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Institutional trust has eroded. The US surgeon general and Fauci told people to stop buying masks. Then they reversed themselves, and defended their position

Institutional trust has eroded. The US surgeon general and Fauci told people to stop buying masks. Then they reversed themselves, and defended their position at the time. Media reports "fiery, but mostly peaceful protests". What intelligent person would trust institutions that are inconsistent and refuse accountability? What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? Can you blame distrust given this environment?

helen___keller 6y ago
I agree with > Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media. A reasonable person would make this same conclusion you have, for example: > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? And yet another person who gets their information from another source, would reach the opposite conclusion. The simple fact is that enough happened in enough locations that if you hone in on one protest here or one riot there you can paint a completely different picture. For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests. But I don't doubt there was arson and numerous other crimes. In other words, I am particularly pessimistic that it is possible to have institutional trust anymore, because the events in our world are so numerous and nuanced that it is frankly impossible to give a succinct, consistent, and accountable view of them. Same with the mask thing: Fauci and the surgeon general were absolutely correct telling people to stop buying masks when there was a shortage and hospitals were running out of them. And they are absolutely correct now telling people that, with no remaining shortage, we should all have masks and wear them to stop the spread (in particular now that most people aren't sheltering in place anymore). But that level of nuance doesn't come through, especially in a world where most "news" comes from headlines on reddit links and facebook posts.
- mc32 6y ago
  >” The simple fact is that enough happened in enough location..” But why with the backdrop of that violence do they characterize that one “as mostly peaceful”. They could at least have been forthcoming and said while most are peaceful this one has devolved into violence you see behind me. But they are like Baghdad Bob ignoring the bombs falling as he broadcasts...
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Protests aren't a monolith, though. People come and go throughout the course of the protest. They are loose in organization, and the participants are generally unaffiliated.
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    I don't know who "they" you are referring to (plenty of organizations covered the violence...) nor why they would not cover the violence in the protests but consider the following possibilities: 1. Executives at the news agencies told the reporters to cover the protests favorably for corrupt reasons 2. The news reporters and camera crew were at the protests for several hours and genuinely got a lot of footage of peaceful protests; the violence happened at 2 AM when most protestors had gone home, and were both not filmed by the camera crew and seemed unrelated to the protest that the camera crew had covered 3. Most of "them" did in fact cover in the violence in some amount, maybe less footage or less coverage then you think is appropriate but some amount of coverage nonetheless. However, because "they" are an unspecific and presumably large number of media channels that run all day long, you probably weren't watching all of the coverage and you might have missed it (or the sources that tell you "they" didn't cover the violence hadn't mentioned that they actually did cover it a little) I can't tell you which is true between 1-3, because I don't know who "they" refers to, and I know I don't watch "them" anyways because I never watched mainstream coverage of the protests. Just some food for thought, again that we are quick to turn to instant distrust before we apply nuance and consider the alternative.
- llcoolv 6y ago
  >For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests. Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting. This is absolutely equivalent to saying - I saw Leni Riefenstahl's movies and there were no people dying in concentration camps, so Nazi propaganda is factually correct. There are tens of thousands of criminal acts documented during those 'peaceful' protests and I don't think that anyone with IQ >80 and the slightest bit of self-respect would ever take what you're saying seriously. Btw, these days even far-left HN seems to be split in two and I was sure it would be one of the last bastions of group-think. I guess we live and learn.
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    > Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting I sincerely apologize if it came off that way, because it was not my intention. I'm not trying to deny that there were crimes and arson and whatever else. They did happen, and they are inexcusable. I am specifically making the point, that the GP had posed the answer: > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? My point is simply trying to add nuance: nobody is saying arson is okay, the people I talk to say things like: "this protest I was at was OK. I left at 11 PM everything that happened while I was there was super peaceful and wholesome and people even brought their kids!" The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests". There were violent protests, there were peaceful protests. There were protests that started peaceful and became violent. Sometimes there were small violent groups that were literally ousted from the larger protest group for causing trouble. I'm not denying that there were violent protests. But I'm also not going to deny that there were a whole lot of peaceful protests.
    - dgfitz 6y ago
      > The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests". It is interesting thought experiment to keep your sentence the same, but replace "protests" with "police." Police brutality is wrong, full stop.
- dnautics 6y ago
  > Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media. Why do you jump straight to social media? Why wouldn't the fault lay with the authority figures themselves? For decades we have authority figures saying "the science says X therefore you must Y" while at the same time we have an educational system that (correctly) says "science is not authoritative". Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    > Why do you jump straight to social media? Social media is literally the catalyst for the loss of institutional trust. Maybe in the long run this is a good thing, and we will rebuild our institutions in a way that we can trust them in a hyper-shared hyper-aware world, but currently i just see no way that it can possibly work out. > Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less. In all honesty, I don't believe this is possible. It's the same problem as how people end up cancelled on twitter for the smallest reasons: humans are flawed, and in our hyper-shared hyper-aware world a single human flaw (or a single systemic flaw in our instutitions) becomes a gigantic crack that makes everyone outraged. While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period. And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome. (NOTE: just to be clear, I'm not saying our institutions are in the right. they are frequently wrong. But any wrongness you find, as in your example the way we communicate science as a closed book done deal, is one single flaw in a massive sprawling institution. I'm saying that statistically any large institution WILL have flaws, no matter what, thus in our new world we CANNOT have trust in these institutions the way things are now because any flaws will get blown up into a full model of distrust by social media. That's simply the new world we live in.)
    - anm89 6y ago
      I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what? Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things? Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere. We've got a better shot at finding less hubristic leaders all though those odds aren't great either
necrotic_comp 6y ago
> The US surgeon general and Fauci told people to stop buying masks. Then they reversed themselves, and defended their position at the time. Making a claim and then reversing it based on new data is the correct thing to do. This isn't an issue at all and shouldn't be considered a violation of trust.
- vlucas 6y ago
  That's not what happened. They intentionally told people to stop buying masks when they KNEW they would help, because they were worried about running out of them for medical professionals. https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7 https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7
- throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
  Saying they don’t work or aren’t necessary was a lie. I’m honestly not trying to stir anything up here, but a lie is a lie. Here’s an interview where Fauci discusses point-blank why the American public was mislead, and it had nothing to do with data: https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire... We need to hold our leaders to a higher standard. All of them. Red, blue, green, whatever.
  - necrotic_comp 6y ago
    What he said on 60 minutes in March 2020, and I'm transcribing here: "The masks are important for someone who is infected to prevent them from infecting someone else. Now when you see people and look at the films in China and South Korea and everyone is wearing a mask - right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better, and it might even block a droplet, but it is not providing the perfect protection people think it is. And often, there are unintended consequences, people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face. When you think mask, you should think of healthcare providers needing them and people who are ill. When you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks, that's fine, I'm not against it, if you want to do it, that's fine." "But it can lead to a shortage of masks?" "Exactly. It can lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it." This was in March, before things started really blowing up. That seems pretty upfront to me as to why they are making the recommendation, and it's incorrect in hindsight. I don't see it as a lie at all.
tobr 6y ago
> Media reports "fiery, but mostly peaceful protests". > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? The first statement sounds more like an ampersand than an equals sign.
jlokier 6y ago
> What intelligent person would trust institutions that are inconsistent [...] An intelligent person would trust institutions that change their mind more, because it's the right thing to do. Institutions that remain utterly consistent in the face of evolving knowledge are the ones you should be wary of. I saw an analogous thing in the much simpler world of signal processing and statistical estimation. Estimators and control systems sometimes oscillate as new data is acquired. It seems counterintuitive, more data should just improve accuracy, right? As if to converge toward an underlying true value? No, sometimes the best possible estimate and control output oscillates gently as more data is acquired, without any inconsistency. It took me a while to appreciate that. Back to the big picture of institutions. Inconsistency over time may seem dissonant, but it shouldn't. It can be the most correct and accurate recommendation over time as new data and knowledge is accumulated. In an evolving situation, you should be seeing this. The fact is people do cite inconsistency as a reason to disbelieve, and it puts public health policymakers in a dilemma. If they tell the truth and give the best advice to follow, people don't believe it because the truth is complicated and counterintuitive, and best advice rightly changes over time, and in different locations, circumstances, etc. So they have to walk a line between fully detailed truth, and simplified advice that people en masse are more inclined to believe and follow. (I don't disagree with your other assertions about accountability etc).
- throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
  > it puts public health policymakers in a dilemma > they have to walk a line between fully detailed truth, and simplified advice that people en masse are more inclined to believe and follow I know they are acting in good faith. However, the field also has a lot of received wisdom that may or may not be true. There’s clearly a bag of tricks they believe must be used to achieve a set of self-set goals, and I think a more straightforward approach along with dialogue would have been wiser in this instance. The alternative is that some people will lose trust and won’t comply. You don’t want that if your plan requires everyone to comply.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    > The alternative is that some people will lose trust and won’t comply. You don’t want that if your plan requires everyone to comply. The dilemma they face is no matter what they do, some people will lose trust and won’t comply. Getting an optimal outcome in the middle of that dilemma is impossible to get right. Not just difficult, but impossible due to the back and forth inter-reactions between individuals, groups and policy. So the process inevitably involves some mixture of politics and data, and multiple points of view that differ. There's no getting away from it. I'm not going to say they have got it right. The different points of view and debate have to continue after all, to pursue the "best" outcome whatever it may be. Only that I have some sympathy with the public health messaging dilemma, and I hope other people can take something useful from the knowledge that public health policy people face this dilemma, and are not just incompetent, blunt instruments, or trying to hoodwink everyone.
supercanuck 6y ago
There was an actual, clear shortage of respirator masks N95 masks for Medical Staff
anm89 6y ago
Agreed, we seem to believe as a society that we can spew bullshit in all directions constantly (advertising, media, our legal system, our politicians campaigning, so many others) but then just turn it off when we want people to agree on some thing. The individual things people seem to believe seem to be nearly universally idiotic, but I sympathize with them to the extent that they can see they are being fed bs narratives all the time and just decide to believe whatever they want if it's all bs anyway.
maxerickson 6y ago
1 person committing arson and 10,000 other people protesting peacefully nearby is entirely possible. That's of course an over-simplification of the dynamics at play in many US cities this summer, but it's not reasonable to attribute responsibility for the actions of a few to large groups that just happen to be nearby.

helen___keller 6y ago

I agree with > Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media. A reasonable person would make this same conclusion you have, for example: > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? And yet another person who gets their information from another source, would reach the opposite conclusion. The simple fact is that enough happened in enough locations that if you hone in on one protest here or one riot there you can paint a completely different picture. For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests. But I don't doubt there was arson and numerous other crimes. In other words, I am particularly pessimistic that it is possible to have institutional trust anymore, because the events in our world are so numerous and nuanced that it is frankly impossible to give a succinct, consistent, and accountable view of them. Same with the mask thing: Fauci and the surgeon general were absolutely correct telling people to stop buying masks when there was a shortage and hospitals were running out of them. And they are absolutely correct now telling people that, with no remaining shortage, we should all have masks and wear them to stop the spread (in particular now that most people aren't sheltering in place anymore). But that level of nuance doesn't come through, especially in a world where most "news" comes from headlines on reddit links and facebook posts.

mc32 6y ago
>” The simple fact is that enough happened in enough location..” But why with the backdrop of that violence do they characterize that one “as mostly peaceful”. They could at least have been forthcoming and said while most are peaceful this one has devolved into violence you see behind me. But they are like Baghdad Bob ignoring the bombs falling as he broadcasts...
- kube-system 6y ago
  Protests aren't a monolith, though. People come and go throughout the course of the protest. They are loose in organization, and the participants are generally unaffiliated.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  I don't know who "they" you are referring to (plenty of organizations covered the violence...) nor why they would not cover the violence in the protests but consider the following possibilities: 1. Executives at the news agencies told the reporters to cover the protests favorably for corrupt reasons 2. The news reporters and camera crew were at the protests for several hours and genuinely got a lot of footage of peaceful protests; the violence happened at 2 AM when most protestors had gone home, and were both not filmed by the camera crew and seemed unrelated to the protest that the camera crew had covered 3. Most of "them" did in fact cover in the violence in some amount, maybe less footage or less coverage then you think is appropriate but some amount of coverage nonetheless. However, because "they" are an unspecific and presumably large number of media channels that run all day long, you probably weren't watching all of the coverage and you might have missed it (or the sources that tell you "they" didn't cover the violence hadn't mentioned that they actually did cover it a little) I can't tell you which is true between 1-3, because I don't know who "they" refers to, and I know I don't watch "them" anyways because I never watched mainstream coverage of the protests. Just some food for thought, again that we are quick to turn to instant distrust before we apply nuance and consider the alternative.
llcoolv 6y ago
>For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests. Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting. This is absolutely equivalent to saying - I saw Leni Riefenstahl's movies and there were no people dying in concentration camps, so Nazi propaganda is factually correct. There are tens of thousands of criminal acts documented during those 'peaceful' protests and I don't think that anyone with IQ >80 and the slightest bit of self-respect would ever take what you're saying seriously. Btw, these days even far-left HN seems to be split in two and I was sure it would be one of the last bastions of group-think. I guess we live and learn.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  > Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting I sincerely apologize if it came off that way, because it was not my intention. I'm not trying to deny that there were crimes and arson and whatever else. They did happen, and they are inexcusable. I am specifically making the point, that the GP had posed the answer: > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? My point is simply trying to add nuance: nobody is saying arson is okay, the people I talk to say things like: "this protest I was at was OK. I left at 11 PM everything that happened while I was there was super peaceful and wholesome and people even brought their kids!" The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests". There were violent protests, there were peaceful protests. There were protests that started peaceful and became violent. Sometimes there were small violent groups that were literally ousted from the larger protest group for causing trouble. I'm not denying that there were violent protests. But I'm also not going to deny that there were a whole lot of peaceful protests.
  - dgfitz 6y ago
    > The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests". It is interesting thought experiment to keep your sentence the same, but replace "protests" with "police." Police brutality is wrong, full stop.
dnautics 6y ago
> Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media. Why do you jump straight to social media? Why wouldn't the fault lay with the authority figures themselves? For decades we have authority figures saying "the science says X therefore you must Y" while at the same time we have an educational system that (correctly) says "science is not authoritative". Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  > Why do you jump straight to social media? Social media is literally the catalyst for the loss of institutional trust. Maybe in the long run this is a good thing, and we will rebuild our institutions in a way that we can trust them in a hyper-shared hyper-aware world, but currently i just see no way that it can possibly work out. > Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less. In all honesty, I don't believe this is possible. It's the same problem as how people end up cancelled on twitter for the smallest reasons: humans are flawed, and in our hyper-shared hyper-aware world a single human flaw (or a single systemic flaw in our instutitions) becomes a gigantic crack that makes everyone outraged. While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period. And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome. (NOTE: just to be clear, I'm not saying our institutions are in the right. they are frequently wrong. But any wrongness you find, as in your example the way we communicate science as a closed book done deal, is one single flaw in a massive sprawling institution. I'm saying that statistically any large institution WILL have flaws, no matter what, thus in our new world we CANNOT have trust in these institutions the way things are now because any flaws will get blown up into a full model of distrust by social media. That's simply the new world we live in.)
  - anm89 6y ago
    I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what? Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things? Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere. We've got a better shot at finding less hubristic leaders all though those odds aren't great either

necrotic_comp 6y ago

> The US surgeon general and Fauci told people to stop buying masks. Then they reversed themselves, and defended their position at the time. Making a claim and then reversing it based on new data is the correct thing to do. This isn't an issue at all and shouldn't be considered a violation of trust.

vlucas 6y ago
That's not what happened. They intentionally told people to stop buying masks when they KNEW they would help, because they were worried about running out of them for medical professionals. https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7 https://medium.com/incerto/the-masks-masquerade-7de897b517b7
throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
Saying they don’t work or aren’t necessary was a lie. I’m honestly not trying to stir anything up here, but a lie is a lie. Here’s an interview where Fauci discusses point-blank why the American public was mislead, and it had nothing to do with data: https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-directive-coronavirus https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire... We need to hold our leaders to a higher standard. All of them. Red, blue, green, whatever.
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  What he said on 60 minutes in March 2020, and I'm transcribing here: "The masks are important for someone who is infected to prevent them from infecting someone else. Now when you see people and look at the films in China and South Korea and everyone is wearing a mask - right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better, and it might even block a droplet, but it is not providing the perfect protection people think it is. And often, there are unintended consequences, people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face. When you think mask, you should think of healthcare providers needing them and people who are ill. When you look at the films of foreign countries and you see 85% of the people wearing masks, that's fine, I'm not against it, if you want to do it, that's fine." "But it can lead to a shortage of masks?" "Exactly. It can lead to a shortage of masks for the people who really need it." This was in March, before things started really blowing up. That seems pretty upfront to me as to why they are making the recommendation, and it's incorrect in hindsight. I don't see it as a lie at all.

tobr 6y ago

> Media reports "fiery, but mostly peaceful protests". > What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace? The first statement sounds more like an ampersand than an equals sign.

jlokier 6y ago

> What intelligent person would trust institutions that are inconsistent [...] An intelligent person would trust institutions that change their mind more, because it's the right thing to do. Institutions that remain utterly consistent in the face of evolving knowledge are the ones you should be wary of. I saw an analogous thing in the much simpler world of signal processing and statistical estimation. Estimators and control systems sometimes oscillate as new data is acquired. It seems counterintuitive, more data should just improve accuracy, right? As if to converge toward an underlying true value? No, sometimes the best possible estimate and control output oscillates gently as more data is acquired, without any inconsistency. It took me a while to appreciate that. Back to the big picture of institutions. Inconsistency over time may seem dissonant, but it shouldn't. It can be the most correct and accurate recommendation over time as new data and knowledge is accumulated. In an evolving situation, you should be seeing this. The fact is people do cite inconsistency as a reason to disbelieve, and it puts public health policymakers in a dilemma. If they tell the truth and give the best advice to follow, people don't believe it because the truth is complicated and counterintuitive, and best advice rightly changes over time, and in different locations, circumstances, etc. So they have to walk a line between fully detailed truth, and simplified advice that people en masse are more inclined to believe and follow. (I don't disagree with your other assertions about accountability etc).

throwmeaway_pls 6y ago
> it puts public health policymakers in a dilemma > they have to walk a line between fully detailed truth, and simplified advice that people en masse are more inclined to believe and follow I know they are acting in good faith. However, the field also has a lot of received wisdom that may or may not be true. There’s clearly a bag of tricks they believe must be used to achieve a set of self-set goals, and I think a more straightforward approach along with dialogue would have been wiser in this instance. The alternative is that some people will lose trust and won’t comply. You don’t want that if your plan requires everyone to comply.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > The alternative is that some people will lose trust and won’t comply. You don’t want that if your plan requires everyone to comply. The dilemma they face is no matter what they do, some people will lose trust and won’t comply. Getting an optimal outcome in the middle of that dilemma is impossible to get right. Not just difficult, but impossible due to the back and forth inter-reactions between individuals, groups and policy. So the process inevitably involves some mixture of politics and data, and multiple points of view that differ. There's no getting away from it. I'm not going to say they have got it right. The different points of view and debate have to continue after all, to pursue the "best" outcome whatever it may be. Only that I have some sympathy with the public health messaging dilemma, and I hope other people can take something useful from the knowledge that public health policy people face this dilemma, and are not just incompetent, blunt instruments, or trying to hoodwink everyone.

supercanuck 6y ago

There was an actual, clear shortage of respirator masks N95 masks for Medical Staff

anm89 6y ago

Agreed, we seem to believe as a society that we can spew bullshit in all directions constantly (advertising, media, our legal system, our politicians campaigning, so many others) but then just turn it off when we want people to agree on some thing. The individual things people seem to believe seem to be nearly universally idiotic, but I sympathize with them to the extent that they can see they are being fed bs narratives all the time and just decide to believe whatever they want if it's all bs anyway.

maxerickson 6y ago

1 person committing arson and 10,000 other people protesting peacefully nearby is entirely possible. That's of course an over-simplification of the dynamics at play in many US cities this summer, but it's not reasonable to attribute responsibility for the actions of a few to large groups that just happen to be nearby.