it broke down. If it was a Toyota nobody would believe that.
But Elon Musk has made himself the face of Tesla, used that power in other contexts to go after critics, and the Cybertruck had a bizarre anti resale clause when released and Tesla have made a habit of features-as-a-service with remote software deactivations when other vehicles are resold.
So in the specific case here, the reaction very much represents a big brand sentiment problem attributable to concrete issues.
There's kind of a fine line between "that this went viral shows that Tesla has a brand problem" (a logically valid argument) and "that I found this believable shows that Tesla is bad" (what the comic is about). The top-level comment did not go super-far out of its way to distinguish between the two, which I think is generally worth doing if you're making an argument that sounds similar to a common fallacy.
More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.
Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
Except it wasn't instantly believable. Which is why there were a large number of comments on the previous thread (including my own) saying this was almost certainly fake.
Surely there were a bunch of automotive engineers on Reddit getting downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that this doesn't pass a sniff test because it arguably violates subsection 69 of FMVSS 420 or that they don't need to do that because industry standard is to just prevent the car from starting next time, or whatever.
A number of people predicted this in the thread the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859807
It'll be interesting to see if the situation evolves further.
It if funny to phrase it like that as if you weren't one of the people in that thread arguing against those skeptical people pointing out issues with the accusations.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859991
Anything using Ockham's razor is a statement about what's more likely when you don't know the truth. Those priors were obviously wrong. I also said we'd find out shortly if it was faked, and now we're here.
Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
>Those priors were obviously wrong.
You're doing it again here with the passive voice. You weren't wrong, it was "Ockham's razor" and "those priors" that were wrong.
>Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
Your responses here show that you aren't actually doing that. You aren't taking any responsibility for your prior incorrect assumptions and therefore you are likely to continue making similar wrong assumptions in the future. How can you learn from this experience if you can't admit that you did anything wrong?
I don't know what you want from me.
Yes, my speculation on incomplete information was wrong. That's obvious to anyone who can read. I haven't hidden it, I haven't said I was ever correct, and even in that thread I explicitly said there are two possibilities and here's the one I find more likely.
Yet you're acting like I kicked a puppy and need to apologize for my moral failings. Chill, it's not a big deal. I'll probably be wrong about something else in the future too. All I can do is update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
>I don't know what you want from me.
All I want from you is to...
>update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
The first step in that process is examining your prior mistakes so you know what not to repeat. Your comments have shown an unwillingness to do that work. You're treating this as a mistake that you just happened to fall into through no fault of your own and not a mistake caused by your own actions.
Being wrong and making a mistake are very different things. A weather forecaster, for example, can be wrong about the weather without making a mistake in forecasting it.
Yes, that was the point being made. Immediately believing the authenticity of this video was not just wrong, but also a mistake. Anyone who believed it initially should take this as a lesson to learn to recalibrate their levels of naïveté/skepticism when it comes to random social media posts.
It's the opposite of the point you want to make. This is obvious if you simplify the example to something like flipping a biased coin. If the coin will come up heads 50-eps% of the time, and tails 50+eps% of the time, then the correct prediction is tails. Tails will often be the wrong prediction, but is still the correct prediction to make.
The outcome of this one event simply doesn't imply anything about the correctness of AlotOfReading's model. The model might actually be mistaken, but that's not an argument you've made.
It’s a bit like an LLM or any model output. I’m wrong, so what? It will happen again. Maybe humans aren’t so different after all.
Sorry for piling on here. To be clear, I don't think you've done anything terrible that requires an apology, and I think it's admirable that you are here after the hoax was debunked and willing to admit you were wrong and discuss it openly. It's just interesting (and somewhat rare on HN) to be able to go back and pick apart your comment less than 24 hours later with perfect hindsight.
You comment was:
> What's the alternative here? A rapper went to the effort to publish an MV, then figured out how to display a fake disabled message in the vehicle, then faked a C&D, knowing that these actions would give Tesla a very legitimate claim against them?
> Ockham's razor is not favorable to the alternative.
I think the issue is that you greatly underestimated how far people are willing to go for likes. There are billions of people online, and while most would not bother to do what you said, some of them are indeed willing to go to incredible lengths for views. The YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane, for example [1]. This stunt with the Cybertruck feels relatively low-effort by comparison.
Or as my favorite response to your comment summed it up:
> "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"
I don't typically like sarcasm in a thoughtful discussion, but in this case it felt warranted.
You also failed to apply Occam's razor to the other side, and consider the legal and reputational risks that Tesla would face by remotely disabling someone's car while they were driving on the expressway. Yes, Musk has done brash things before, which certainly increases the believability of this hoax. But this would be new ground even for Musk. And you have to weigh Musk's capacity for doing brash things against the entire internet's capacity for generating fake news and hoaxes.
You probably should have known better than try and apply Occam's razor to determine the likelihood that an instagram post is a hoax. There are just too many irrational people out there (and rational people acting in bad faith) for Occam's razor to be applicable. And the fact that you were able to overlook the overwhelming number of counterexamples to your application of Occam's razor suggests to me that there may have been some confirmation bias at play.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67622247
And at least 222 people believed it to be true (or else those are some illogical upvotes).
An upvote does not mean the user believes the story is true.
I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true, and using it as an opportunity to rail against corporate abuse in full generality, just like every HN thread about a negative story about a tech company. It was only later that the skeptical comments started to rise to the top.
> I read the thread when it had something like 50 comments, and most of them were treating it as either confirmed or at least potentially true (...)
I think you're trying to fabricate an alternative version of reality while being aware that the facts (i.e., the actual posts in the thread) are not on your side.
You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail. That said, at 30 comments I think the comments section as a whole was still credulous. Here's my attempt at recreating what it was like then: https://ameliaquining.neocities.org/tesla-hn-comments
Note that I put all the comments in reverse chronological order because historical vote data isn't available, so which comments are at the top here isn't necessarily reflective of which ones were at the top at the time.
You can judge for yourself whether my summary was misleading.
Agree that while the skeptics eventually won out, the thread was very credulous for a while. I recall that at the time I made my skeptical comment, there was almost no skepticism in the thread at all.
> You are correct that my math was a little off; by the time it hit 50 comments the skeptics were starting to prevail.
I think you didn't even bothered to read your own citation.
The first comment literally leads with "This isn't real".
The bulk of replies are questioning the questionable claims, and asking for their sources.
There are indeed a few comments from gullible people, but to frame this as gullible people being prevalent in the thread is outright wrong, as your own source shows.
"First comment" here merely means the most recent comment, not the one that was at the top at the time, because, again, that data isn't available.
By my count, five comments expressed some kind of overt skepticism, and another four included a "if this is true" disclaimer without indicating any particular grounds to disbelieve it. The other 21 all either explicitly accepted the story as true, or implicitly didn't care whether it was true or not (e.g., piling onto criticism of Tesla without mentioning the specific controversy).
The best part is that if the alleged reality is true it's an even bigger condemnation of the community.
"no, they didn't believe it, they were engaging in strategic trolling and vote gaming" as if that doesn't imply a way more malicious frame of mind than some hapless idiot looking at the message and going "yup, seems legit, upvote we go".
(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
>(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
As someone who did see that thread evolve, let me help you out.
HN (being largely comprised of redditors) were more than happy to amplify pure misinformation because it was politically expedient. The evidence that it was fake was given fairly early on; a lot of people ignored it.
It's certainly a condemnation of the userbase on this forum.
Many of the people who suspected the story to be a fake were... not very well received in that thread, at least at first.
Since HN is manually unflagging political posts, and not enforcing the 'uses HN for political advocacy' guideline the site is generally more combatative and there's a lot more hoaxes and conspiracy theories on the front page.
I've noticed this as well. It feels more and more like Reddit everyday.
The problem with having a site-wide rule against complaining that the site is becoming Reddit is that when it actually becomes true you're prohibited from telling the truth.
There is no site-wide prohibition - which is obvious since these comments would be prohibited.
There are guidelines and each guideline is mostly loosely encouraged by the community here by downvoting - in effect becoming community standards. However a well written exception can receive upvotes (even though strictly against guidelines) because it is a community and individual judgement mostly gets priority.
Flagging is different because it is a much stronger signal of violation of norms, however it is still mostly a signal from the HN user community.
The moderation balance on HN appears to be quite functional to me (although I'm happy with many guidelines that others fight against).
Just my opinion on the topic.
Exactly - they might have something to gain by convincing others it is true for example.
There are non-nefarious reasons, too. If someone is unsure whether something is real they could upvote it to increase visibility and discussion.
According to HN guidelines, upvotes means something that sparks curiosity.
Then they are illogically boosting a hoax on purpose, or at least with reckless disregard for truth.
Or they want knowledge of the hoax to spread, so as to protect the victim against further lies?
Just because you don't consciously believe something to be true, doesn't mean you don't care about its veracity. The null hypothesis is that people are willing to treat things as true based on their priors — which could be informed by things as simple as "this was posted on a website not known as a den of misinformation, and shared on HN" — while not actually devoting thought to an investigation of the truth.
> "this was posted on a website not known as a den of misinformation, and shared on HN"
I don't know whether you mean Threads or Bluesky but it sounds like you haven't used either.
Yeah I have peeked into both and have never seen such a strident collection of vituperation, misinformation, and hatred. For people who claim to have left Twitter due to supposed toxicity, they definitely seem unacquainted with mirrors.
If your goal is to burn down tesla/musk, you logically promote everything remotely damaging.
And there are plenty rational reasons to have that goal.
It’s funny that I just read the thread on rationalism and then come back to this one and someone posted this flawed nonsense.
Or not engaging enough to come to any conclusion - just chuckle - upvote. Useful, but not idiots nor villains
Well I see it's flagged for now, and I was one of the flaggers.
IMO, at least by the time I saw it, there were more than enough red flags raised to say that having it on HN before more evidence is available is only flamebait.
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If Tesla weren't constantly attacked as a supposed shady company by NYT and the rest of the psyop propaganda machine it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes.
Totally not the actions of a shady company with cowboy culture built in from the top: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
If Tesla's owner didn't have a history of lying, and the company didn't have a history of attempting to evade legal disclosure obligations, people wouldn't think of it as a shady company.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Thank you for this comic. It addresses a feeling I experience a lot on the internet
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>Because it is on-brand with Musk behavior.
It really isn't. I said as much in the previous thread, but the part that elevates this past the typical petty Musk behavior was the accusation that the car was bricked while it was being driven. That goes way past anything Tesla or Musk has done before and could easily have killed someone. Doing that doesn't just require an asshole CEO, it would require incompetence of both the legal and technical folks at the company who would actually implement this type of haphazard remote disabling.
Pretty clear this was faked, but continuing the previous discussion, a vehicle lock doesn't have to be as dangerous as you're thinking.
I've implemented limp modes before and the easiest way is to prevent acceleration to over a certain speed without enabling regen. If you're already at highway speeds, you'll simply coast down to the limp speed and have plenty of time to pull over.
I suspect that wouldn't fall afoul of FMVSS either, but it's never come up for me.
>Pretty clear this was faked
Yet you were saying the opposite in that previous thread.
>I've implemented limp modes before and the easiest way is to prevent acceleration to over a certain speed without enabling regen. If you're already at highway speeds, you'll simply coast down to the limp speed and have plenty of time to pull over.
The video had the car stopped in the middle of traffic, so this wasn't the accusation being made. You are creating a hypothetical scenario in which the accusations are plausible rather than actually engaging with the accusations as they were made.
hmm, remember when Mercedes tried to fake how well their emergency assistance works and had their mics still on?
"Yeah I fell for the bait, but that says a lot about my political enemies"
Come on, you'd get laughed out of any other serious forum.
This is not what they are saying.
The original:
"Because it is on-brand with Musk behavior. If for example somebody would write that Mercedes bricked a car to an influencer, people would be skeptical because that would not be how Mercedes usually operates."
The paraphrase:
"Yeah I fell for the bait, but that says a lot about my political enemies."
Seems fair to me.
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This is Hacker News. There are some hive mind positions you just don't question. It's starting to feel like Reddit with a tech lean.
More like it's on brand with the fantastic delusions people have about Musk. In reality Tesla and Musk are very good about privacy and leaving control with the user. But, you do you.
This statement "Tesla and Musk are very good about privacy and leaving control with the user" is pretty clearly false [1]:
> between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
Like spying people on internal cameras and then sharing it?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
Claims of privacy and user control are mostly "trust" based. A car that can be controlled and surveilled remotely, will be controlled and surveilled remotely. To dissuade potential customers of that notion they require faith in independent public or private institutions and their ability to verify that attacks on their privacy and autonomy are not possible. That doesn't seem possible in the zero trust environment people like Musk are promoting. Musk is his own worst enemy.
>A car that can be controlled and surveilled remotely, will be controlled and surveilled remotely.
Fair point. The examples given elsewhere here are limited and very explainable cases of this, but I’d argue the overall stance of current management is good. Future management, it’s anyone’s guess, but I am just commenting what I see with current management as an owner of their cars.
Reminded of all those times that Musk had Tesla release crash details on X pinning the blame on the driver when it was in Tesla's interest to shift the blame for crashes. Yep, great commitment to privacy there.
You know what automakers don't do that? Literally every other automaker. When they release those kinds of details, they do so in response to a court proceeding as part of the legal discovery process so that privacy concerns, etc. can be dealt with before the information is released.
Plus, they supposedly had it turn off the automatic features just before it detected an imminent crash, ensuring that they could always correctly tell everyone that "Auto Pilot was off at the time of the crash". Of course, that doesn't mean that it wasn't used in the 20 seconds prior.
So, those details weren't actually insightful. They were just PR bullshit.
Everyone else is giving you examples as to why you have to be delusional to believe this so I'm not going to pile on but I've seen no evidence that Tesla and Musk are good in regards to handling privacy and user data but I've seen many examples that they are bad with it.
The examples given are easily explainable but I won’t bother. You’ve seen no evidence but you’ve heard a lot of anecdotes is unfortunately the normal case for the mainstream population.
Whenever you finish hovering above all of us I would love an explanation but sure.
Evolves further how? What do you expect might happen next?
As I said in that thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44860077), seems like a slam-dunk defamation case for Tesla (assuming they want to pursue it) if the whole thing was fabricated.
Nothing new under the sun. Remember when NBC admitted to rigging a truck to burst into flames in a crash for Dateline, because it wouldn't do it on its own? Or when a jury found that Consumer Reports lied about how easily an Isuzu pickup rolled over on turns?
But hey, the media probably wouldn't lie these days, and Musk bad man.
Just because other people are bad doesn't make Musk suddenly good
I'm the one who posted a similar post that wasn't removed. The actions of the ceo in the past would not make this event unreasonable imho
Given all the fake Tesla news and seemingly inexhaustible supply of Tesla haters, this was my first thought as well.
One of the richest people in the world has a billion dollar short position on Tesla. You can bet there is enormous might trying everything to rank the stock
Tesla's autonomous driving solution is 10 years overdue and the stock's PE ratio is almost 200. If Gates still has a short position, I am sure he is waiting silently.
I'm not sure which is more concerning: how easy it was to fall for it in the first place, or the mental gymnastics some are going through to place the blame outside themselves.
A lie is a lie, it does not matter how plausible it is. "No smoke without fire" is complete bullshit that leaves room only for cascading hatred.
In this case, there's definitive proof of it being a hoax, and news of it seems to be spreading. But how many more subtle falsehoods are being spread, ones that aren't as easily disproven? And how many perfectly plausible lies does it take for a narrative to become self-sustaining?
There is no shortage of real and verifiable things to be outraged about (Tesla-related or otherwise). Don't waste your headspace on anything less.
It really is concerning. I have a friend who went off the rails in the past couple years and is constantly sharing twitter rage bait. When things are proven to be fake news, it doesn't even phase him. It's like reality doesn't even matter, and maximizing outrage is the end goal.
> Tesla tweeted about the video, saying, “This is fake – that’s not our screen. Tesla does NOT disable vehicles remotely.”
I think the “does not” stands out to me more than “can not”. I’d rather keep my dumb car knowing it can’t be disabled remotely at all without something like an emp.
Dumb cars are like dumb TVs; you arent going to find any on the consumer market. All modern connected cars can be controlled remotely. Ford has even filed patents for remote shutoff for reposession purposes.
Its just how it is.
Ramzan Kadyrov got his hands on a Cybertruck, and it was disabled remotely. Asides from the trade embargo with Russia, Kadyrov also trolled Elon by thanking him personally, Telsa found it and turned it off: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/business/chechnya-kadyrov-mus...
It’s easy to be cynical specifically in this case, when Elon has in the past very gleefully amplified AI fakes to drum up social sentiment
I don't get it. Is the implication that Elon/Tesla/X specifically promoted/amplified the post?
I infer that the implication is "that's rich coming from Elon/Tesla" because Elon is not honest and amplifies misinformation often?
(not singling Elon out, he's one of many)
The implication is that Elon is a massive hypocrite for complaining when these dishonest tactics are used against him because he uses them all the time.
During election, Musk promoted a lot of deep fakes about Kamala Harris, including fake images generated using Grok. He's a total asshole.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/kamala-harris-de...
Here's the video - it was very obviously a parody.
https://x.com/MrReaganUSA/status/1816826660089733492
> - it was very obviously a parody.
Not to the stupid.
Here's another one:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/03/media/elon-musk-x-kamala-harr...
"couldn't have happened to a nicer guy"
The original post made front page of HN for a good while, whereas this correction post was dropped almost immediately to page 3, and now on page 4. This post is/was more recent, with more upvotes, than almost everything currently on the front page, yet it's hidden all the way down on page 4.
Lengthy comment sections full of flame wars, which controversial topics like fake news against Tesla often result in, tend to make the threads less visible on HN.
Wouldn’t that apply to the original post too?
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it”
- Jonathan Swift
This is why fake news is such an effective propaganda tool.
There are to this day many people who honestly believe untruths because the media repeated lies and half truths loudly, followed by quiet retractions when they got caught.
The fact that this deactivation feels possible is still a telling sign of where we’ve been heading. Update fail. Subscription lapsed payment. All sorts of new failure modes.
"The lie has value because it feels true" is one of the more disturbing trends I have seen gain traction on the internet in recent years. People are now unironically turning themselves in the Stephen Colbert character from The Colbert Report[1].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Yeah. I have noticed a disturbing amount of people believe fake stories, tweets, videos, propaganda etc. because it confirms their worldview or is otherwise fun. For example, the amount of people who thought dumb Republicans were dying from eating horse dewormer was way overblown. Or that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.
I have adopted an extremely skeptical view of almost all content on the internet now. Fun videos that are staged aren't particularly harmful. Something like "a crazy coincidence or wild prank" made to look real and genuine is not particularly sinister. I personally have briefly put way to much stock in a screenshot of a Tweet from an unattributed anonymous poster alleging X happened. Simply because "it feels true" and confirms my bias. Be careful out there kids!
I think it is troubling to say “the lie has value”, but it is worth thinking why certain stories and hoaxes resonate. It’s similar to how sci-fi and horror can reflect the anxieties of their contemporary society
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How about, "10-15 years ago such a scenario was completely implausible/impossible, and I find it disturbing that it is now completely plausible and possible"?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
It’s funny you bring up Colbert on this topic. His own narrative of why his show was cancelled is a lie that felt true to his fans.
It felt good to martyr him and say that he was cancelled for saying truth to power against President Trump. The truth is that his show was losing $40 million a year and only had traction with viewers that were outside the target advertising demographics.
This sort of thing has to be illegal, right? Not sure what it’s called, but it’s basically libel against a corporation. Can you just do that and it’s fine? If so I would expect it to happen all the time via competitors hiring agencies to lie in this sort of way, and AFAIK that doesn’t happen broadly, so it seems like something is preventing it, such as it being illegal.
I see trending interviews that seem fake now. Really curious to see what the Internet looks like in five years.
This is significantly less interesting than any of the dozens of nonsense conspiracy theories Musk repeatedly posts about. Why so much attention?
Damn that would be funny as hell if it was real
Darn. I really wanted it to be true
I frankly have very little sympathy for Tesla here. If you're going to "sell" people a computer and not give them root it's impossible for everyone else to tell if you're screwing around with it like that.
You want to be the admin for everyone else? Well you get the responsibility and emotional demands from everyone else too.
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HN also fell for the video at first, so let's not throw stones here.
Let's criticise HN too. It was fake, it was a fairly obvious fake, and HN should have known better.
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It is possible to dislike (or even hate) someone, without allowing yourself to be exploited. Apart from anything else, you are giving ammunition to the other side by doing so.
I can see why you fell for this hoax...
It's crazy that people would believe Elon's salute meant exactly what he wanted them to think. /sarcasm
Self-professed Nazis are probably the best judges of Nazi symbols, and they approved it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#F... The only other place it could have come from is a "Roman salute" which was used by other fascists who killed hundreds of thousands; is that any more defensible than Nazi?
I'll grant you he is probably not a Nazi in any organized way. And he probably meant it more as a troll than an earnest profession. But if he talks like a Nazi, salutes like a Nazi, donates to the party cheering on concentration camps for minorities and crying about fake Nazi-esque "white genocides"... maybe he's just a Nazi in denial that he's a Nazi.
I hear the best way to tell if someone's a Nazi is to dunk them in a pond and see if they float.
If he's at the shore of the pond and tells the crowd a series of Nazi-themed puns, you can skip the dunking. He's so committed to making you think he's a Nazi, it doesn't matter any more whether he thinks he's being ironic; he's a Nazi supporter either way.
What? I didn't even hear about this until this post. Crazy projection.
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Is this how people are going to water down and re-brand "dog-whistle"? Get it to stop meaning "coded political messaging" and have it mean "indicator"? Regardless of whether you agree with GP or not, there was nothing coded about what they were saying.
> Regardless of whether you agree with GP or not, there was nothing coded about what they were saying.
I honestly weren’t aware of that particular distinction. Thanks for the clarification.
A dog whistle is something a dog can hear. If you can hear the dog-whistle, then you're one of the dogs in question.
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> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell, 1984.
You've been told that Trump and Musk are Nazis for almost 10 years now. Drip-fed for ten years as the "evidence" of your eyes and ears.
It turned out that in the late 2010s, the "party" wasn't a monolith. It was every identikit left of centre news organisation saying exactly the same thing in lockstep for years. And then finally the newest "evidence" appeared and so everyone thought "I knew it!" When in fact they didn't know it. They just believed everything they saw and heard on a television screen.
Not sure what you're even talking about, but you should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
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You should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
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It's hilarious how that's pretty much true, only you have to define "bad" as "ideologically different" and you're set. Anyone disagreeing with the userbase in any contentious topic, well, they are just evil, that's all.,
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When you step away from the internet things are much better. Internet is a toxic place.
That is very much not the current situation in the USA. You need to take a long break from politics; this is just another administration. In 2028 we will have an election, there will be a new president, and things will be just fine.
... except for all of the destruction wrought on our societal and government institutions. The other half of the problem is that the milquetoast "liberals" have stopped building things as well, and so it's not like our institutions are going to be getting rebuilt after this. We will have a new "president" in name mostly, with even more of our rights ceded to the unaccountable corpos. And then when people are bored of the relative stability in another four or eight years, they'll vote in destructionists again and we'll be back to the performative spectacles of cruelty.
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Surely there are more than two stances that can be had on issues?
Plus I still remember that time a certain journalist entered the platform and people completely lost their shit, making up pedophilia allegations, demanding him to be banned, publishing the location of his residence and instigating violence against him.
Was this a "struggle against evil"?
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Nazis weren't bad because they saluted in that way. They were bad because they were a high-authoritarian, socialist, racism bunch of warmongering killers. Their salute is the silliest thing to worry about. It's like thinking if someone grew a Hitler moustache that that would be the worst thing ever. It's actually the most superficial thing ever, for superficial thinking only. The next evil won't look like the last one. In fact the next, and greater, evils were Stalin and Mau, and it's somehow fine to salute like them, or call your kid Joseph, or peddle communism in universities.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe you only think that's true and see everything through that lense.
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Fakes become believable when they are on-brand and match people's existing expectations, in this case about a company. I would totally expect petty, retaliatory behavior from a company run by a petty, retaliatory guy. So a forgery totally bypasses my usual "bullshit detector". This is a human weakness that a lot of people, admittedly including myself, are vulnerable to.
Precisely. If it had been a Honda or a Ford would folks have found it as plausible?
Yes, and the comments would have been nearly the same less the ones specifically referring to Musk.
That said, if you'd hav picked Toyota or Volvo when writing your comment you'd be correct. Those OEMs could literally put coal rolling diesels backed by Nissan CVTs in Yugo chassis and the "everything I know about cars I learned from internet comments and car-mags in my dentist waiting room" crowd would defend them.
Amazing that people like you are still defending the story.
Its telling about your bias, not Tesla or Musk.
I don't see where I am defending the story. I'm even admitting that it was fake and that I fell for it! You're barking up the wrong tree.
You fell for a hoax. End of.
Or it should be. Instead you blame the victims of the hoax for your inability to discern something is a hoax (and a pretty obvious one).
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We didn't need a fake incident to "tell" us about Tesla's reputation. We already knew that. It's "telling" us zero bits of new information.
Tired of car manufacturers doing politics, and this goes for all of them. Well, for all companies. Just make goods and shut up, dammit.
Both customers and employees put pressure on companies to take sides on particular issues.
I can see the rationale behind it but it has very dysfunctional and unhealthy outcomes.
Other then Tesla which car companies are doing politics beyond the usual "donate to both sides" thing?
Tesla, due to Musk, is an absolute outlier here.
Gaywashing and greenwashing for example, which almost all (all?) legacy car companies engage in in some capacity.
> Telling though, isn't it? I mean the degree to which this is so instantly believable.
It's telling on the users in question and their relationship with reality.
You're ignoring the "X" and "Reddit" and focusing purely on Bluesky. Your post here is a good example of confirmation bias in itself, and it's sad that you're not realising it.
I do realise it. I agree they also have this; every group of people of size 1 or greater has it. But X and Reddit are much broader churches with fewer universal biases than BlueSky.
> It's telling on the users in question and their relationship with reality.
It’s telling to Tesla’s brand reputation. This will take decades and billions of dollars to repair, if it even can be fixed.
Tesla may become synonymous with cars-as-internet-of-shit. Same as how Italian cars to this day are the butt of every reliability joke. This reputation has followed them since the 90’s. British cars are synonymous with cheap construction – a reputation they built in the 70’s.
Stuff like this can be forever.
The question is why certain people found believable in the first place. "May become synonymous" implies they're not already, in which case this instance wouldn't be believable.
In reality, people who believed this probably think Elon is a petty tyrant and don't like his politics. I agree with them, especially on the first point. The difference is that they either allow this to overwhelm their critical thinking skills, or never had any to begin with.
> why certain people found believable in the first place
Because Tesla’s brand perception is that of a shady company who would do something like this and nobody would be surprised. How they built that reputation I don’t know, lots of little things over the years.
Sure, it's not true, but the fact that I believed it could be true pretty much confirms that Elon is evil, does it not?
You mean X users, right?
You are doing the thing from the comic! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Tesla has a PR problem. I'm not sure that is what the comic is addressing.
There's something of a difference between the abstract presentation there and the much more tangible brand problem Tesla has. If this was a Ford nobody would believe it. They might argue it broke down. If it was a Toyota nobody would believe that.
But Elon Musk has made himself the face of Tesla, used that power in other contexts to go after critics, and the Cybertruck had a bizarre anti resale clause when released and Tesla have made a habit of features-as-a-service with remote software deactivations when other vehicles are resold.
So in the specific case here, the reaction very much represents a big brand sentiment problem attributable to concrete issues.
There's kind of a fine line between "that this went viral shows that Tesla has a brand problem" (a logically valid argument) and "that I found this believable shows that Tesla is bad" (what the comic is about). The top-level comment did not go super-far out of its way to distinguish between the two, which I think is generally worth doing if you're making an argument that sounds similar to a common fallacy.
What an interesting way of thinking.
More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.
Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
Except it wasn't instantly believable. Which is why there were a large number of comments on the previous thread (including my own) saying this was almost certainly fake.
Believable to who?
Surely there were a bunch of automotive engineers on Reddit getting downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that this doesn't pass a sniff test because it arguably violates subsection 69 of FMVSS 420 or that they don't need to do that because industry standard is to just prevent the car from starting next time, or whatever.