For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.
Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.
You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”
Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.
The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory.
If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
>Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
If you think for yourself, this doesn't really matter.
>If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
You keep mentioning this stuff from a liberal perspective but conservatives and free thinkers have been fighting this fight on social media for years as policies they disagreed with were promoted unilaterally and everything else was censored and suppressed. People were at risk of losing their jobs and being sent into exile over not wanting to take a vaccine. "My body, my choice" doesn't count when it comes to that.
The information economy is full of shills and AI bots, but that does not in and of itself prevent you from finding your own reliable sources of information. Censorship would stop you from finding it, however. Mandatory online ID would also hurt the flow of sincerely communicated information.
The Republican Party is essentially merged with a media conglomerate. The media conglomerate is able to avoid dealing with accuracy by simply moving onto the next story constantly.
They found a free market way to pervert the marketplace of ideas.
I highly recommend the book, it’s pretty comprehensive, and at this point I am beyond tired having to argue the same case, its permutations and combinations and having to restart from square one each time.
People better than me have put the effort to explain how you are being circumvented.
I am not telling you not to fight the good fight, I am telling you that you were accounted for and made redundant without tripping your alarms.
It’s easy to fight me, or argue with me, because I am a comment on a screen.
I don’t know if you are someone who leans towards research and analysis first, or action first.
Either way, the best answer and data gathering in one place is in that boring ass book.
>The Republican Party is essentially merged with a media conglomerate.
>They found a free market way to pervert the marketplace of ideas.
I'm not going to argue with you that the Republican Party has no friendly media. But 80% of the media has a Democrat bias, to the point of shamelessly calling Republicans Nazis. Don't get me started on Hollywood, which is also overwhelmingly biased toward Democrats. The fact that you are oblivious to this is depressing.
>Either way, the best answer and data gathering in one place is in that boring ass book.
I appreciate that you think the book is a good one, but I can just turn on the news and see the biases of each individual outlet on display. I don't need to read a boring ass book complaining about biases from a biased perspective, when I can simply look at what each media agency puts out and figure out what their agenda is. I think you aren't pessimistic enough about the state of the media, because you're ascribing a monopoly on bias to a group that decidedly does not own it. Where was all this skepticism over the last, oh, 10 or 20 years?
Read it. For the love of god. I genuinely dont care if you are Red or Blue. I care that you have the technical ability to understand modern media tactics. It is well past things like bias.
Fight team blue for all its worth - just be aware of how modern information suppression is being achieved.
>I care that you have the technical ability to understand modern media tactics. It is well past things like bias.
I understand what they do very well. I'm at the point where if the media says it's raining, I go look outside.
I truly wonder if you know how modern suppression is achieved. I've been witnessing it for many years now. If you didn't already know, social media outlets like Twitter had backdoor access for government employees, where practically anyone who had access could request to infringe on their fellow citizens' First Amendment rights. They would throttle and ban people with as few as dozens of followers/subscribers. Liberals were very much of the "It's not happening but it's a good thing" attitude the whole time, like they do with every concern from the other side. Look at the tyrannical censorship, disarmament, surveillance, and financial oppression taking shape all over the Western world. Our "allies" are doing trial runs, and the "elites" have the same intentions for us stubbornly independent Americans.
If you want to go down another rabbit hole on this topic, look up Operation Mockingbird.
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
We've had many of these trust-destroying events in the past, before the Iraq war, but their effects were limited. What we didn't have back then, and what I'd argue brought us Trump and RFK Jr., was a world-wide information-distributing machine and a megaphone in every idiot's (and malevolent foreign actor's) pocket. We're here because anger, belligerence, conspiracies, distrust, hatred, and ignorance are being deliberately spread on Internet platforms by 1. adversaries motivated to destabilize the country and destroy its institutions, and 2. domestic idiots who help to spread it (and make a buck off of its popularity).
I used to think that "platforming everyone" was a noble goal, but we're seeing the results.
I think that's underselling the importance of massive media consolidation and deregulation since the Reagan years in bringing us to where we are today.
If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
The myriad effects of deregulation and massive consolidation that have cascaded in the past ~40 years (fewer companies owned by wealthier people, the destruction of local news, the erosion of norms protecting journalistic integrity, etc) are, IMO, very clearly hugely to blame for the modern state of political discourse. I'm not saying the internet didn't have an effect—it could hardly fail to; it's an enormous change in our world overall—but I have a very hard time seeing it as being more detrimental than these changes in how media companies operate.
> If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
I think the problem is that what you're describing is no longer a viable business model.
Back when there were only at most a half dozen or so news sources (newspapers and TV stations) in each major market, it didn't make sense for any one of those sources to lean hard left or right because that would only alienate a significant portion of the market.
Today, any given individual has access to thousands of different sources of "news", and everyone chooses to listen to only those sources that confirm their existing opinions. To me, that seems more than sufficient to explain a lot of things, including a lack of widespread agreement on basic facts.
Objective reality is frequently very nuanced, but nuance is a PITA when it comes to comprehension, so people tend to very much avoid it (knowingly or not).
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
> subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed
But that's also not what happened.
What we did is buy back junk assets from banks to keep the banks from going under. The only way it really "subsidized" mortgages is in that it kept banks afloat which allowed them to keep issuing mortgage loans.
People, particularly people that fell for predatory lending, still lost their homes. The people that were mostly aided by the bailout were investors who bought snake oil mortgage backed securities which had fake credit ratings applied to them.
And the reason people take a dim view on this is because it really was only people with significant assets in the first place that saw a benefit from these government interventions. A direct result of the regulation was it became a lot harder for a few years to get a home loan unless you had significant assets behind you.
That's not to say some percentage of these interventions didn't help everyone. It's always messy. But it is saying that a lot of people would have been in a much better situation had the government, instead of bailing out the banks and investors, taken that same money and given it directly to the citizenry. Even the banks and investors would have ultimately been in a better position as people would have ultimately taken that money and spent it on things like their mortgages which they fell behind on.
There were specific mortgage subsidies as part of tarp. For instance the making homes affordable and hardest hit fund programs.
But beyond that if the mortgages had been sold at market prices many of them would have been snapped up by companies that aggressively went after the secured properties. That’s the _natural_ outcome of letting the market action happen. More people would have been put out of their homes.
I’m fairly ambivalent on tarp. I think letting actors take risky actions and get bailed out creates a moral hazard. But that applies to mortgage holders who were over extended and auto workers who get bailed out ahead of other stake holders too. I can see a strong argument that we should have biased that way, but to say we didn’t help “regular” people is just false narrative.
It's a biased narrative, but perception of truth is equivalent to truth when it comes to trust, and multiple factors make this narrative compelling than more nuanced ones
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
> because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
I think this gets lost somewhat in the distance between how conservatives describe themselves and how they actually behave. They cry the loudest about some vague "FREEDOM!" but are actively cheering on the blatant violation of human rights in the country. They pretend to be "individualists" but go out of their way to make fun of and ostracize people who don't conform to their version of "normal". Practically every position they state is directly contradicted by the things they support. They get to carry this "fiscally responsible" badge despite never once being accountable for delivering on that promise. Their entire ideology is based on lies and bad faith and it shows by the people they keep electing.
>We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn
Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.
There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.
If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
Yes! The DoD uses the military to test novel vaccines with service members. That is part of the “some workers” because you’re being deployed worldwide to new situations.
In Court, it was ruled that vaccination could not be forced on military personnel without a special order by the president. Thereafter it ran into and judicial obstacles (mainly concerning the methods and viability of the vaccine).
You know, unsurprisingly these claims are almost always heavy on rhetoric but offer no references or data to back up the assertion beyond a had wavy 'everyone knows'.
You are not being honest, but you are trying to your best to undermine the idea of honesty.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
> You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.
The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.
You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.
It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian.
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...
Whatever else I might be arguing about here, let me first express how much I HATE those headlines and video titles with "destroys", "obliterates", etc. I'd much rather see something about "coming to a common understanding".
So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.
The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).
We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)
I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
Everyone has the right to question scientific findings.
If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.
Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.
Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.
Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said:
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it".
I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory.
We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else.
There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).
And these are the examples people bring up eeeeevery time they want to claim that we must listen to the cranks and the nutjobs! Think of all the amazing, important science we would be missing if we didn't!!!
But that's poor logic.
Those few instances are, by far, the exception. They're the ones you know about because they are so exceptional. But they are one in a million. Literally. Possibly even rarer.
And, frankly, your argument doesn't even hold up if they were more common. Because what's the common feature of those, that you yourself highlight? They were mocked. They were ignored. They were laughed at.
And yet, their ideas still caught on, because they were right. Only because they were right.
What this tells me is that, even if we do fully shut the cranks and the conspiracy theorists out of the scientific conversation, the one in a million (or hundred million) that actually find something real will get heard, because their ideas will prove to be right. They may not get credit for them—they might, instead, be credited to an actual scientist in the field who heard it two years later, from a friend of a friend of a friend with no clear attribution, tried it out, and found that it worked—but the truth will out.
I don't even know how to understand the latter part of your reply. I don't understand how you can argue that we should FULLY (and I take that word from you) shut out those who appear to be cranks because, through some magic, their argument will win out because it has some magical property that will make it heard despite the only one speaking it being gagged.
Your comment wins the internet, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned. Your three examples of scientific tenacity are wonderful. We all benefited from these heroic efforts in the face of dogmatic establishment Science. And your comment reminds us of how valuable that lone "voice from the wilderness" can become.
A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.
The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.
The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.
I'm not saying I agree with them. I'm saying that they're not the ones committing the original sin, and that I can empathize - I understand why they feel betrayed.
> Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
The average person doesn’t have the time or intellect to do this. This isn’t a realistic way for society to function. Trust is the most important thing for a public institution, and ours failed spectacularly there. Claiming the vaccine had a 99% efficacy, flip flopping on masks, etc. Massive hubris that should have been handled with a “here’s the best we know, but our confidence isn’t high enough to make definitive statements yet”.
Trust is a necessity. Without that there is no debating merits.
> Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
Religious groups often employ the same rhetoric: Pretend to be victims, mocked and ostracized, which pulls at the heartstrings of people who themselves are (or believe they are) mocked and ostracized. Some of the largest and most powerful organized religions in the world have this exact kind of persecution complex at the heart of their scripture and sermons.
A lot of vaccine companies also made a lot of money from Covid-19, even when some of the vaccines were later judged shoddy or outlawed by some countries.
One perspective is that the quality and issues of vaccines can vary. Some have more side-effects than others, and some have more issues than others.
Like one specific polio-vaccine that very rarely can mutate into a contagious variant [0]. Or one vaccine for chickens that had some rather serious overall issues [1]. Or that some of the Covid-19 vaccines, hastily developed, were rejected by some countries, while other Covid-19 vaccines were accepted by those same countries.
And vaccines demand a huge amount of trust. Vaccines can be abused in lots of ways by governments, organizations and individuals [2]. This is extra unfortunate, considering the huge potential benefits of some variants of vaccines. Vaccines also require trust in competence and public control [3]. For urgency reasons, standards and checking of vaccines were lowered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are also often administered to healthy individuals, not merely sick individuals.
> Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek's is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented.
No, it wasn't, and these extremely marginal results got way too much attention compared to the millions of results showing all the valuable results from broad vaccination.
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight.
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
You're either mistaking me for someone else or massively projecting - that was my only comment in this thread, and it was nothing but a neutral request for sources. You can't expect to win anyone over with personal attacks followed by "it's obvious".
If you were to give me a truly compelling argument/source, I would still consider it, as with anything. I don't trust the government and I don't put it past the "establishment" to systematically lie about something, but that doesn't mean there's no burden of proof on the other side.
Of all the comments, you chose to engage on my deep one and chose what perhaps you thought was the weakest assertion to challenge, which was the covid vaccines failed to innoculate.
That was enough of a signal that I assumed you were a proponent. Was there projection? Some, but talking past the sale is a persuasion technique and I wasn't in the mood to argue.
"So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
'Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.'"[1]
Really? Fauci understood that masks were effective for health care workers. Instead of saying we want to reserve them for health care workers, he downplayed their effectiveness to achieve the goal of reserving them for health care workers. That destroys trust.
This is the same society that was already hoarding *toilet paper*. There is a very strong streak of selfishness in American culture, so telling people "here's all the information, now be nice and don't ruin things for everyone" means that 100% of the time someone will ruin things for everyone to try to make a buck.
Fine. That's how he justified his actions. And maybe that produces a good short term result. The result is you lose trust and people don't believe you the next time you need them to.
Early in the pandemic, my girlfriend paid hundreds of dollars for a respirator to use in an emergency at her job at the hospital. It was a basic Honeywell respirator, but one of the few the hospital could approve for her to use. The same respirator costs ~$40 on Amazon today.
I'm an airline brat and have flown millions of miles and been in two emergency landings involving fires. If you're ever in a similar situation, you and everybody around you better hope the crew sticks to protocol rather than worrying about bruising your precious long-term trust.
What's your point? The airline stuck to a protocol that was worked out in advance and effective. The CDC apparently had no protocol or one that Fauci threw out the window because he thought he knew better. Now when we're in a similar situation, we have a problem.
The people screaming like children during an emergency fare even worse when told the truth. It's tricky, because as you illustrate, they're incapable of accepting that working toward the benefit of the group in such a situation is the best approach to solving the problem.
In case you didn't understand my point because you don't work in healthcare, PPE for people dealing with the crisis was real fucking slim.
What would you have said, in the CDC's position, with a country full of scared people who want to survive and do what's best for the community, but also with a sizable number of selfish, greedy assholes, hoarding groceries to make a buck off their neighbor, and coughing on people for the lulz, who were unfortunately capable of ruining it for everyone?
You're Fauci, trying to convince assholes to do the right thing. Go:
You continue to willfully interpret these words as if they reflect malice or deception, even after receiving a very simple explanation. You’re doing it on purpose at this point.
First, it's not clear that a significant number of people were hoarding TP at all. The best info I've read suggests that the reason for shortages were changing usage patterns: people would have been pooping at work, but since they weren't going to work, they pooped at home. Thus, sales changed from bulk institutional packaging to retail consumer products. The shortage was because the pipeline for retail products emptied, and manufacturers couldn't switch gears and distribute the alternative fast enough.
Second, you have the timeline wrong. On February 29, the Surgeon General told the public to stop buying masks. On March 8, Fauci told 60 Minutes "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask."
Only later, during the week of March 16, 2020, toilet paper panic buying exploded. According to NCSolutions (a retail data tracker), toilet paper sales skyrocketed compared to the previous month. And as of April 19, 2020, almost half of U.S. grocery stores experienced stockouts of toilet paper at some point during the day.
The TP hoarding was indicative of known trends, not a shocking revelation about the state of American culture. Hoarding and gouging bottled water during hurricanes, ticket scalping at arenas, high frequency trading - our entire society is full of people whose first reaction to any piece of information is "how can I exploit this to take advantage of other people"?
I think what you're saying is plausible, although I don't necessarily buy it in this particular case. I personally never expected the TP thing.
But more to the point, though, let's assume your right. Is it right for our leaders to manipulate our behavior by lying to us? For me, it seems like the minute that starts happening, we're a democracy in name only. The fact that the government is "of the people" is really then just a technicality.
Yes, when the alternative is "our entire healthcare system is collapsing because an incredibly contagious disease infected a significant percentage of our healthcare professionals and more patients because the healthcare professionals didn't have access to PPE".
What I hear when people make these excuses is that democracy is just for when it's convenient. For important matters, a technocratic oligarchy should rule.
To me, the liberal enlightenment ideals in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are what have made us the greatest power the world has ever seen. This is a philosophical thing that I don't think anyone can prove or disprove (until maybe after it's too late), but I think we should follow those ideals at all times, and not consider them inconveniences to be swept out of the way when technocrats find them problematic.
At no point did "democracy" or its principles come into this discussion. Democracy does not mean universal disclosure. It never has.
If your claim is that giving people access to "all the information" will allow them to make informed decisions and lead to utopia, the internet disproved that long ago.
At no point did "democracy" or its principles come into this discussion.
Yes, it did. Just a few minutes ago when I pointed it out. Or are you the only one who's allowed to identify what principles are implicateed in the conversation?
I have no idea what you mean by "the internet disproved that long ago". But you seem to be setting this up as a false choice fallacy.
It can be simultaneously true that, on one hand, there's no need to exhaustively publicize every fact all the time; while also true that the leadership of a democracy providing false information to its citizens subverts the very foundations of democracy.
When full disclosure of the truth means that people will panic and cause bigger harms, you have to take the good of society into consideration.
"Ducking and covering" isn't going to do anything in a nuclear strike, but if telling people that it will do something means they stay calm and don't go into a panic stockpiling guns and food (or abandoning all civilized principles altogether in a nihilistic fit), then telling them that is justified.
When full disclosure of the truth means that people will panic and cause bigger harms, you have to take the good of society into consideration.
OK, so at least we're being honest now and not pretending it's a democracy anymore. But who is it that decides when it's something of sufficient severity that we must lie?
You’re reading malice or deception where there is none, and are being very selective in your context window.
You want to allocate resources to where they will have the biggest impact, and you want to ensure you don’t run out of resources for the most critical uses. They were transparent about this from the beginning.
I'm reading deception (not malice) because he said he was being deceptive. He was not transparent at all.
He chose to allocate resources for the contemporaneous crisis at the expense of the trust needed to manage future crises. Maybe you objectively think that was the correct choice, but it's revisionist to claim that that wasn't the choice he made.
Where does he say he was being deceptive? I reject both your premise and your interpretation: you either don’t remember well or didn’t understand anything.
I'm surprised that your simlple "And?" comment, requesting explanation, got such a downvoting. We can't even try to seek understanding of each others' opinions in this discussion, apparently.
Maybe you're new to these discussions but replying with "And?" is not evidence of an earnest and dispassionate desire to communally discover a foundational truth.
It's pretty clear objectively that Fauci did a lot of lying and misleading.
1. Fauci admitted on TV that he'd been misleading the public about herd immunity numbers. He said he'd painted a rosier picture than reality in order to avoid making the world fear that we could never overcome the pandemic.
-- https://thenationaltelegraph.com/opinion/dr-fauci-admits-to-...
3. Slightly more controversially, Fauci misled us by dissembling under questioning by Sen. Paul. By a strict technocratic definition that nobody he was talking to was privy to, he told the truth when he steadfastly maintained that there had been no GoF research. But by the plain meaning of the words, he was clearly lying.
-- https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/04/fauci-says-rand-paul-egregio...
I'm not sure these citations are the best, I don't have time to read through all of it, but hopefully it's illustrative.
Reading your links, I see lots of emotion and twisting of statements, and not much honest searching for the truth.
I see a need to mock and ostracize and to try to twist others' statements and words.
Do you not see that too? If there are better links to support your incendiary phrasing of points, it may help get the point across better. But I'm not sure you can find something that's not trying to misrepresent and sensationalize the issue.
You've been around HN a long time. You know that responding to tone is frowned upon here. If there are statements in those links you think were twisted just say how.
For #1, about herd immunity numbers, consider the below. I don't see any space for interpretation here: Fauci flat-out admitted to changing what he told the public in order to manipulate their (our!) behavior:
In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
[...]Dr. Fauci said that weeks ago, he had hesitated to publicly raise his estimate because many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines, which they would need to accept almost universally in order for the country to achieve herd immunity.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.” “We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Regarding #2, this is also pretty clear. Here's another citation, which also seems pretty clear.
The 6ft social distancing guidance enforced in the US during the Covid pandemic “sort of just appeared”, Dr Anthony Fauci, the former White House medical adviser, has admitted.
It was “likely not based on data”, Dr Fauci conceded in a behind-closed-doors session of the House select subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic.
For #3, I acknowledged from the start that this is more subjective. If we judge solely by academic jargon, then Fauci was telling the truth. The thing is, it's not reasonable to judge solely by that academic jargon when Fauci wasn't talking to fellow members of the academy. He was being questioned by Congress, and one expects an intelligent guy like him to be able to communicate effectively. When speaking to politicians and ultimately to the public, he should be aware of the language he uses.
EDIT: Sorry to jump back into the same post. But I want to emphasize that the root question we're arguing about here is loss of trust. We don't need a mathematically airtight proof that Fauci was lying. I just need to demonstrate that the institution, and Fauci specifically, said things that for reasonable listeners could be construed in ways that destroyed trust. I think what I've illustrated clears that threshold easily.
It feels like trying to crucify a man for not being able to bring a desired/claimed level of nuance, to what was a confusing emerging deeply troubled time.
You might be factually right that the story changed over time. But to me, none of these feel like misdeeds. They seem like reasonable & adequate (outright necessary?) steps taken along a hard road we all faced.
I'd have him not lie. At a minimum, if he thought that the truth would drive counterproductive behavior, he should have at least kept his mouth shut.
But as a public servant, one of the leaders in our democracy, I think he owes it to us to actually tell us the truth, even when it doesn't seem to serve his immediate goals.
HN is usually pretty positive on democratic principles, that it should be We The People driving rather than elites. But when the democracy is being steered behind the scenes, being misled into provoking us into the behaviors that the elites think are best for us, then that democracy is in name only. Functionally we've then become an oligarchy.
In general I think I have a lot more faith in medical professionals than it seems you do, but I do agree that the early mixed messaging around face masks in Feb. 2020 left me with a lot of distrust of Fauci in particular: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/01/8862991...
Also don't underestimate the effect of many politicians and government officials being caught violating the lockdown policies that they were forcing on the rest of us.
> Fauci, who thought people were too stupid to understand any nuance of a situation. Maybe he had the same well-intentioned and misguided notions as rent control advocates who are myopically willing to trade long term well-being for short term expedience.
For me, this comparatively benign explanation of his behavior became much less plausible when the details of the EcoHealth arrangement became public.
I'm not a big believer in the current so-called criminal justice system as a way to establish... well, justice, but I do think that a trial in open court for his crimes - even just the unambiguous perjury - was likely to be healing and perhaps restorative for our institutions of scientific research.
No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.
Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
I'm confused by your statement "We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed."
The NIH does not approve drugs. If you have a citation that I can read that clarifies this point, I'm happy to read it.
Unfortunately, for every "questionable relationship between the authorities and the industries they regulate' being exposed by citizen journalists and the power of the internet, there are 10 wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact being spread. And for every 1 of those conspiracies being spread, there are 10 grifters out there making a buck selling products and services based around them. The Internet was a great idea that has not held up against stupidity and greed.
That is unfortunate, but also, I'd rather choose the situation where truth about abuses of power by authorities can spread with the trade off that some wing nuts are also making up stories out of whole cloth, than the one where truth is crushed under power of authority.
As a person who a lot of folks would consider, to use the kids' term, "noided up", I don't know if I agree.
My experience has been that in general the fact that there are so many folks able to get traction with their poorly-informed ideas and who face little or no consequences (rhetorically) for being show wrong time-and-again has led to a situation where we can go from "limited hangouts" to "we just publish facts and folks ignore it thinking they are just like all the other dumb things people say".
Like, it's incredibly hard to talk about how many horrible things the US has done and published abut over the years (I am thinking of Pheonix, Bluebird, Artichoke, etc) without sounding like a crank even when the government itself is the primary source.
Authoritarian governments crushing truth directly, but that doesn't mean that liberal governments don't have heavy layers of propaganda to maintain their control.
As a principle, "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" probably just results in the same destruction of the truth, as you might see in this thread.
Many "liberal governments" of the West certainly have some authoritarian elements to them. I don't see that as a conflict with advocating for free speech. If the government is running the propaganda, who is supposed to push against that other than dissidents protected by free speech? It certainly won't be the government or "the authorities".
I don't understand what "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" means. Who should be enforcing these consequences? What even is a "rhetorical consequence"?
As ever, the problem with creating an authority to regulate what is truth, is who is going to be that authority, and how are we going to prevent it from being corrupted by human nature.
You don't need a ministry of truth to have a bit of shame when you say say something incorrect or to recall what really bad and false positions people take or to remember when you've put out bad ideas that were incorrect.
Oh, I think I see what you're saying. If I'm understanding the thrust of your argument:
I do think it would be good if people would be more humble in what they think they know and be more willing to engage with the argument presented by the "other side", and not be so tribal. More introspection, and less blindly doing as they are told, while acknowledging "doctors", "scientists", "reporters", are all actually humans that have human emotions, various incentives, varying knowledge, who sometimes do stupid things, and sometimes things with malevolent intent. They are not all-being, all-seeing, all-virtuous non-humans, so don't take everything at face value.
Once again finding the "diversity of opinions" so so so bizarre a recent invention. Which is so weird, because I do believe there's plenty of corruption in the medical system, that the US's is a deeply corporate affront. I'm so near to finding "anti authority" vibes to resonate on.
But everything happening now is a deep insult, to inquiry, to science, to this nation, to life. The people running the show right now embody everything you are saying, are exactly this case. But not a one of the folks running HHS seems able to hear anything except what they've a-priori chosen to believe. Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? I believe accurately reflects a delusional hyper-reality, where health is being governed by a select few who have wrapped a deeply politicized reality around themselves as shield to the world, and alas these very few very special actors are now running the show. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rfk-jr-public-h...
Diversity of voices is once again, just as it is at universities, being used to try to force it's way through the paradox of tolerance, to demand a seat at the table not for interesting suppressed voices, but for violent active harm seeking & destruction. That is not well founded either, that does not even attempt to engage to make its case.
Call it what you will, but the ability of dissenting voices to be heard is the basis of free speech, and also integral to the pursuit of science. Blind trust in authorities is anti-science, and suppression of dissenting views is also anti-science. Those in position of authority like to cast out all who have opposing views as lunatics, but that isn't true. When those in position of authority lie to feather their own nests and cement their power, the truth will be found among the dissidents.
Specifically to Kennedy, in his congressional hearings I've watched does not present himself as a doctor or a scientist, and also not anti-science. His main thrust appears to be that there are a great many problems in the status quo, the "authority" scientists and institutions don't have any reasonable explanations for them, and there are other scientists that are not financially entangled in the status quo that have theories that look to be worth pursuing. That is pro-science in the meaning of exploring the world in pursuit of truth. He is trained as a lawyer, and it is within his profession to be leading inquiries into intent and motivations of various parties in a dispute.
The characterization of him as anti-vax is a slur, and greatly simplified from what he actual advocates.
There's nothing about RFK today that has any search for truth. It's a trial lawyer convinced of his rightness, who has found a couple other folks who are equally as belligerent & uninterested in actually finding truth as him.
I don't think there has been much struggle for dissenting voices. They are out in legion in the world lately. Antiauthority is ragingly popular, anything against anyone knowing better is the hip new thing.
"Do your own research" is a horrifying anti-governance stance. I do want people to question authority too, for authority to be responsive & explain itself, keep the mandate. But I thought Faucci did an amazing job of talking to the people, in hard complex scary times, and used appropriate candor and tried to listen to lots and lots of scientists and stakeholders. I see a belligerent insane delusional madman who listens to no one and who is using his lawyerly flailing without pause to bludgeon what he sees as his opponent in RFK. This is not promoting truth, it has shown itself time and time again to be resilient against science, against all evidence, a willful dementedness against the world.
Are you basing that on viewing what he actually says and does, or through the filter of summaries by people who favour the status quo? Because listening to the new coverage, and then listening to the actual speeches and testimony show opposite conclusions from what I can see.
The adjectives you use seem to be trying to build emotional investment in framing this a good v evil, rather than a sober look at the facts on the ground.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.