About five or six years ago I spent a long time making outrageous claims on Reddit, and I'd wrap various parts of it in link tags. The links would go to random nytime articles, random papers, or simply nowhere at all. Then I'd watch as the outrageous claim propagated (this in niche communities). It was absolutely terrifying.
I never, ever got called out.
EDIT: I'm remembering now I'd pretend to be all sorts of people, swapping hats within minutes, always waiting for someone to just pop open my post history and see that at one moment I'm a teacher and 5 minutes later a firefighter. It was kind of a joke, kind of an experiment, kind of an angsty setting-of-fire to the internet.
When I was in university one of my friends tried to win a bet at a bar by editing a Wikipedia page to add the outrageous claim he made. At first my trust in Wikipedia increased because it got removed in less then an hour. The next day it decreased, because he registered a free blog account, published one post with his outrageous claim in it (and basically nothing else), then edited Wikipedia again adding the blog as a source. That edit stayed up for years. He still tells that story when drinking with friends...
They also have an inherent information theoretic advantage over non-outrageous claims when consumed by someone who is unable to discern their veracity.
Could you expand on that? Are you saying the more outrageous a claim it's the more likely people are to believe it? That itself sounds like an outrageous claim to me, so I would like to see evidence for it.
> the "informational value" of a communicated message depends on the degree to which the content of the message is surprising [0]
Of course, this assumes the message is factual. If it's not factual then the message carries no information (aside from the information it implies about the sender). But, that assumes the receiver is able to discern whether or not the message is factual. If the receiver can't discern that, then it simply appears to be a highly informative message.
False outrageous claims have the further advantage that they are unconstrained by reality. True surprising claims are by nature less likely to occur. That's why they're surprising. But there is no probabilistic throttle on false outrageous claims - one can generate them at whatever frequency they desire.
Thus, false outrageous claims have an information theoretic advantage over true claims because they outnumber true surprising claims, and they appear to be more informative than true unsurprising claims. My argument isn't that the more outrageous a claim is, the more likely people are to believe it, per se. My argument is that outrageous claims get more attention from people because they are less likely, and those who are unable to discern that they are false will simply see them as highly informative.
You could probably argue further that the more frequently an outrageous claim is repeated, the less improbable it will sound. In other words, start with an outrageous claim to get peoples attention, and then repeat it a lot to normalize it and reduce doubt about it's validity.
"Another topic is derived from things which are thought to happen but are incredible, because it would never have been thought so, if they had not happened or almost happened. And further, these things are even more likely to be true; for we only believe in that which is, or that which is probable: if then a thing is incredible and not probable, it will be true; for it is not because it is probable and credible that we think it true."
Aristotle, Rhetoric 2:23 (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...)
Just because 1 side doesn't provide evidence doesn't mean the other side is correct. If neither side provides evidence then neither side is necessarily correct.
And in the absence of evidence, generally the simplest (common sense) explanation should be presumed most likely (Hanlon's Razor).
I never, ever got called out.
EDIT: I'm remembering now I'd pretend to be all sorts of people, swapping hats within minutes, always waiting for someone to just pop open my post history and see that at one moment I'm a teacher and 5 minutes later a firefighter. It was kind of a joke, kind of an experiment, kind of an angsty setting-of-fire to the internet.