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It’s also sometimes an important phenomenon. Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Eventually mainstream med

It’s also sometimes an important phenomenon. Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Eventually mainstream media came around, but they did a lot of damage to their credibility. Not to mention the whole Iraq having weapons of mass destruction narrative that many of us grew up seeing proven false firsthand. At this point I just don’t trust anything. It’s fortunate to be of a scientific mindset, since you can make up your own mind with some confidence that you’re not crazy. That doesn’t really work for most people, which seems like the main problem you touch on.

staunton 2y ago
> I just don’t trust anything Surely you trust a lot of things and people every day. One cannot make up ones mind about almost anything without being influenced by others, nor without taking into account information received from others. The point is to always be willing to question and revise one's opinions while consciously making decisions despite uncertainty.
- sillysaurusx 2y ago
  It seems like we’re saying the same thing. Trust implies that you can afford to outsource your skepticism. Being willing to question whoever you trust is at odds with that. It’s probably more accurate to say that whenever someone says something, it’s treated as an independent data point, each of which is assigned somewhere between "probably true" and "probably false". The datapoints get updated as more observations about the world come in. Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it.
  - amalcon 2y ago
    That assigned probability is a function of trust in the speaker, prior plausibility, other available information, and the consequences of being wrong in either direction. You can't avoid the trust question by talking about probability.
rimunroe 2y ago
> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Eventually mainstream media came around, but they did a lot of damage to their credibility. …but they didn’t. The lab leak theory is still mostly the realm of conspiracy theorists, and is (rightly, imo) treated as such. I’ve seen stories reporting on efforts investigating the lab leak hypothesis, but they’re always about how the study turned up nothing and thus the best evidence continues to point at direct animal -> human transmission. Occasionally conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, but that’s vanishingly rare next to the number of them which turn out to be false. > At this point I just don’t trust anything. It’s fortunate to be of a scientific mindset, since you can make up your own mind with some confidence that you’re not crazy. That doesn’t really work for most people, which seems like the main problem you touch on. Be very careful about this. It’s crucial to think critically and evaluate sources. However, if there’s a theory among domain experts (like epidemiologists or climatologists) which is overwhelmingly believed (Covid didn’t come from a lab) and you believe something which has the reputation of being a conspiracy theory, the odds of you being right don’t look good. Your odds get worse the longer the prevailing theory has been accepted, as in the intervening time the people in the minority will have been searching for convincing support.
- thsksbd 2y ago
  You know we have the government emails vis a vis the lab leak?
  - rimunroe 2y ago
    Which emails are you referring to? The ones with Fauci in early 2020? If so, they ruled that out as an option within a few months. I can understand being outraged about the suppression of those emails (though I understand why they’d want to do that), but the fact they were suppressed doesn’t have any bearing on the validity of the lab leak theory.
  - sumeno 2y ago
    From when? Before or after the investigations that determined it was most likely zoonotic? https://www.reuters.com/world/no-direct-evidence-covid-19-pandemic-started-wuhan-lab-us-intelligence-report-2023-06-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/no-direct-evidence-covid-19-pa...
christianqchung 2y ago
[flagged]
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > The vast majority of journalism is accurate How do you get into that one conclusion? Anyway, the GP used a 20 years old example because it started a large scale war, killed thousands of people and got close to braking the government of the largest economy on Earth. Are you claiming things like that happen all the time and the GP is remembering the one that was wrong?
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  > The vast majority of journalism is accurate Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, I want to ask: Do you not realize how shaky of a claim this is? Even if you did somehow know this to be true, why would anybody believe that you know this? Have you somehow both consumed the vast majority of journalism and known enough to judge its veracity (presumably without relying on other journalism)? You would have to be a subject matter expert in just about everything, as well as somehow spend more than 24 hours a day consuming news for your claim to be at all credible.
  - christianqchung 2y ago
    > Without agreeing or disagreeing with you You disagree, and pretending otherwise is pointless. > Do you not realize how shaky of a claim this is? How many things do you actually verify in your life? That's not how society or facts work, you rely on others to verify things for you. Do you run tests on your car tire rubber to ensure the properties of the material, and in the process reverify the entirety of materials science and molecular chemistry starting from scratch, or are you sane and trust experts? If journalism is so inaccurate, I can write a script to pick any amount of random articles from the New York Times dating back several decades, and you can try to find factual inaccuracies in a random selection of articles. Hint: it's not going to be in your favor, because contrary to popular belief, the news room is not the same thing as the opinion section. It's also not going to be in your favor because the vast majority of reported news is trivially verifiable by other sources. Picking a few topics a year where this is not the case is only proving me right, if I'm wrong, find 100 false narratives on the scale of the Iraq war in the last month on the news room of the New York Times. > Even if you did somehow know this to be true, why would anybody believe that you know this? Who said I'm the expert? I trust institutions because the default for intuitions in America is that they are generally accurate. The accuracy rate of institutions being below 100% is not a reason to behave as if it is 0%. Again, do you not trust sports reporting on who won? > Have you somehow both consumed the vast majority of journalism and known enough to judge its veracity (presumably without relying on other journalism)? No, because I'm not an expert, I listen to experts. Why make a weird made up situation? > You would have to be a subject matter expert in just about everything, as well as somehow spend more than 24 hours a day consuming news for your claim to be at all credible. This mentality is why conspiracy theories are so widespread, because non domain experts like you think you know better than experts on average. Now you're either going to tell me conspiracy theories are all true, or it's scientists fault for being bad communicators (the correct option). If the former, then you can use the alien time travel machines or whatever to tell my future self I was wrong.
acdha 2y ago
> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? No, because I saw people talking about it continuously throughout the period. The conspiracy nuts and right-wing activists making wild evidence-free claims that COVID was a Chinese bio weapon or genetic engineering mistake were rightly dismissed, but people approaching it scientifically and trying to assess evidence for clues that it might have been a mishandled lab sample were not. That’s always been the problem with this: “lab leak” meant different things to different people, and the erstwhile martyrs tried to represent themselves as representing some broader truth when they had always been trying to work backwards from a politically-advantageous explanation.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Fortunately I don't think I have ever curbed my reason or logic because of possibly being "labeled". > At this point I just don’t trust anything. That's sad to read. It suggests those that would sow disinformation have won. All my life I have been skeptical — somehow I was raised with the mind of a scientist - likely many of us here have. But I have also learned to be skeptical of skepticism if you know what I mean — contrarians, doubting Thomasii, etc. EDIT: I see your comment here: "Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it." You should have led with that. Still, as we can't all be on the ground in Anytown, China or conducting a scientific test on superconductivity, we have to have a framework of what "sounds reasonable based on life experiences" and accept a certain amount of what we hear/read.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  It's not just about being 'labeled'. What amount of censure would break your steely resolve? Maybe you are ok with your posts being down-ranked. What if your accounts are disabled next?
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    If my accounts are disabled I don't really want to have anything to do with those sites. As an example, I'm pretty sure there are a few subreddits that would ban me for my beliefs. I have no interest in those subreddits. To take an extreme example, I'm also old enough to remember enjoying life before there was an internet. If all of the internet tossed me out ... might be the best thing that happened to me in many, many decades.
dahart 2y ago
> At this point I just don’t trust anything That is what the spreaders of fake news want, it is literally the agenda to sow mistrust, and it’s working. This, I fear, is going to be the real and lasting damage of this effort, it’s breaking down our ability to find common ground and have civil discourse, it’s breaking our ability to function democratically.
tonetheman 2y ago
[dead]

staunton 2y ago

> I just don’t trust anything Surely you trust a lot of things and people every day. One cannot make up ones mind about almost anything without being influenced by others, nor without taking into account information received from others. The point is to always be willing to question and revise one's opinions while consciously making decisions despite uncertainty.

sillysaurusx 2y ago
It seems like we’re saying the same thing. Trust implies that you can afford to outsource your skepticism. Being willing to question whoever you trust is at odds with that. It’s probably more accurate to say that whenever someone says something, it’s treated as an independent data point, each of which is assigned somewhere between "probably true" and "probably false". The datapoints get updated as more observations about the world come in. Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it.
- amalcon 2y ago
  That assigned probability is a function of trust in the speaker, prior plausibility, other available information, and the consequences of being wrong in either direction. You can't avoid the trust question by talking about probability.

rimunroe 2y ago

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Eventually mainstream media came around, but they did a lot of damage to their credibility. …but they didn’t. The lab leak theory is still mostly the realm of conspiracy theorists, and is (rightly, imo) treated as such. I’ve seen stories reporting on efforts investigating the lab leak hypothesis, but they’re always about how the study turned up nothing and thus the best evidence continues to point at direct animal -> human transmission. Occasionally conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, but that’s vanishingly rare next to the number of them which turn out to be false. > At this point I just don’t trust anything. It’s fortunate to be of a scientific mindset, since you can make up your own mind with some confidence that you’re not crazy. That doesn’t really work for most people, which seems like the main problem you touch on. Be very careful about this. It’s crucial to think critically and evaluate sources. However, if there’s a theory among domain experts (like epidemiologists or climatologists) which is overwhelmingly believed (Covid didn’t come from a lab) and you believe something which has the reputation of being a conspiracy theory, the odds of you being right don’t look good. Your odds get worse the longer the prevailing theory has been accepted, as in the intervening time the people in the minority will have been searching for convincing support.

thsksbd 2y ago
You know we have the government emails vis a vis the lab leak?
- rimunroe 2y ago
  Which emails are you referring to? The ones with Fauci in early 2020? If so, they ruled that out as an option within a few months. I can understand being outraged about the suppression of those emails (though I understand why they’d want to do that), but the fact they were suppressed doesn’t have any bearing on the validity of the lab leak theory.
- sumeno 2y ago
  From when? Before or after the investigations that determined it was most likely zoonotic? https://www.reuters.com/world/no-direct-evidence-covid-19-pandemic-started-wuhan-lab-us-intelligence-report-2023-06-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/no-direct-evidence-covid-19-pa...

christianqchung 2y ago

[flagged]

marcosdumay 2y ago
> The vast majority of journalism is accurate How do you get into that one conclusion? Anyway, the GP used a 20 years old example because it started a large scale war, killed thousands of people and got close to braking the government of the largest economy on Earth. Are you claiming things like that happen all the time and the GP is remembering the one that was wrong?
ifyoubuildit 2y ago
> The vast majority of journalism is accurate Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, I want to ask: Do you not realize how shaky of a claim this is? Even if you did somehow know this to be true, why would anybody believe that you know this? Have you somehow both consumed the vast majority of journalism and known enough to judge its veracity (presumably without relying on other journalism)? You would have to be a subject matter expert in just about everything, as well as somehow spend more than 24 hours a day consuming news for your claim to be at all credible.
- christianqchung 2y ago
  > Without agreeing or disagreeing with you You disagree, and pretending otherwise is pointless. > Do you not realize how shaky of a claim this is? How many things do you actually verify in your life? That's not how society or facts work, you rely on others to verify things for you. Do you run tests on your car tire rubber to ensure the properties of the material, and in the process reverify the entirety of materials science and molecular chemistry starting from scratch, or are you sane and trust experts? If journalism is so inaccurate, I can write a script to pick any amount of random articles from the New York Times dating back several decades, and you can try to find factual inaccuracies in a random selection of articles. Hint: it's not going to be in your favor, because contrary to popular belief, the news room is not the same thing as the opinion section. It's also not going to be in your favor because the vast majority of reported news is trivially verifiable by other sources. Picking a few topics a year where this is not the case is only proving me right, if I'm wrong, find 100 false narratives on the scale of the Iraq war in the last month on the news room of the New York Times. > Even if you did somehow know this to be true, why would anybody believe that you know this? Who said I'm the expert? I trust institutions because the default for intuitions in America is that they are generally accurate. The accuracy rate of institutions being below 100% is not a reason to behave as if it is 0%. Again, do you not trust sports reporting on who won? > Have you somehow both consumed the vast majority of journalism and known enough to judge its veracity (presumably without relying on other journalism)? No, because I'm not an expert, I listen to experts. Why make a weird made up situation? > You would have to be a subject matter expert in just about everything, as well as somehow spend more than 24 hours a day consuming news for your claim to be at all credible. This mentality is why conspiracy theories are so widespread, because non domain experts like you think you know better than experts on average. Now you're either going to tell me conspiracy theories are all true, or it's scientists fault for being bad communicators (the correct option). If the former, then you can use the alien time travel machines or whatever to tell my future self I was wrong.

acdha 2y ago

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? No, because I saw people talking about it continuously throughout the period. The conspiracy nuts and right-wing activists making wild evidence-free claims that COVID was a Chinese bio weapon or genetic engineering mistake were rightly dismissed, but people approaching it scientifically and trying to assess evidence for clues that it might have been a mishandled lab sample were not. That’s always been the problem with this: “lab leak” meant different things to different people, and the erstwhile martyrs tried to represent themselves as representing some broader truth when they had always been trying to work backwards from a politically-advantageous explanation.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Fortunately I don't think I have ever curbed my reason or logic because of possibly being "labeled". > At this point I just don’t trust anything. That's sad to read. It suggests those that would sow disinformation have won. All my life I have been skeptical — somehow I was raised with the mind of a scientist - likely many of us here have. But I have also learned to be skeptical of skepticism if you know what I mean — contrarians, doubting Thomasii, etc. EDIT: I see your comment here: "Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it." You should have led with that. Still, as we can't all be on the ground in Anytown, China or conducting a scientific test on superconductivity, we have to have a framework of what "sounds reasonable based on life experiences" and accept a certain amount of what we hear/read.

elevatedastalt 2y ago
It's not just about being 'labeled'. What amount of censure would break your steely resolve? Maybe you are ok with your posts being down-ranked. What if your accounts are disabled next?
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  If my accounts are disabled I don't really want to have anything to do with those sites. As an example, I'm pretty sure there are a few subreddits that would ban me for my beliefs. I have no interest in those subreddits. To take an extreme example, I'm also old enough to remember enjoying life before there was an internet. If all of the internet tossed me out ... might be the best thing that happened to me in many, many decades.

dahart 2y ago

> At this point I just don’t trust anything That is what the spreaders of fake news want, it is literally the agenda to sow mistrust, and it’s working. This, I fear, is going to be the real and lasting damage of this effort, it’s breaking down our ability to find common ground and have civil discourse, it’s breaking our ability to function democratically.

tonetheman 2y ago

[dead]