5 ms·

I actually disagree. This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "scien

I actually disagree. This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty. This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.

zpeti 2y ago
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. This is just as valid as saying education has gotten worse. It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.
rootusrootus 2y ago
> People go flat earth Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
- krapp 2y ago
  Modern flat earth theory owes more to fringe Christian theology and the general normalization of conspiracy theory and meme culture than anything to do with the Flat Earth Society.
justsocrateasin 2y ago
People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said - > People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking. Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education. That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative. It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
  - danaris 2y ago
    Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.) Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth. There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause. I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
      Oh whatever; presidents have been lying for decades now. I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing. I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012. I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden. I can go on.
      - danaris 2y ago
        Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too. But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.
ako 2y ago
When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...
philipkglass 2y ago
Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.
smt88 2y ago
This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of: - first-hand reports from other people - private news networks - the governments of other countries The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  > first-hand reports from other people Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that. > private news networks You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35 https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35 > the governments of other countries Are governments inherently trustworthy? I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
  - pj_mukh 2y ago
    The idea that government institutions suddenly got more scandal ridden after 1990's is just pure golden age fallacy. News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
  - smt88 2y ago
    > Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that. Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos. It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask: - is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers? - what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators? - is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort? In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy. If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US. > You mean rebranded affiliates? No, I mean the Weather Channel and others. > I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought. I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.
Spivak 2y ago
I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand. And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
antisthenes 2y ago
> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty. It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
yongjik 2y ago
> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. This is such a weird way of looking at it. Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect. What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit." And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse. This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  You assume that if people were better educated, they would trust science and wouldn't be so upset. I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    > If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now. I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.
- an_guy 2y ago
  When gov insist on a certain position, just to track back to conclusions of conspiracy theories, it does raise questions about where else they were wrong or lying. > This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education. So what exactly would an educated person do if they were led to believe something based on false premises which affected their life? Are they not supposed to question the authority who makes decision based on such information? Or question the source that provides such information consistently? Or just ignore it because it doesn't aligns with their political view? Or are they supposed to just shut up and accept it because... SCIENCE(holy text)?
jgeada 2y ago
Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies. I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
EasyMark 2y ago
There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.
autoexec 2y ago
the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted. I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted. When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system. Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.

zpeti 2y ago

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. This is just as valid as saying education has gotten worse. It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.

rootusrootus 2y ago

> People go flat earth Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.

krapp 2y ago
Modern flat earth theory owes more to fringe Christian theology and the general normalization of conspiracy theory and meme culture than anything to do with the Flat Earth Society.

justsocrateasin 2y ago

People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said - > People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking. Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education. That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative. It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
- danaris 2y ago
  Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.) Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth. There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause. I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago
    Oh whatever; presidents have been lying for decades now. I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing. I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012. I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden. I can go on.
    - danaris 2y ago
      Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too. But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.

ako 2y ago

When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...

philipkglass 2y ago

Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.

smt88 2y ago

This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of: - first-hand reports from other people - private news networks - the governments of other countries The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> first-hand reports from other people Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that. > private news networks You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35 https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35 > the governments of other countries Are governments inherently trustworthy? I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
- pj_mukh 2y ago
  The idea that government institutions suddenly got more scandal ridden after 1990's is just pure golden age fallacy. News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
- smt88 2y ago
  > Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that. Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos. It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask: - is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers? - what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators? - is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort? In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy. If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US. > You mean rebranded affiliates? No, I mean the Weather Channel and others. > I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought. I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.

Spivak 2y ago

I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand. And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.

antisthenes 2y ago

> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty. It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.

yongjik 2y ago

> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. This is such a weird way of looking at it. Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect. What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit." And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse. This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
You assume that if people were better educated, they would trust science and wouldn't be so upset. I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
- yongjik 2y ago
  > If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now. I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.
an_guy 2y ago
When gov insist on a certain position, just to track back to conclusions of conspiracy theories, it does raise questions about where else they were wrong or lying. > This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education. So what exactly would an educated person do if they were led to believe something based on false premises which affected their life? Are they not supposed to question the authority who makes decision based on such information? Or question the source that provides such information consistently? Or just ignore it because it doesn't aligns with their political view? Or are they supposed to just shut up and accept it because... SCIENCE(holy text)?

jgeada 2y ago

Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies. I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.

EasyMark 2y ago

There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.

autoexec 2y ago

the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted. I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted. When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system. Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.