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The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer
by thmsths 2y ago
The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoThis happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.
- idontwantthis 2y agoBest example: A whole town thinking Bigfoot AND aliens were invading at the same time https://medium.com/@weirdones/the-pa-ufo-bigfoot-invasion-of-1973-9e34e7ad3875 https://medium.com/@weirdones/the-pa-ufo-bigfoot-invasion-of...
- oldgradstudent 2y agoHavana syndrome can have a far less charitable explanation. There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.
- gopher_space 2y agoThe veterinary world has a specific term for a condition they can’t diagnose, and I appreciate the intellectual honesty behind that.
- itronitron 2y agodo you know the specific term, or does your intellectual honesty prevent you from saying that you do?
- pdntspa 2y ago"Idiopathic"?
- gopher_space 2y agoAin't Doin Right.
- ghurtado 2y agoAlso: killer clowns every few years. That one is a cultural icon by now.
- zitsarethecure 2y agoAnother good one is the "Mad Gasser Of Mattoon" incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoBut the "Illinois Enema Bandit" was real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Kenyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Kenyon (coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois). I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4
- whatevertrevor 2y agoAnd also the Monkey Man of Delhi (though that urban legend wasn't confined to Delhi): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-man_of_Delhi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-man_of_Delhi
- metabagel 2y ago[flagged]
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago"House Intelligence leaders" are not exempt from hysteria.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoIndeed, that's an obvious appeal to authority fallacy, and "appears increasingly likely that a foreign adversary is behind some cases" is just weasel words; it's vague and meaningless but articles like this position it as pretty much factual. Sure, they don't explicitly say it's a fact, but it's enough for many people to be "sold" on the idea that it's foreign adversaries.
- schmidtleonard 2y agoIt's all just memes? Always has been.
- bregma 2y agoAll the way down.
- AceJohnny2 2y agoI dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out". This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?" There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.
- mrandish 2y agoWe already have a more neutral term than "collective delusion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias
- metabagel 2y agoWhat's the term for when people's attention and outrage is directed by an unreliable third party (let's say a partisan news channel) towards certain issues/threats, and away from other equally (or more) significant issues/threats? I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas. For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- toast0 2y agoCuration? Programming? Editorial discretion?
- AceJohnny2 2y ago
- csours 2y ago> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one. We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last. Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
- piotrkaminski 2y ago> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
- s2l 2y agoStories Pushing Imaginary Nonsence
- rvbissell 2y agoI was about to recommend "Satisfaction High, Information Tenuous"
- schmidtleonard 2y agoOoh, I like that. However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism. That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
- csours 2y agoI like it. Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying
- cute_boi 2y ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 2y agoEvery ten years or so there's a new batch of evidence that eating a lot of something has some health effects for some folks. Then a minority turns it into a morality cult against the thing and the media picks it up as "you woudn't guess what common food could be killing you" And then ten years later new evidence for that thing comes out that's like "maybe not so bad after all!" and a new set of backlash morality. These things are politically affiliated now too if they can be depending on who picks up which evidence first. Each decade people get bored and find something new to be upset about. "gluten" is definitely way down these days and "seed oils" haven't yet hit their peak.
- sfjailbird 2y agoThe consumption of which itself is driven by an unscientific scare about animal fat.
- karlgkk 2y agoIt's not unscientific, there is a very direct link. The real issue, as I see it, is that there was a huge change in pattern in availability and consumption of those fats in the last 50 years.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoOr by cost of production or ethical considerations or perishability or smoke point or water content
- karlgkk 2y agothe seed oil thing is so funny to me because, like, yeah. also, no. it's actually true. they cause serious inflammation which aggravates serious downstream health problems. like, you shouldn't be eating seed oils in any large quantity that you would get from regularly eating deep fried foods oh but wait, eating foods with beef tallow and other saturated fats also causes health problems. except, those problems only show up when you eat large quantities of them, such as if you were regularly eating deep fried foods so what if it wasn't the seed oils that were the problem for many people, but rather, consuming lots of seed oil - as you might find if you ate a lot of deep fried food? what if it's not the seed oils that are causing you to get fat and feel like shit all the time? what if it's the quantity of fats that you're consuming? and, what if not eating seed oils is actually an easy an effective way to avoid eating deep fried foods as a second order effect? that'd be crazy. better just jump on the new fad diet.
- kryogen1c 2y agoI think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.
- vehemenz 2y agoMaybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago[flagged]
- schmidtleonard 2y agoRight back at you.
- throwway120385 2y agoEspecially in the first couple of nursing home outbreaks where the entire patient populace died within a few weeks.
- binoct 2y agoI don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.
- WalterBright 2y ago
- krunck 2y agoWitch!!!
- dessimus 2y agoBuild a bridge out of her!
- hobs 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 there's a lot of conflicting stories, but mass hallucinations and insanity are not an abnormal thing in history (unfortunately)
- mikepurvis 2y agoI think the vast majority of people are just astonishingly suggestible. That combined with a dash of main character syndrome and horrid sleep patterns and you’ve got millions driving home from work in the dark, ready to immediately assume that whatever is out their windshield is what they heard about on the radio that morning.
- stickfigure 2y agoThe majority of people (in the US, at least) spend half a day a week being taught to believe in magic. From birth. Usually on Sunday.
- WalterBright 2y ago[flagged]
- cassepipe 2y agohttps://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
- heresie-dabord 2y agoEven well-funded and widely-supported notions, projects, and institutions prove to be mere facades when we demand evidence and verifiable predictability. So to actually be provocative, I suggest that we set aside theoretical economic constructs and mention the hypothesis of Democracy itself. Government itself becomes the consensus of the wealthy. And for any lesser hysteria, we can consider the uncomfortable lessons described in "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". [1] [1] _ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
- p1necone 2y agoAre you one of those people who think that regular modern capitalist societies with any kind of social safety net or publicly funded healthcare are communism?
- lxgr 2y agoIt's always been like that, but now you and many more people have this information available to you and can take it into consideration – arguably you're better off than before :)
- jidar 2y agoIt's not terrifying. It's how people are, and it's destressing to me that so few people seem to be aware of it. No amount of explaining what confirmation bias is will convince people that drones in the sky aren't aliens. The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThe fundamental issue with skeptical truth and science is that it is boring in terms of mass market marketing. Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy. Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait. So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.
- oceanplexian 2y agoIntellectuals have the same blind spots. During COVID (At least the ones I worked with) made fun of the disease when it started spreading and refused to take it seriously, then did a complete 180 when their social circles took it seriously. And then did insane stuff like wipe down their groceries with bleach and obsessively washed their hands long after the science was clear that it spreading through the air. No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.
- lazide 2y agoCOVID is easily spread via air, but like most diseases that are spread that way, is also easily spread via surface contamination. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10531613/#:~:text=Viruses%20can%20spread%20directly%20through,fine%20respiratory%20aerosol%20%5B10%5D https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10531613/#:~:text=V....] Speaking of blind spots.
- nilsbunger 2y agoIt’s been fascinating to watch this play out with the drone stories in NJ too. Despite all our amazing tech, we still can’t tell truth from fiction.
- raddan 2y agoI assume this is why this was posted on HN. My first thought when I heard the drone stories was “you’re just noticing them now?” Anyone who has ever spent any time watching the skies knows that there is an amazing variety of things in the sky. To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThe implausible thing there is that if it really was an Iranian mother-drone ship etc, it'd be shot down ages ago. But it's a convenient story for parties that want to portray the US as incompetent, even if said parties have tentative alliances / shared interests with Iran.
- 2lazy2pwdmgr 2y agoHuman beings are the most dangerous, potentially-violent, and destructive animal this planet has ever known... and far more dangerous in larger groups. None of us is as dumb as all of us.
- bagels 2y agoMaybe not all of us, but enough + the media indulging it.
- m463 2y ago> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.
- Neil44 2y agoDrones over NJ, anyone? Communism scares in the 60s, Witch trials, etc
- lazide 2y agoWhy do you think introverts are the way they are?
- mplanchard 2y agoWelcome to the human race, we’re the scariest thing around