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I don't think it's an exaggeration, and I wouldn't flag it, but I worry about the attitude. Officials are telling the truth about the danger of the coronavirus,

I don't think it's an exaggeration, and I wouldn't flag it, but I worry about the attitude. Officials are telling the truth about the danger of the coronavirus, but sometimes they do lie! We can't afford to cultivate an attitude that only raving lunatics accuse government agencies of lying.

acdha 5y ago
No, but I think it’s important to do that by relying on reason and evidence. Anyone known to repeat lies is unlikely to be right about deep secrets, just as the Snowden leak didn’t validate the people convinced that the government was reading your emails on behalf of the Trilateral Commission and aliens in Area 51.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I mean... didn't it? One of the things Snowden revealed was an international conspiracy called Five Eyes, where intelligence agencies across the Anglosphere coordinate to covertly guide world events in their preferred direction, leaning on each other to handle things such as domestic espionage which would be illegal in their home countries. I'm not sure we can mark this as a loss for the conspiracy theorists, even if they were wrong to think the Trilateral Commission was involved.
  - acdha 5y ago
    I don’t think it validated anyone: they didn’t contribute any new facts about the groups, reasons, or methods. The fact that there was a government spy agency spying doesn’t mean any of those details were less wrong or that the conspiracy theorists are trustworthy sources of information about anything in the future. Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that. This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?
cbsmith 5y ago
More often than not, they aren't "lying". It's presented that way, but there's a real challenge explaining policy to a hostile audience. I mean, that's the job, so not much pity for them, but most of the time is an oversimplification (a classic form of propaganda). Their incentives are such that it is way easier to tell the truth.

acdha 5y ago

No, but I think it’s important to do that by relying on reason and evidence. Anyone known to repeat lies is unlikely to be right about deep secrets, just as the Snowden leak didn’t validate the people convinced that the government was reading your emails on behalf of the Trilateral Commission and aliens in Area 51.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
I mean... didn't it? One of the things Snowden revealed was an international conspiracy called Five Eyes, where intelligence agencies across the Anglosphere coordinate to covertly guide world events in their preferred direction, leaning on each other to handle things such as domestic espionage which would be illegal in their home countries. I'm not sure we can mark this as a loss for the conspiracy theorists, even if they were wrong to think the Trilateral Commission was involved.
- acdha 5y ago
  I don’t think it validated anyone: they didn’t contribute any new facts about the groups, reasons, or methods. The fact that there was a government spy agency spying doesn’t mean any of those details were less wrong or that the conspiracy theorists are trustworthy sources of information about anything in the future. Part of what makes conspiracy theories spread well is mixing in real details to make the invented parts sound reasonable. Five Eyes and ECHELON weren’t secret so they were great for making it sound more like you knew what you were talking about, things like PRISM, MUSCULAR, and XKeyscore were but none of the conspiracists had detailed anything like that. This is the same dynamic we’re seeing now with antivax and QAnon types digging through things like CDC bulletins. They can use details to sound like they’re more informed and find odd phrasing or terms of art which can be confusing to normal people in a way which supports their narrative. Imagine how it’d sound if someone started writing stories about a dark cannibal-murder conspiracy among Linux admins forking and killing children, based on someone’s mailing list posts about troubleshooting some C code. If they correctly identified fork(2) and you knew that Reiser had actually killed someone, would that make you trust them about anything because a few details could be stretched to cover something real?

cbsmith 5y ago

More often than not, they aren't "lying". It's presented that way, but there's a real challenge explaining policy to a hostile audience. I mean, that's the job, so not much pity for them, but most of the time is an oversimplification (a classic form of propaganda). Their incentives are such that it is way easier to tell the truth.