

Slate's experiment on implanting false memories - jessekeys
http://www.slate.com/id/2254054

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boredguy8
The far more insidious manifestation of 'false memories':

"But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad handshake? There's no question of a true
incident being misremembered: The two men have never been physically close
enough to be photographed together. (We searched for them in Google Images and
gave up after scanning 500 results.)"

That presence or absence on Google Images is sufficient to constitute proof.
Which isn't to say Obama's secretly shaking hands in underground bunkers. I
am, however, interacting more and more with people who seem to think that if
they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist.

~~~
nkohari
In this case, I'd say the photograph would be newsworthy enough to be run all
over the mainstream media, and indexed extensively by Google.

~~~
boredguy8
1) Hence the broader point that such 'verification' extends far beyond this
picture, which I agree would be noteworthy;

2) The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close
enough to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a
camera was around.

3) It ignores the broader social context in which Google is the funnel through
which information exists. If the ministry of truth wants to rewrite history,
they'll do so by manipulating what Google results are available. The entire
point of the article is how history can be manipulated, and then succumbs to
verification via a source that can, in fact, be manipulated. That is, imagine
a picture was taken, and you're sitting here thinking, "I really thought those
two met." If verification constitutes, "Is it on Google?" then the task of
changing history is pretty easy.

~~~
jerf
"The lack of a picture doesn't mean the two were never physically close enough
to be photographed together. It just means they were never so when a camera
was around."

I see what you're trying to say here, but you've picked a terrible example.
The probability that these men would meet and there would _not_ be cameras
around is negligible. Non-zero, I concede, but in a Bayesian world absence of
evidence is indeed evidence of absence, under the right circumstances. (The
conventional phrasing is wrong, it ought to read "Absence of evidence is not
_100% proof_ of absence", which scans much less well but is actually correct;
the phrase is intrinsically Aristotelian.)

~~~
boredguy8
You're still missing the point. Google has censored results before, and future
censoring would lead to the types of dystopic scenarios outlined in the
beginning of the article. I'm not about to get into a debate about the
relative probabilities of a picture existing or not. In part, because just-so
stories abound on either side. But more fundamentally: it's not the point of
the selection in my first post.

~~~
hugh3
I think you're getting carried away with the part of the article where it says
that they verified they'd never met by checking google.

The historical fact is that these two have never publicly met. They already
were pretty certain they knew this, but checked google just to be absolutely
sure. Doing an image search is a lot easier than doing a text search since
there's an awful lot of articles which mention them both and it would be too
hard to sort through the guff.

That doesn't mean you can fool people into thinking that something never
happened just by removing all pictures of it from google image search.
(Removing pictures would of course be a necessary but not sufficient step for
anyone wanting to remove something from history.)

------
anigbrowl
Interesting. On a somewhat related note, the technique of film editing has
been heavily influenced by early Russian artists; Lev Kuleshov discovered that
audiences' perception of what occurred in identical segments of footage was
heavily influenced by the context in which it was viewed.

Stalin later suppressed the output of these early filmmakers, objecting to the
idea of formalism (but was happy to have his propaganda people indirectly
employ the technique to political ends).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Experiment>

~~~
mturmon
The book "The Commissar Vanishes" presents bunch of before-and-after
photographs in which various of Stalin's associates and henchmen are removed
from photos after they become persona non grata. Some examples:

[http://tfustudios.blogspot.com/2009/11/commissar-
vanishes.ht...](http://tfustudios.blogspot.com/2009/11/commissar-
vanishes.html)

The first photo above shows an eerie example: So many of the commissars have
been removed from the official history, that Stalin is alone in the photo.

------
hugh3
_Four of the fake incidents were tainted by essential truths. Lieberman did
rebuke President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Cheney did rebuke Sen.
John Kerry for mentioning Cheney's lesbian daughter, though not until well
after the vice presidential debate. Bush was in Crawford during Hurricane
Katrina. And Republicans did distribute a Jeremiah Wright ad. These truths may
have confused some of our subjects. But what about the Obama-Ahmadinejad
handshake? There's no question of a true incident being misremembered: The two
men have never been physically close enough to be photographed together._

Actually this one has a genuine incident with which it might have been
confused as well. There was a several-day controversy during the Presidential
campaign about whether Obama _would_ be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad if he
became President. It occupied a large slice of one of the Obama/McCain
debates. Obama's position that he would be willing to meet with Ahmadinejad
"without preconditions" was controversial and widely debated. So one might
easily misremember that controversy as a controversy about a real, rather than
hypothetical, meeting.

(In fact the meeting that Obama promised he'd be willing to attend never
occurred, but I'm not sure whether this was because Obama changed his mind or
whether Ahmadinejad turned out not to have any desire to meet anyway.)

------
btilly
Old news. We've known for decades about how easy it is to implant false
memories, and bad therapy has caused millions needless suffering by implanting
really horrible false memories. Between the memories, and the fallout from
false accusations, this ranks as one of the biggest disasters in psychology in
the last hundred years.

See <http://www.fmsfonline.org/> for more.

------
jackfoxy
The experiment write-up would have benefited from graphic representation of
the results.

------
Jimmy
Breaking News: If you lie, people will sometimes believe you. Details at 11.

~~~
tzs
No, if you lie, people will sometimes believe you because they think you are
telling them something they already knew.

Big difference.

