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There was plenty of dissent but it was censored on pretty much every platform.

version_five 3y ago
Yeah we need open venues for discussion more than ever would be a better take. Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through. Dissent is irrelevant because it has almost nowhere to go, and gets branded as "denialist" or whatever by the mob anyway.
- threeseed 3y ago
  > Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through Never in history has it been easier for someone to create their own media publication, present alternative views and make it available to anyone in the world. But rather than do that what those people prefer to do is rant, rave and demand that other publications carry those views. Concentration of power in media and online is because the majority of people simply don't want to listen to the type of views that are typically censored. And since the media is a business the owners understandably listen to those people. You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.
  - HardlyCurious 3y ago
    Did you hear about Parler? AWS cancelled their service for violating their terms of service. This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook. Also apple pulled their app from the marketplace when they were trending. 'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Almost all of the people who were involved in Jan 6 have gone to jail. It was a serious crime. And you can't expect companies to be wilfully complicit in criminal acts by allowing services like Parlor which you admit partly facilitated the Jan 6 event. That said you can run internet services without AWS or Apple. Build a web app and host it on your own infrastructure.
      - vixen99 3y ago
        In this context, if genuine, this seems odd to me. https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656 https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656 Not to be outdone, if you've not seen it in the UK we've had this much smaller rebellion: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-protestors-enter-parliaments-house-commons-chamber-2022-09-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-pr...
    - krapp 3y ago
      >This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook. "mostly planned on Facebook" doesn't mean "not at all planned anywhere else." There was a whole data dump of content from Parler showing that yes a lot of planning was done there. Here[0] is a Slate article about it. >'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today. Weird, because Parler was recently acquired and will presumably be relaunched, Gab still exists, and Rumble and Truth Social and plenty of other "alternative" platforms are still active as far as I know. How is it that an entire ecosystem of platforms to serve the conservative and right-wing market has popped up if it's impossible to build alternatives to mainstream services? I mean, for all of the censorship supposedly going on, the "dissenters" don't seem to be hindered in getting their message out at all. [0]https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-facebook-twitter.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-fa...
      - curtisblaine 3y ago
        If I'm not wrong, Gab was cut off by pretty much all payment processors and had to launch its own to survive. There was a moment in which, if you wanted to give money to Gab, you had to either mail them a check or do a bitcoin payment to their wallet. They technically survived, but dissenters were - and are - greatly hindered at every step.
        Izkata 3y ago
        Correct, it's called Gab Pay.
    - gochi 3y ago
      >'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today. You can do it today very effectively. Many platforms exist today that don't rely on any of the major conglomerates. It's really not difficult, you just don't get the niceties that the big players have the experience in providing.
      - curtisblaine 3y ago
        It's really hard to exist without a payment processor, and it's overwhelmingly hard to set up one.
  - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
    I downvoted you and I want to explain why. The public square, and the communication around it are controlled by BigTech, BigMedia, and are heavily beholden to Govt & BigPharma which means pushing provax, esg, and various other uniparty narratives. That means publications, and new sources, as well as social media, forums, instant messaging, IMs, email and many others are all censored. It is hard to reach eyeballs if all communications are controlled&censored too.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      It is nonsense that all forms of media and online sites are censored. It is simply the ones that are popular that have and will enforce their own terms of service. And that is because there is a proven, strong relationship between sites that do this and sites that are popular. Because again. Most people simply aren't interested in hearing the type of views that are typically censored.
    - danem 3y ago
      He never said these platforms don’t feature any amount of censorship, or that certain types of content don’t face unique hurdles that other types do not. The fact is, it’s still vastly easier today to disseminate your ideas — no matter what they are — than at any other time in history. Do you really think radio, newspapers, tv stations, and book publishers weren’t just as influenced by large corporate and political interests?
    - lasc4r 3y ago
      I seriously doubt IMs and email are being censored. You sound like someone who gets their information from grifters that complain about censorship despite having huge audiences captured by masses of lazy thinkers.
      - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
        Please do not discount my experience. On a high karma Reddit account I was warned by an admin about banning for a specific story they wanted suppressed, and the post was deleted. On Facebook I have been blocked from sending specific links from 3 different URLs in IMs, the last of which was because it had a contrary position about the Ukrainian war (the website Southfront which is Russian govt affiliated) when I was talking with a friend of mine that happens to have a Ukrainian wife. We were talking about stories in the news in the West vs East and what was the actual story.
  - tenpies 3y ago
    > You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen. I don't mean you in the specific, but I am deeply alarmed by what seems like a coordinated regime effort to re-define free speech into what you describe above. Perhaps the WEF-affiliated Twitter CEO put it best on CNBC the other day: "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach". So in effect, for the regime censors, freedom of speech now means freedom of expression + censorship. That is, as long as the censors allow you to put the words on paper, you have "freedom of speech" in their eyes, even if that paper is immediately thrown into a lead bottle and into the Mariana Trench. As long as your Tweet is not outright and immediately deleted, you have "free speech", even if the algorithmic censors immediately ensure that no one but you will ever see it. This will not end well.
    - version_five 3y ago
      You make an interesting point but I think there are two separate issues. Freedom of speech does not mean a requirement for people to listen or to have your ideas broadcast. In general nobody should be compelled to promote your ideas. With Twitter and others, the issue is that they are monopoly platforms, and so by refusing to carry some ideas they are effectively censoring them and denying free speech. It would be like saying you can say whatever you want in a public square but some people need to wear soundproof masks when they do it. All that to say, the issue imo is we need better laws around monopolies that include common carrier type rules that prevent their interference, not because companies shouldn't be allowed to censor, but because monopoly platforms shouldn't.
      - Nathanba 3y ago
        I think that's not true actually, freedom of speech absolutely implies a requirement for broadcast. Speech is in itself a broadcast, the intent is that you're supposed to be able to be heard - otherwise it would be called freedom of thought and everyone would naturally agree that that is not good enough. We can quickly end up in a world where your ruler tells you that you have full freedom of speech just as long as this speech remains firmly inside your cranium and never leaves it. The problem here is that the philosophical position is a bit more complex: Issues of decorum and harassment and spam exist, requiring limits on broadcast and so someone always has to judge what the true intent of your speech is. We now live in a world where people readily judge that the other side never has good intentions, therefore their speech can be forbidden. It's an intellecutal and moral problem, some people are simply incapable or unwilling to understand the other side's position or moral values to such a high degree that they reject any allowance for speech.
  - curtisblaine 3y ago
    > You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen. You can't demand that everyone has to listen, but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you. People that don't want to listen to you can use that channel too, without opting in to follow you. Nobody is forced to listen, nobody is forced to be silent. What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.
    - version_five 3y ago
      > What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it. Well said.
      - jpmoral 3y ago
        In many cases, it's not because you're (the general "you") being "suppressed". It's just that you're tiresome. A few weeks ago someone was ranting about something (some movie he claimed was being given the woke treatment). I told him that he shouldn't get so worked up about it. In hindsight, his response should've been predictable. "Oh, so I'm not allowed to have an opinion?". I told him it was fine to have an opinion and share it, but that I thought he should just skip watching the movie and not get worked up about creative choices he disagreed with. I wasn't trying to "suppress wrongthink", I just found it very tiresome. Edit: granted that wasn't about science, but I find the dynamic is often similar.
        curtisblaine 3y ago
        Yeah, this happens on both sides. You just need to mention you disagree with creative use of pronouns, or with certain categories of sexuality, or with the unhealthiness of clinical obesity, or the understanding of privilege, and you're met with accusations of genocide.
    - gochi 3y ago
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    Freedom to listen is a good right and arguably better than freedom of speech but you don't understand how it works. Freedom to listen means the censors don't get in the way. Facebook censoring a post from reaching someone who wants to see isn't "people not wanting to listen", it's facebook getting in the way of two consenting adults who want to communicate to eachother. Freedom to listen requires freedom of speech, but also requires good blocking and filtering tools on the individual level. If the tools are not on an individual level, and you cannot choose to unblock or unfilter "dangerous" views, you don't have freedom to listen. By the way, we have this on hacker news, this is how the post flagging and dead systems work, you can just choose to see what's being moderated.
    - toofy 3y ago
      what you’re calling “censored”, on my forum (and even here on hackernews) and on countless other forums, we simply say “deleted.” and move on with our day. from irc to bbs’, from forums to discord rooms, here on hackernews, from our own living rooms to restaurants/bars, if the person running the show finds someone obnoxious, they delete the comments or remove the person. this isn’t new, it isn’t surprising. it’s been happening since the beginning days. are you looking for publicly owned internet infrastructure or something? if it’s a private space, how can you demand they host people they find obnoxious? how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time. i get publicly owned spaces, i really do. free speech and all that, but i can’t imagine doing anything but laughing at someone if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” at the top of their lungs, then screaming “censorship” as the owner removes them.
      - curtisblaine 3y ago
        > how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time. Demanding that cloud providers and payment processors act as neutral channels doesn't seem that hard to me. The problem is not the bar owner removing the person, the problem is the person being effectively barred from opening their bar. > if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” Well, that's an extreme example. Normally, what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying things like "we don't want to use your pronouns" or "we don't think your theory of privilege is credible" or "we don't think make athletes should compete in women's sports".
houseatrielah 3y ago
Censored and then "rationalized" Gustave Le Bon was a French scientist who wrote extensively on crowd psychology. He left behind a number of important works, being the first writer to thoroughly investigate the psychology of socialism. For a long time, noted Le Bon, psychologists regarded belief as voluntary and rational….” But a shocking discovery was made. Psychologists discovered that mass belief is an unconscious process, “under the influence of mystical and affective elements independent of reason and will….” We do not fully understand why people believe irrational things, noted Le Bon, but they do.”[36] According to Le Bon, the decisive role of the unconscious means that the decisive factors in belief are: “prestige, affirmation, repetition, suggestion and contagion.” These factors sway the mind independent of reason. “The power of these influences on the genesis of beliefs” is “proved by their effects on the actions of even the most cultivated men,” noted Le Bon. Man is not so much the “rational animal” as he is a “rationalizing animal” whose irrationality is supported by seemingly logical arguments. Le Bon wrote, “We have arrived thus at this important philosophical law: Far from presenting a common intellectual origin, our concepts have very different mental sources and are ruled by very different forms of logic. From the predominance of each … are born the great happenings of history.”[37] https://jrnyquist.blog/2023/07/23/about-the-s-word-a-polemic/#_edn2 https://jrnyquist.blog/2023/07/23/about-the-s-word-a-polemic...
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
How is it then that a majority of Americans believe the lab leak theory?
- metalspot 3y ago
  a majority of americans believe the opposite of whatever the "experts" tell them. they are not always right but it is a good heuristic.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    This is beyond foolish, and untrue, and if it were true, it is a relatively new phenomenon. People do not believe the opposite of what experts tell them unless encouraged to do so, and given a set of plausible reasons. While sometimes this has merit (because experts are not always right), it is almost always done by people who having something to gain from a public discordance with expert opinion. In addition, "experts" have been made much less visible in our society than they once were, largely due to the democritization of communication technology but also the concomittant rise of self-promoters. A lot of the reactions to "experts" are actually just reactions to noise. Finally, the single most important issue with public/expert interactions IMO is the media-driven lack of tolerance for nuance on the part of the public. People are much less willing to accept actual expert answers, which tend to be of the form "well, it could be X, but it could also be Y, we probably won't know until we do Z". Consequently, a secondary stream of not-actual experts emerges, who provide the handholding answers like "It's X", and this is then used to disparage actual expert opinion when it turns out to be Y. There are fields where "expertise" is hard to establish and of limited utility, and the expression of opinion there is primarily a statement of ideology and desire. I think that severe skepticism is warranted there, even more than the general skepticism one should apply. But FFS, it is what "experts" know and do that has bought us so much power, agency and comfort in the world, and the idea that believing the opposite of them is a good heuristic is just nuts.

Yeah we need open venues for discussion more than ever would be a better take. Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through. Dissent is irrelevant because it has almost nowhere to go, and gets branded as "denialist" or whatever by the mob anyway.

threeseed 3y ago
> Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through Never in history has it been easier for someone to create their own media publication, present alternative views and make it available to anyone in the world. But rather than do that what those people prefer to do is rant, rave and demand that other publications carry those views. Concentration of power in media and online is because the majority of people simply don't want to listen to the type of views that are typically censored. And since the media is a business the owners understandably listen to those people. You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.
- HardlyCurious 3y ago
  Did you hear about Parler? AWS cancelled their service for violating their terms of service. This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook. Also apple pulled their app from the marketplace when they were trending. 'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    Almost all of the people who were involved in Jan 6 have gone to jail. It was a serious crime. And you can't expect companies to be wilfully complicit in criminal acts by allowing services like Parlor which you admit partly facilitated the Jan 6 event. That said you can run internet services without AWS or Apple. Build a web app and host it on your own infrastructure.
    - vixen99 3y ago
      In this context, if genuine, this seems odd to me. https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656 https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656 Not to be outdone, if you've not seen it in the UK we've had this much smaller rebellion: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-protestors-enter-parliaments-house-commons-chamber-2022-09-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-pr...
  - krapp 3y ago
    >This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook. "mostly planned on Facebook" doesn't mean "not at all planned anywhere else." There was a whole data dump of content from Parler showing that yes a lot of planning was done there. Here[0] is a Slate article about it. >'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today. Weird, because Parler was recently acquired and will presumably be relaunched, Gab still exists, and Rumble and Truth Social and plenty of other "alternative" platforms are still active as far as I know. How is it that an entire ecosystem of platforms to serve the conservative and right-wing market has popped up if it's impossible to build alternatives to mainstream services? I mean, for all of the censorship supposedly going on, the "dissenters" don't seem to be hindered in getting their message out at all. [0]https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-facebook-twitter.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-fa...
    - curtisblaine 3y ago
      If I'm not wrong, Gab was cut off by pretty much all payment processors and had to launch its own to survive. There was a moment in which, if you wanted to give money to Gab, you had to either mail them a check or do a bitcoin payment to their wallet. They technically survived, but dissenters were - and are - greatly hindered at every step.
      - Izkata 3y ago
        Correct, it's called Gab Pay.
  - gochi 3y ago
    >'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today. You can do it today very effectively. Many platforms exist today that don't rely on any of the major conglomerates. It's really not difficult, you just don't get the niceties that the big players have the experience in providing.
    - curtisblaine 3y ago
      It's really hard to exist without a payment processor, and it's overwhelmingly hard to set up one.
- OrvalWintermute 3y ago
  I downvoted you and I want to explain why. The public square, and the communication around it are controlled by BigTech, BigMedia, and are heavily beholden to Govt & BigPharma which means pushing provax, esg, and various other uniparty narratives. That means publications, and new sources, as well as social media, forums, instant messaging, IMs, email and many others are all censored. It is hard to reach eyeballs if all communications are controlled&censored too.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    It is nonsense that all forms of media and online sites are censored. It is simply the ones that are popular that have and will enforce their own terms of service. And that is because there is a proven, strong relationship between sites that do this and sites that are popular. Because again. Most people simply aren't interested in hearing the type of views that are typically censored.
  - danem 3y ago
    He never said these platforms don’t feature any amount of censorship, or that certain types of content don’t face unique hurdles that other types do not. The fact is, it’s still vastly easier today to disseminate your ideas — no matter what they are — than at any other time in history. Do you really think radio, newspapers, tv stations, and book publishers weren’t just as influenced by large corporate and political interests?
  - lasc4r 3y ago
    I seriously doubt IMs and email are being censored. You sound like someone who gets their information from grifters that complain about censorship despite having huge audiences captured by masses of lazy thinkers.
    - OrvalWintermute 3y ago
      Please do not discount my experience. On a high karma Reddit account I was warned by an admin about banning for a specific story they wanted suppressed, and the post was deleted. On Facebook I have been blocked from sending specific links from 3 different URLs in IMs, the last of which was because it had a contrary position about the Ukrainian war (the website Southfront which is Russian govt affiliated) when I was talking with a friend of mine that happens to have a Ukrainian wife. We were talking about stories in the news in the West vs East and what was the actual story.
- tenpies 3y ago
  > You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen. I don't mean you in the specific, but I am deeply alarmed by what seems like a coordinated regime effort to re-define free speech into what you describe above. Perhaps the WEF-affiliated Twitter CEO put it best on CNBC the other day: "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach". So in effect, for the regime censors, freedom of speech now means freedom of expression + censorship. That is, as long as the censors allow you to put the words on paper, you have "freedom of speech" in their eyes, even if that paper is immediately thrown into a lead bottle and into the Mariana Trench. As long as your Tweet is not outright and immediately deleted, you have "free speech", even if the algorithmic censors immediately ensure that no one but you will ever see it. This will not end well.
  - version_five 3y ago
    You make an interesting point but I think there are two separate issues. Freedom of speech does not mean a requirement for people to listen or to have your ideas broadcast. In general nobody should be compelled to promote your ideas. With Twitter and others, the issue is that they are monopoly platforms, and so by refusing to carry some ideas they are effectively censoring them and denying free speech. It would be like saying you can say whatever you want in a public square but some people need to wear soundproof masks when they do it. All that to say, the issue imo is we need better laws around monopolies that include common carrier type rules that prevent their interference, not because companies shouldn't be allowed to censor, but because monopoly platforms shouldn't.
    - Nathanba 3y ago
      I think that's not true actually, freedom of speech absolutely implies a requirement for broadcast. Speech is in itself a broadcast, the intent is that you're supposed to be able to be heard - otherwise it would be called freedom of thought and everyone would naturally agree that that is not good enough. We can quickly end up in a world where your ruler tells you that you have full freedom of speech just as long as this speech remains firmly inside your cranium and never leaves it. The problem here is that the philosophical position is a bit more complex: Issues of decorum and harassment and spam exist, requiring limits on broadcast and so someone always has to judge what the true intent of your speech is. We now live in a world where people readily judge that the other side never has good intentions, therefore their speech can be forbidden. It's an intellecutal and moral problem, some people are simply incapable or unwilling to understand the other side's position or moral values to such a high degree that they reject any allowance for speech.
- curtisblaine 3y ago
  > You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen. You can't demand that everyone has to listen, but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you. People that don't want to listen to you can use that channel too, without opting in to follow you. Nobody is forced to listen, nobody is forced to be silent. What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.
  - version_five 3y ago
    > What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it. Well said.
    - jpmoral 3y ago
      In many cases, it's not because you're (the general "you") being "suppressed". It's just that you're tiresome. A few weeks ago someone was ranting about something (some movie he claimed was being given the woke treatment). I told him that he shouldn't get so worked up about it. In hindsight, his response should've been predictable. "Oh, so I'm not allowed to have an opinion?". I told him it was fine to have an opinion and share it, but that I thought he should just skip watching the movie and not get worked up about creative choices he disagreed with. I wasn't trying to "suppress wrongthink", I just found it very tiresome. Edit: granted that wasn't about science, but I find the dynamic is often similar.
      - curtisblaine 3y ago
        Yeah, this happens on both sides. You just need to mention you disagree with creative use of pronouns, or with certain categories of sexuality, or with the unhealthiness of clinical obesity, or the understanding of privilege, and you're met with accusations of genocide.
  - gochi 3y ago
- LightHugger 3y ago
  Freedom to listen is a good right and arguably better than freedom of speech but you don't understand how it works. Freedom to listen means the censors don't get in the way. Facebook censoring a post from reaching someone who wants to see isn't "people not wanting to listen", it's facebook getting in the way of two consenting adults who want to communicate to eachother. Freedom to listen requires freedom of speech, but also requires good blocking and filtering tools on the individual level. If the tools are not on an individual level, and you cannot choose to unblock or unfilter "dangerous" views, you don't have freedom to listen. By the way, we have this on hacker news, this is how the post flagging and dead systems work, you can just choose to see what's being moderated.
  - toofy 3y ago
    what you’re calling “censored”, on my forum (and even here on hackernews) and on countless other forums, we simply say “deleted.” and move on with our day. from irc to bbs’, from forums to discord rooms, here on hackernews, from our own living rooms to restaurants/bars, if the person running the show finds someone obnoxious, they delete the comments or remove the person. this isn’t new, it isn’t surprising. it’s been happening since the beginning days. are you looking for publicly owned internet infrastructure or something? if it’s a private space, how can you demand they host people they find obnoxious? how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time. i get publicly owned spaces, i really do. free speech and all that, but i can’t imagine doing anything but laughing at someone if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” at the top of their lungs, then screaming “censorship” as the owner removes them.
    - curtisblaine 3y ago
      > how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time. Demanding that cloud providers and payment processors act as neutral channels doesn't seem that hard to me. The problem is not the bar owner removing the person, the problem is the person being effectively barred from opening their bar. > if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” Well, that's an extreme example. Normally, what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying things like "we don't want to use your pronouns" or "we don't think your theory of privilege is credible" or "we don't think make athletes should compete in women's sports".

houseatrielah 3y ago

Censored and then "rationalized" Gustave Le Bon was a French scientist who wrote extensively on crowd psychology. He left behind a number of important works, being the first writer to thoroughly investigate the psychology of socialism. For a long time, noted Le Bon, psychologists regarded belief as voluntary and rational….” But a shocking discovery was made. Psychologists discovered that mass belief is an unconscious process, “under the influence of mystical and affective elements independent of reason and will….” We do not fully understand why people believe irrational things, noted Le Bon, but they do.”[36] According to Le Bon, the decisive role of the unconscious means that the decisive factors in belief are: “prestige, affirmation, repetition, suggestion and contagion.” These factors sway the mind independent of reason. “The power of these influences on the genesis of beliefs” is “proved by their effects on the actions of even the most cultivated men,” noted Le Bon. Man is not so much the “rational animal” as he is a “rationalizing animal” whose irrationality is supported by seemingly logical arguments. Le Bon wrote, “We have arrived thus at this important philosophical law: Far from presenting a common intellectual origin, our concepts have very different mental sources and are ruled by very different forms of logic. From the predominance of each … are born the great happenings of history.”[37] https://jrnyquist.blog/2023/07/23/about-the-s-word-a-polemic/#_edn2 https://jrnyquist.blog/2023/07/23/about-the-s-word-a-polemic...

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

How is it then that a majority of Americans believe the lab leak theory?

metalspot 3y ago
a majority of americans believe the opposite of whatever the "experts" tell them. they are not always right but it is a good heuristic.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  This is beyond foolish, and untrue, and if it were true, it is a relatively new phenomenon. People do not believe the opposite of what experts tell them unless encouraged to do so, and given a set of plausible reasons. While sometimes this has merit (because experts are not always right), it is almost always done by people who having something to gain from a public discordance with expert opinion. In addition, "experts" have been made much less visible in our society than they once were, largely due to the democritization of communication technology but also the concomittant rise of self-promoters. A lot of the reactions to "experts" are actually just reactions to noise. Finally, the single most important issue with public/expert interactions IMO is the media-driven lack of tolerance for nuance on the part of the public. People are much less willing to accept actual expert answers, which tend to be of the form "well, it could be X, but it could also be Y, we probably won't know until we do Z". Consequently, a secondary stream of not-actual experts emerges, who provide the handholding answers like "It's X", and this is then used to disparage actual expert opinion when it turns out to be Y. There are fields where "expertise" is hard to establish and of limited utility, and the expression of opinion there is primarily a statement of ideology and desire. I think that severe skepticism is warranted there, even more than the general skepticism one should apply. But FFS, it is what "experts" know and do that has bought us so much power, agency and comfort in the world, and the idea that believing the opposite of them is a good heuristic is just nuts.