MetaChat - I love Gullible.info.

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19 June 2006

I love Gullible.info. The theory: people will believe/quote any kind of statistical information or trivia they come across, without checking for accuracy - or even noting the url where they found the info. →[More:]

Worse, after googling a bit, I find most people will even link to gullible.info as the source of their amazing "fact", or use the handy-dandy "Display a random Gullible.info fact" to guilessly publish an unending stream of disinformation to their blog. At least Metafilter didn't let me down.

Here's a short NYT story about the site and its creator.

(This post obviously inspired by loquacious' great deleted askme. You can join the resulting debunkathon here.)

post by: taz at: 04:00 | 6 comments

Members of Gullible do not try to plant fake information on the web in any direct way, btw; they merely manufacture facts that they publish onsite, then wait to see where it goes.

As an example, The Guardian and Wikipedia get snared by a bit of Timothy Leary foolishness:

snip:

How to Manufacture Reality in the Information Age

1. After the release of the .info domain, have a flash of insight and register gullible.info.

2. Brainstorm a few concepts. Settle on posting fake trivia just to see if people are so stupid as to completely ignore even the domain name of their online information sources.

3. Recruit a few college friends to submit fake facts everyday. Quickly realize through e-mail query that people are indeed so stupid as to completely ignore even the domain name of their online information sources.

4. Have one of your friends use the "random article" button on Wikipedia for inspiration when creating new facts.

5. Have him stumble across the article on counter-culture guru Timothy Leary.

6. Have your friend post a fact about how Leary claimed to have seen a new primary color he called "gendale."

6. Watch as someone updates the Leary entry on Wikipedia to add the information about the new primary color.

7. Have a lazy reporter from the Guardian use the Wikipedia entry on Leary for research on an article about an upcoming film on Leary's life.

8. Watch the folks at Wikipedia delete the information because it has no citation.

9. Watch the fact published in the Guardian.

10. Watch the fact, now with a source, go right back up on Wikipedia.

posted by taz 19 June | 04:01

Here's site-owner Kyle's story of the genesis of Gullible, including some amusing reader mail excerpts.

posted by taz 19 June | 04:18

The Chinese version of Google links to at least 12,000 pages of United States government information that is illegal to disseminate in the U.S., and is thus not indexed by the American version of the search engine.

Priceless. There's a fact I'm going to start using.

posted by seanyboy 19 June | 05:03

• Creator Marc Cherry has acknowledged that the Desperate Housewives are loosely based on the characters from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

Hee!

This is too good. We'll have to make a fun post for creating our own factoids.

posted by taz 19 June | 05:23

Wow - what a gold nugget!

posted by chewatadistance 19 June | 07:03

Wikipedia doesn't think that's funny.

posted by stilicho 19 June | 10:51

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