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There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton e

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers. I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.

pwillia7 5y ago
I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so. I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months. I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was. That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case. Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
- rorykoehler 5y ago
  It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming. On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.
whall6 5y ago
Woah woah woah who says the earth isn’t flat?
jkhdigital 5y ago
A to the men
vosper 5y ago
> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article) https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...
- hermitdev 5y ago
  This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.
  - lhnz 5y ago
    The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims. So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.
- PedroBatista 5y ago
  There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".
dqpb 5y ago
Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.
- premium-komodo 5y ago
  Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life. I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      See also: the stereotype that physicists think they know everything because they know physics
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Is HN any better? On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.
Animats 5y ago
Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source. Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum? Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
  - potatoman22 5y ago
    Creepy
  - eitland 5y ago
    > "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid? And I actually appreciate you all being here : ) But please distinguish between - "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and - secretly pushing an agenda. And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb: in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
lawnchair_larry 5y ago
Trump Derangement Syndrome.
tootie 5y ago
As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.
- lawnchair_larry 5y ago
  You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide. The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning. But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way. Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
  - tootie 5y ago
    The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab. And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.
avivo 5y ago
From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution." I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.
- busymom0 5y ago
  > There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost. > fake consensus that can become very misleading It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580 Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked. I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult. Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large. Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.
- lmm 5y ago
  Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war. The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.
JPKab 5y ago
You really hit the nail on the head with this comment. Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment. Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity. It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them..... Curious journalists would have identified these earlier. Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say. That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.
3327 5y ago
Your post is absolutely rubbish. White washing one wrong with another. If there is no lab leak, its not hard to prove. Why destroy samples and genetic data? What the author wrote and how its interpretation is material is beyond the point. The world is owed an explanation- and hiding facts simply exasperates suspicion. The world is owed an explanation- and if there is no “lab leak” then it can be proven without a doubt. Is there smoke? Most certainly. Is there fire? Maybe, maybe not. But surely the evidence is there. And cooperation is step one. Cheers.
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

pwillia7 5y ago

I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so. I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months. I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was. That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case. Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?

rorykoehler 5y ago
It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming. On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.

whall6 5y ago

Woah woah woah who says the earth isn’t flat?

jkhdigital 5y ago

A to the men

vosper 5y ago

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article) https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-beating https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...

hermitdev 5y ago
This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.
- lhnz 5y ago
  The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims. So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.
PedroBatista 5y ago
There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".

dqpb 5y ago

Is HN any better? I got censored and ridiculously rate limited today for trying to post a similar article.

premium-komodo 5y ago
Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Lots of people who are extremely educated (i.e. vocational training) fail to grasp very simple concepts of arguing, debating and behave quite childish and immature in many other aspects of their life. I spent about 20 years in academia, among the most "highly intelligent and prepared people" in the world, yet know 14-15 year olds who behave in a much more honorable way.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    See also: the stereotype that physicists think they know everything because they know physics
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Is HN any better? On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.

Animats 5y ago

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

fartcannon 5y ago
I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source. Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum? Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-2019-005545657.html https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
- potatoman22 5y ago
  Creepy
- eitland 5y ago
  > "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." Wow! That was unexpectedly - what should I say - candid? And I actually appreciate you all being here : ) But please distinguish between - "helping customers where they are" which is a great idea and - secretly pushing an agenda. And if anyone wonders about how do you distinguish between those two here's a rule of thumb: in the first case if someone realizes you work for that company it feels good. In the second case it probably feels bad.
- crispyambulance 5y ago

lawnchair_larry 5y ago

Trump Derangement Syndrome.

tootie 5y ago

As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.

lawnchair_larry 5y ago
You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide. The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning. But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way. Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
- tootie 5y ago
  The lab leak theory is not Occam's razor. We've had many, many pandemics and epidemics and none have been associated with research labs. We've had SARS outbreaks in China that are not associated with a lab. There is also no proof beyond circumstance to associate it with the lab. And it's not wrong because Trump said it. He may end up being partly correct. The fact remains he had no reason to be as confident in his pronouncement as he was aside from political expediency. Cotton was far more measured in his statements even if he was still stretching. I'm also saying that the MSM and scientific consensus only really threw a fit over the bioweapon theory and inflammatory rhetoric. Even the infamous WHO study said accidental lab leak was possible.

avivo 5y ago

From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution." I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.

busymom0 5y ago
> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way. That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost. > fake consensus that can become very misleading It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580 Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked. I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult. Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large. Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.

lmm 5y ago
Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war. The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.

JPKab 5y ago

You really hit the nail on the head with this comment. Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment. Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity. It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them..... Curious journalists would have identified these earlier. Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say. That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.

3327 5y ago

Your post is absolutely rubbish. White washing one wrong with another. If there is no lab leak, its not hard to prove. Why destroy samples and genetic data? What the author wrote and how its interpretation is material is beyond the point. The world is owed an explanation- and hiding facts simply exasperates suspicion. The world is owed an explanation- and if there is no “lab leak” then it can be proven without a doubt. Is there smoke? Most certainly. Is there fire? Maybe, maybe not. But surely the evidence is there. And cooperation is step one. Cheers.

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.