5 ms·

the article in passing mentions the key difference. People in Portugal don't pathologically question every source of authority. If you had trotted out a militar

the article in passing mentions the key difference. People in Portugal don't pathologically question every source of authority. If you had trotted out a military general in uniform in the US talking about the war against vaccines one hour later every talk radio host would have started ranting about how the military has been undermined by the deep state and so on. Conspiracy logic cannot be argued with because if commitment is strong enough everything that is seen as contrary evidence is just incorporated. "Oh great, now they're pretending they're apolitical!" etc. You've seen it already with other military personnel on different issues. Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political but more so, a lot of European countries even in very relative history have been governed by military authority at times. one only needs to look at the shocked "army in the streets" articles after every terror attack in the english-speaking press. I don't think this can be transplanted to the US.

pjmlp 5y ago
We are also allergic to anything else that brings memories from pre-1974 days. If someone would try to make too much of right wing kind of stuff, "April never again" would be chanted on the streets. Unfortunately, when my generation is gone, that kind of resistance will be gone as well.
HelixEndeavor 5y ago
Are you trying to suggest that questioning authority figures is a flaw?
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Anything taken to excess is a flaw. parent comment said "pathologically question", do not deliberately misinterpret.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    But nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines, regardless of what some people may wish to believe. The questions are all very much relevant, on point and - given the untrustworthy nature of public health authorities up to this point - necessary to ask.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      Ok, you don't want the health authorities, virologists and experts in pandemics to answer your legit questions about vaccines. Who do you think that has earned the stripes and the authority to answer your questions then? FOX news?, a Russian troll farm?, Beyonce?, Jesus? Please propose somebody that you would trust and why you think that should be seen as an expert in this field, so we can solve this obstacle and move on with our lives.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        > somebody that you would trust Presumably, a whole society, even in limited though adequate number, of experts who are capable of reassuring by asking the same questions the subject may raise, and providing convincing answers, and by avoiding acting with the most unconvincing signals. "The incumbent shall have an elephant detector and will positively and publicly acknowledge and properly assess all the specimens found in the rooms s/he will be assigned to".
        pvaldes 5y ago
        Its a start at least, but that's still very vague. Can you specify more?
        mdp2021 5y ago
        No prob. I did not mean to be vague, I wanted to specify the principles. Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse). In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers. -- Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    This is a no true Scotsman statement. Questioning authority is okay as long as it’s just questioning, but any question can be dismissed as pathological questioning and forbidden. If you want to use some qualification of ‘pathologically questioning’ you’ll have to define what it is. So it’s clear what kind of questions you want forbidden.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      This is a no true "no true Scotsman" statement: yet there are Scotsmen; there are still always excess of anything; despite the caveat that this can be abused as "any question can be dismissed as pathological". Do not overthink it into pretzel-logic. My other comment outlines the situation that I think clearly qualifies.
      - tinus_hn 5y ago
        So your argument is that the no true Scotsman fallacy is not a fallacy because Scotsmen do in fact exist? It would be nice to state in advance that you have abandoned logic and that any discussion with you is pointless.
        SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        It's that claiming everything is a fallacy is a pointless distraction. it's not _always_ a falacy. As I said, "Anything taken to excess is a flaw" - there is always a limit somewhere. That does not in itself make everything "no true scotsman!"
  - HelixEndeavor 5y ago
    At what point does questioning of authority figures become "pathological"? Who decides where that line is drawn?
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      My reply to that is already present here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736407
JetSpiegel 5y ago
> Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political In this case, it is. Now that the Vice-Admiral is done with the vaccinations, all he wants is to be promoted to Admiral (which led to a kerfuffle between the President and the Government). He wants no political post whatsoever. In fact, there was a doctor ahead of vaccination task force before, but he was pushed aside after supporting one of the losing candidates for president.

pjmlp 5y ago

We are also allergic to anything else that brings memories from pre-1974 days. If someone would try to make too much of right wing kind of stuff, "April never again" would be chanted on the streets. Unfortunately, when my generation is gone, that kind of resistance will be gone as well.

HelixEndeavor 5y ago

Are you trying to suggest that questioning authority figures is a flaw?

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Anything taken to excess is a flaw. parent comment said "pathologically question", do not deliberately misinterpret.
- native_samples 5y ago
  But nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines, regardless of what some people may wish to believe. The questions are all very much relevant, on point and - given the untrustworthy nature of public health authorities up to this point - necessary to ask.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Ok, you don't want the health authorities, virologists and experts in pandemics to answer your legit questions about vaccines. Who do you think that has earned the stripes and the authority to answer your questions then? FOX news?, a Russian troll farm?, Beyonce?, Jesus? Please propose somebody that you would trust and why you think that should be seen as an expert in this field, so we can solve this obstacle and move on with our lives.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      > somebody that you would trust Presumably, a whole society, even in limited though adequate number, of experts who are capable of reassuring by asking the same questions the subject may raise, and providing convincing answers, and by avoiding acting with the most unconvincing signals. "The incumbent shall have an elephant detector and will positively and publicly acknowledge and properly assess all the specimens found in the rooms s/he will be assigned to".
      - pvaldes 5y ago
        Its a start at least, but that's still very vague. Can you specify more?
        mdp2021 5y ago
        No prob. I did not mean to be vague, I wanted to specify the principles. Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse). In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers. -- Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  This is a no true Scotsman statement. Questioning authority is okay as long as it’s just questioning, but any question can be dismissed as pathological questioning and forbidden. If you want to use some qualification of ‘pathologically questioning’ you’ll have to define what it is. So it’s clear what kind of questions you want forbidden.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    This is a no true "no true Scotsman" statement: yet there are Scotsmen; there are still always excess of anything; despite the caveat that this can be abused as "any question can be dismissed as pathological". Do not overthink it into pretzel-logic. My other comment outlines the situation that I think clearly qualifies.
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      So your argument is that the no true Scotsman fallacy is not a fallacy because Scotsmen do in fact exist? It would be nice to state in advance that you have abandoned logic and that any discussion with you is pointless.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        It's that claiming everything is a fallacy is a pointless distraction. it's not _always_ a falacy. As I said, "Anything taken to excess is a flaw" - there is always a limit somewhere. That does not in itself make everything "no true scotsman!"
- HelixEndeavor 5y ago
  At what point does questioning of authority figures become "pathological"? Who decides where that line is drawn?
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    My reply to that is already present here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28736407

JetSpiegel 5y ago

> Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political In this case, it is. Now that the Vice-Admiral is done with the vaccinations, all he wants is to be promoted to Admiral (which led to a kerfuffle between the President and the Government). He wants no political post whatsoever. In fact, there was a doctor ahead of vaccination task force before, but he was pushed aside after supporting one of the losing candidates for president.