In the early days of the web, card tricks like this one from crazycardtrick.com were common.
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Go ahead, pick a card. Once you've selected one, scroll to the bottom of this page to see how the website magically picked out yours. How did it do that?
This trick exploits how difficult it is to notice omissions because it's not just your chosen card that was omitted, all of them were.
I thought about this card trick a lot yesterday when I was reading extreme right news stories about the Trump assassination attempt. Misinformation still bothers me, but I've gazed on so much of it that I'm starting to appreciate when it's done well which is a strange feeling. Let me explain...
How hard is it really to create misinformation? All you have to do is just say something that is false. But the more interesting question is how do you create *viral misinformation*? How do you create misinformation in such a way that when the accused tries to fight back against it, they have no choice but to make it seem even more true? How do you create misinformation that strangely gets repeatedly confirmed by reality?
I want to show you an example that came up recently in the assassination attempt by Donald Trump. There was an extreme right-wing newspaper that I will leave unnamed with a headline claiming the secret service were instructed to stand down when the shooter was spotted.
That's what I call the lazy variety of manipulation Because it's just making something up and that's about all there is to it. But then further down the article there's this:
> “footage of the snipers pointing their guns at the assassin but refusing to pull their trigger, deliberately allowing Trump to remain in the direct line of fire, had pundits on X asking “why didn’t they shoot him first?”
This is one of countless examples of well-crafted pieces of manipulation, specifically because of three things.
1. Lying as close to the truth as possible.
2. Rather than making an allegation, they cause the reader to look beyond the allegation as if it is already an established fact.
3. It ends with a question to *postulate what has yet to be proved*.
The claim is false of course. Yet as it happens, you might see this description coming to life if you review the footage. We do see a sniper fully positioned looking through their scope, pointing outwards well before the shots begin. That's what I mean by being close to the truth. It's important to have this for a conspiracy theory to spread.
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Hey this sounds easy now, let's try creating some home made manipulation right now, just like Nanna used to make. Remember the 1-2-3: Lie close to the truth, talk beyond the allegation, and close with a leading question.
So a simpler example is that instead of saying,
> “Adam took cookies out of the cookie jar,”
we say,
> “Why does the White House **not want to acknowledge** Adam’s theft of cookies from the cookie jar?”
> “How did Adam **manage to conceal** the cookie after taking it from the cookie jar?”,
> “How did **investigators miss** the inventory count of the cookies in the cookie jar after Adam’s theft?”
These kinds of phrasings, like the card trick, play with the human mind’s tendency to miss omissions. It requires effort on our part to go back and question the information we’re given to say, “But did Adam actually steal from the cookie jar? Do we know this? What are other people saying?”
But the leading question is the subtle but powerful detail. Instead of saying, “Adam was found guilty of stealing from the cookie jar,” we ask, “Never mind that. Why did he do it, and how did he conceal it, and how did investigators miss this?” It shifts our attention to a later part in the story, making us think that the previous chapters have already been established.
By the way, I don’t necessarily think people are being clever when they do this. I think this can happen naturally because it is much easier and much more interesting of a path to take, to take one’s own misunderstanding and assume there is a conspiracy at foot that explains the misunderstanding rather than one’s own ignorance.
I’m told that the earth is round, but when I look out over the horizon, everything looks flat. From there, I could take on a lot of effort to try to understand curves and objects that exist at a significantly larger scale than the everyday round objects that I’m used to dealing with (the Earth and planets) But if someone instead tells me NASA wants me to think that that horizon that you can plainly see with your own eyes is actually coming from a big round planet, which is counterintuitive, it’s going to be easy for some people to latch onto the idea that how they perceive reality is exactly how it is and that NASA is corrupt and trying to pull one over on us.
And so back to the Trump assassination, if in my reality, Republicans are good and Democrats are bad, then when something bad happens to the leader of my tribe, I need to see information that’s going to fit my perception: The left is bad and the right is good. And the narrative that the left is the villain and the right is the victim is just ripe for the taking. So there is very little mental effort needed for me to read something like, "why did the sniper allow it to take place?" And fill in the easy conclusions that have been teed up for me from the beginning.
Anyway, here's the rest of that card trick:
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