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> Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anythin

by kaybe 6y ago

> Needless to say, he doesn't provide any scientific evidence of that -- he knows full well his supporters need nothing more than his word to believe in anything. I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. (Living in Germany, I do trust Angela Merkel that much, for example. I want that for everyone.)

caiobegotti 6y ago
The other day I read an article (sorry, I lost the link to it) comparing the response to the coronavirus between nations led by men and women and it was not very surprising to me that countries whose president or prime minister was a woman had a better first response and fewer deaths compared to neighbour states. I would love to read a "postmortem" about that when this is all over.
Aeolun 6y ago
It’s pretty amazing how short the list of countries like that actually is.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
> I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Trust is an essential element of society. Constant individual validation simply doesn't scale, trust is enormously efficient, and low-trust societies are poor and dysfunctional societies. That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones. Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    An ensemble model of trust is entirely reasonable: for things that don't require a mountain of evidence, you can mostly trust that the collection of sources you depend on will not all simultaneously gaslight you in a consistent way. But the comment I was replying to suggested that in an ideal world you could trust one source (political leaders). I'm suggesting I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information. And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1] It fails two ways: 1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue. 2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them). There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-framework-for-thinking-6530d417e364 https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats. Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs. A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased. What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this. Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems. ________________________________ Notes: 1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409
dreamcompiler 6y ago
I take your point, but Angela Merkel is a very special case. Angela Merkel is a quantum chemist. I wish every world leader was an actual scientist too, but there aren't many who can wear two hats the way Merkel does.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  Many in Chinese leadership have technical degrees in science. While science appears to be the enemy of some authoritarian governments, others see it as their national edge.

by kaybe 6y ago

caiobegotti 6y ago

The other day I read an article (sorry, I lost the link to it) comparing the response to the coronavirus between nations led by men and women and it was not very surprising to me that countries whose president or prime minister was a woman had a better first response and fewer deaths compared to neighbour states. I would love to read a "postmortem" about that when this is all over.

Aeolun 6y ago

It’s pretty amazing how short the list of countries like that actually is.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

> I want to live in a world where this is actually viable everywhere, where we can trust our leaders to confer with experts and change their opinion if the situation changes. I want to live in a world where everyone knows to verify things for themselves. Yes, I'd like leaders we can trust, but trust should never mean "don't check". (At the very least, have multiple other sources you trust to cross-check your sources of authority.)

dredmorbius 6y ago
Trust is an essential element of society. Constant individual validation simply doesn't scale, trust is enormously efficient, and low-trust societies are poor and dysfunctional societies. That's not to say you can simply declare trust (though TOFU / TOFI tit-for-tat is remarkaby reliable), and the question of how to bootstrap trust is a difficult one. Ironically, many nationalist/populist behavioral patterns substitute a sense of tribal trust patterns for epistemic ones. Ideally, a set of values and institutions which provide robust cross-checking and validation, distributing the trust verification burden, emerge. Any systemic doctrine of power concentration, whether authoritarian government, monopolistic economies, exclusive religions, educational uniformatism, etc., tends to undermine this.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  An ensemble model of trust is entirely reasonable: for things that don't require a mountain of evidence, you can mostly trust that the collection of sources you depend on will not all simultaneously gaslight you in a consistent way. But the comment I was replying to suggested that in an ideal world you could trust one source (political leaders). I'm suggesting I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I'd like a world where everyone consistently applies critical thinking to all sources of information. And that specifically Does. Not Scale.[1] It fails two ways: 1. Individuals suffer information overload, trust breakdown, and validation fatigue. 2. Society finds itself with no common foundation of common shared facts and mechanisms. All points of view are asserted to be equally valid, expertise is entirely dismissed. Tribal beliefs are asserted as true (for Us) and invalid (if Them). There is, I'll posit, a broad gulf between "verify everything" and "be prepared to question any belief". One varient of the latter is "strong opinions, weakly held" (https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-framework-for-thinking-6530d417e364 https://medium.com/@ameet/strong-opinions-weakly-held-a-fram...) I'm not fully convinced this is a valid model, but it seems a good initial approach. It addresses both the need. to act in the moment, based on. partial information, and the realisation that this information and conclusions based on it may be faulty. The problem occurs when making decisions with no recourse --- betting the farm, burning the boats. Otherwise, I lean strongly on Baconian, Pragmatic principles: our brains, both individually and socially, are sense-making organs, optimising for practical benefit. A challenge is that subject to perception, processing, and model-generation costs, complexity and rigour, though affording greater accuracy and precision, have enormous costs. A manifestly false assumption of rational markets (and behaviour) theory is that information is free. It's not --- it has extraordinary costs, and model formation and coordination --- getting everyone on the same page --- are among the highest. We're constantly facing a complexity cost constraint (this is the essence of Gresham's law), in which a much simpler model is, under relaxed environmental selection, often more useful, as it permits discarding expensive perception, processing, and model transmission (education of the population). Which works fine until environmental selection mechanisms are increased. What a trust, not in authority but in expertise, has to offer, suject to sufficient checks, is an efficient distribution of information, processing, and model formation. This is the ultimate aim of Baconian Science, expressed in the motto of the Royal Society: In nullis verba --- on the word of no person. Rather, it is justified trust in experiment, experience, integrity, and institutions, that gets you this. Mind, the usual problem is that power-serving institutions have a staggering tendency to become self-serving and select not based on truth but on self-interest. Correcting for this tendency is the great problem of polity, commercial, social, justice, and moral systems. ________________________________ Notes: 1. As I was composing this reply, another HNer in a different thread makes similar remarks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450409

dreamcompiler 6y ago

I take your point, but Angela Merkel is a very special case. Angela Merkel is a quantum chemist. I wish every world leader was an actual scientist too, but there aren't many who can wear two hats the way Merkel does.

threatofrain 6y ago
Many in Chinese leadership have technical degrees in science. While science appears to be the enemy of some authoritarian governments, others see it as their national edge.