12 ms·

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and yo

• zaji 5y ago
  Yeah, the line in there about how "debate on such accusations will cause the voices of conspiracy to dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.", to paraphrase, almost made me laugh out loud. Do they really not see the glaring irony there? They are creating the voices of conspiracy all on their own by hiding that information. They are the ones doing harm to science and international harmony.
• staplers 5y ago
  Getting into crypto around 2012 dramatically highlighted this for me. Many in here still regurgitate the same talking points I saw published then.
  • oblio 5y ago
    Could you list a few of those, please?
    • ls15 5y ago
      It even correlates with the price. https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ If you would remove the dates and the prices, I would not be able to tell the age of most of these headlines.
      • midasuni 5y ago
        What an awful graph. Should be a logarithmic Y axis anchored at zero
        • ls15 5y ago
          It is if you zoom out completely
      • oblio 5y ago
        Ah, "rumors of my deaths were greatly exaggerated". My opinion is something like: Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies will not die, but long term the current ones will become fringe techs except for some of their aspects which will be merged into the mainstream. It's too early to know which aspects will remain and which will go away. Plus at this point we cannot evaluate the beneficial/negative aspect of cryptocurrencies as a whole, but the general impression leans towards negative (a ton of negative externalities and 99% of the time used for raw speculation and we could have used those resources for things more beneficial to humankind).
  • ArnoVW 5y ago
    I think the discussion over crypto is, like many other discussions currently, broken. Two groups of people arguing their side, not realising they are both wrong (and both right). Good for you on getting in early. Crypto, as a concept, is extremely neat. It is a libertarians dream. It is an interesting movement, in this time of centralisation and consolidation of power. Crypto, as a tool however, is a solution looking for a problem. A problem that most people do not have. The only reason that crypto is currently huge, is because it (currently) is a Make Money Fast scheme. Should crypto ever become a mainstream way of performing transactions, it will still have to abide by the rule of law, or risk becoming illegal. If Bitcoin could develop and improve, all the while without being a ponzi-scheme, it would be great. And who knows, if POS ever worked out and we manage to transition the whole ecosystem, it may find some usecases in smaller applications. But as it is, POW is generating the CO2 of a large country, providing money to the wrong people (and I'm not talking about you), and preparing financial crash. If you're sitting on a pile of bitcoins since 2012, I understand your point of view. But I'm not convinced it's a net benefit to us all.
• larryflint 5y ago
  Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want to focus on what i'm good at and let others do what they are good at. But now its been shown that the people who are supposed to take care of gathering the facts and presenting them to the public have agendas and will lie if they see it fit. Not sure how any semblance of democracy survives with people like this in charge.
  • t-writescode 5y ago
    The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?” Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.
    • 4ggr0 5y ago
      At least for me, in this instance I don't see why the percentage is of more relevancy than the total amount. Yes, it's only 1% of a company, which is not a lot. But 700 people being fired is quite a lot, if we consider that this affects more than these 700 people. I'm sure a lot of these 700 people have a family at home. In your example I don't really see why that is proof that they use the total amount for ad-driven clickbait. There are more than enough better examples for this, I think.
    • reallyagain 5y ago
      I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago). I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2. Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the company size?
• yread 5y ago
  You've studied and worked on viruses?
• ayngg 5y ago
  "Trust the science" hasn't made people more rational, it has made "science" more dogmatic. I wonder what governments and the media will latch onto once they have eroded the trust in science, because there aren't many other trustworthy institutions left.
  • HPsquared 5y ago
    When politics is mixed with any other field, that field generally becomes a subfield of politics - not the other way round.
    • theaeolist 5y ago
      Much like mixing garbage into food. You get garbage, not food.
  • HumanReadable 5y ago
    I agree, but I still consider it a step up to what we had before. There's always been institutions whom people are told to trust. For a thousand years it was the church. I think for most people to trust credentialed scientists from government institutions is a vast step up, even if they have sorely disappointed during this pandemic.
    • zx85wes 5y ago
      You mean the people who told us not to wear masks? I trust science, but that doesn't mean I trust every scientist.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        If you really trusted science, you would trust that information and knowledge is dynamic and they don’t always have the right answer at the beginning, just an answer that gets changed over time as more knowledge pours in. I’m guessing you prefer your scientists to be absolutely right at the beginning right?
• oblio 5y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624175
  • pasquinelli 5y ago
    it's great to have a name for this.
  • irthomasthomas 5y ago
    Except that according to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect the spell is never broken for most people. They turn the page and resume reading as if the source was still trust worthy.
    • oblio 5y ago
      I'd argue that for most people that's still the case. It's easy to pontificate for a few hours, days, weeks even, and much harder many years and decades down the line for someone else to objectively evaluate the way you access media and say: "J decided to give up on X media after discovering the 'spell' and even decades later they stuck to their decision". My money's on most people giving up these "major" decisions due to practical reasons or sheer boredom, somewhere down the line. You could say that we almost want or need the lies.
    • adolph 5y ago
      The rest think they can winnow grains from chaff due to: Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect
• underdeserver 5y ago
  Government officials are not one homogenous group, and neither are scientists. Please remember that most people who belong to one of those groups truly want to get to truth and improve our knowledge and lives.
  • larryflint 5y ago
  • krageon 5y ago
    It's much more reasonable to think most government officials and scientists don't care one way or the other. Some outliers in both groups are malicious, some outliers are benign.
  • lobocinza 5y ago
    If I'm to extrapolate my personal experience I'd say that most only care to look like that. All my respect to the real ones.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    In this case they unfortunately did act as a completely homogenous group. Epidemiology at least had the Great Barrington Declaration, it had Anders Tegnell. There were a tiny minority who spoke up. Where was the equivalent group for virology? The fact that these guys were lying and lying as a group had to be figured out by deep investigation and lawsuits by outsiders. > Please remember that most people who belong to one of those groups truly want to get to truth and improve our knowledge and lives. I no longer believe this.
• emn13 5y ago
  I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular, a debate in which people constructively interpret what other's say, and don't take it out of context. The back and forth helps focus attention on all the various factors and indirect or partially trusted evidence. But that means people must be able to propose ill-founded hypotheses. They'll be proposing tons of them as they try to separate fact from fiction! In an idealized world you might do this in the open. Unfortunately, media outlets and social media including hacker news will take things out of context, as both the telegraph and this very discussion is doing right now. That's simply not a valid interpretation of the participants opinions and their confidence in them. Selectively quoting "experts" while they're still forming their interpretation of the data is misleading, because it removed the whole point of expertise; the reason you trust such expert opinion is because it is informed, and the social contract here is that experts should refrain from misusing their authority when they're not sure of their conclusions. And most generally do that to maintain their reputation. So what to make of this? I think this could simply be part of a normal healthy debate; one that never saw the light of day simply because (a) evidence was lacking, and alternative explanations (e.g. of that furin cleavage site) emerged, and (b) given the lack of evidence and the unfortunate impossibility to express a nuanced opinion and have it be interpreted by the public correctly due to the charged atmosphere at the time, many chose simply not to speak. That's not to say there aren't a few people that probably acted in bad faith, but the vast majority looks perfectly reasonable to me. And if we want to avoid this in the future, we need to have an atmosphere where nuance is expressible; otherwise you simply can't expect people to open up about potentially explosive hypotheses that they themselves don't even really support but cannot rule out; the damage to their reputation and to society would be too large.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    We had people banned from the discussion for suggesting ideas that run counter the official story. This isn't reasonable anymore, this is a propaganda instrument and not something that was nuanced at all. The mistakes that were made need correction. Don't advertise diversity, live up to it.
• mellosouls 5y ago
  You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? Related to "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect", though I guess in this case the amnesia is replaced by a red-pill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
• enriquto 5y ago
  > Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that) very serious in TV explaining to all the citizens of the republic that we should not buy nor wear masks. That we should clean our doorknobs and vegetables, wash our hands, and avoid touching our face. If we did that we would be safe, no need of masks. Just two weeks later, he appeared again on TV announcing that wearing masks was now mandatory. That it was the most important thing to do. Without any correction on the previous statement. Without any explanation of whether the previous statement was wrong due to ignorance or intentionally (to save masks for health personnel). Not only he was a liar "for our own good", he acted as if people hadn't even a two-week memory! An utmost lack of respect. I found it extremely offensive that a democratically elected president treats the citizens who elected him as little children, and not as adults. I don't believe any of the stupid conspiracy theories, but I have more sympathy for the conspiracists that follow these theories (I am compassionate to them) than for the evil lying politicians.
  • cm2187 5y ago
    Even before the masks, they were presenting "case fatility rates" as "infection fatility rates" (by just calling them "death rate", which everyone understands as risk of death when infected), when there was hardly any test. Of course if you only test people who show up at the ICU, you will get a very high death rate. That was obvious from the outset and I think deliberate disinformation as a scare tactic. It is not before June that they started admitting that the IFR was way below 1%, when the first serology studies started showing up (though I came to believe that this number is meaningless, you need to look at IFR by age). Sam Harris invited Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease MD from John Hopkins in early April 2020, and his estimate at that time was around 0.5%. So it's not like the information wasn't there.
    • phh 5y ago
      Well yes the information was there, I remember clearly that back then, we had the "perfect" measurement (for such an early study that is): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_Princess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_Diamond_P... 14 people out of 2666 died, hence 0.5% death rate (because I don't agree with the estimate that only 700 individuals got it, I saw no good reason not to consider everyone got it, but even without that, it'd give low 2%) A retrospective on who said what on the matter of death rates would be extremely interesting to pick the ""good"" medias and the ""bad"" ones
• Taurenking 5y ago
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Climate change is mostly that barometer for me. So when I see this article cites Viscount Ridley, the climate change denier, I pretty much put it in the same category of bullshit as all of that stuff This is assuming I've not spotted its in the Telegraph first, which is enough to know its almost certainly lies and misrepresention.
  • hkt 5y ago
    I've reached the same conclusion about the Telegraph. It is Pravda for conservatives.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    And what makes you so sure that climatologists have way higher standards than virologists? Clearly, the institutions themselves are not enforcing even the most basic standards of integrity on scientists because they've been fighting the release of these emails for two years. The fact that you dislike the Telegraph because it's conservative is irrelevant. The evidence here is absolute proof that scientists, as a group, systematically lied to and manipulated both the public and governments for two years. Their goal was simply to ensure people didn't stop blindly trusting them, which might cause them to lose funding and power. There was no higher purpose yet nobody in the field of virology stepped up and pointed this out publicly. Many of them knew and were saying so in private emails, but - and this is critical - none of them spoke out. Not one. Climatology is in reality not better. The ClimateGate emails have largely been forgotten now but it was also very clear in those that they were manipulating the peer review process, manipulating the temperature records and more in order to get the outcomes they wanted. They admitted it quite openly, at the time even Guardian writers like Monbiot were shocked by it.
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• MrPatan 5y ago
  Yes, the fog of Gell-Mann's amnesia is lifting. It's probably peer to peer communication like this. What would you do before? Send a letter to the editor of the very same news source to tell them they were full of shit?
• aaron42net 5y ago
  Over the years, I've had direct knowledge of or involvement with maybe a dozen or so events that have ended up in the mainstream news. And in almost every case it has been inaccurate in some way, sometimes getting basic facts wrong and others having significant bias or spin that was misleading. This hasn't given me great confidence in the accuracy of the reporting for things that I don't have direct knowledge of.
• Angostura 5y ago
  I'm very surprised to find someone on HN who lists the Daily Telegraph as their favourite news source. This remoinds me of Climegate where cherry-picked phrases taken out of context were used to try and smear scientists. I'll wait to see the words in context.
  • tim333 5y ago
    I'd like that. One of the problems here is seeing the words at all - this stuff has only come out after over a year of freedom of information requests.
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