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This is really a crisis of modernity. People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. That's not to men

This is really a crisis of modernity. People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology that was never before available in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and desktop publishing software. Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read. At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is. Moderation isn't going to change any of this.

duxup 5y ago
>because authorities time and time again have misled them. I think because people are more comfortable believing what they want to believe.
- ratsmack 5y ago
  That may be true in a non-general sense. There are many people that take the time to research and learn the truth, and there are probably a number of people that prefer to just go with the flow of their peers. I really couldn't tell you what the split is, but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group.
  - duxup 5y ago
    > There are many people that take the time to research Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out. Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore. And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.
    - mrguyorama 5y ago
      Let's take this even farther. Let's say I'm going to do "research" correctly (at least how I would interpret it) So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc. At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.
      - ryandrake 5y ago
        Maybe a difference is, back in my parents' generation's time, nobody was willing to publish crackpots and quacks, but today, literally anyone can create a YouTube channel, and build viewers. Modern platforms exercise very little editorial control, and are willing to publish anything. So, the dry, boring experts are getting drowned out by popular Joe Rogans.
        bryan_w 5y ago
        That's just the promise of the internet isn't it? If YouTube didn't exist, I'm sure joerogan.com would be more popular than some university professors website. Do you want to get rid of the internet?
  - uberman 5y ago
    I'm not sure many or even a handful of people really research. I feel the many go to youtube to be told by their favorite talking head how to feel or rationalize a subject. That is not "research". I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust. That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me. People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist. I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters. Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    > , but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group. Of course. That’s what allows us to talk about the foibles of People in this thread as if we were Martians.
- thephyber 5y ago
  I think it’s a little more complicated than your wording. We don’t go all the way to first principles on every topic, so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We tend to trust people like us. When there were still gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by engagement-focused algorithms. Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities. Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly trusted in recent years.
lmilcin 5y ago
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. No, that's wrong model. Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful. What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world. > That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way. You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available. There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable. What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.
- crmd 5y ago
  My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work. The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.
VikingCoder 5y ago
> because authorities time and time again have misled them. I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation. When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station. When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods. When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome. The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls... Which erodes trust in authorities. And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I feel obliged to point out that reputable poles predicted Clinton's chances at significantly lower than 99%.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Also there was undo foreign influence on the election that didn't become evident until afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
  - gilleain 5y ago
    Not to distract from your point ... this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_... suggests the value was always between 40-50% ... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not Polish people :)
Ansil849 5y ago
> People just don't trust authorities anymore I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is: People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.
- uberman 5y ago
  This 110%
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is: > People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them. This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that. In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe. Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1]. The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
  - thephyber 5y ago
    >> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them. > This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that. Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority. Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.
antihero 5y ago
It's terrifying, the only thing that can combat this is to win at a critical thinking cat and mouse, that will become ever more in the favour of propagandists.
ska 5y ago
> Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not secondary. Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems likely many people aren't learning the lesson about institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the institutions themselves.
clairity 5y ago
you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not, etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications, titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other. that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about. that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.
- nocturnial 5y ago
  I would also like to add to your point that there's a delusion that tech can moderate a couple billion people. In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they aren't working.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Perhaps, we should quit trying and only build “small” communities that can self moderate.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
mrtksn 5y ago
I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess. That's in an environment where people demand simple and concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for something and receive a full service for it has become the norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a result, services and the information on cutting edge are not spotless.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  > I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess. the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks actually do anything or not, this was deliberate misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen people on this very website admit that they are aware of this fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although they were deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So With Righteous Intentions, So It's Okay. once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the Authority says going forward is the Truth?
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    I don't talk about authority at all, that doesn't interests me. Just to be sure, by authority I mean people who hold authority over something due to their appointment. For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our right wingers often import American propaganda and it's death giveaway when they start talking about something that some American politician like dr. Fauci said. In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In fact, the health ministry showed better than the average competence and just as they start building some trust, they were exposed to be lying shamelessly. Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere. Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation happens when people try to digest very complex information beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person who is actually in control of the complex information tries to simplify things to the layman. If physics were more mainstream, we would have people misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those. It's just that those people are not marching on the streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build around layman misunderstanding things and building alternative realities over oversimplified scientific topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and when they speak publicly they commit the sin of oversimplifications and best guesses presented as clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the universe.
mrtesthah 5y ago
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning. See: “Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study” https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Should have fallen in line like all the intelligent kids.
  - croon 5y ago
    Facetious: I'm not gonna curve with the road like all these lemmings, I'm gonna go straight off the cliff! The majority isn't always right, but instinctively going the other way isn't better.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
> This is really a crisis of modernity. Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like Marcuse and Derrida. "As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the circumference of the shadows surrounding it. That is not an endorsement of ignorance, but a warning that our philosophy and socio-politics must expand in proportion to our technologies."
fredgrott 5y ago
No it's a crisis of COMMONS, if we have enough commons this would not be a problem. When you monopolize commons into private things you get this.. Yes this is a rehash of a former Presidential candidates own arguments, some of you may remember his law works such as the CC mark.
avgcorrection 5y ago
> At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is. Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
psychlops 5y ago
> Moderation isn't going to change any of this. Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls the information. Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument is simply over who gets the power to do it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
62951413 5y ago
Wouldn't it be more like a crisis of post-modernity? They say high modernism and all that 20th century stuff is behind us. People never trusted authorities outside of the first world. The Western governments were hiding their true nature much better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit the same problems people living outside of it are used to. Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy for a century. Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong to and support them. Typically your government is your worst enemy, not some foreign dictator. Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive you to extinction.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  There is no such thing as "more good" more "more evil", simply "existing to survive" - but there is an absolute binary of freedom vs. non-freedom? There is no such thing as moderation(pragmatism) in policy? There is no power(government?) except those trying to demoralize and exploit you to extinction? Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here? Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we really have no idea what they are blathering on about. Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able] assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well. To quote a terrible movie[0], in the case of the comment you're replying to "the only winning move is not to play." IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc. As such, I recommend backing away slowly. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
lunatuna 5y ago
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth. I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue. >Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read. One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis. [0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-possible https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
I don't agree, unless your definition of modernity is the set of unfounded and unvalidated beliefs that have been largely imposed on people against their will for the last 100 or so years. I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on power and control… and reality for that matter. They reject reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural order and life, and it will always fail eventually.
evrydayhustling 5y ago
Authorities, moderation, and the mistrust of both are nothing new. The modernity crisis is that we can't trust our instincts any more about what's a centralized authority, what's an individual, what's a moderated environment, and what's a public square. There were always battle lines to contemplate, but now the front line is everywhere.
tablespoon 5y ago
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the perception that the "authorities" have a different set of values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.
- rayiner 5y ago
  That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled. Yeah, but it's important to emphasize the values aspect, because I think that's where the emotional energy comes from. IMHO, that energy is fuzzy, resentment against one authority in one area transfers to a different authority in a different area, just as long as they're perceived being alike in some vague way. For instance, I don't think there'd be so much distrust over COVID response if there hadn't already been a bitter culture war where medical authorities sometimes take sides.
throwaway894345 5y ago
There was a brief window during the latter bit of the 20th century and early 2020s during which public trust in the media and academia were relatively high. The relevant factor as far as I can tell were that these institutions aspired toward neutrality and objectivity (someone will predictably miss the distinction between aspired toward and successfully delivered 100% of the time, but hopefully the rest of us can enjoy a fruitful discussion). It really feels like there was a significant shift in these fields away from integrity and toward activism in the most recent couple of decades, and that this is driving mistrust (and consequently causing people to feel around through the fog for more reliable institutions, often unsuccessfully).
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  There are two points of view on the cause of the 20th century media trust. One: The media aspired towards neutrality Two: The media was consolidated and Overton window kept so tight average people couldn't find contradictions.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I can't bring myself to subscribe to (2) for a variety of reasons. 1. The post-2010 media has been as consolidated as it ever has been--around coastal elite / woke left ideologies and Democratic activism (I say this having only ever voted Democrat in POTUS elections for whatever that's worth). Granted, social media provides a diversity of opinions--even still, there are other factors. 2. The post-2010 media unanimously and widely publishes high-profile, objective, and trivially verifiable falsehoods (a few from memory): characterizing the Google Memo as an "anti-diversity screed", the coverage of the Nicolas Sandman still photo, the coverage of the Rittenhouse saga, the coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, etc. Note that all of these errors support the same woke left viewpoints (as opposed to random errors). There's also a long tail of more subjective issues ("why does the media keep bringing up racial disparities in police shootings without exploring obvious follow-on questions?"). 3. The post-2010 media landscape includes reporters and entire publications who rather proudly consider themselves activists, who insert themselves into their stories, and who loudly broadcast their biases (typically woke-left biases) on social media. This is a stark departure from the 20th century journalistic ethos. 4. The academic fields which became openly activist have similarly experienced a degradation in public trust, while the more objective fields have retained much more trust. This mirrors what we're seeing in the media. All of this seems to boil down to a failure to pursue neutrality in my view. I suspect the tight 20th century Overton window was a result of 20th century epistemological institutions' pursuit of neutrality. The institutions were much more fact-based and opinions began to converge around facts.
908B64B197 5y ago
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists". Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab. The Chinese authorities certainly didn't release any more data, the only thing that changed was the presidential administration. How can this be explained? Why would the “authorities” try to initially divert attention from the evidence pointing to a lab leak from China?
allturtles 5y ago
> People just don't trust authorities anymore, This is true. > because authorities time and time again have misled them. But is this? Here's a chart of U.S. public trust in government since the late 1950s: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident? I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."

duxup 5y ago

>because authorities time and time again have misled them. I think because people are more comfortable believing what they want to believe.

ratsmack 5y ago
That may be true in a non-general sense. There are many people that take the time to research and learn the truth, and there are probably a number of people that prefer to just go with the flow of their peers. I really couldn't tell you what the split is, but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group.
- duxup 5y ago
  > There are many people that take the time to research Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out. Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore. And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.
  - mrguyorama 5y ago
    Let's take this even farther. Let's say I'm going to do "research" correctly (at least how I would interpret it) So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc. At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      Maybe a difference is, back in my parents' generation's time, nobody was willing to publish crackpots and quacks, but today, literally anyone can create a YouTube channel, and build viewers. Modern platforms exercise very little editorial control, and are willing to publish anything. So, the dry, boring experts are getting drowned out by popular Joe Rogans.
      - bryan_w 5y ago
        That's just the promise of the internet isn't it? If YouTube didn't exist, I'm sure joerogan.com would be more popular than some university professors website. Do you want to get rid of the internet?
- uberman 5y ago
  I'm not sure many or even a handful of people really research. I feel the many go to youtube to be told by their favorite talking head how to feel or rationalize a subject. That is not "research". I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust. That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me. People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist. I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters. Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  > , but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group. Of course. That’s what allows us to talk about the foibles of People in this thread as if we were Martians.
thephyber 5y ago
I think it’s a little more complicated than your wording. We don’t go all the way to first principles on every topic, so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We tend to trust people like us. When there were still gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by engagement-focused algorithms. Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities. Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly trusted in recent years.

lmilcin 5y ago

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. No, that's wrong model. Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful. What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world. > That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way. You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available. There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable. What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.

crmd 5y ago
My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work. The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.

VikingCoder 5y ago

> because authorities time and time again have misled them. I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation. When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station. When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods. When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome. The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls... Which erodes trust in authorities. And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.

deleted 5y ago
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spywaregorilla 5y ago
I feel obliged to point out that reputable poles predicted Clinton's chances at significantly lower than 99%.
- bduerst 5y ago
  Also there was undo foreign influence on the election that didn't become evident until afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
- gilleain 5y ago
  Not to distract from your point ... this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_... suggests the value was always between 40-50% ... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not Polish people :)

Ansil849 5y ago

> People just don't trust authorities anymore I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is: People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.

uberman 5y ago
This 110%
tablespoon 5y ago
> I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is: > People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them. This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that. In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe. Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1]. The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly
- thephyber 5y ago
  >> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them. > This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that. Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority. Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.

antihero 5y ago

It's terrifying, the only thing that can combat this is to win at a critical thinking cat and mouse, that will become ever more in the favour of propagandists.

ska 5y ago

> Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not secondary. Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems likely many people aren't learning the lesson about institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the institutions themselves.

clairity 5y ago

you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not, etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications, titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other. that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about. that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.

nocturnial 5y ago
I would also like to add to your point that there's a delusion that tech can moderate a couple billion people. In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they aren't working.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Perhaps, we should quit trying and only build “small” communities that can self moderate.
  - deleted 5y ago
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mrtksn 5y ago

I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess. That's in an environment where people demand simple and concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for something and receive a full service for it has become the norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a result, services and the information on cutting edge are not spotless.

adamrezich 5y ago
> I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess. the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks actually do anything or not, this was deliberate misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen people on this very website admit that they are aware of this fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although they were deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So With Righteous Intentions, So It's Okay. once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the Authority says going forward is the Truth?
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I don't talk about authority at all, that doesn't interests me. Just to be sure, by authority I mean people who hold authority over something due to their appointment. For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our right wingers often import American propaganda and it's death giveaway when they start talking about something that some American politician like dr. Fauci said. In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In fact, the health ministry showed better than the average competence and just as they start building some trust, they were exposed to be lying shamelessly. Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere. Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation happens when people try to digest very complex information beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person who is actually in control of the complex information tries to simplify things to the layman. If physics were more mainstream, we would have people misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those. It's just that those people are not marching on the streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build around layman misunderstanding things and building alternative realities over oversimplified scientific topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and when they speak publicly they commit the sin of oversimplifications and best guesses presented as clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the universe.

mrtesthah 5y ago

>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning. See: “Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study” https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915 https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915

avgcorrection 5y ago
Should have fallen in line like all the intelligent kids.
- croon 5y ago
  Facetious: I'm not gonna curve with the road like all these lemmings, I'm gonna go straight off the cliff! The majority isn't always right, but instinctively going the other way isn't better.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

> This is really a crisis of modernity. Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like Marcuse and Derrida. "As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the circumference of the shadows surrounding it. That is not an endorsement of ignorance, but a warning that our philosophy and socio-politics must expand in proportion to our technologies."

fredgrott 5y ago

No it's a crisis of COMMONS, if we have enough commons this would not be a problem. When you monopolize commons into private things you get this.. Yes this is a rehash of a former Presidential candidates own arguments, some of you may remember his law works such as the CC mark.

avgcorrection 5y ago

> At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is. Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.

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psychlops 5y ago

> Moderation isn't going to change any of this. Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls the information. Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument is simply over who gets the power to do it.

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62951413 5y ago

Wouldn't it be more like a crisis of post-modernity? They say high modernism and all that 20th century stuff is behind us. People never trusted authorities outside of the first world. The Western governments were hiding their true nature much better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit the same problems people living outside of it are used to. Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy for a century. Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong to and support them. Typically your government is your worst enemy, not some foreign dictator. Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive you to extinction.

unethical_ban 5y ago
There is no such thing as "more good" more "more evil", simply "existing to survive" - but there is an absolute binary of freedom vs. non-freedom? There is no such thing as moderation(pragmatism) in policy? There is no power(government?) except those trying to demoralize and exploit you to extinction? Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here? Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we really have no idea what they are blathering on about. Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able] assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well. To quote a terrible movie[0], in the case of the comment you're replying to "the only winning move is not to play." IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc. As such, I recommend backing away slowly. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

lunatuna 5y ago

>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth. I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue. >Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read. One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis. [0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-possible https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

I don't agree, unless your definition of modernity is the set of unfounded and unvalidated beliefs that have been largely imposed on people against their will for the last 100 or so years. I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on power and control… and reality for that matter. They reject reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural order and life, and it will always fail eventually.

evrydayhustling 5y ago

Authorities, moderation, and the mistrust of both are nothing new. The modernity crisis is that we can't trust our instincts any more about what's a centralized authority, what's an individual, what's a moderated environment, and what's a public square. There were always battle lines to contemplate, but now the front line is everywhere.

tablespoon 5y ago

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the perception that the "authorities" have a different set of values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.

rayiner 5y ago
That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled. Yeah, but it's important to emphasize the values aspect, because I think that's where the emotional energy comes from. IMHO, that energy is fuzzy, resentment against one authority in one area transfers to a different authority in a different area, just as long as they're perceived being alike in some vague way. For instance, I don't think there'd be so much distrust over COVID response if there hadn't already been a bitter culture war where medical authorities sometimes take sides.

throwaway894345 5y ago

There was a brief window during the latter bit of the 20th century and early 2020s during which public trust in the media and academia were relatively high. The relevant factor as far as I can tell were that these institutions aspired toward neutrality and objectivity (someone will predictably miss the distinction between aspired toward and successfully delivered 100% of the time, but hopefully the rest of us can enjoy a fruitful discussion). It really feels like there was a significant shift in these fields away from integrity and toward activism in the most recent couple of decades, and that this is driving mistrust (and consequently causing people to feel around through the fog for more reliable institutions, often unsuccessfully).

droopyEyelids 5y ago
There are two points of view on the cause of the 20th century media trust. One: The media aspired towards neutrality Two: The media was consolidated and Overton window kept so tight average people couldn't find contradictions.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I can't bring myself to subscribe to (2) for a variety of reasons. 1. The post-2010 media has been as consolidated as it ever has been--around coastal elite / woke left ideologies and Democratic activism (I say this having only ever voted Democrat in POTUS elections for whatever that's worth). Granted, social media provides a diversity of opinions--even still, there are other factors. 2. The post-2010 media unanimously and widely publishes high-profile, objective, and trivially verifiable falsehoods (a few from memory): characterizing the Google Memo as an "anti-diversity screed", the coverage of the Nicolas Sandman still photo, the coverage of the Rittenhouse saga, the coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, etc. Note that all of these errors support the same woke left viewpoints (as opposed to random errors). There's also a long tail of more subjective issues ("why does the media keep bringing up racial disparities in police shootings without exploring obvious follow-on questions?"). 3. The post-2010 media landscape includes reporters and entire publications who rather proudly consider themselves activists, who insert themselves into their stories, and who loudly broadcast their biases (typically woke-left biases) on social media. This is a stark departure from the 20th century journalistic ethos. 4. The academic fields which became openly activist have similarly experienced a degradation in public trust, while the more objective fields have retained much more trust. This mirrors what we're seeing in the media. All of this seems to boil down to a failure to pursue neutrality in my view. I suspect the tight 20th century Overton window was a result of 20th century epistemological institutions' pursuit of neutrality. The institutions were much more fact-based and opinions began to converge around facts.

908B64B197 5y ago

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them. Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists". Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab. The Chinese authorities certainly didn't release any more data, the only thing that changed was the presidential administration. How can this be explained? Why would the “authorities” try to initially divert attention from the evidence pointing to a lab leak from China?

allturtles 5y ago

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, This is true. > because authorities time and time again have misled them. But is this? Here's a chart of U.S. public trust in government since the late 1950s: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-government-1958-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g... Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident? I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."