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The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of inform

by throwaway22032 5y ago

The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Because when we start to doubt them, we then inevitably elect alternative bodies, simply due to limited thinking capacity/time - as explained above it's impossible to do otherwise, no-one derives from first principles every opinion they hold. The best way, _overall_, to convince someone to do something, is by clearly explaining to them the positives and negatives and letting them come to their own conclusion. It doesn't always work, and there are specific situations (e.g. someone is holding a gun to your face) in which the cost/benefit analysis is very different - in such a situation, the short term is all that exists, the long term effect of misplaced trust is irrelevant - you simply have to neutralize them. But in general, I'm absolutely sure that education over coercion is the correct approach for society. Because if you force them, sure, you've got a short term win, at the long term cost of trust. What is the long term cost of lost trust?

shadowgovt 5y ago
What do you do while education lags where it needs to be? Because enough education to understand, say, climate change takes about a decade. (... And that's assuming it can be provided without being shut down as "indoctrination").
- deleted 5y ago
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- yanmaani 5y ago
  That's ... not true? Children can learn a basic model of the greenhouse effect in school, and do so in most civilized nations. Whether this is sufficient is another thing entirely, but I would personally contend that (non-propaganda) education can never be 100% effective at causing someone to believe something?
  - throwaway22032 5y ago
    Right, this hits at the more fundamental issue which is that the purpose of stuff like "misinformation" filters is not to affect what people believe, but the second order effect - how they act. Loads of people are well aware that wearing a mask would result in less coronavirus particles being emitted from my face if they were infected. But they don't act on that for various other reasons unrelated to the virus. The same is true of climate change. You can think that it's real and still drive your car for precisely the same reason that you can think that cirrhosis is real and still drink a few beers.
blix 5y ago
The interesting thing about trust is it takes much longer to build than to spend. Given the level scientific institutions have been spending trust over the past few years I'm not sure how this problem can be alleviated within our current framework.
- donw 5y ago
  It can’t be.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  You can't spend trust, you can only violate it.
Lammy 5y ago
> because we don’t have time This part is a huge society-wide problem that can theoretically be fixed so people can become more informed and active participants in the framework of their daily lives. Don’t ask me how, though, because I just got off work and am too exhausted to do anything except let the news tell me what to be afraid of today, then probably binge The Office and slam a few brewskis until I fall asleep on my couch ‘cause I got work again tomorrow
- raziel2p 5y ago
  Even if I do have time and energy, my lack of knowledge on the subject matter would probably lead me to waste that time on dead ends, wrong conclusions, or learning things I will never use again outside of fact-checking one study.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    > dead ends, wrong conclusions You have to trust yourself to try anyway. Beats doomscrolling even if both are equally meaningless in the long run. Something that helps me is refusing to accept any narrative or conclusion about any topic where it would require a specific named group of people (e.g. members of any nationality, profession, corporation, ancestry, presentation, etc — anything) to be uniformly dumb or malicious. That might sound silly but it means there’s no downside to entertaining any consideration, not even the downside of my own bad feelings from negative ideas. It totally removes a layer of mental latency I didn’t even realize I had until recently, even about topics where that wouldn’t ever be a question that’s possible to ask. Instead of getting bogged down checking one story after another it’s easier to ignore entire storyline arcs at a time once they’re more obviously one set of jangling keys after another all vying for my attention at a higher priority than any self-directed interests :)
- fragmede 5y ago
  We, as a society, bought a dog, and it took at literary shit in our communnal kitchen. No one wants to clean it up, and frankly, I can't blame you/me/any one individual for it. It's exhausting but a society-wide problem. It sucks that the only response from platforms has been to ban the discussion, rather than pay for a writers corp to come up with easy to parse FAQs why some of the garbage misinformation is a pile of lies, and to write systemic takedowns of odious dreck. But here we are.
0xy 5y ago
The CDC recently dropped to 50% public trust, after repeated failures, mixed messages and outright lies in some cases. They lie and then act incensed when the public stops believing them. Given the massive damage they've done, I'd consider it justified. The CDC is an incompetent, bloated and fundamentally dishonest organization that was perfectly comfortable throwing grandma to the wolves via lies (masks don't work!) if it meant their unpreparedness wasn't exposed. Via anti-masking lies, CDC irreparably damaged their reputation and also likely got people killed who believed them. The damage is deserved.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I remember pre-covid thinking that the CDC was the only federal agency that had its stuff together, but early on in COVID they really came off as inept. They failed to stockpile PPE (masks and such) or even make provisions for procuring the same. Then they told us masks don't work (as you noted) before eventually flipping on that position. Then they bungled the tests (instead of going with the WHO test like the rest of the world, CDC rolled its own which didn't work and was much less efficient to process). Still, I don't share the distrust of a lot of folks regarding their policies and decisions over the last year or so. I think they're probably making reasonable calls for the available evidence even if hindsight eventually proves them wrong. To the extent their critics are correct, I think most will have arrived at their conclusions as a matter of luck (e.g., someone who knows nothing of virology happens to hear some study or other that hints that the CDC may be wrong and bases their entire worldview on that study without any awareness of the counter evidence).
hammock 5y ago
>The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. What caused that trust to be lost? Is it something they did?
- CPLX 5y ago
  Absolutely. At least here in the United States there’s a full on collapse of trust in institutions and supposed expertise and for extremely good reasons. Over and over again those with authority have squandered it. An opioid epidemic devastated so many communities after doctors, health care executives, and McKinsey and Company said the new class of drugs were non-addicting. Our manufacturing sector evaporated after economists and politicians said free trade would benefit everyone. Thousands of young people were sent to die in the Middle East in a war all the experts said was necessary and would be relatively painless. Those are just the first three examples off the top of my head. I could keep going. We were promised technology would improve our lives. We were promised borrowing money for education would improve our lives. And on and on and on. All bullshit. All promulgated by supposed experts with impeccable credentials. It’s a full on disaster and the chickens have come home to roost.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    > in a war all the experts said was necessary Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.
    - CPLX 5y ago
      Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts. But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.
      - lmm 5y ago
        That's not the way I remember it at all. The government were very obviously going into war because they wanted to and scrabbling around for anyone who would support them. You only have to look at the death of David Kelly.
EarlKing 5y ago
> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1] [1] https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg
- deleted 5y ago
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- immibis 5y ago
  - drugstorecowboy 5y ago
    You are making some pretty uncharitable assumptions here, and frankly I find this entire post very distasteful. Who decides what is "pseudo-truth" instead of "actual truth"? I'll take a wild guess... you are the one who knows the "actual truth" unlike all the ignorant people who disagree with you...
  - EarlKing 5y ago
    ....and that is exactly why no one trusts institutional actors anymore. > I think your comic is referencing the political "left" vs "right" divide, you are part of "the right" That's a big assumption. I could very well be part of the left who simply doesn't share "the left"(tm)(c)pat. pending)'s current party line because I find it to be nonsensical. > People who exhibit this pattern are usually stuck in a rut of pseudo-truth. There it is. That arrogance right there. "You don't share my class interests, therefore you are wrong". That, in essence, is exactly why no one trusts institutional actors -- because people realize they've aligned themselves with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. There's no disguising it anymore. They will do or say whatever those who hold the purse-strings tell them to say. > It doesn't help that a lot of institutions agree with the actual truth a lot of the time Which truth is that? The one that said that masks helped halt the spread of the virus, or the one that said it didn't and we should stop hoarding them? Roll 2d6 and consult your Propaganda Master's Guide on page 666 to find the answer. > People who exhibit this pattern often reflexively disbelieve whatever any authority says, just because they're an authority, i.e. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. ...or they've correctly identified them as class enemies who will do or say whatever it takes to defend their class interest such that you can't believe anything that comes out of their mouth. It honestly doesn't matter if they're right at that point because the lack of trust cannot be amended. > The thing that makes it really insidious is the mentality they're right and everyone else is automatically wrong. Indeed. Calling someone a part of 'the right' and saying they're from a side stuck in a 'rut of pseudo-truth' because they point out that institutional actors are biased to their own interest, have a history of lying, and this is why no one trusts them anymore, is quite insidious. > I ask you: Hypothetically, if what you believed was not actually true, what would convince you of that? Institutional actors abdicating their posts in favor of someone of proletarian class interest so proletarian ideals can be put to the test without interference.
Gravityloss 5y ago
For long term scientific correctness, what the hacker news crowd could help with tremendously is reproducibility and that means versioning and continuous integration with data, for research software. In context of a paper or doing research, you have to write software anyway. The other one that pops to mind is probably statistical calculation helping services. Maybe there are lots of other things as well - I haven't been involved with scientific research in a long time.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  The main thing I think is lacking is representing data in helpful and actionable ways. A theoretical climate change example might be: Car A emits 10% less CO2 than car B. Driving is 30% of your annual emissions (i.e. it's significant and one of the low hanging fruit). That 30% of your annual emissions if multiplied by 7 billion people is likely to cause X. If everyone drives car B instead of car A, Y will happen instead. Y is better than X, because we end up with a more verdant Earth, cheaper food, better weather, less war (insert reason here). Therefore, our overall quality of life is higher if we switch to car A. Without the whole information chain, you just have isolated statistics that don't really mean anything. Convincing argumentation is not only about mathematics, it's about appealing to the things that matter to people.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    > Y is better than X, because we end up with a more verdant Earth, cheaper food, better weather, less war (insert reason here). The problem is that while it's easy to calculate exactly how much less CO2 car A emits than car B, it is close to impossible to use science to predict to any useful degree of accuracy how much cheaper the food, better the weather, or less of the war we will get. It's often hard to even predict the sign, not even trying to determine the magnitude. This means that when scientists or politicians tell you that "we need to do X, so that we get Y", they're very often fooling you, because they have no good idea how much (if any) Y you get for each unit of X.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    I think you missed a step in the chain; if you increase the quality of life for humans, what are the consequences for human population growth and the consequences for the rest of the biosphere as a result?
strictfp 5y ago
I wasn't social media that eroded the trust in research and science, it was the introduction of politics. We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This way people would trust the results.
- urthor 5y ago
  I strongly protest the concept that the recent introduction of politics is making things worse than they used to be. If you ask anyone who was senior working in these institutions in the 1970s, things were far more dodgy back then. Corruption and bigotry were rampant. But it was far easier to cover up back in the day. Politicization is mostly driven by transparency. Politicization is not a new thing, it's a fact that there's a lot of extremely conservative individuals in each country. And technology has bought them closer to their institutions. Society is being brought very closely together, and we're working through the teething issues.
  - slg 5y ago
    >I strongly protest the concept that the recent introduction of politics is making things worse than they used to be... Corruption and bigotry were rampant. It is wild how people think things like institutional bigotry aren't politics. How is a scientific organization that excludes large swaths of the population due purely to the circumstances of their birth apolitical? Science has always been political because politics is how people interact with each other. That is true whether we are discussing how governments behave on the world stage or how that big project is being managed at your job. Wherever people exist, politics exists.
  - skissane 5y ago
    Most people accept that science in past generations was, to a certain degree, corrupted by the prevailing prejudices and societal/cultural/political/ideological beliefs of the time. But, if we acknowledge that was true then – why shouldn't we expect the same to be true now? The prevailing prejudices and ideologies may have changed, but has anything changed about the actual practice of science to make it more immune to those forces? I think a lot of people can't see it, because it is far easier to see when science is being influenced by beliefs you reject than when it is being influenced by beliefs you yourself share. I think the politicisation of science is inevitable, and science is never going to be entirely politically neutral. Scientists are human beings, and as Aristotle famously said, "man is a political animal". I think science is going to achieve the maximum possible political neutrality when it is either (a) things so clearly established no one can sensibly debate them (which especially happens when scientific theories get translated into widely adopted working technologies–the very fact that the technology works is proof the theories behind it must be mostly correct); (b) things that avoid political entanglements because they have little relevance to everyday human life (e.g. string theory vs loop quantum gravity isn't influenced by broader societal politics because it has no relevance to issues of social/cultural/economic/political power, although even it is surely influenced by the micro-politics of the theoretical physics community, its funding models, etc.) Take something like human-induced climate change – personally, I accept the mainstream account of that topic as most likely to be correct, but I can't be completely sure that it is right, surely there is some non-zero probability (even if a small one) that it is wrong. But, I expect people in a couple of centuries from now will be able to reach a much firmer consensus – they'll know whose predictions turned out to be right, plus technological and economic developments will likely greatly reduce the number of people with a vested economic interest in the non-mainstream answer. I think the most likely outcome will be that the mainstream account will be vindicated, and almost everyone will acknowledge that the minority were wrong; but it isn't absolutely impossible that it could turn out the other way around. And whichever way it turns out, I think people will see politics as having played a major role – if the mainstream account is confirmed, people will see much of the opposing minority as being led astray by politics; but, conversely, if the sceptical minority turn out to have been right all along, people will reach the same conclusion with respect to today's mainstream.
loceng 5y ago
Edit to add: I found out what happens when you present a video testimonial strongly calling into question vaccine clinical trials - it gets downvoted. So what happens when you present a video testimonial like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ - and people just dismiss it, people not understanding that with clinical trials you're meant to keep track of and report all outcomes, and not only that - by limiting the scope via an app that has limited options, and no free form input, you're crafting a very narrow scope of outcome, literally doctoring the outcome by minimizing the potential range and severity of adverse events? (If the people even watch the video or understand the implications of what Maddie's mother has shared; and if not, then you're not able to educate or inform them further - probably because it's a counter-mainstream narrative point, arguably the mainstream and government captured, regulatory capture from industrial complexes, etc) Does the video described build or harm trust of our institutions? Does that this happened with this clinical trial, does that not automatically extrapolate that all of the other clinical trials were ignored, not given proper oversight, nor having integrity to them?
- immibis 5y ago
  Anyone can make a video about anything. There are lots of videos explaining why the moon landing was a hoax. Was it?
  - loceng 5y ago
    Are you telling me you watched that video and that you're claiming the mother is lying?
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rgrieselhuber 5y ago
Let people draw their own conclusions and don’t censor or otherwise penalize them for questioning one interpretation of data vs another. Encourage people to do their own research and investigate who is funding the sources used for that research. There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist.
- 1270018080 5y ago
  Do you mean "Do their own research" like make up conspiracy theories out of thin air and parrot nonsense deep state rhetoric? Completely divorcing yourself from reality? You want more of that?
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    The world will always have heathens and heretics. Some people will always come to the wrong conclusion some of the time. Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.
    - rob_c 5y ago
      Amen!
    - rgrieselhuber 5y ago
      Right. Why do we care so much if everyone agrees?
      - fragmede 5y ago
        Thing is, to a large degree, we haven't had to before. If someone random person wants to believe the moon landing is hoax, it doesn't affect my life in the slightest. What's changed is that random person walking around with no mask and no vax. Now, a random person in a Target market a thousand miles away from me isn't literally a threat, but where that attitude is supported online and a random someone walks into my local Target, it causes me to need to care. Someone can chime in to question the underlying beliefs on the matter of Covid, but the point is this is an example of an issue where we care. There are extremist views like white supremacy or similar violent ideology that are a bit further outside the scope of discussion but are another example of why we care that enough everyones agree.
smrtinsert 5y ago
Trust wasn't lost first. Talking heads swooped in for money or power, and they sell whatever they have to in order to achieve those goals. There isn't any sort of fact they are arguing for in good faith. You can add any number of layers of scientific rigor and it won't convince someone who has a favorite talking head.
iamben 5y ago
I don't disagree, and it's probably the right option - but most people are lazy thinkers. You want the simplest answer that explains the problem in a way you understand. If someone is trying to take advantage of a situation that's inherently complicated or unpleasant - it's easy to do so with a simple message that makes it digestible, even if it's wrong or harmful. We've seen this time and time again over the last few years. And then worse still, social media perpetuates it by keeping you in a bubble and pushing you further down a path.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  You could be right, and as far as I can tell - that's what we've done. But is it sustainable to lie to people in order to effect a desired (even if positive) change? How long can it go on for before people just turn off? Maybe the answer is indefinitely. Empirically at least in my country this doesn't seem to be the case. I've heard this been described as "pandemic fatigue", but it seems to more revolve around taking orders than believing in or being concerned about the pandemic itself. People are willing to follow counterintuitive rules for a while, but eventually they need to understand some sort of final benefit derived. The vast majority of people don't get "not drinking bleach fatigue" because they know it's bloody awful and that if they don't drink it, they're gone.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I see that as a failing of the policy setters and communicators. You can communicate a simple message, but you have to show your work too. Pretending counter-points don't exist only leads to "gotchas" and distrust down the road. This has been the the theme of last few years for me. If you want more than a public policy soundbite, you should be able to get a public position paper describing the assumptions, arguments, and counter-arguments.
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rob_c 5y ago
This is not helped by the lack of scientific and logical literacy in the public at large who will cherry pick to support either position on a topic and call that "homework done". The scientific process involves testing the accepted and pushing ideas to there extremes. The fact there is a test of 5G on mice isn't surprising, but when these show a statistically insignificant blip and it's not in the conclusion that's not "big science hiding the real truths", it's that this blip in isolation is a true statistical anomaly...
wcerfgba 5y ago
Thanks for your comment. I broadly agree with your points and find them insightful. In particular I appreciate that you model authority as an analogue for trust, and trust as an analogue for independent verification. I think trust is a prerequisite for successful convincing, because it is hard for human brains to overcome the emotional and relational elements of discourse, and we need to be in a receptive frame of mind. [citation needed] We should study how authorities have built and lost trust, but I don't think we should be rebuilding those authorities using this knowledge. Instead I think focusing on how members of the public and different experts and scholars can build more diverse networks of trust relationships would create a more resilient system in the Internet age. For example, instead of "I trust the CDC because they are an authority on disease" or "I trust Fauci on COVID because he is an immunologist", what if the common relationship was "I trust Fauci on COVID because his work on Zika and HIV was very interesting". A related problem is what I call the 'knowledge gap'. Researchers develop a very comprehensive understanding of their chosen subjects, whereas members of the public have only a lay-person level of understanding. As experts become increasingly experienced and knowledgeable, the gap between lay-person understanding and expert comprehension grows. This means researchers are not always able to understand what a member of the public needs to know or how to explain it: how do you compress years of learning into a few minutes of talking, as part of a conversation? Good science communication skills are essential for experts if they want to develop trust relationships with members of the public, and if we as a society want to move from authority and coercion and towards education.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I actually think we may learn a lot by studying whom someone distrusts and the underlying causes. I imagine we would find that most of the times, the distrust is projected distrust—in other words, I distrust X person in my life because they did A thing and person Y is like X therefore I distrust person Y as well. For example, I think many distrust Fauci less because of Fauci himself and his behaviors and more because his behaviors may remind them of their primary care physician who treated them condescendingly, saying they were stupid for asking a question. Or because their parent got Alzheimer's or cancer and don't know where it came from and were told by doctors that their family member would be fine, even though their family is not fine. I guess I just wished we paid more attention to the transgressions that happened to find the presumed cause of distrust so we can repair it, because I think trust can be highly efficient and distrust highly inefficient at times.
wyager 5y ago
> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities Yeah, because there's no rational basis to continue to afford them that trust. You're describing the symptom, not the disease.
jhallenworld 5y ago
Well the trust has to be earned by a history of proven visibly good outcomes. Never forget that there is a long history of cases where the established scientifically accepted ideas were actually harmfully wrong, particularly in the medical arena. In the USA in particular, medical practice is far from a benign charity, so people are right to question. One example: I had a tonsillectomy when I was a kid. No actual evidence that this is good medicine.. On the other hand, I don't disagree that the level of misinformation is ridiculous. It's difficult to understand why someone would trust someone with a popular podcast so much more than licensed professionals. Maybe there shouldn't be censorship, but where are the medical malpractice claims against these people? I think it's all tied in with the general acceptance of the "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" supplement industry. As long as your supplement does not do too much direct harm, we allow it.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  > It's difficult to understand why someone would trust someone with a popular podcast so much more than licensed professionals. I'm less convinced that this is a matter of trust, I think it's more about value systems and priorities. I trust my dentist to recommend me the best filling or crown material for my teeth, even in the face of financial incentives. But his advice does not tell me, in an absolute sense, whether it'd be worth me paying $1K for a crown if that means I miss the rent next month. It's not a tractable problem. I can't speak to the US situation, but in the UK in my peer groups most coronavirus-related argumentation doesn't revolves around whether e.g. wearing a mask reduces the spread of coronavirus, but around whether wearing a mask is a net positive for the society and/or the wearer. The former is a matter for epidemiology, the latter is nowhere near clear cut.
  - jhallenworld 5y ago
    Well I agree that there are actual valid arguments about priority, by which I mean the math works out- the costs are significant either way. Excess deaths vs. broader economic impact or even questioning how much economic benefit from allaying fear by an otherwise dubious activity (cloth masks..). But in the US, we have this extreme irrational vaccine skepticism where the math just does not work out. People believe the vaccine is much worse than its benefit. It's hard to argue with since prominent people are supporting this idea.
concinds 5y ago
I'm skeptical that education is a solution to collapsing societal trust. First, the primary organs that would be capable of this education are the media, who have a profit motive to stoke any and all fears (immigration, radiological warfare, world war, coffee being carcinogenic). Second, I think this distrust goes beyond "the CDC said something wrong once, I don't trust them as much anymore." That could be solved with education. But we're seeing a more fundamental rise in broad-based distrust of any authority figure, and it's a much more instinctive response. In a world where authority is more powerful and centralized than ever, some are bound to feel powerless. Someone's actions on the other side of the world have more impact on your life than they ever could (pick depending on your priors: a Wuhan wet market customer's appetite, or a Wuhan Institute of Virology employee's carelessness). With such an interconnected world, how could conspiratorial thinking not be appealing to some people? Power inherently fosters distrust and cynicism. You can have as much pedagogy and education as you want: rational discourse just can't combat a fundamental instinctive reaction, a growing sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness that some people are bound to feel. And the response to this distrust? More control over discourse, over communication mechanisms[0], and ultimately, over citizens. Governments and corporations are more powerful than they ever were. Surveillance, and enforcement of rules, are easier and more automated than ever. How could our primitive, Dunbar-number brain wiring not react with distrust, or even hostility towards (some) authority figures? [0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany-should-ban-telegram-unless-it-tackles-extremist-content-2021-12-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany...
- aeternum 5y ago
  It's not just that the CDC and other institutions of scientific authority 'said something wrong once.' I think most people understand and accept that science is not perfect. Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational? https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shorter-covid-19-isolation-rules-for-health-workers/2785164/ https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shor...
jxramos 5y ago
even if someone doesn't walk us through the entire chain of proof I'd settle for clearly delineated junctions and paper trails--basically full transparency with the ability to augment and shim any gaps people identify along the way. Nothing is implemented by default though but it would be great to have this public body of work where someone can spot check on the fly to see if things line up. It's a lot to ask for with no incentive to push such a thing through but maybe I'm not seeing a potential profit motive behind such a project.
zbyforgotpass 5y ago
The strength of science used to be that it was anti-authoritative - experiments not institutions used to be the ultimate source of truth.
- immibis 5y ago
  Is it not still that way? There may be a bias towards believing trusted institutions, but that's because they have reputations for delivering truth based on experiments.
jlpom 5y ago
> one derives from first principles every opinion they hold But it's the only correct way, if credible studies contradict an official agency (more often it's the degree of the opinion where there is disagreement, not the opinion itself), my advice would be to trust the studies. For instance MRI contrast agents: the EMA banned most of them while the FDA did not, which is not the advice one would form by reading studies on the matter.
brutusborn 5y ago
What if the scientific proof chain was published as a knowledge graph? This could be easily followed and all questions by skeptics could theoretically be automatically answered.
- hnfong 5y ago
  In theory the references and bibliography sections of published papers would be more than enough to construct a knowledge graph. Being able to construct a graph does not mean it's possible to check whether the claims are correct though..
  - immibis 5y ago
    This is how I learned (approximately) how GPT-2 worked. Start with GPT-2 and it's full of nonsense you don't understand. Follow the references, follow more references. Get to basic neural networks with one hidden layer like you learned about in college. Reverse the chain and build upwards.
  - brutusborn 5y ago
    It's less about checking whether claims are true but about how they are rationalized. E.g. the claim could be a node "masks should be mandatory" with connections to reason, "masks reduce spread of virus" and papers supporting this policy. These would also need to be connected to nodes showing values, e.g. "reducing hospital admissions is more important than freedom of choice". In this way it would be more obvious why policies are choosen and provide a way to express current knowledge. As more nodes are added to the graph, the policy prescriptions would change which would prevent mistrust that is based on "health department said do x, now they say don't do x".
raxxorrax 5y ago
I believe if you take for yourself the right to neutralize or silence an opponent, he gets to do the same in kind. State authority is mostly based on show and relies on people complying, even in autocracies. So you should be very sure about it if you do silence people and about the costs. There was never a point in the recent pandemic or would you disagree? It is also difficult to come up with an example where it was warranted to suppress information. Can you name one? Educated and intelligent people are often very distrustful, especially of authority. Society is not a boot camp of grunts.
api 5y ago
> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. This misses a lot of the cause. People aren't listening on the vaccine because there were no WMDs in Iraq. All the "experts" said that too. The fact that huge frauds have been perpetuated at scale against our entire society and nobody has been held to account is a major reason for collapsing trust. It would be very helpful if the parties responsible had at least been censured even if the political class couldn't muster the will to truly apply penalties, but few in the political class have even admitted that anything bad happened. When trusted authorities perpetuate frauds or display extreme incompetence and then just paper it over (often at others' expense), they are destroying the fundamental trust basis of society. Opportunistic politicians are destroyers of civilization.

shadowgovt 5y ago

What do you do while education lags where it needs to be? Because enough education to understand, say, climate change takes about a decade. (... And that's assuming it can be provided without being shut down as "indoctrination").

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yanmaani 5y ago
That's ... not true? Children can learn a basic model of the greenhouse effect in school, and do so in most civilized nations. Whether this is sufficient is another thing entirely, but I would personally contend that (non-propaganda) education can never be 100% effective at causing someone to believe something?
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  Right, this hits at the more fundamental issue which is that the purpose of stuff like "misinformation" filters is not to affect what people believe, but the second order effect - how they act. Loads of people are well aware that wearing a mask would result in less coronavirus particles being emitted from my face if they were infected. But they don't act on that for various other reasons unrelated to the virus. The same is true of climate change. You can think that it's real and still drive your car for precisely the same reason that you can think that cirrhosis is real and still drink a few beers.

blix 5y ago

The interesting thing about trust is it takes much longer to build than to spend. Given the level scientific institutions have been spending trust over the past few years I'm not sure how this problem can be alleviated within our current framework.

donw 5y ago
It can’t be.
betwixthewires 5y ago
You can't spend trust, you can only violate it.

Lammy 5y ago

> because we don’t have time This part is a huge society-wide problem that can theoretically be fixed so people can become more informed and active participants in the framework of their daily lives. Don’t ask me how, though, because I just got off work and am too exhausted to do anything except let the news tell me what to be afraid of today, then probably binge The Office and slam a few brewskis until I fall asleep on my couch ‘cause I got work again tomorrow

raziel2p 5y ago
Even if I do have time and energy, my lack of knowledge on the subject matter would probably lead me to waste that time on dead ends, wrong conclusions, or learning things I will never use again outside of fact-checking one study.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > dead ends, wrong conclusions You have to trust yourself to try anyway. Beats doomscrolling even if both are equally meaningless in the long run. Something that helps me is refusing to accept any narrative or conclusion about any topic where it would require a specific named group of people (e.g. members of any nationality, profession, corporation, ancestry, presentation, etc — anything) to be uniformly dumb or malicious. That might sound silly but it means there’s no downside to entertaining any consideration, not even the downside of my own bad feelings from negative ideas. It totally removes a layer of mental latency I didn’t even realize I had until recently, even about topics where that wouldn’t ever be a question that’s possible to ask. Instead of getting bogged down checking one story after another it’s easier to ignore entire storyline arcs at a time once they’re more obviously one set of jangling keys after another all vying for my attention at a higher priority than any self-directed interests :)
fragmede 5y ago
We, as a society, bought a dog, and it took at literary shit in our communnal kitchen. No one wants to clean it up, and frankly, I can't blame you/me/any one individual for it. It's exhausting but a society-wide problem. It sucks that the only response from platforms has been to ban the discussion, rather than pay for a writers corp to come up with easy to parse FAQs why some of the garbage misinformation is a pile of lies, and to write systemic takedowns of odious dreck. But here we are.

0xy 5y ago

The CDC recently dropped to 50% public trust, after repeated failures, mixed messages and outright lies in some cases. They lie and then act incensed when the public stops believing them. Given the massive damage they've done, I'd consider it justified. The CDC is an incompetent, bloated and fundamentally dishonest organization that was perfectly comfortable throwing grandma to the wolves via lies (masks don't work!) if it meant their unpreparedness wasn't exposed. Via anti-masking lies, CDC irreparably damaged their reputation and also likely got people killed who believed them. The damage is deserved.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I remember pre-covid thinking that the CDC was the only federal agency that had its stuff together, but early on in COVID they really came off as inept. They failed to stockpile PPE (masks and such) or even make provisions for procuring the same. Then they told us masks don't work (as you noted) before eventually flipping on that position. Then they bungled the tests (instead of going with the WHO test like the rest of the world, CDC rolled its own which didn't work and was much less efficient to process). Still, I don't share the distrust of a lot of folks regarding their policies and decisions over the last year or so. I think they're probably making reasonable calls for the available evidence even if hindsight eventually proves them wrong. To the extent their critics are correct, I think most will have arrived at their conclusions as a matter of luck (e.g., someone who knows nothing of virology happens to hear some study or other that hints that the CDC may be wrong and bases their entire worldview on that study without any awareness of the counter evidence).

hammock 5y ago

>The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. What caused that trust to be lost? Is it something they did?

CPLX 5y ago
Absolutely. At least here in the United States there’s a full on collapse of trust in institutions and supposed expertise and for extremely good reasons. Over and over again those with authority have squandered it. An opioid epidemic devastated so many communities after doctors, health care executives, and McKinsey and Company said the new class of drugs were non-addicting. Our manufacturing sector evaporated after economists and politicians said free trade would benefit everyone. Thousands of young people were sent to die in the Middle East in a war all the experts said was necessary and would be relatively painless. Those are just the first three examples off the top of my head. I could keep going. We were promised technology would improve our lives. We were promised borrowing money for education would improve our lives. And on and on and on. All bullshit. All promulgated by supposed experts with impeccable credentials. It’s a full on disaster and the chickens have come home to roost.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  > in a war all the experts said was necessary Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts. But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.
    - lmm 5y ago
      That's not the way I remember it at all. The government were very obviously going into war because they wanted to and scrabbling around for anyone who would support them. You only have to look at the death of David Kelly.

EarlKing 5y ago

> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. Hmm. I wonder how we got there...[1] [1] https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg https://i.imgflip.com/63b63m.jpg

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immibis 5y ago
- drugstorecowboy 5y ago
  You are making some pretty uncharitable assumptions here, and frankly I find this entire post very distasteful. Who decides what is "pseudo-truth" instead of "actual truth"? I'll take a wild guess... you are the one who knows the "actual truth" unlike all the ignorant people who disagree with you...
- EarlKing 5y ago
  ....and that is exactly why no one trusts institutional actors anymore. > I think your comic is referencing the political "left" vs "right" divide, you are part of "the right" That's a big assumption. I could very well be part of the left who simply doesn't share "the left"(tm)(c)pat. pending)'s current party line because I find it to be nonsensical. > People who exhibit this pattern are usually stuck in a rut of pseudo-truth. There it is. That arrogance right there. "You don't share my class interests, therefore you are wrong". That, in essence, is exactly why no one trusts institutional actors -- because people realize they've aligned themselves with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. There's no disguising it anymore. They will do or say whatever those who hold the purse-strings tell them to say. > It doesn't help that a lot of institutions agree with the actual truth a lot of the time Which truth is that? The one that said that masks helped halt the spread of the virus, or the one that said it didn't and we should stop hoarding them? Roll 2d6 and consult your Propaganda Master's Guide on page 666 to find the answer. > People who exhibit this pattern often reflexively disbelieve whatever any authority says, just because they're an authority, i.e. Oppositional Defiant Disorder. ...or they've correctly identified them as class enemies who will do or say whatever it takes to defend their class interest such that you can't believe anything that comes out of their mouth. It honestly doesn't matter if they're right at that point because the lack of trust cannot be amended. > The thing that makes it really insidious is the mentality they're right and everyone else is automatically wrong. Indeed. Calling someone a part of 'the right' and saying they're from a side stuck in a 'rut of pseudo-truth' because they point out that institutional actors are biased to their own interest, have a history of lying, and this is why no one trusts them anymore, is quite insidious. > I ask you: Hypothetically, if what you believed was not actually true, what would convince you of that? Institutional actors abdicating their posts in favor of someone of proletarian class interest so proletarian ideals can be put to the test without interference.

Gravityloss 5y ago

For long term scientific correctness, what the hacker news crowd could help with tremendously is reproducibility and that means versioning and continuous integration with data, for research software. In context of a paper or doing research, you have to write software anyway. The other one that pops to mind is probably statistical calculation helping services. Maybe there are lots of other things as well - I haven't been involved with scientific research in a long time.

throwaway22032 5y ago
The main thing I think is lacking is representing data in helpful and actionable ways. A theoretical climate change example might be: Car A emits 10% less CO2 than car B. Driving is 30% of your annual emissions (i.e. it's significant and one of the low hanging fruit). That 30% of your annual emissions if multiplied by 7 billion people is likely to cause X. If everyone drives car B instead of car A, Y will happen instead. Y is better than X, because we end up with a more verdant Earth, cheaper food, better weather, less war (insert reason here). Therefore, our overall quality of life is higher if we switch to car A. Without the whole information chain, you just have isolated statistics that don't really mean anything. Convincing argumentation is not only about mathematics, it's about appealing to the things that matter to people.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  > Y is better than X, because we end up with a more verdant Earth, cheaper food, better weather, less war (insert reason here). The problem is that while it's easy to calculate exactly how much less CO2 car A emits than car B, it is close to impossible to use science to predict to any useful degree of accuracy how much cheaper the food, better the weather, or less of the war we will get. It's often hard to even predict the sign, not even trying to determine the magnitude. This means that when scientists or politicians tell you that "we need to do X, so that we get Y", they're very often fooling you, because they have no good idea how much (if any) Y you get for each unit of X.
- pabs3 5y ago
  I think you missed a step in the chain; if you increase the quality of life for humans, what are the consequences for human population growth and the consequences for the rest of the biosphere as a result?

strictfp 5y ago

I wasn't social media that eroded the trust in research and science, it was the introduction of politics. We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This way people would trust the results.

urthor 5y ago
I strongly protest the concept that the recent introduction of politics is making things worse than they used to be. If you ask anyone who was senior working in these institutions in the 1970s, things were far more dodgy back then. Corruption and bigotry were rampant. But it was far easier to cover up back in the day. Politicization is mostly driven by transparency. Politicization is not a new thing, it's a fact that there's a lot of extremely conservative individuals in each country. And technology has bought them closer to their institutions. Society is being brought very closely together, and we're working through the teething issues.
- slg 5y ago
  >I strongly protest the concept that the recent introduction of politics is making things worse than they used to be... Corruption and bigotry were rampant. It is wild how people think things like institutional bigotry aren't politics. How is a scientific organization that excludes large swaths of the population due purely to the circumstances of their birth apolitical? Science has always been political because politics is how people interact with each other. That is true whether we are discussing how governments behave on the world stage or how that big project is being managed at your job. Wherever people exist, politics exists.
- skissane 5y ago
  Most people accept that science in past generations was, to a certain degree, corrupted by the prevailing prejudices and societal/cultural/political/ideological beliefs of the time. But, if we acknowledge that was true then – why shouldn't we expect the same to be true now? The prevailing prejudices and ideologies may have changed, but has anything changed about the actual practice of science to make it more immune to those forces? I think a lot of people can't see it, because it is far easier to see when science is being influenced by beliefs you reject than when it is being influenced by beliefs you yourself share. I think the politicisation of science is inevitable, and science is never going to be entirely politically neutral. Scientists are human beings, and as Aristotle famously said, "man is a political animal". I think science is going to achieve the maximum possible political neutrality when it is either (a) things so clearly established no one can sensibly debate them (which especially happens when scientific theories get translated into widely adopted working technologies–the very fact that the technology works is proof the theories behind it must be mostly correct); (b) things that avoid political entanglements because they have little relevance to everyday human life (e.g. string theory vs loop quantum gravity isn't influenced by broader societal politics because it has no relevance to issues of social/cultural/economic/political power, although even it is surely influenced by the micro-politics of the theoretical physics community, its funding models, etc.) Take something like human-induced climate change – personally, I accept the mainstream account of that topic as most likely to be correct, but I can't be completely sure that it is right, surely there is some non-zero probability (even if a small one) that it is wrong. But, I expect people in a couple of centuries from now will be able to reach a much firmer consensus – they'll know whose predictions turned out to be right, plus technological and economic developments will likely greatly reduce the number of people with a vested economic interest in the non-mainstream answer. I think the most likely outcome will be that the mainstream account will be vindicated, and almost everyone will acknowledge that the minority were wrong; but it isn't absolutely impossible that it could turn out the other way around. And whichever way it turns out, I think people will see politics as having played a major role – if the mainstream account is confirmed, people will see much of the opposing minority as being led astray by politics; but, conversely, if the sceptical minority turn out to have been right all along, people will reach the same conclusion with respect to today's mainstream.

loceng 5y ago

Edit to add: I found out what happens when you present a video testimonial strongly calling into question vaccine clinical trials - it gets downvoted. So what happens when you present a video testimonial like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2GKPYzL_JQ - and people just dismiss it, people not understanding that with clinical trials you're meant to keep track of and report all outcomes, and not only that - by limiting the scope via an app that has limited options, and no free form input, you're crafting a very narrow scope of outcome, literally doctoring the outcome by minimizing the potential range and severity of adverse events? (If the people even watch the video or understand the implications of what Maddie's mother has shared; and if not, then you're not able to educate or inform them further - probably because it's a counter-mainstream narrative point, arguably the mainstream and government captured, regulatory capture from industrial complexes, etc) Does the video described build or harm trust of our institutions? Does that this happened with this clinical trial, does that not automatically extrapolate that all of the other clinical trials were ignored, not given proper oversight, nor having integrity to them?

immibis 5y ago
Anyone can make a video about anything. There are lots of videos explaining why the moon landing was a hoax. Was it?
- loceng 5y ago
  Are you telling me you watched that video and that you're claiming the mother is lying?

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rgrieselhuber 5y ago

Let people draw their own conclusions and don’t censor or otherwise penalize them for questioning one interpretation of data vs another. Encourage people to do their own research and investigate who is funding the sources used for that research. There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist.

1270018080 5y ago
Do you mean "Do their own research" like make up conspiracy theories out of thin air and parrot nonsense deep state rhetoric? Completely divorcing yourself from reality? You want more of that?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  The world will always have heathens and heretics. Some people will always come to the wrong conclusion some of the time. Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.
  - rob_c 5y ago
    Amen!
  - rgrieselhuber 5y ago
    Right. Why do we care so much if everyone agrees?
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Thing is, to a large degree, we haven't had to before. If someone random person wants to believe the moon landing is hoax, it doesn't affect my life in the slightest. What's changed is that random person walking around with no mask and no vax. Now, a random person in a Target market a thousand miles away from me isn't literally a threat, but where that attitude is supported online and a random someone walks into my local Target, it causes me to need to care. Someone can chime in to question the underlying beliefs on the matter of Covid, but the point is this is an example of an issue where we care. There are extremist views like white supremacy or similar violent ideology that are a bit further outside the scope of discussion but are another example of why we care that enough everyones agree.

smrtinsert 5y ago

Trust wasn't lost first. Talking heads swooped in for money or power, and they sell whatever they have to in order to achieve those goals. There isn't any sort of fact they are arguing for in good faith. You can add any number of layers of scientific rigor and it won't convince someone who has a favorite talking head.

iamben 5y ago

I don't disagree, and it's probably the right option - but most people are lazy thinkers. You want the simplest answer that explains the problem in a way you understand. If someone is trying to take advantage of a situation that's inherently complicated or unpleasant - it's easy to do so with a simple message that makes it digestible, even if it's wrong or harmful. We've seen this time and time again over the last few years. And then worse still, social media perpetuates it by keeping you in a bubble and pushing you further down a path.

throwaway22032 5y ago
You could be right, and as far as I can tell - that's what we've done. But is it sustainable to lie to people in order to effect a desired (even if positive) change? How long can it go on for before people just turn off? Maybe the answer is indefinitely. Empirically at least in my country this doesn't seem to be the case. I've heard this been described as "pandemic fatigue", but it seems to more revolve around taking orders than believing in or being concerned about the pandemic itself. People are willing to follow counterintuitive rules for a while, but eventually they need to understand some sort of final benefit derived. The vast majority of people don't get "not drinking bleach fatigue" because they know it's bloody awful and that if they don't drink it, they're gone.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I see that as a failing of the policy setters and communicators. You can communicate a simple message, but you have to show your work too. Pretending counter-points don't exist only leads to "gotchas" and distrust down the road. This has been the the theme of last few years for me. If you want more than a public policy soundbite, you should be able to get a public position paper describing the assumptions, arguments, and counter-arguments.

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rob_c 5y ago

This is not helped by the lack of scientific and logical literacy in the public at large who will cherry pick to support either position on a topic and call that "homework done". The scientific process involves testing the accepted and pushing ideas to there extremes. The fact there is a test of 5G on mice isn't surprising, but when these show a statistically insignificant blip and it's not in the conclusion that's not "big science hiding the real truths", it's that this blip in isolation is a true statistical anomaly...

wcerfgba 5y ago

Thanks for your comment. I broadly agree with your points and find them insightful. In particular I appreciate that you model authority as an analogue for trust, and trust as an analogue for independent verification. I think trust is a prerequisite for successful convincing, because it is hard for human brains to overcome the emotional and relational elements of discourse, and we need to be in a receptive frame of mind. [citation needed] We should study how authorities have built and lost trust, but I don't think we should be rebuilding those authorities using this knowledge. Instead I think focusing on how members of the public and different experts and scholars can build more diverse networks of trust relationships would create a more resilient system in the Internet age. For example, instead of "I trust the CDC because they are an authority on disease" or "I trust Fauci on COVID because he is an immunologist", what if the common relationship was "I trust Fauci on COVID because his work on Zika and HIV was very interesting". A related problem is what I call the 'knowledge gap'. Researchers develop a very comprehensive understanding of their chosen subjects, whereas members of the public have only a lay-person level of understanding. As experts become increasingly experienced and knowledgeable, the gap between lay-person understanding and expert comprehension grows. This means researchers are not always able to understand what a member of the public needs to know or how to explain it: how do you compress years of learning into a few minutes of talking, as part of a conversation? Good science communication skills are essential for experts if they want to develop trust relationships with members of the public, and if we as a society want to move from authority and coercion and towards education.

jimkleiber 5y ago
I actually think we may learn a lot by studying whom someone distrusts and the underlying causes. I imagine we would find that most of the times, the distrust is projected distrust—in other words, I distrust X person in my life because they did A thing and person Y is like X therefore I distrust person Y as well. For example, I think many distrust Fauci less because of Fauci himself and his behaviors and more because his behaviors may remind them of their primary care physician who treated them condescendingly, saying they were stupid for asking a question. Or because their parent got Alzheimer's or cancer and don't know where it came from and were told by doctors that their family member would be fine, even though their family is not fine. I guess I just wished we paid more attention to the transgressions that happened to find the presumed cause of distrust so we can repair it, because I think trust can be highly efficient and distrust highly inefficient at times.

wyager 5y ago

> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities Yeah, because there's no rational basis to continue to afford them that trust. You're describing the symptom, not the disease.

jhallenworld 5y ago

Well the trust has to be earned by a history of proven visibly good outcomes. Never forget that there is a long history of cases where the established scientifically accepted ideas were actually harmfully wrong, particularly in the medical arena. In the USA in particular, medical practice is far from a benign charity, so people are right to question. One example: I had a tonsillectomy when I was a kid. No actual evidence that this is good medicine.. On the other hand, I don't disagree that the level of misinformation is ridiculous. It's difficult to understand why someone would trust someone with a popular podcast so much more than licensed professionals. Maybe there shouldn't be censorship, but where are the medical malpractice claims against these people? I think it's all tied in with the general acceptance of the "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA" supplement industry. As long as your supplement does not do too much direct harm, we allow it.

throwaway22032 5y ago
> It's difficult to understand why someone would trust someone with a popular podcast so much more than licensed professionals. I'm less convinced that this is a matter of trust, I think it's more about value systems and priorities. I trust my dentist to recommend me the best filling or crown material for my teeth, even in the face of financial incentives. But his advice does not tell me, in an absolute sense, whether it'd be worth me paying $1K for a crown if that means I miss the rent next month. It's not a tractable problem. I can't speak to the US situation, but in the UK in my peer groups most coronavirus-related argumentation doesn't revolves around whether e.g. wearing a mask reduces the spread of coronavirus, but around whether wearing a mask is a net positive for the society and/or the wearer. The former is a matter for epidemiology, the latter is nowhere near clear cut.
- jhallenworld 5y ago
  Well I agree that there are actual valid arguments about priority, by which I mean the math works out- the costs are significant either way. Excess deaths vs. broader economic impact or even questioning how much economic benefit from allaying fear by an otherwise dubious activity (cloth masks..). But in the US, we have this extreme irrational vaccine skepticism where the math just does not work out. People believe the vaccine is much worse than its benefit. It's hard to argue with since prominent people are supporting this idea.

concinds 5y ago

I'm skeptical that education is a solution to collapsing societal trust. First, the primary organs that would be capable of this education are the media, who have a profit motive to stoke any and all fears (immigration, radiological warfare, world war, coffee being carcinogenic). Second, I think this distrust goes beyond "the CDC said something wrong once, I don't trust them as much anymore." That could be solved with education. But we're seeing a more fundamental rise in broad-based distrust of any authority figure, and it's a much more instinctive response. In a world where authority is more powerful and centralized than ever, some are bound to feel powerless. Someone's actions on the other side of the world have more impact on your life than they ever could (pick depending on your priors: a Wuhan wet market customer's appetite, or a Wuhan Institute of Virology employee's carelessness). With such an interconnected world, how could conspiratorial thinking not be appealing to some people? Power inherently fosters distrust and cynicism. You can have as much pedagogy and education as you want: rational discourse just can't combat a fundamental instinctive reaction, a growing sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness that some people are bound to feel. And the response to this distrust? More control over discourse, over communication mechanisms[0], and ultimately, over citizens. Governments and corporations are more powerful than they ever were. Surveillance, and enforcement of rules, are easier and more automated than ever. How could our primitive, Dunbar-number brain wiring not react with distrust, or even hostility towards (some) authority figures? [0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany-should-ban-telegram-unless-it-tackles-extremist-content-2021-12-14/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany...

aeternum 5y ago
It's not just that the CDC and other institutions of scientific authority 'said something wrong once.' I think most people understand and accept that science is not perfect. Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational? https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shorter-covid-19-isolation-rules-for-health-workers/2785164/ https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shor...

jxramos 5y ago

even if someone doesn't walk us through the entire chain of proof I'd settle for clearly delineated junctions and paper trails--basically full transparency with the ability to augment and shim any gaps people identify along the way. Nothing is implemented by default though but it would be great to have this public body of work where someone can spot check on the fly to see if things line up. It's a lot to ask for with no incentive to push such a thing through but maybe I'm not seeing a potential profit motive behind such a project.

zbyforgotpass 5y ago

The strength of science used to be that it was anti-authoritative - experiments not institutions used to be the ultimate source of truth.

immibis 5y ago
Is it not still that way? There may be a bias towards believing trusted institutions, but that's because they have reputations for delivering truth based on experiments.

jlpom 5y ago

> one derives from first principles every opinion they hold But it's the only correct way, if credible studies contradict an official agency (more often it's the degree of the opinion where there is disagreement, not the opinion itself), my advice would be to trust the studies. For instance MRI contrast agents: the EMA banned most of them while the FDA did not, which is not the advice one would form by reading studies on the matter.

brutusborn 5y ago

What if the scientific proof chain was published as a knowledge graph? This could be easily followed and all questions by skeptics could theoretically be automatically answered.

hnfong 5y ago
In theory the references and bibliography sections of published papers would be more than enough to construct a knowledge graph. Being able to construct a graph does not mean it's possible to check whether the claims are correct though..
- immibis 5y ago
  This is how I learned (approximately) how GPT-2 worked. Start with GPT-2 and it's full of nonsense you don't understand. Follow the references, follow more references. Get to basic neural networks with one hidden layer like you learned about in college. Reverse the chain and build upwards.
- brutusborn 5y ago
  It's less about checking whether claims are true but about how they are rationalized. E.g. the claim could be a node "masks should be mandatory" with connections to reason, "masks reduce spread of virus" and papers supporting this policy. These would also need to be connected to nodes showing values, e.g. "reducing hospital admissions is more important than freedom of choice". In this way it would be more obvious why policies are choosen and provide a way to express current knowledge. As more nodes are added to the graph, the policy prescriptions would change which would prevent mistrust that is based on "health department said do x, now they say don't do x".

raxxorrax 5y ago

I believe if you take for yourself the right to neutralize or silence an opponent, he gets to do the same in kind. State authority is mostly based on show and relies on people complying, even in autocracies. So you should be very sure about it if you do silence people and about the costs. There was never a point in the recent pandemic or would you disagree? It is also difficult to come up with an example where it was warranted to suppress information. Can you name one? Educated and intelligent people are often very distrustful, especially of authority. Society is not a boot camp of grunts.

api 5y ago

> The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. This misses a lot of the cause. People aren't listening on the vaccine because there were no WMDs in Iraq. All the "experts" said that too. The fact that huge frauds have been perpetuated at scale against our entire society and nobody has been held to account is a major reason for collapsing trust. It would be very helpful if the parties responsible had at least been censured even if the political class couldn't muster the will to truly apply penalties, but few in the political class have even admitted that anything bad happened. When trusted authorities perpetuate frauds or display extreme incompetence and then just paper it over (often at others' expense), they are destroying the fundamental trust basis of society. Opportunistic politicians are destroyers of civilization.