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> 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good. Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing a

by pdonis 5y ago

> 1. Be 100% accurate and risk confusing people 2. Be strategic about it and for the greater good. Humans have a very poor track record at actually advancing any "greater good" when they choose option 2. In practice, "the greater good" turns out to be whatever helps those particular humans keep their power and status. That's why option 1 is the only acceptable one. > We need a narrative and the cost is accuracy. If this is actually true (I don't think it is), then our civilization is doomed. > We need to have more empathy for people who are the decision makers and have to make difficult choices. No, we need to stop thinking that certain people should be given the power to be "decision makers" and tell the rest of us what to do. The only acceptable thing for people in public health positions to do should be your option 1 above.

rootusrootus 5y ago
I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.
- barbinbrad 5y ago
  Humility is the truth. Thus, the simple man has a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking skills than the average HN community member.
  - judahmeek 5y ago
    And why do you think the single man is more humble than the average HN community member?
    - pdonis 5y ago
      I don't know if the HN community member "rootusrootus" is "average", but his post certainly did not seem humble to me.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        I would say I am smart enough to recognize how ignorant I am. I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them, and I won't get that from a night on wikipedia, facebook, or youtube.
        pdonis 5y ago
        > I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them Unless those years of education and experience translate into actually being able to make better predictions about what to do than you can, they're useless as something to rely on.
  - dbsmith83 5y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
- pdonis 5y ago
  > I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > is supposed to be a free country That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others. Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media. The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about. My original comment about the poor track record humans have of actually advancing "the greater good" when they think that's what they are doing was meant to be general, however. > If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. Which experts are these? From what I can see, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, two actions that the world could have taken to drastically reduce the impact of COVID, much more than anything anyone actually did, are: (1) Stop all international travel, sometime around late January or early February 2020. (2) Make the vaccines that were discovered in January 2020 available, at least to high risk people (e.g., the elderly, health care workers) in high risk areas, sometime in February or March 2020. I'm not aware of any "expert" that ever recommended either of those things. Indeed, experts were vociferously recommending against #1.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all. If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > If you think the people who [...] I did not mention any of those folks. The reason you knocked that argument out of the park was because it was made of straw.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > I did not mention any of those folks. Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        > Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans. In that case, so are all other humans too. The GP did not mention any specific occupational or educational categories; that was all your own invention.
mcguire 5y ago
How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case? How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions? Alternatively, what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Or do you provide 100% accurate information in sufficient detail that they can make those decisions individually?
- pdonis 5y ago
  > How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case? If experts in various fields could be trusted to just tell the truth about what they've found and not try to spin it or filter it, their information would be much more useful. It's precisely because the average person cannot trust experts to just tell the truth about what they've found that it's so hard for average people to get information they feel they can trust. Also, being an expert in virology, for example, does not make a person an expert in human psychology; but trying to spin or filter your information about virology (or anything else) based on how you think people are going to receive it is a human psychology problem, not a virology problem. And if spinning and filtering scientific information was viewed, as it properly should be, as a matter of psychology, it would be much more obvious how manipulative it is--do you really want so-called psychology "experts" spinning and filtering the information you get based on their model of how human minds work? In short: your implicit assumption that I, as a non-expert in a given field, can just trust the experts to tell me what to do is wrong--dangerously so. If the decision really matters to you, you take the time to learn enough about the field to at least be able to apply some intelligent common sense. > How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions? You don't need to take time to learn tens of thousands of fields in order to apply intelligent common sense to your everyday life decisions, or even to decisions about something like COVID. Intelligent common sense just about viral illnesses in general, which should be common knowledge to any adult in a first world country in the 21st century, should have been enough to tell people in the US, for example, to wear masks and social distance around the end of February 2020, which is when my wife and I started doing it. If it's really true that a majority of the US population is unable to exercise that much intelligence and common sense, then our society certainly has a problem, but "just trust the experts" is not going to solve it, it will make it worse. > what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Not in any way that requires me to communicate information to others, no. What I do does affect others, but only in the sense that my work, which is in a technical field, has to be done right in a technical sense. That said, I should be clear that my comments about what public officials should do are made from the viewpoint of a citizen, not from the viewpoint of an official.

by pdonis 5y ago

rootusrootus 5y ago

I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all.

barbinbrad 5y ago
Humility is the truth. Thus, the simple man has a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking skills than the average HN community member.
- judahmeek 5y ago
  And why do you think the single man is more humble than the average HN community member?
  - pdonis 5y ago
    I don't know if the HN community member "rootusrootus" is "average", but his post certainly did not seem humble to me.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I would say I am smart enough to recognize how ignorant I am. I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them, and I won't get that from a night on wikipedia, facebook, or youtube.
      - pdonis 5y ago
        > I put more weight in what experts say because they have the years of education and experience to help guide them Unless those years of education and experience translate into actually being able to make better predictions about what to do than you can, they're useless as something to rely on.
- dbsmith83 5y ago
  Do you have a source for this?
pdonis 5y ago
> I feel like your underlying assumption here is that the average human has a similar level of intelligence and critical thinking skills as the average HN community member. No. My underlying assumption is that my country (the US) is supposed to be a free country, where people are expected to make their own decisions and manage their own lives. If a significant fraction of people aren't capable of doing that, then, as I said in another post downthread, that's a problem, yes, but it's not a problem that can be fixed by just telling everyone to trust the experts. That makes the problem worse, not better.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > is supposed to be a free country That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. For some variations of those you are going to find yourself decidedly less free than others. Agreed that blind trust in experts makes the problem worse - in principle. But with hysteria just around the corner (of which the wishful thinking that a cheap and common cure exists is one exponent) I can see why authorities chose to try to massage the message. Where they wrong? Probably, in the general case, yes. Were they wrong in this case? Possibly, but I would not be too sure of that, taking into account that even the highest levels of politics were actively spreading mis-information against informed scientific consensus. If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. But instead, we outsourced our trust and hence our decision making to committees, politicians and the lens of the media. The fact that every country acted on its own was yet another confounding factor, if this had been a giant synchronized operation then it likely would have worked out differently as well. Even today we are still seeing giant differences between countries, rather than that the rich countries structurally help the poor.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > That's highly dependent on a bunch of stuff that you can not choose at birth. Meaning, which country you are born in? Yes, of course; that's why I specified which country I was talking about. My original comment about the poor track record humans have of actually advancing "the greater good" when they think that's what they are doing was meant to be general, however. > If we actually had trusted the experts things would likely look a lot better. Which experts are these? From what I can see, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, two actions that the world could have taken to drastically reduce the impact of COVID, much more than anything anyone actually did, are: (1) Stop all international travel, sometime around late January or early February 2020. (2) Make the vaccines that were discovered in January 2020 available, at least to high risk people (e.g., the elderly, health care workers) in high risk areas, sometime in February or March 2020. I'm not aware of any "expert" that ever recommended either of those things. Indeed, experts were vociferously recommending against #1.
pdonis 5y ago
> At the risk of coming across as extremely snobby, that just isn't true at all. If you think the people who grow our food, make our clothes, build our houses and cars, fix our plumbing and heating and air conditioning when it breaks, run our electrical wiring safely, run the utility plants that provide our power and water and sewage disposal, and do the thousands of other things that are necessary to keep our technological society working, have less intelligence and common sense than you do, you don't come across to me as snobby, just woefully uninformed.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > If you think the people who [...] I did not mention any of those folks. The reason you knocked that argument out of the park was because it was made of straw.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > I did not mention any of those folks. Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Yes, you did. You said "the average human". All of those folks are average humans. In that case, so are all other humans too. The GP did not mention any specific occupational or educational categories; that was all your own invention.

mcguire 5y ago

How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case? How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions? Alternatively, what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Or do you provide 100% accurate information in sufficient detail that they can make those decisions individually?

pdonis 5y ago
> How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case? If experts in various fields could be trusted to just tell the truth about what they've found and not try to spin it or filter it, their information would be much more useful. It's precisely because the average person cannot trust experts to just tell the truth about what they've found that it's so hard for average people to get information they feel they can trust. Also, being an expert in virology, for example, does not make a person an expert in human psychology; but trying to spin or filter your information about virology (or anything else) based on how you think people are going to receive it is a human psychology problem, not a virology problem. And if spinning and filtering scientific information was viewed, as it properly should be, as a matter of psychology, it would be much more obvious how manipulative it is--do you really want so-called psychology "experts" spinning and filtering the information you get based on their model of how human minds work? In short: your implicit assumption that I, as a non-expert in a given field, can just trust the experts to tell me what to do is wrong--dangerously so. If the decision really matters to you, you take the time to learn enough about the field to at least be able to apply some intelligent common sense. > How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions? You don't need to take time to learn tens of thousands of fields in order to apply intelligent common sense to your everyday life decisions, or even to decisions about something like COVID. Intelligent common sense just about viral illnesses in general, which should be common knowledge to any adult in a first world country in the 21st century, should have been enough to tell people in the US, for example, to wear masks and social distance around the end of February 2020, which is when my wife and I started doing it. If it's really true that a majority of the US population is unable to exercise that much intelligence and common sense, then our society certainly has a problem, but "just trust the experts" is not going to solve it, it will make it worse. > what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others? Not in any way that requires me to communicate information to others, no. What I do does affect others, but only in the sense that my work, which is in a technical field, has to be done right in a technical sense. That said, I should be clear that my comments about what public officials should do are made from the viewpoint of a citizen, not from the viewpoint of an official.