11/21/2023

I was listening to a podcast called Hidden Brain at work on Monday. Hidden Brain, per their website, "explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world".
The program began with a story concerning a woman browsing Google Street View and looking at her mother's home. As the story progressed she talked about how the street view image was from 2009. Google Street View began in 2007. It was a night shot and she saw the light on in the window of her mother who died in 2018 or some such shit. "OMG IT'S LIKE SHE'S STILL ALIVE!". Right then and there I stopped playing the episode and marked it as played.
Google Street View cars only do their images during clear days. There are a few night shots out there but overall the imagery is daytime imagery.
Work's been slow so I googled, found a story about her story and that article had a stock image of a house at night rather than a screenshot. Found the writer's Twitter account but I didn't want to wade through her tweets until I found the original thread in hopes of seeing a screenshot verifying her shitpost.

The egregious bit is the host, and presumably the show's producers, swallowed the tale as being gospel making this some deluded Oprah-tier shit. Plus it appears lots of people online swallowed the yarn as being true rather than fiction. I'm very disappointed that a seemingly intelligent progam can be so pants-on-head retarded.
Bad enough I was naïve listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, swallowed it whole, then got sick when I learned about the terrible research and cherry-picking by Malcolm Gladwell.

This isn't the first time NPR has played a role in disseminating horseshit. This American Life had a story back in the day in an episode entitled Superpowers. It's an interesting listen but seems too good to be true. There's a wonderful breakdown of why this episode is full of shit, how Kelly McEvers is a liar yet still works for NPR.

In a similar vein is the mystery behind Greg Egan. Greg Egan is an Australian hard science fiction author who is notoriously reclusive and states there are no photographs of him on the internet. One other person made such a declaration, Cecil Adams of the Chicago Reader, and it was handily revealed Cecil Adams is not a real person but a pseudonym for Ed Zotti or whomever took up the job contributing to The Straight Dope. I'm sure it'd be easy to suss out Greg Egan's identity and prove he's a shared pseudonym among a cadre of science fiction authors.
On the other hand, Egan might be an artificial intelligence.
On the gripping hand, Egan might be an extraterrestrial writing non-fiction from his homeworld yet it's considered to be fiction here on Earth.