11 ms·

Nobody knows what's going on

225 points by herbertl 2y ago

duckmysick 2y ago
> Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong. Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints. You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets. Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.
nox101 2y ago
First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  And things might change after you leave that country.
- mr_toad 2y ago
  In some countries the part the tourists get to see are like a completely different country.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Which countries are like this?
    - scrollaway 2y ago
      Greece, Italy, …
    - AzzieElbab 2y ago
      North Korea, China, Russia, and most Gulf and Central Asia countries.
    - greenchair 2y ago
      north korea?
    - lobochrome 2y ago
      Spain, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar
      - djaouen 2y ago
        My favorite theory about Cambodia is that they subtlely threaten any tourist to post positive feedback about the country otherwise they get the Pol Pot treatment lol
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      All of them, really. As a tourist, you don't have to work a regular job there, you don't have to rent an apartment or buy a home there, you don't have to deal with the locals on a day-to-day basis, you're usually not aware of the political issues (esp. at the local level). You just go to some popular tourist destinations, take photos, eat in restaurants, walk around a bit, and go home. Of course you're not going to get a very good idea of what it's really like to live there. You can, however, get a good feel for the place, especially if you step outside the tourist zones more, but it's going to be very incomplete because of the factors above.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - em-bee 2y ago
        this is why, when i go somewhere i prefer to either stay with locals couchsurfing, or when i stay longer, rent a room or an apartment. i don't travel around but stay in the same place, make friends with locals, join their events, etc. i intentionally don't read about the places before going there, to avoid influencing my experience by the subjective reports of others. especially reports of other foreigners. i'll never experience the life and struggles as a local, especially not when the culture is very different, or the language or its a developing country. at best i get to experience what living in that place as a european, an expat, is like. but, where i am able to make friends or become part of a local family, i still get way more insights than any tourist would. while traveling in japan (where i was couchsurfing) i met a young european who claimed to have learned things about japanese culture that generally no foreigner ever finds out and his japanese friends would always be surprised when he told them about some of the things he learned. i could not verify his claim of course, but it was interesting nonetheless.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Tao3300 2y ago
  Similarly, a lot of people believe in what we could call "ghosts" based on firsthand experience, yet the expert consensus is that there is no such thing.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Expert consensus does not define the state of objective reality, it only alters people's beliefs about it. Also, an absence of evidence is not proof of absence, though it usually appears that it is.
    - balder1991 2y ago
      This is one reason I really enjoyed reading Prometheus Rising. A significant part of the book is dedicated to show you just how little you actually know about reality when you discount beliefs you acquired either extrapolating experiences or simply adopting some dogma (even if it’s simply believing Positivism in science). In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        Thank you for the book recommendation, I am going to check it out. > In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there. Well, I'd say ontologically / phenomenologically it's basically a sure thing, though whether the nature and ontology of it is anything near what it is said to be is a very different matter!
- Gormo 2y ago
  It'd bad to rely on a small selection-biased sample of anything as an indicator of the general case, regardless of whether the sample data is acquired firsthand or secondhand.
kplath 2y ago
[flagged]
- krapp 2y ago
  This is just a public web forum, not a professional symposium. It's here to provide entertainment and distraction to bored nerds with nothing better to do, expecting anything more from it is your mistake.
  - paulcole 2y ago
    Somebody in another comment here said: >For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so. Many many many people believe HN is more than a marketing campaign for a VC firm. That makes it true. The same as how many many people believe they are here to get educated and not entertained. That makes it true.
    - krapp 2y ago
      Welp. Guess I'm getting another hour added to my account limit after this, because I have to commit the sin of speaking candidly. At one point, many many people believed diseases were borne by humors and miasmas, that didn't make it true. They believed the stars were etched onto crystal spheres, that didn't make it true. People believe the universe was created in a literal week, ten thousand years ago, but that doesn't make it true. People believe cancer can be healed by crystals, that doesn't make it true. More people believe the Earth is a flat disc now than did in the ancient world, that doesn't make it more true than it ever was. Is that last thing I said even true? I don't know, I just pulled it out of my ass and asserted it with confidence. A prevailing belief that Hacker News is an educational resource does not make it true. One can be educated here, just as one can be educated anywhere. But that is not the purpose of this forum, nor is it a reasonable expectation to have. Hacker News is notorious for the gaping chasm between the proclaimed expertise of the claims made here, and actual knowledge, in any non-technical domain, and often even the technical. This tendency towards aggressive ignorance becomes obvious whenever actual experts in a field enter a thread and inevitably have to talk people down from their preconceptions, often getting harassment in exchange. No one is ever, ever as impressed with what Hacker News knows about anything, as Hacker News is with itself. This is such a well known facet of the culture here it got written up about in the New Yorker[0]. Hacker News is no better an educational resource than Reddit. Actually, it's worse than some technical subreddits, which require proof of domain knowledge and enforce a strict hierarchy between experts and lay posters - all it takes to join Hacker News is filling out a basic web form. No matter how much people want this place to be the apex of intellectual discussion, the last dying light of civilization in a culture overrun with normie scum, and the nexus of tech culture, or whatever, it is not, cannot and will never be. It is just a place where people hang out and shoot the shit. Anything more you might get from it is an anomaly, and just as often as not, a crapshoot. You want to be educated? Take a class. Read a book. Get out and do the damn thing. Don't waste your time hanging out here expecting enlightenment. Carry water. Chop wood. Touch grass. [0]https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
ashwinne 2y ago
There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.
- lamename 2y ago
  This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.
  - ashwinne 2y ago
    That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).
- Erem 2y ago
  The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves. On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias. It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.
  - jameshart 2y ago
    During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face. The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts. Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.
Keegs 2y ago
This is off topic, but can anyone tell where the photo with the caption “The situation is developing” was taken? There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.
- leetrout 2y ago
  Edit: wrong photo originally. Chiang Mai https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-water-on-the-ground-K-fbBy5HNSg https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-w... --- Taken in Bali. https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6kii3H5CcU https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6...
B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago
"and the details are all false" (Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807)
kelseyfrog 2y ago
That's what's so fun about deciding that you have a vanishing small slice of sorcery over the spectacle. From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.
hatefuldang 2y ago
[flagged]
xianshou 2y ago
"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'" (spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell. The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.
- ahi 2y ago
  Now I'm suspicious of your Emerson quote.
- sublinear 2y ago
  As soon as I read that quote I immediately searched to verify and stopped reading the rest of the blog post. I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote: "Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah
- labster 2y ago
  Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.
- hooo 2y ago
  I love this comment. It succinctly pulls it all together!
- Barrin92 2y ago
  what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much. If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation. Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.
xanderlewis 2y ago
“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” - (probably not) Mark Twain
xanderlewis 2y ago
> you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.
rozap 2y ago
One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones? Kind of a bummer to think about.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame described this as Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:text=(see%20quotation).-,Proper%20noun,which%20they%20are%20knowledgeable%20about https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  That 'bummer' has a name, has been put into the frame of fame: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
- jaredcwhite 2y ago
  It's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  Even worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.
- rapjr9 2y ago
  The accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.
MisterDizzy 2y ago
I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.
- an-allen 2y ago
  I was listening to the latest Lex Friedman podcast from the Amazon jungle and there was an interesting comment that the “reality is a simulation” folks have never had to survive in the Amazon and that the belief is somewhat of a side effect of the relative safety of everyday life.
  - imchillyb 2y ago
    The realm of the quantum does not care about the Amazonian wildlife and the converse is also true. The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano. Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh." Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm. Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
    - j16sdiz 2y ago
      Brief in afterlife is somewhat different from brief in simulation. In a simulation, you are just a bit of data. You can be destroyed or duplicated, multiple instance of you may exist, even at the same time. In (most) brief of afterlife, "something in you" is unique, last forever, really do matter, etc.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
everly 2y ago
An educated populace can better resist such issues. The solution is better journalism/reporting and better education. Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.
- gonzo41 2y ago
  RE investment in traditional news media. No one trusts them anymore because they have all become partisan. The news nowdays doesn't seem to be about what happened. It's all takes. People disengage as a result. They watch it like sport.
WalterBright 2y ago
If you design and build an airplane and it flies as expected, you know a lot about aeronautical engineering. You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't. One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.
- gary_0 2y ago
  GPS wouldn't work if relativity was wrong. Radio wouldn't work if our theory of electromagnetism was wrong. Satellites wouldn't stay in orbit if Newton was wrong. Modern medicine wouldn't work if our understanding of biology was wrong. And chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and so forth all overlap, all require each other to some degree... and each of these interconnected areas of knowledge need to be correct, because we want to use it to build things or solve problems or make discoveries. That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    > was wrong This is a true/false Boolean is it? > And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. What if it's probabilistic, and rare?
  - lahvak 2y ago
    I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.
- MrJohz 2y ago
  To a certain extent I agree, but I think you're missing a lot of nuance there. Boeing, for example, have built a lot of planes that fly as expected. The problem is the ones they built that don't: where bits fall off them or where their sensor systems don't work. So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?
metabagel 2y ago
Smug people tend to be wrong, because they are emotionally entangled with their beliefs.
wait_a_minute 2y ago
> If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about. No, not always.
- wavemode 2y ago
  Can you offer a counterexample?
TheAlchemist 2y ago
A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why. But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about ! As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !
- rsanek 2y ago
  I don't know if I'd go this far. If a company reports earnings far below what they previously gave guidance on, the stock pretty reliably falls.
  - elijaht 2y ago
    Disagree- plenty of times in my career the company I work for beats/misses guidance and the stock moves in the “wrong” direction. To the point where it was independently a joke in multiple companies
  - TheAlchemist 2y ago
    Yes, but not always - in the case it goes in the opposite direction, they will write 'investors priced it in already' :D There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market. Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”
djaouen 2y ago
This article reminds me of a quote from George Washington, leader of the Rebel Army in American Revolutionary lore. He said, "Dayum, these pretzels are makin me thirsty!!!!"
Uehreka 2y ago
A couple paragraphs in and I’m already like “Ah, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the “papers’ full of ‘em” one.” I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying) Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared
hindsightbias 2y ago
“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” — Superintendent Maillard
kstenerud 2y ago
The problem with knowing - of actually, REALLY, knowing - is that you can't do anything with it. Not enough other people know, and so you find yourself fighting against the tide. It gets lonely.
ookblah 2y ago
so how do people vet information and maintain this skepticism without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?
- mistermann 2y ago
  One approach: apply skepticism to your own beliefs...learn to experience it like a game, so the natural (and culturally conditioned) human aversion to epistemology diminishes over time, or even reverses. > without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking? Should this necessarily be avoided? Are you asserting that it is not substantially true?
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Have a system. I like STASM (mid-XX): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212528 > "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports." PS. It is not true that Linebarger was some furry rando.
moribunda 2y ago
> The friend sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch knows I’m not independently wealthy. Oh, right, because FI is about spending a lot on new things constantly...
calibas 2y ago
I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact. Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.
caseyy 2y ago
Related read: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/overconfidence-executives-as-personality-defect/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/overconfidence-executives-as...
csours 2y ago
A really useful meta-question is: How much work is it to answer that question? A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer. Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed. Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions. --- Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0
cainxinth 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

225 points by herbertl 2y ago

> Plumbing knowledge, for example, is constantly tested by whether the place floods after you’ve advanced your theory about what pipe connects to what. You need to get it right because it costs you something when you get it wrong. Sure, for obvious failures where water is leaking in a spectacular fashion. But there's tons of shoddy non-obvious projects that work and look fine now. The problems come down the road, years later. Usually these problems come from either cutting corners or working under constraints. You know those horror stories programmers or sys admins trade? How they saw something and couldn't believe their own eyes? Plumbers have those too, in buckets. Maybe this whole paragraph about the plumbing is just a meta commentary on the "nobody knows what's going on". In that case, disregard the above.

nox101 2y ago

First hand experience is certainly better than second hand accounts bit it can be just as wrong. My example woild be, going to some foreign country, getting a few first hand experiences, then assuming those experiences match the norm in that country when the don't.

brokenmachine 2y ago
And things might change after you leave that country.
mr_toad 2y ago
In some countries the part the tourists get to see are like a completely different country.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Which countries are like this?
  - scrollaway 2y ago
    Greece, Italy, …
  - AzzieElbab 2y ago
    North Korea, China, Russia, and most Gulf and Central Asia countries.
  - greenchair 2y ago
    north korea?
  - lobochrome 2y ago
    Spain, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar
    - djaouen 2y ago
      My favorite theory about Cambodia is that they subtlely threaten any tourist to post positive feedback about the country otherwise they get the Pol Pot treatment lol
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    All of them, really. As a tourist, you don't have to work a regular job there, you don't have to rent an apartment or buy a home there, you don't have to deal with the locals on a day-to-day basis, you're usually not aware of the political issues (esp. at the local level). You just go to some popular tourist destinations, take photos, eat in restaurants, walk around a bit, and go home. Of course you're not going to get a very good idea of what it's really like to live there. You can, however, get a good feel for the place, especially if you step outside the tourist zones more, but it's going to be very incomplete because of the factors above.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - em-bee 2y ago
      this is why, when i go somewhere i prefer to either stay with locals couchsurfing, or when i stay longer, rent a room or an apartment. i don't travel around but stay in the same place, make friends with locals, join their events, etc. i intentionally don't read about the places before going there, to avoid influencing my experience by the subjective reports of others. especially reports of other foreigners. i'll never experience the life and struggles as a local, especially not when the culture is very different, or the language or its a developing country. at best i get to experience what living in that place as a european, an expat, is like. but, where i am able to make friends or become part of a local family, i still get way more insights than any tourist would. while traveling in japan (where i was couchsurfing) i met a young european who claimed to have learned things about japanese culture that generally no foreigner ever finds out and his japanese friends would always be surprised when he told them about some of the things he learned. i could not verify his claim of course, but it was interesting nonetheless.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Tao3300 2y ago
Similarly, a lot of people believe in what we could call "ghosts" based on firsthand experience, yet the expert consensus is that there is no such thing.
- mistermann 2y ago
  Expert consensus does not define the state of objective reality, it only alters people's beliefs about it. Also, an absence of evidence is not proof of absence, though it usually appears that it is.
  - balder1991 2y ago
    This is one reason I really enjoyed reading Prometheus Rising. A significant part of the book is dedicated to show you just how little you actually know about reality when you discount beliefs you acquired either extrapolating experiences or simply adopting some dogma (even if it’s simply believing Positivism in science). In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      Thank you for the book recommendation, I am going to check it out. > In the end it’s impossible for us to even assess whether there is a reality out there. Well, I'd say ontologically / phenomenologically it's basically a sure thing, though whether the nature and ontology of it is anything near what it is said to be is a very different matter!
Gormo 2y ago
It'd bad to rely on a small selection-biased sample of anything as an indicator of the general case, regardless of whether the sample data is acquired firsthand or secondhand.

kplath 2y ago

[flagged]

krapp 2y ago
This is just a public web forum, not a professional symposium. It's here to provide entertainment and distraction to bored nerds with nothing better to do, expecting anything more from it is your mistake.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Somebody in another comment here said: >For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so. Many many many people believe HN is more than a marketing campaign for a VC firm. That makes it true. The same as how many many people believe they are here to get educated and not entertained. That makes it true.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Welp. Guess I'm getting another hour added to my account limit after this, because I have to commit the sin of speaking candidly. At one point, many many people believed diseases were borne by humors and miasmas, that didn't make it true. They believed the stars were etched onto crystal spheres, that didn't make it true. People believe the universe was created in a literal week, ten thousand years ago, but that doesn't make it true. People believe cancer can be healed by crystals, that doesn't make it true. More people believe the Earth is a flat disc now than did in the ancient world, that doesn't make it more true than it ever was. Is that last thing I said even true? I don't know, I just pulled it out of my ass and asserted it with confidence. A prevailing belief that Hacker News is an educational resource does not make it true. One can be educated here, just as one can be educated anywhere. But that is not the purpose of this forum, nor is it a reasonable expectation to have. Hacker News is notorious for the gaping chasm between the proclaimed expertise of the claims made here, and actual knowledge, in any non-technical domain, and often even the technical. This tendency towards aggressive ignorance becomes obvious whenever actual experts in a field enter a thread and inevitably have to talk people down from their preconceptions, often getting harassment in exchange. No one is ever, ever as impressed with what Hacker News knows about anything, as Hacker News is with itself. This is such a well known facet of the culture here it got written up about in the New Yorker[0]. Hacker News is no better an educational resource than Reddit. Actually, it's worse than some technical subreddits, which require proof of domain knowledge and enforce a strict hierarchy between experts and lay posters - all it takes to join Hacker News is filling out a basic web form. No matter how much people want this place to be the apex of intellectual discussion, the last dying light of civilization in a culture overrun with normie scum, and the nexus of tech culture, or whatever, it is not, cannot and will never be. It is just a place where people hang out and shoot the shit. Anything more you might get from it is an anomaly, and just as often as not, a crapshoot. You want to be educated? Take a class. Read a book. Get out and do the damn thing. Don't waste your time hanging out here expecting enlightenment. Carry water. Chop wood. Touch grass. [0]https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

ashwinne 2y ago

There’s a way around this, but it’s not fun or easy. It’s to listen to only the experts on that tiny sliver of a domain in which they are experts in. (And don’t listen to that expert when they talk about something that’s not their expertise .) This means listening to the expert on caves and not to the social media loving billionaire.

lamename 2y ago
This is the correct answer. I'd add _multiple_ experts, because even they can disagree depending on the topic, which is expected and healthy. And even then, realize that experts can be wrong, but they're much less likely to be wrong than <random skeptic>.
- ashwinne 2y ago
  That is right. Listen to multiple experts and see what is the cluster/mean of an answer they are crystallizing around. And if they all have different answers, then it means that there is no clear answer for your question (yet).
Erem 2y ago
The tough thing about this approach is that the borders of each expert’s sliver of knowledge is not known to the reader, and maybe not even to the author themselves. On top of that, individual experts still carry their own biases in their heads, and they lack any sort of editorial board to service the reader by separating knowledge from bias. It’s easy for me to cast stones but I also have no answer. The best I’ve come to is to read broadly on topics you need to truly know and compare what you find in your sources. For less important topics just accept that you are likely off the mark and have much to learn.
- jameshart 2y ago
  During the early days of the pandemic, as advice to wear masks started to propagate into the population, and laypeople started to have to develop familiarity with concepts like ‘N95’, a community of helpful experts (often nurses and doctors, people with actual qualifications and real experience) piped up to tell the world that they had been trained in the proper use of PPE, and that there were very important donning and doffing procedures that needed to be followed (not touching the outside of the mask, eg), without which ordinary untrained mask users were going to be exposed to enormous risks. If you tried to use such masks without following these procedures you might as well just rub a dead bat on your face. The thing is, though, that the PPE handling requirements which practitioners like nurses and doctors are trained in, for working in a clinical environment with patients who are highly infectious or highly vulnerable to infection, are not the same as the PPE handling requirements for walking around a supermarket during a public health emergency. Public health usage of masks was not supposed to solve the same problems as masks solve in surgery or in infectious disease care contexts. Experts are vulnerable to having highly specific knowledge about how something works in a very narrow domain, but overestimating how well that knowledge applies to even quite closely related nearby domains.

Keegs 2y ago

This is off topic, but can anyone tell where the photo with the caption “The situation is developing” was taken? There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.

leetrout 2y ago
Edit: wrong photo originally. Chiang Mai https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-water-on-the-ground-K-fbBy5HNSg https://unsplash.com/photos/a-city-street-with-a-puddle-of-w... --- Taken in Bali. https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6kii3H5CcU https://unsplash.com/photos/close-up-photo-of-earth-globe-v6...

B1FF_PSUVM 2y ago

"and the details are all false" (Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807)

kelseyfrog 2y ago

That's what's so fun about deciding that you have a vanishing small slice of sorcery over the spectacle. From a starting point of mereological nihilism, you can absolutely play to people's desire for ontological certainty. For many, many, many, things, what's true is simply the number of people who believe it so.

hatefuldang 2y ago

[flagged]

xianshou 2y ago

"As George Orwell said, 'The most fundamental mistake of man is that he thinks he knows what’s going on. Nobody knows what’s going on.'" (spoiler) The author reveals at the end that this quote was made up and falsely attributed to Orwell. The most ironic part of this article is that the spurious quote will probably now make its way across the internet, whereas the disclaimer will not. Emerson actually did say “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me” - and after I've forgotten this article, I will probably remember that Orwell said no one knows what's going on.

ahi 2y ago
Now I'm suspicious of your Emerson quote.
sublinear 2y ago
As soon as I read that quote I immediately searched to verify and stopped reading the rest of the blog post. I found another blog quoting this one, but pointing out the quote was fake, and another vaguely similar quote: "Q: What is a fundamental mistake of man's? A: To think that he is alive, when he has merely fallen asleep in life's waiting-room." - Idries Shah
labster 2y ago
Given the topic, I assumed the quote was probably false the first time I read it. It pays to be a little paranoid about everything, and hold most of one’s beliefs only shallowly.
hooo 2y ago
I love this comment. It succinctly pulls it all together!
Barrin92 2y ago
what that actually reveals, and explains one of the authors questions, why most things at all still work despite this, is that the particularities of statements don't matter much. If there's something useful in the made up quote that is why it's going to be proliferated, whether XY said it doesn't matter, there's not really any practical harm in that false attribution. This is also why crowdsourced predictions are remarkable accurate (and in fact often outperform experts, see Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner), despite most members of the crowd being wrong. As long as the wrong people aren't correlated in some way the average is a really good approximation. Most stuff being noise and only some stuff being signal is just how the world works in general, it's not even really an insight.

xanderlewis 2y ago

“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” - (probably not) Mark Twain

xanderlewis 2y ago

> you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. This is interestingly close to what I think about claims of ChatGPT being ‘as good as an expert’ at, say, mathematics or medicine.

rozap 2y ago

One thing a coworker said once that I think about a lot: ever read an article about a subject that you know a bit about, and invariably you come to the conclusion that the writer doesn't really have a good grasp on what they're talking about. Now think about all the articles you read about subjects that you don't know much about, why would the accuracy be any higher on those ones? Kind of a bummer to think about.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame described this as Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:text=(see%20quotation).-,Proper%20noun,which%20they%20are%20knowledgeable%20about https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect#:~:t....
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
That 'bummer' has a name, has been put into the frame of fame: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
jaredcwhite 2y ago
It's like when we see people "do programming" in TV shows/movies and laugh at how goofy it is. I suspect most technical professions are exactly like that, we just don't realize it most of the time.
QuantumGood 2y ago
Even worse when there are slightly creative solutions that haven't reached conventional wisdom status yet. They're out there, but almost impossible to find.
rapjr9 2y ago
The accuracy of other articles can be higher or lower because other people researched and wrote them. This is why people tend to have favorite reporters and favorite news outlets. They do not trust every thing they read, they look for people who seem to reliably report the truth as they know it, and those people/outlets they _tend_ to trust. People are naturally skeptical. Often they just read to entertain themselves or to gather topics to discuss with friends or coworkers later. That doesn't mean they believe it all. You can read all the UFO articles but that doesn't mean you believe in UFO's. You might instead find them interesting as a sign that the military ignoring UFO's mean enemy spy drones can easily sneak in and spy on maneuvers, a big vulnerability that the military is _supposed_ to be cognizant of, but is apparently ignoring.

MisterDizzy 2y ago

I've been thinking for a while about the "reality is a simulation" idea. It may not be literally true, but it certainly is useful to try on as a temporary LARP. The more you think of things that way, the more it starts to make sense in a weird way. Nearly all media, that is to say nearly all stimuli/input, is irreflective of reality. Nobody knows what's going on.

an-allen 2y ago
I was listening to the latest Lex Friedman podcast from the Amazon jungle and there was an interesting comment that the “reality is a simulation” folks have never had to survive in the Amazon and that the belief is somewhat of a side effect of the relative safety of everyday life.
- imchillyb 2y ago
  The realm of the quantum does not care about the Amazonian wildlife and the converse is also true. The brilliant minds that believe we are indeed in a simulation have extrapolated this concept from the weirdness that is found within the realm of quantum, the realm of the sub micro and nano. Religious folk believe we live in some sort of simulation as well: "You are travelers and sojourners here. This is not your home. God is of spirit not of flesh." Don't know what 'spirit' is, but it's not carbon-based matter. Don't know what home is, but it's evidently not here. The Bible suggests that nothing here is real and the only real things are found in the spiritual realm. Simulation, or manufactured space, it doesn't really matter to us. Like Mr. Friedman pointed out, we have to deal with the space around us and whether the space around us is simulation or not is irrelevant.
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    Brief in afterlife is somewhat different from brief in simulation. In a simulation, you are just a bit of data. You can be destroyed or duplicated, multiple instance of you may exist, even at the same time. In (most) brief of afterlife, "something in you" is unique, last forever, really do matter, etc.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

everly 2y ago

An educated populace can better resist such issues. The solution is better journalism/reporting and better education. Instead, the knee jerk reaction seems to be calling for further hollowing out of public education and less investment in traditional news media. I fear what that looks like after a few more decades.

gonzo41 2y ago
RE investment in traditional news media. No one trusts them anymore because they have all become partisan. The news nowdays doesn't seem to be about what happened. It's all takes. People disengage as a result. They watch it like sport.

WalterBright 2y ago

If you design and build an airplane and it flies as expected, you know a lot about aeronautical engineering. You cannot pretend it is flying when it isn't. One of the reasons I chose to be an engineer.

gary_0 2y ago
GPS wouldn't work if relativity was wrong. Radio wouldn't work if our theory of electromagnetism was wrong. Satellites wouldn't stay in orbit if Newton was wrong. Modern medicine wouldn't work if our understanding of biology was wrong. And chemistry, physics, astronomy, mathematics and so forth all overlap, all require each other to some degree... and each of these interconnected areas of knowledge need to be correct, because we want to use it to build things or solve problems or make discoveries. That's why I like science and engineering, it's a whole structure that, while not perfect or complete, has self-reinforcement and self-correction built in. And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. Otherwise, like you say, your airplane will fall out of the sky.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > was wrong This is a true/false Boolean is it? > And if it's right about something, the proof will be in the pudding. What if it's probabilistic, and rare?
- lahvak 2y ago
  I believe you've got it backwards. The theory of relativity would be wrong if GPS did not work, the theory of electromagnetism would be wrong if radio did not work, etc. The only thing that working radio tells us is that certain mathematical model that we call theory of electromagnetism happens to agree with the real world (whatever that is) to a sufficient precision. For many purposes (like for example building radios), that is enough.
MrJohz 2y ago
To a certain extent I agree, but I think you're missing a lot of nuance there. Boeing, for example, have built a lot of planes that fly as expected. The problem is the ones they built that don't: where bits fall off them or where their sensor systems don't work. So do Boeing know a lot about aeronautical engineering, or are they just guessing? To what extent are they just pretending their planes are flying?

metabagel 2y ago

Smug people tend to be wrong, because they are emotionally entangled with their beliefs.

wait_a_minute 2y ago

> If you ever read an article on a subject with which you have a lot of first-hand experience, you’ll notice that they always get major things wrong – basic facts, dates, names of people and organizations, the stated intentions of involved parties, the reasons a thing is happening – things even a novice in the space would know better about. No, not always.

wavemode 2y ago
Can you offer a counterexample?

TheAlchemist 2y ago

A perfect example of this, is stock market reporting. On a daily basis, stocks move, sometimes a lot - but apart from the people who make them move (and even then, it can be impossible for them to know it's them !), nobody knows why. But a lot of people, without knowledge of finance or economics, want to know *why* stocks moved. And so, we have an entire industry reporting on a daily basis, without any direct knowledge about the thing they are reporting about ! As the author said, there are few penalties for bullshit, and many rewards !

rsanek 2y ago
I don't know if I'd go this far. If a company reports earnings far below what they previously gave guidance on, the stock pretty reliably falls.
- elijaht 2y ago
  Disagree- plenty of times in my career the company I work for beats/misses guidance and the stock moves in the “wrong” direction. To the point where it was independently a joke in multiple companies
- TheAlchemist 2y ago
  Yes, but not always - in the case it goes in the opposite direction, they will write 'investors priced it in already' :D There are of course tangible things that can help explain movements, but truth is - very very rarely those writing the articles know what's going on on the market. Another funny thing in the market, mostly recently, is that earnings are announced after hours - and most of the movement happen in those after hours - which doesn't really make sense, since the liquidity is very very limited. So how come that just following the earnings, the price of say Tesla will go +10% in the after hours, and then stay pretty much at that level the next day, when real investors and big funds start trading ? Who knows...
kjkjadksj 2y ago
The day of stock reports are such crap its actually entertaining to read. Especially when the market whiplashes a couple minutes after the midday report and they need to come up with a narrative. Most of the moves could honestly be summed up with “it was noon so a bunch of hft cron jobs turned on right then and bought or sold” or “nice numbers ending in 0 or 5 have their own gravity pull”

djaouen 2y ago

This article reminds me of a quote from George Washington, leader of the Rebel Army in American Revolutionary lore. He said, "Dayum, these pretzels are makin me thirsty!!!!"

Uehreka 2y ago

A couple paragraphs in and I’m already like “Ah, here comes the Michael Crichton quote, the “papers’ full of ‘em” one.” I’ve never read one of these that didn’t come off as unbearably smug. Like sure, discerning the truth is hard, duh. But the people who try their best to do it, even if they sometimes fail, are worth immeasurably more than the dead-souled people who decide “might as well sling bullshit since it’s impossible to be totally correct” (if that’s not what the article is saying out loud, it’s certainly what a lot of the commenters are saying) Edit: Just to end on a positive note, I want to call out the one good piece of content in this genre, which takes Gell-Mann amnesia, flips it, inverts it, and then skewers Michio Kaku for trying to act like he knows about hurricanes: https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared https://youtu.be/wBBnfu8N_J0?feature=shared

hindsightbias 2y ago

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” — Superintendent Maillard

kstenerud 2y ago

The problem with knowing - of actually, REALLY, knowing - is that you can't do anything with it. Not enough other people know, and so you find yourself fighting against the tide. It gets lonely.

ookblah 2y ago

so how do people vet information and maintain this skepticism without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking?

mistermann 2y ago
One approach: apply skepticism to your own beliefs...learn to experience it like a game, so the natural (and culturally conditioned) human aversion to epistemology diminishes over time, or even reverses. > without devolving into full conspiracy-esque "trust no one", "everyone has an agenda" type thinking? Should this necessarily be avoided? Are you asserting that it is not substantially true?
082349872349872 2y ago
Have a system. I like STASM (mid-XX): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212528 > "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports." PS. It is not true that Linebarger was some furry rando.

moribunda 2y ago

> The friend sitting on my fifteen-year-old couch knows I’m not independently wealthy. Oh, right, because FI is about spending a lot on new things constantly...

calibas 2y ago

I was tangentially involved in a news story a few years ago. The reporter went to a small town, interviewed a few people, then wrote up an article. Only problem was they didn't actually interview anybody directly involved, it was a lot of hearsay from the small town rumor mill, which they reported as fact. Nothing major about the story was changed, but I know some of the details were incorrect. It bugs me that these are now "facts", and places like Wikipedia confidently state these "facts" without anybody knowing the origin was just small town gossip.

caseyy 2y ago

Related read: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/overconfidence-executives-as-personality-defect/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/overconfidence-executives-as...

csours 2y ago

A really useful meta-question is: How much work is it to answer that question? A few examples: Junior devs asking about how to do something - sometimes the answer is clear, there's a standard or a decision has already been made - sometimes someone has to do some work to decide how to proceed. Its easy for people to get frustrated when they think they asked a simple question, but at the point they ask, NO ONE knows the answer. Do masks work? How much evidence of what types would it take to make a satisfying answer to this question? What would those study designs look like? How large would your sample size need to be? I think it would take a great deal of work just to design the studies and get them past ethical review boards, much less get them funded and completed. Anything related to diet. Getting real answers takes way more work than can reasonably be done for anything more that the simplest questions. --- Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBBnfu8N_J0

cainxinth 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing