We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
I was shocked by this during COVID. There's a huge anti-expertise, anti-institutions, anti-government-anything strain here, and they're very active on the various comment hiding buttons.
> What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
There's no reason to be fascinated. HN voting is generally inexplicable and random. For any given article, and even more so for any given comment, the "voter turnout" is extremely low, compared to the total HN user base. The votes depend crucially on which relatively small number of users happen to be around and reading at the time. It's always a mistake to project comment upvoting and downvoting into some kind of larger theory or conclusion.
Individual HN users upvote or downvote or neither for various, incongruous reasons. There's no unified theory or principle of voting.
The voting in this thread is far more variable and intense and random than in other threads. I have never had so many comments go up a few votes, then down suddenly into negative territory, and then have a slow recovery.
It says that the audience and/or audience behavior for this post is far different from most! It's very interesting and says a lot about the topic and HN, and is worthy of noting, IMHO.
A main point about this era is that it's not about infectious disease research. It's been transformed into a culture war that supersedes anything having to do with science. It's become right-wing-coded to object to the science of infectious disease. Not all people who identify on the right succumb to this, but obviously many do, and those people are seen here in the comments section daily.
It is the weekend HN effect. Conspiracy theories and low-information complaints thrive here on the weekends, presumably because of a weekly shift in audience demographics based on white collar working hours.
Sadly, no. Hacker News has hosted a large and vociferous contingent of anti-vaxxers ever since COVID, and their numbers have only grown over time. And they don't just post on the weekends.
I mean, even the idea of "it's only going to affect the weak" is disgusting and horrible. "The weak" is someone's grandmother, or their dad with a heart transplant, or their newborn baby. There is some pretty filthy, wretched ideology in the world that says very similar things about people it perceives as not worthy of being alive. And someday, for any of us who are blessed to live that long, we will be weak, too. We will be infirm. We will arrive at the end of our lives deserving protection, too, just like all of those people who were wantonly discarded during the pandemic.
Every life lost is a tragedy, especially when it is, to an extent, preventable. Not perfectly, and not without mistakes, but we could've done better than we did. It's heartbreaking that so many people are so willing to sacrifice the very people society should be trying to protect.
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.
Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.
You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”
Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.
The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory.
If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
>Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
If you think for yourself, this doesn't really matter.
>If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
You keep mentioning this stuff from a liberal perspective but conservatives and free thinkers have been fighting this fight on social media for years as policies they disagreed with were promoted unilaterally and everything else was censored and suppressed. People were at risk of losing their jobs and being sent into exile over not wanting to take a vaccine. "My body, my choice" doesn't count when it comes to that.
The information economy is full of shills and AI bots, but that does not in and of itself prevent you from finding your own reliable sources of information. Censorship would stop you from finding it, however. Mandatory online ID would also hurt the flow of sincerely communicated information.
> because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
I think this gets lost somewhat in the distance between how conservatives describe themselves and how they actually behave. They cry the loudest about some vague "FREEDOM!" but are actively cheering on the blatant violation of human rights in the country. They pretend to be "individualists" but go out of their way to make fun of and ostracize people who don't conform to their version of "normal". Practically every position they state is directly contradicted by the things they support. They get to carry this "fiscally responsible" badge despite never once being accountable for delivering on that promise. Their entire ideology is based on lies and bad faith and it shows by the people they keep electing.
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
> subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed
But that's also not what happened.
What we did is buy back junk assets from banks to keep the banks from going under. The only way it really "subsidized" mortgages is in that it kept banks afloat which allowed them to keep issuing mortgage loans.
People, particularly people that fell for predatory lending, still lost their homes. The people that were mostly aided by the bailout were investors who bought snake oil mortgage backed securities which had fake credit ratings applied to them.
And the reason people take a dim view on this is because it really was only people with significant assets in the first place that saw a benefit from these government interventions. A direct result of the regulation was it became a lot harder for a few years to get a home loan unless you had significant assets behind you.
That's not to say some percentage of these interventions didn't help everyone. It's always messy. But it is saying that a lot of people would have been in a much better situation had the government, instead of bailing out the banks and investors, taken that same money and given it directly to the citizenry. Even the banks and investors would have ultimately been in a better position as people would have ultimately taken that money and spent it on things like their mortgages which they fell behind on.
There were specific mortgage subsidies as part of tarp. For instance the making homes affordable and hardest hit fund programs.
But beyond that if the mortgages had been sold at market prices many of them would have been snapped up by companies that aggressively went after the secured properties. That’s the _natural_ outcome of letting the market action happen. More people would have been put out of their homes.
I’m fairly ambivalent on tarp. I think letting actors take risky actions and get bailed out creates a moral hazard. But that applies to mortgage holders who were over extended and auto workers who get bailed out ahead of other stake holders too. I can see a strong argument that we should have biased that way, but to say we didn’t help “regular” people is just false narrative.
It's a biased narrative, but perception of truth is equivalent to truth when it comes to trust, and multiple factors make this narrative compelling than more nuanced ones
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
We've had many of these trust-destroying events in the past, before the Iraq war, but their effects were limited. What we didn't have back then, and what I'd argue brought us Trump and RFK Jr., was a world-wide information-distributing machine and a megaphone in every idiot's (and malevolent foreign actor's) pocket. We're here because anger, belligerence, conspiracies, distrust, hatred, and ignorance are being deliberately spread on Internet platforms by 1. adversaries motivated to destabilize the country and destroy its institutions, and 2. domestic idiots who help to spread it (and make a buck off of its popularity).
I used to think that "platforming everyone" was a noble goal, but we're seeing the results.
I think that's underselling the importance of massive media consolidation and deregulation since the Reagan years in bringing us to where we are today.
If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
The myriad effects of deregulation and massive consolidation that have cascaded in the past ~40 years (fewer companies owned by wealthier people, the destruction of local news, the erosion of norms protecting journalistic integrity, etc) are, IMO, very clearly hugely to blame for the modern state of political discourse. I'm not saying the internet didn't have an effect—it could hardly fail to; it's an enormous change in our world overall—but I have a very hard time seeing it as being more detrimental than these changes in how media companies operate.
> If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
I think the problem is that what you're describing is no longer a viable business model.
Back when there were only at most a half dozen or so news sources (newspapers and TV stations) in each major market, it didn't make sense for any one of those sources to lean hard left or right because that would only alienate a significant portion of the market.
Today, any given individual has access to thousands of different sources of "news", and everyone chooses to listen to only those sources that confirm their existing opinions. To me, that seems more than sufficient to explain a lot of things, including a lack of widespread agreement on basic facts.
Objective reality is frequently very nuanced, but nuance is a PITA when it comes to comprehension, so people tend to very much avoid it (knowingly or not).
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
>We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn
Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.
There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.
If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
Yes! The DoD uses the military to test novel vaccines with service members. That is part of the “some workers” because you’re being deployed worldwide to new situations.
In Court, it was ruled that vaccination could not be forced on military personnel without a special order by the president. Thereafter it ran into and judicial obstacles (mainly concerning the methods and viability of the vaccine).
No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.
Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
>> For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
When doctors questioned vaccine safety studies they were mocked and ostracized. Which is the opposite of truth seeking you think was going on.
You know, unsurprisingly these claims are almost always heavy on rhetoric but offer no references or data to back up the assertion beyond a had wavy 'everyone knows'.
You are not being honest, but you are trying to your best to undermine the idea of honesty.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
> You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.
The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.
You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.
It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian.
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...
Whatever else I might be arguing about here, let me first express how much I HATE those headlines and video titles with "destroys", "obliterates", etc. I'd much rather see something about "coming to a common understanding".
So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.
The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).
We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)
I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
Everyone has the right to question scientific findings.
If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.
Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.
Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.
Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said:
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it".
I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory.
We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else.
There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).
Your comment wins the internet, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned. Your three examples of scientific tenacity are wonderful. We all benefited from these heroic efforts in the face of dogmatic establishment Science. And your comment reminds us of how valuable that lone "voice from the wilderness" can become.
A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.
The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.
The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.
> Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
Religious groups often employ the same rhetoric: Pretend to be victims, mocked and ostracized, which pulls at the heartstrings of people who themselves are (or believe they are) mocked and ostracized. Some of the largest and most powerful organized religions in the world have this exact kind of persecution complex at the heart of their scripture and sermons.
A lot of vaccine companies also made a lot of money from Covid-19, even when some of the vaccines were later judged shoddy or outlawed by some countries.
One perspective is that the quality and issues of vaccines can vary. Some have more side-effects than others, and some have more issues than others.
Like one specific polio-vaccine that very rarely can mutate into a contagious variant [0]. Or one vaccine for chickens that had some rather serious overall issues [1]. Or that some of the Covid-19 vaccines, hastily developed, were rejected by some countries, while other Covid-19 vaccines were accepted by those same countries.
And vaccines demand a huge amount of trust. Vaccines can be abused in lots of ways by governments, organizations and individuals [2]. This is extra unfortunate, considering the huge potential benefits of some variants of vaccines. Vaccines also require trust in competence and public control [3]. For urgency reasons, standards and checking of vaccines were lowered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are also often administered to healthy individuals, not merely sick individuals.
> Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek's is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented.
No, it wasn't, and these extremely marginal results got way too much attention compared to the millions of results showing all the valuable results from broad vaccination.
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight.
They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
Yes. Would you trust me and my sources? If not, why not?
The best I can do is state obvious facts and perhaps persuade other open minded people to come to the same conclusions as me.
Arguing with you is worse than fruitless and is actually hurtful. Truly I wish you the best personally but failure and rejection when it comes to your well-intentioned ideas and hobgoblin fears.
You're either mistaking me for someone else or massively projecting - that was my only comment in this thread, and it was nothing but a neutral request for sources. You can't expect to win anyone over with personal attacks followed by "it's obvious".
If you were to give me a truly compelling argument/source, I would still consider it, as with anything. I don't trust the government and I don't put it past the "establishment" to systematically lie about something, but that doesn't mean there's no burden of proof on the other side.
Of all the comments, you chose to engage on my deep one and chose what perhaps you thought was the weakest assertion to challenge, which was the covid vaccines failed to innoculate.
That was enough of a signal that I assumed you were a proponent. Was there projection? Some, but talking past the sale is a persuasion technique and I wasn't in the mood to argue.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
I'm confused by your statement "We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed."
The NIH does not approve drugs. If you have a citation that I can read that clarifies this point, I'm happy to read it.
Unfortunately, for every "questionable relationship between the authorities and the industries they regulate' being exposed by citizen journalists and the power of the internet, there are 10 wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact being spread. And for every 1 of those conspiracies being spread, there are 10 grifters out there making a buck selling products and services based around them. The Internet was a great idea that has not held up against stupidity and greed.
That is unfortunate, but also, I'd rather choose the situation where truth about abuses of power by authorities can spread with the trade off that some wing nuts are also making up stories out of whole cloth, than the one where truth is crushed under power of authority.
As a person who a lot of folks would consider, to use the kids' term, "noided up", I don't know if I agree.
My experience has been that in general the fact that there are so many folks able to get traction with their poorly-informed ideas and who face little or no consequences (rhetorically) for being show wrong time-and-again has led to a situation where we can go from "limited hangouts" to "we just publish facts and folks ignore it thinking they are just like all the other dumb things people say".
Like, it's incredibly hard to talk about how many horrible things the US has done and published abut over the years (I am thinking of Pheonix, Bluebird, Artichoke, etc) without sounding like a crank even when the government itself is the primary source.
Authoritarian governments crushing truth directly, but that doesn't mean that liberal governments don't have heavy layers of propaganda to maintain their control.
As a principle, "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" probably just results in the same destruction of the truth, as you might see in this thread.
Many "liberal governments" of the West certainly have some authoritarian elements to them. I don't see that as a conflict with advocating for free speech. If the government is running the propaganda, who is supposed to push against that other than dissidents protected by free speech? It certainly won't be the government or "the authorities".
I don't understand what "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" means. Who should be enforcing these consequences? What even is a "rhetorical consequence"?
As ever, the problem with creating an authority to regulate what is truth, is who is going to be that authority, and how are we going to prevent it from being corrupted by human nature.
You don't need a ministry of truth to have a bit of shame when you say say something incorrect or to recall what really bad and false positions people take or to remember when you've put out bad ideas that were incorrect.
Once again finding the "diversity of opinions" so so so bizarre a recent invention. Which is so weird, because I do believe there's plenty of corruption in the medical system, that the US's is a deeply corporate affront. I'm so near to finding "anti authority" vibes to resonate on.
But everything happening now is a deep insult, to inquiry, to science, to this nation, to life. The people running the show right now embody everything you are saying, are exactly this case. But not a one of the folks running HHS seems able to hear anything except what they've a-priori chosen to believe. Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? I believe accurately reflects a delusional hyper-reality, where health is being governed by a select few who have wrapped a deeply politicized reality around themselves as shield to the world, and alas these very few very special actors are now running the show. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rfk-jr-public-h...
Diversity of voices is once again, just as it is at universities, being used to try to force it's way through the paradox of tolerance, to demand a seat at the table not for interesting suppressed voices, but for violent active harm seeking & destruction. That is not well founded either, that does not even attempt to engage to make its case.
Call it what you will, but the ability of dissenting voices to be heard is the basis of free speech, and also integral to the pursuit of science. Blind trust in authorities is anti-science, and suppression of dissenting views is also anti-science. Those in position of authority like to cast out all who have opposing views as lunatics, but that isn't true. When those in position of authority lie to feather their own nests and cement their power, the truth will be found among the dissidents.
Specifically to Kennedy, in his congressional hearings I've watched does not present himself as a doctor or a scientist, and also not anti-science. His main thrust appears to be that there are a great many problems in the status quo, the "authority" scientists and institutions don't have any reasonable explanations for them, and there are other scientists that are not financially entangled in the status quo that have theories that look to be worth pursuing. That is pro-science in the meaning of exploring the world in pursuit of truth. He is trained as a lawyer, and it is within his profession to be leading inquiries into intent and motivations of various parties in a dispute.
The characterization of him as anti-vax is a slur, and greatly simplified from what he actual advocates.
We should all be concerned. I was watching Ken Burns, and it seems Washington ordered all his troops to be inoculated for Smallpox, and it made a huge difference in that war. Vaccines are good science, and the amount of testing we do to check safety is simply astonishing. We got extremely lucky with Covid-19, it was a warning shot, and we are taking away the wrong lessons from it. When bird flu comes with 50% mortality (half of the people you know will die, mostly children) we will go into complete lockdown with a required MRNA vaccine and we will thank God or Providence that we have people with the knowledge to make them.
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
You can both be right. Goverment agencies can do their own thing under normal circumstances and be politicized when their activity is the focus of a huge political event, like a pandemic.
"largely insulated from politics" note that claim they made is that in past there was no political interference at all, not that it was smaller or manageable
yes, exactly. And article makes the "completely" claim
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
If in the past they could do 98% of their job without political influence most people would describe that as being free to do their jobs without influence.
If there's now political hacks interfering in 50% or more of their job that's a big change.
If in the past the political hacks were never interfering with THEIR role, just affecting what projects get funded, and now the hacks are interfering directly with them and controlling what they can say or publish - that's obviously new and significantly worse influence.
There are moments when it looks like the plan is quite literally to cause a mass die-off. White that seems paranoid at best, and very cynical at best... that is the obvious outcome of low vaccine compliance. We can see this from death rates before the vaccine era.
I agree this is how it feels, its like the evil and corrupt of this country are actively convincing huge swaths of the poor and uneducated to basically undermine and kill themselves. A good chunk of this thread is a handful of people so detached from the actual plot that they are hell bent on carrying on a vendetta against a doctor and scientist they've never met, because they feel like his advice to the american people personally wronged them in some unforgivable and most egregious way.
When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution.
Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
Both Repubs & Dems have lots of blood on their hands for their intentional mishandling of COVID (continued to this day, since the pandemic is not over) in service to our archaic consumption-first economy:
I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad
But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
>this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
On the recommendation of the CDC, large outdoor events were canceled because of the risk of disease spread. Then came the BLM protests and the CDC said "no, actually those are different." If you want to be a scientific authority, you must avoid saying things that anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit.
As far as I can tell, this is false. The CDC did not offer guidance which said that protests should be treated differently from other outdoor events. If you can demonstrate otherwise, please do so.
>anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit
I’m not familiar with the facts of your anecdote, but clearly the CDC is a government agency and banning protests would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech, you would depend on the Supreme Court to get an exception.
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
It is impossible for every citizen to fully understand every scientific issue. Part of living in a society—in fact, one of the primary purposes of living in a society—is having different people specialize in different things, and trusting each other to actually be good at what they specialize in.
None of this implies that people don't know enough to vote.
Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the available evidence suggests that a major part of the problem right now is people's votes being suppressed and people being poorly represented by their supposed representatives (both due to deliberate gerrymandering, and more simply due to the fact that the size of the House of Representatives was capped in the early 20th century, leading to one person representing hundreds of thousands or more, rather than the ~10k or so each they represented prior to the cap).
You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?
Reagan's words resonated because the public already believed them. He is not the cause. The public's fear of government power is not remotely irrational. It is the responsibility of the government to maintain public trust, not the responsibility of the public to trust their authority.
The Powell Memorandum (1971) explicitly building the case for business takeover of democracy (by in many ways undermining/sabotaging the public's belief in the United States as a government), for the record, was a decade old when Reagan was in office (1981).
The Powell Memorandum is famous for being incredible explicit, for the scope & scale of how and where it would seek to dominate and control the media and abuse courts, for example. But no, even 1971 was not the first business plot to takeover the government, to foment dissent to try to rip the nation apart & assert a capitalist / oligarchical government on/against these United States.
I agree the government has the obligation to maintain the trust of it's people. But my heavens, it is deeply woefully & sad that there is such a loud angry butter popular political party whose axis is revanchist hatred of the state. It's not grounded, it's not trying for better, it's not honest: it's a constant attack on the USA at all levels, and the party exists only because that is the only message most rich people will fund: the Powell Memorandum style plot to get rid of as much government as possible.
Reagan's words against the government are indeed old ideas. Part of a long scary tradition against the state.
There is no smoke filled room. The government lost public trust by sucking. It turned itself into a bureaucratic hellscape for rent seeking lawyers (of which the number has gone up 3x since 1970). to feed on. Its model of restricting supply of necessary commodities like housing and then subsidizing them has reached its limit. They lost public trust because they don't deserve it.
There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.
But if they also have to win the hearts and minds, ongoingly, against an advanced persistent threat of disinformation networks and the most well funded US citizens, working for a Powell Memorandum revolt of the elites, well...
It sure seems like doing governance is much much much harder than it used to be. The enemies of the state are making it much most costly, creating a vast unrest that saps constant energy and attention.
I can't 100% disagree with you. But there's been 50 years of well spoken plot to overburden the government and topple the state's ability to act. Whatever people are feeling today has certainly been deeply shaped by the centuries of the rich & their opposition to democracy & governance. That seems more clear and present than ever, seems so clear that people have been lead so strongly to dissent. We don't have any control groups to assess this by. But pleading that it's all genuine, none of this is manufactured, that it's all objectively deserved: I cannot imagine polarizing yourself so hard as to deny the air we breath, the information environment we've drowned in with Hastert Rule democracy, tiny little Tea Party shenanigans ruling the airwaves (vs vastly bigger No Kings getting barely mentions), and the Grok-goverened brave new X world. The propaganda of dissent and obstruction has been working, and it has fed and shaped and sharpened the crusade against the United States as a competent capable governing entity.
Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
Fox News was created because they didn't want another Watergate-level scandal be able to make R presidents lose popularity. It's surprising how effective it is.
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.
We are embarking on a population-level Darwin Award experiment. Once the stupid people die off the overall population's resistance to stupidity will increase a little bit.
But getting there means a huge number of innocent, non-stupid people will die.
What makes you think the stupid people will die off? Seems to me they're the ones breeding.
I think the Idiocracy effect may win though.
What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
What I find to be reasonable comments from me are getting downvoting in a way that never usually happens on HN! Is it me? I didn't think that the HN community would turn so hard against the CDC and basic infectious disease research.
I was shocked by this during COVID. There's a huge anti-expertise, anti-institutions, anti-government-anything strain here, and they're very active on the various comment hiding buttons.
> What I find fascinating is the voting is this thread.
There's no reason to be fascinated. HN voting is generally inexplicable and random. For any given article, and even more so for any given comment, the "voter turnout" is extremely low, compared to the total HN user base. The votes depend crucially on which relatively small number of users happen to be around and reading at the time. It's always a mistake to project comment upvoting and downvoting into some kind of larger theory or conclusion.
Individual HN users upvote or downvote or neither for various, incongruous reasons. There's no unified theory or principle of voting.
The voting in this thread is far more variable and intense and random than in other threads. I have never had so many comments go up a few votes, then down suddenly into negative territory, and then have a slow recovery.
It says that the audience and/or audience behavior for this post is far different from most! It's very interesting and says a lot about the topic and HN, and is worthy of noting, IMHO.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I admit to violating this guideline myself, but only in response to your first violation. ;-)
A main point about this era is that it's not about infectious disease research. It's been transformed into a culture war that supersedes anything having to do with science. It's become right-wing-coded to object to the science of infectious disease. Not all people who identify on the right succumb to this, but obviously many do, and those people are seen here in the comments section daily.
It is the weekend HN effect. Conspiracy theories and low-information complaints thrive here on the weekends, presumably because of a weekly shift in audience demographics based on white collar working hours.
Sadly, no. Hacker News has hosted a large and vociferous contingent of anti-vaxxers ever since COVID, and their numbers have only grown over time. And they don't just post on the weekends.
Not even a joke.
States with lower Covid Vaccine coverage had more deaths.
Technically, are Red States correct that they will achieve herd immunity, by letting their weak die off?
Early in COVID, someone said to me, “survival rates are good - it’s only going to affect the weak.”
…without realizing the irony that he was mid-40s, overweight, and had had an acute heart problem.
The funny thing about the “natural immunity” crowd is that they don’t seem to grasp their own comorbidities.
Yet of the unvaccinated COVID patients admitted to hospital, 2/3 admitted they regretted not getting vaccinated.
I guess everybody’s brave until they’re in a hospital bed with a low pulse ox.
I mean, even the idea of "it's only going to affect the weak" is disgusting and horrible. "The weak" is someone's grandmother, or their dad with a heart transplant, or their newborn baby. There is some pretty filthy, wretched ideology in the world that says very similar things about people it perceives as not worthy of being alive. And someday, for any of us who are blessed to live that long, we will be weak, too. We will be infirm. We will arrive at the end of our lives deserving protection, too, just like all of those people who were wantonly discarded during the pandemic.
Every life lost is a tragedy, especially when it is, to an extent, preventable. Not perfectly, and not without mistakes, but we could've done better than we did. It's heartbreaking that so many people are so willing to sacrifice the very people society should be trying to protect.
https://archive.ph/auQhC
For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
What we have seen happen over the past decade is quite similar what happened in Russia in decades before it: complete dismantling of trust, of the idea of truth, of the idea of honesty or integrity. And in that space of uncertainty, a new sort of ruling class is enabled to control the population.
Anti-vaxxers used to be a tiny minority, and living in a crunchy leftish area, they were concentrated around me, and I got into arguments with them all the time. Now, they are no longer leftists, they are MAHA/MAGA, because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority. Vaccines were rejected as much because of the idea of an authority "knowing stuff" as it is about the ickiness of something impure being injected into the body, as much as they love the idea of "everything natural" including "natural" infectious disease.
We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn, and replaced it with authority that exists merely because it hated the past authority, and became what it hated.
Form what its worth, I urge people to pick up Network Propaganda.
Online speech, moderation and regulation are things I am focused on, and this book does a better job of putting all the parts together.
You can often hear someone on HN talk about “I would rather have many voices than let someone decide what is true.”
Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
In the simplest sense - the information economy is no longer functional. Its been co-opted by private=government mutations. None of the old hacker culture rhetoric is graded to combat it.
The current shtick is to promote a fringe theory. Have a talking head state the fringe theory on Fox. Then have a government functionary state that the Fox mentioned said theory. Then have Fox state that a government functionary mentioned said theory. If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
>Thing is, that is standing up at a battle line which has been flanked entirely.
If you think for yourself, this doesn't really matter.
>If you are someone who has a counter theory, you just don’t get platformed.
You keep mentioning this stuff from a liberal perspective but conservatives and free thinkers have been fighting this fight on social media for years as policies they disagreed with were promoted unilaterally and everything else was censored and suppressed. People were at risk of losing their jobs and being sent into exile over not wanting to take a vaccine. "My body, my choice" doesn't count when it comes to that.
The information economy is full of shills and AI bots, but that does not in and of itself prevent you from finding your own reliable sources of information. Censorship would stop you from finding it, however. Mandatory online ID would also hurt the flow of sincerely communicated information.
> because their fundamental view of the world is not left/right, it's authority/antiauthority
Except that (given the vagaries of the English language) that sounds like they would be "anti-authoritarian", but they're exactly the people cheering on the current authoritarian government.
However, I suspect that the sense of "authority" you mean is more like "expertise", or "intellectual", with a dash of "perceived establishment" thrown in.
(No shade on you for this—like I said, English is frequently ambiguous and tricky to clearly word things in.)
I think this gets lost somewhat in the distance between how conservatives describe themselves and how they actually behave. They cry the loudest about some vague "FREEDOM!" but are actively cheering on the blatant violation of human rights in the country. They pretend to be "individualists" but go out of their way to make fun of and ostracize people who don't conform to their version of "normal". Practically every position they state is directly contradicted by the things they support. They get to carry this "fiscally responsible" badge despite never once being accountable for delivering on that promise. Their entire ideology is based on lies and bad faith and it shows by the people they keep electing.
“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.”
In my life there have been two huge destructions of public trust.
The first was the Iraq war, which could only be the result of either bald faced lies or gross incompetence or both. We blundered into the desert and set a trillion dollars and countless lives on fire and have nothing to show for it. Tons of people across the spectrum knew this was a terrible idea and were silenced or ignored.
The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership. The response was that the Eastern establishment saved itself at the expense of the country, or that’s how it looked to a ton of people all across the country and the political spectrum including myself.
There have been smaller cuts but those are the big obvious ones.
You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Unfortunately these two characters are not reformers. They are vultures. They are frauds and con men dining on the corpse of trust.
I’m not Russian but I imagine that the failure of the Soviet regime and the hollowness of its propaganda did a number on trust over there, and that Putin and his allies are likewise vultures.
“ The other was the 2008 bank bailouts. The problem isn’t that the state stepped in to avert a depression. The problem is that they did it by handing the very people who caused the crash a bonus and a promotion and then proceeded to reinflate the housing bubble to lock two generations out of home ownership”
What’s interesting about this telling of it is how it reinterprets history. You are complaining about a lack of trust based on, if not an outright lie, an extremely biased narrative. The most obvious missing piece is you don’t mention the auto makers or uaw workers at all. Or that you say “reinflate the housing bubble” instead of “subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed”. We forced banks that did have proper risk controls to take tarp funds and the attached compensation limits against their will and made money on many of the assets we bought with tarp funds.
There is a trust gap, but it’s not some one way problem of coastal elites selling fables to enrich themselves and the good proletariat being duped. It’s at least as much a story of the populace not using critical reasoning skills to understand multifaceted and nuanced issues, which I suspect is not new.
> subsidize mortgages on houses that should have been repossessed
But that's also not what happened.
What we did is buy back junk assets from banks to keep the banks from going under. The only way it really "subsidized" mortgages is in that it kept banks afloat which allowed them to keep issuing mortgage loans.
People, particularly people that fell for predatory lending, still lost their homes. The people that were mostly aided by the bailout were investors who bought snake oil mortgage backed securities which had fake credit ratings applied to them.
And the reason people take a dim view on this is because it really was only people with significant assets in the first place that saw a benefit from these government interventions. A direct result of the regulation was it became a lot harder for a few years to get a home loan unless you had significant assets behind you.
That's not to say some percentage of these interventions didn't help everyone. It's always messy. But it is saying that a lot of people would have been in a much better situation had the government, instead of bailing out the banks and investors, taken that same money and given it directly to the citizenry. Even the banks and investors would have ultimately been in a better position as people would have ultimately taken that money and spent it on things like their mortgages which they fell behind on.
There were specific mortgage subsidies as part of tarp. For instance the making homes affordable and hardest hit fund programs.
But beyond that if the mortgages had been sold at market prices many of them would have been snapped up by companies that aggressively went after the secured properties. That’s the _natural_ outcome of letting the market action happen. More people would have been put out of their homes.
I’m fairly ambivalent on tarp. I think letting actors take risky actions and get bailed out creates a moral hazard. But that applies to mortgage holders who were over extended and auto workers who get bailed out ahead of other stake holders too. I can see a strong argument that we should have biased that way, but to say we didn’t help “regular” people is just false narrative.
It's a biased narrative, but perception of truth is equivalent to truth when it comes to trust, and multiple factors make this narrative compelling than more nuanced ones
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
We've had many of these trust-destroying events in the past, before the Iraq war, but their effects were limited. What we didn't have back then, and what I'd argue brought us Trump and RFK Jr., was a world-wide information-distributing machine and a megaphone in every idiot's (and malevolent foreign actor's) pocket. We're here because anger, belligerence, conspiracies, distrust, hatred, and ignorance are being deliberately spread on Internet platforms by 1. adversaries motivated to destabilize the country and destroy its institutions, and 2. domestic idiots who help to spread it (and make a buck off of its popularity).
I used to think that "platforming everyone" was a noble goal, but we're seeing the results.
I think that's underselling the importance of massive media consolidation and deregulation since the Reagan years in bringing us to where we are today.
If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
The myriad effects of deregulation and massive consolidation that have cascaded in the past ~40 years (fewer companies owned by wealthier people, the destruction of local news, the erosion of norms protecting journalistic integrity, etc) are, IMO, very clearly hugely to blame for the modern state of political discourse. I'm not saying the internet didn't have an effect—it could hardly fail to; it's an enormous change in our world overall—but I have a very hard time seeing it as being more detrimental than these changes in how media companies operate.
> If we still had a half-dozen major largely reliable news outlets that may have had some political leanings, but could still be (hah) trusted to largely report truth, rather than crafting narratives to maximize profit, it would have been much harder for the lies to spread.
I think the problem is that what you're describing is no longer a viable business model.
Back when there were only at most a half dozen or so news sources (newspapers and TV stations) in each major market, it didn't make sense for any one of those sources to lean hard left or right because that would only alienate a significant portion of the market.
Today, any given individual has access to thousands of different sources of "news", and everyone chooses to listen to only those sources that confirm their existing opinions. To me, that seems more than sufficient to explain a lot of things, including a lack of widespread agreement on basic facts.
Objective reality is frequently very nuanced, but nuance is a PITA when it comes to comprehension, so people tend to very much avoid it (knowingly or not).
uhh I think various parts of Trump's presidency seem to be tantamount to those things. Jan 6, for instance.
The Jan 6 mob isn't a public institution that ever had any public trust to lose.
I am talking about Trump's handling of it. Both day of and subsequently (e.g. pardoning them because they're "his people.")
Not to mention public officials being fired due to calling it a "mob" as you just did.
> You could never get a Trump or an RFK Jr without these two things.
Fully agree with the rest but not with this. Pure and simple economic devastation is enough - yes, the Iraq war did a number on y'all... but most countries in Europe didn't join in on that particular shitshow and still got our version of Trump.
Hell I'd say even the 2008 bank bailouts aren't the problem. The uber rich looting the country for all it's worth, that's been a staple of human society, it doesn't mean automated flip to fascism.
IMHO, the true problem rather is that we (i.e. Western countries) allowed unrestricted trade with Asia, in particular China and India - our greedy big corporations swooped in and moved a lot of economic activity providing decent paid jobs of all skill levels there. Production mostly went off to China, service (i.e. callcenters) to India, high-tech to South Korea and especially Taiwan. And there was nothing domestic, other than maybe be a drone in an Amazon warehouse or Walmart (that, in turn, destroyed even more decent paid jobs in small retail!), to provide alternative gainful employment.
That is what destroyed democracy the most - the devastation and the utter ignorance of politicians.
>We've destroyed the idea of expertise and authority based on knowledge that's open to anybody who wants to put in the time to learn
Let me stop you right there. Actual credentialed experts who disagreed with the mainstream narratives put forth by other experts were censored, had their careers threatened, and were lumped in with "anti-vaxxers". Social media was censored. If you want to win people over and get them to trust you, you need to accept that they may not agree with you, and you don't get to silence them. The financial interests of pharmaceutical companies further muddy the waters.
There exists a large set of "experts" in every field of interest who want you to know that their work is absolutely essential and if you disagree with them, you're wrong. Some of these fields have massive epistemological issues and conflicts of interests. These experts are often proven to be extremely wrong. Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to disregard the "experts" and trust your own personal interpretation of a situation, and "do your own research"... If nobody ever thought different from "experts" we would still be in the dark ages thinking that the sun revolves around a flat Earth.
We also subjected a lot of the population to vaccine mandates in order to retain their employment. That makes sense for some workers, sure, but it bred a lot of resentment toward authority.
It wasn't the CDC doing vaccine mandates, it was some employers, by their own choice.
If the mandates were the problem, wouldn't people hate their employers for doing that, not the CDC?
It's certainly not the first time people have been required to be vaccinated. I remember talking to some people in the military, who were very upset about the COVID vaccine, yet they get so many more vaccines all the time. Why would they be upset about vaccine mandates for COVID out of nowhere, when they get far more vaccines as a matter of course and have for decades?
There's something new in the information space, specifically about COVID and vaccines, and maybe it is such an irrational thing as trying to destroy the CDC because of some employers' mandates for vaccines, because under this all its irrationality, but I don't understand it.
It didn't for decades until bad actors spewing lies worked to spread distrust in the system.
Doesn’t the military mandate vaccines for decades
Yes! The DoD uses the military to test novel vaccines with service members. That is part of the “some workers” because you’re being deployed worldwide to new situations.
Historically, though, I believe the DoD started it because of the threat of biological/chemical warfare, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthrax_Vaccine_Immunization_P...
From 2001:
No, their concern was specifically over mRNA and how it might screw with the body.
Over 2021 and 2022 it very much felt like the pro-vaccine crowd was the anti-science crowd: While they were dismissing all concerns with things like the overly-simplistic "that's not how it works, it's DNA -> RNA -> proteins like we learned in school", the MAGA crowd was talking about reverse-transcriptase enzymes and sharing studies like https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
Their concerns were never addressed, just ignored. It's not surprising they stopped trusting authorities like the CDC.
>> For there to be democracy, there must be accountability. For there to be accountability, there must be some sense of truth, and under that some sense of trust of each other.
When doctors questioned vaccine safety studies they were mocked and ostracized. Which is the opposite of truth seeking you think was going on.
You know, unsurprisingly these claims are almost always heavy on rhetoric but offer no references or data to back up the assertion beyond a had wavy 'everyone knows'.
Sincere request: Can you provide some specific examples of doctors being mocked or ostracized for criticizing studies?
You are not being honest, but you are trying to your best to undermine the idea of honesty.
Every vaccine safety study was questioned and examined, thoroughly.
Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
We need to pivot to rationality, and away from in-group/out-group analysis. Let's evaluate claims on their merits, not based on who is making them.
> It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies.
You seem to be doing just what the OP is complaining about. You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
That's not how science should work, at least in a functional system. If only insiders have the privilege of asking "why?", then we'll be forever trapped in orthodoxy, or worse, trapped in authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
> You've set up the scientific establishment as some sort of priesthood, which the great unwashed masses should not question.
No, I absolutely have not. I'm representing what actually happened, in practice.
The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
Trying to come back and say "that's too perfect, you're trying to establish them as a priesthood" is exactly the opposite of what I'm trying to do.
All the critique is out there in the open, available to look for anybody who wants to. However, people prefer to be spoonfed stuff in YouTube videos, prefer to imagine a conspiracy oppressing them.
You are spreading an image of the scientific community that is simply untrue and easy to disprove just by looking at what actually happened.
> The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety.
See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
> See, that's my whole point: "examined and critiqued inside the scientific community".
> If you didn't want the rest of society to accept "the rest of the scientific community" as a separate, privileged authority, then why did you even make this part of your reply?
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian. If my house is on fire, I'm going to call the fire department, not the grocery store. Expertise and specializations exist! It's not a shadowy conspiracy by mustache-twirling "elites" trying to make science into a priesthood.
It doesn't matter who you are--if you have a rational, scientific, rigorous critique of some established science, you publish it, and it survives discussion debate, you are part of the "scientific community."
If my car is broken, I'm going to ask a mechanic to take a look and diagnose it, not a gardener or librarian.
Sure. but when your mechanic tells you that the cost of fixing it is going to be astronomical, you don't just believe him and go into debt to fix it. You're going to consider your own common sense, you're going to read and ask in reddit subs where people who own and have experience with that car gather, and so forth. And given the reputation of many mechanics, you may challenge them; when (true story!) they say I need to let them take apart my engine to clean the fuel injectors, I ask them to show me where in the manufacturer's spec does it list that as normal maintenance.
My point is that, annoying and time-consuming as it might be for the mechanics/scientists, we should not just accept whatever they say without question. It's proper to challenge them. Neither scientists nor mechanics are entitled to unquestioning devotion, especially given their actual observed behavior in the past.
But what we shouldn't do is go to the AntiMechanic subreddit where they all spread conspiracy theories about how mechanics are always lying, and how your vibes about your car are just as good as their diagnostic work, and by the way, here's a book I'm selling and a monetized YouTube channel you can watch, that both DESTROYS the auto mechanic elite and shows you a secret trick about car repair They Don't Want You To Know...
Whatever else I might be arguing about here, let me first express how much I HATE those headlines and video titles with "destroys", "obliterates", etc. I'd much rather see something about "coming to a common understanding".
So yeah, I hate those guys. But consider this in a completely abstract framework, stripped of all practical issues. Picture the debate as a number line, so any given proposal can be represented as a line going off in opposite directions. The origin represents the status quo, and the proposed policy is some point off to the right (or the left, if you like that better). As a simple matter of mathematics, then if we only consider answers in the interval [0, proposal], then we will only ever move in the direction of the proposal; perhaps slowly, but inevitably. And that will happen even if the proposal is dead wrong.
The only way to guard against that inexorable pull in what's potential bad territory is to entertain conversation in the whole interval of [-proposal, proposal] (or at least some degree in the negative direction, anyway).
We must always entertain the possibility that not only is the proposal wrong, but is fundamentally contrary to what's really needed. Failure to do this leads to what we see in our modern regulatory regime: a host of rules that are actively digging the whole deeper, even while we tell ourselves that we're fixing the problem. (There are countless examples, but I hesitate to cite any specifics because I want to keep the argument abstract and not get hung up in other partisan bickering.)
I guess if you think the very idea of science is invalid, the idea that people can study and learn a lot about a topic and discuss it using their knowledge, then perhaps your comment makes sense.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
If you want to critique them, then please do! But please do it with honesty, rather than saying "I hate those nerds and they seem like elites" merely because they spent a lot of their life trying to understand biology.
Is it "privilege" to study something and look at it in detail? Why would that be "privilege"?
That's not at all what I said. The privilege you seem to be reserving for the scientific establishment is that the rest of us should accept their pronouncements without question. The implication of your prior statement was that "The vaccines studies were heavily examined and critiqued inside the scientific community, and scientists found that they established safety and this should be sufficient for us to follow without challenging them."
Everyone has the right to question scientific findings.
If they actually have scientific expertise to back it up.
Dropping that qualifier means you have to answer, forever, to every crank with an axe to grind, and treat them as if their criticism is just as valid as that of someone who's spent their life studying what you do.
Your* ignorance is not as valid as my knowledge, and I'm sick and tired of people acting like it is.
*: not "you" personally; the general "you"
Yeah, I agree that sucks. If you go back to my first reply in the thread, I said:
Unfortunately, the insurance policy against that trap - that annoying people will keep asking "why?" - itself has a steep price, sometimes almost turning into a heckler's veto. It's a tough problem.
Sometimes that ignorant schmuck annoying us is the only thing pulling us out of a hole. Consider Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift. He was a meteorologist with no formal training in geology, and his ideas were rejected with what I've seen described as "militantly hostile" reactions. Before Barry Marshall, it was doctrine that peptic ulcers were caused by stress, and stomach acid. His theory that the real cause was bacterial led to cancelled speaking slots, blocked grant applications, and so forth. He finally resorted to intentionally infecting himself with H. Pylori and developing gastritis, then curing himself with antibiotics. Ignaz Semmelweis offended surgeons - seen as "holy" men in noble work - by suggesting that their unwashed hands were killing patients.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, said "When a shift does happen, it's almost invariably the case that an outsider or a newcomer, at least, is going to be the one who pulls it off... Insiders are highly unlikely to shift a paradigm and history tells us they won't do it".
I agree that people repeatedly making you (again, the general "you") explain can slow down progress quite a lot. But this seems to be the price for having a democracy rather than a technical oligarchy.
Wegener was technically a meteorologist but his PhD was in Astronomy and he had lots of training in physics. He (among others) noticed that the shapes of landmasses seemed to complement each other. He had a great deal of observational evidence. and he really wasn't this lone figure crusading for drift- that's partly because when we write narratives of science, people like to hear about lone rangers who overturn paradigms, when really, most scientific paradigms are overturned by a large number of people collecting evidence that supports the new theory.
We can write whole books about the unnecessarily hostile response of establishment scientists to novel theories. I've witnessed it myself and sometimes it takes decades and deaths of older scientists to overturn a paradigm. That's not particularly fair, but it's not like scientists are magically ultra-rational, they're emotional human beings like everybody else.
There's a few areas where I don't think outsiders can realistically produce change: thermodynamics (see all the attempts at perpetual motion machines), the shape of the earth (see the flat earth "theorists"), and complex medical topics (see all the current noise about vaccines, cancer, neuro disorders). To contribute to these areas, you need to go see what other people painfully learned over centuries. And most of that is just not written down, it's transmitted orally within advanced educational systems (which is not great).
Your comment wins the internet, as they say, and as far as I'm concerned. Your three examples of scientific tenacity are wonderful. We all benefited from these heroic efforts in the face of dogmatic establishment Science. And your comment reminds us of how valuable that lone "voice from the wilderness" can become.
I can add one even more pertinent example:
https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/10/after-being-demoted-a...
A lot of lives were saved during the pandemic because of the efforts of a biochemist (Katalin Karikó) and an immunologist (Drew Weissman), despite their research not being embraced or encouraged by the scientific establishment.
The Trump 1.0 CDC, NIH, and private industries did an amazing job delivering the Covid vaccines in time to save millions of lives.
The Trump 2.0 CDC/NIH is a farcical rebound romcom which I can't watch. It's not romantic. It's not tilting at windmills. It's not funny at all.
Kids playing doctor with our country.
> Introducing this idea of "mocked and ostracized," is a rhetorical tactic to try to establish the idea of some sort of mistreated people that other mistreated people can identify with. It's not based in truth of how the scientific community worked. If there's "mocking and ostracization" then it's in some sort of other social space, not in the evaluation of the vaccine safety studies. And by trying to conflate these two areas, you are trying to undermine the very idea of truth seeking, and replace it with this weird vibes-based in-group/out-group emotionally-based judgements.
Well put
Religious groups often employ the same rhetoric: Pretend to be victims, mocked and ostracized, which pulls at the heartstrings of people who themselves are (or believe they are) mocked and ostracized. Some of the largest and most powerful organized religions in the world have this exact kind of persecution complex at the heart of their scripture and sermons.
Yup. I’m not sure who downvoted me but I meant my comment as a genuine compliment.
A lot of vaccine companies also made a lot of money from Covid-19, even when some of the vaccines were later judged shoddy or outlawed by some countries.
One perspective is that the quality and issues of vaccines can vary. Some have more side-effects than others, and some have more issues than others.
Like one specific polio-vaccine that very rarely can mutate into a contagious variant [0]. Or one vaccine for chickens that had some rather serious overall issues [1]. Or that some of the Covid-19 vaccines, hastily developed, were rejected by some countries, while other Covid-19 vaccines were accepted by those same countries.
And vaccines demand a huge amount of trust. Vaccines can be abused in lots of ways by governments, organizations and individuals [2]. This is extra unfortunate, considering the huge potential benefits of some variants of vaccines. Vaccines also require trust in competence and public control [3]. For urgency reasons, standards and checking of vaccines were lowered during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccines are also often administered to healthy individuals, not merely sick individuals.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease
> Because vaccination does not prevent infection with the virus, Marek's is still transmissible from vaccinated flocks to other birds, including the wild bird population. The first Marek's disease vaccine was introduced in 1970. The disease would cause mild paralysis, with the only identifiable lesions being in neural tissue. Mortality of chickens infected with Marek's disease was quite low. Current strains of Marek virus, decades after the first vaccine was introduced, cause lymphoma formation throughout the chicken's body and mortality rates have reached 100% in unvaccinated chickens. The Marek's disease vaccine is a "leaky vaccine", which means that only the symptoms of the disease are prevented.[12] Infection of the host and the transmission of the virus are not inhibited by the vaccine. This contrasts with most other vaccines, where infection of the host is prevented.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
> The fact that the CIA organized a fake vaccination program in 2011 to help find Osama bin Laden is an additional cause of distrust.[120]
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories#Cutter_inc...
No, it wasn't, and these extremely marginal results got way too much attention compared to the millions of results showing all the valuable results from broad vaccination.
I know the mocking, wicked tone is why a response on this comment was flagged and dead.
> Your head is so far up your --- you can see daylight. They were mocked for being wrong, not for questioning orthodoxy. There is a well understood epistemology for these things, and you need basic competence to apply it.
So, I have trouble anyone is so cocksure about vaccines and the shot rollout and the general response to covid like lockdowns, etc. I hope this is some consensus shaping bot, but in the case it is not and a real human wrote that, I just want to respond.
Your loud, semi-religious devotion to a consumer product is disgusting. Your outrage fuels my resolve.
There are different safety profiles for any drug, not all are equal. The covid vaxxes all have an atrocious safety profile, at least one was pulled in the states after wide distribution, all were experimental in nature and were generally rushed out to market. There needs to be jail time for the scoundrels that ignored safety signals. And on top of that the damn things didn't work and didn't stop the spread.
Beyond that, the vaxxes were publicly funded corporate welfare, there was broad public-private collusion to force people to get it (no jab, no job), there were 1st amendment violations by businesses forcing employees to disclose medical statuses.
You will not listen to reason, there are a million other sus things you all ignore about 2020-2022. I just hope everyone rebukes you and whatever neo-paganism has a death grip on your mind.
Do you have a source on those safety profiles and the "didn't work" claim?
Yes. Would you trust me and my sources? If not, why not?
The best I can do is state obvious facts and perhaps persuade other open minded people to come to the same conclusions as me.
Arguing with you is worse than fruitless and is actually hurtful. Truly I wish you the best personally but failure and rejection when it comes to your well-intentioned ideas and hobgoblin fears.
You're either mistaking me for someone else or massively projecting - that was my only comment in this thread, and it was nothing but a neutral request for sources. You can't expect to win anyone over with personal attacks followed by "it's obvious".
If you were to give me a truly compelling argument/source, I would still consider it, as with anything. I don't trust the government and I don't put it past the "establishment" to systematically lie about something, but that doesn't mean there's no burden of proof on the other side.
Of all the comments, you chose to engage on my deep one and chose what perhaps you thought was the weakest assertion to challenge, which was the covid vaccines failed to innoculate.
That was enough of a signal that I assumed you were a proponent. Was there projection? Some, but talking past the sale is a persuasion technique and I wasn't in the mood to argue.
The alternate take is that improved information publishing and distribution platforms (the internet) have allowed the exposure of some pretty corrupt and questionable relationships between the authorities and the industries they regulate (regulatory capture).
Previously people only got their information from the authorities and newspapers. Newspapers were owned by the industries (either directly, or via advertising). Now we can see diverse view points from others in various fields, and it is clear when "doctors say ..." that doesn't mean that all doctors believe that to be true. We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed.
People can also question where the studies are to back guidelines from authorities. Like what is the scientific basis of the food pyramid? Turns out that was created by the Department of Agriculture to support grain farmers, not because it is a good diet for humans. Or that the deaths and injuries for many infectious diseases had significantly declined before their respective vaccines hit the market, and that the authorities have been cherry picking the points of the graph to hide how much of the improvement happened before vaccines were available.
The biggest change is the availability of diverse voices in an industry being able to be heard, rather than just a select few chosen by "authority", aka power, aka money.
I'm confused by your statement "We can now see that NIH scientists that approve drugs are allowed to approve drugs where they have a patent and commercial interest in the drugs they are approving, which is mind-bendingly wild that level of corruption is allowed."
The NIH does not approve drugs. If you have a citation that I can read that clarifies this point, I'm happy to read it.
They don't directly approve drugs, but are involved in the testing pathway for some, and have been caught manipulating data to cause the approval.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2700754/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC545012/
Note the dates on those greatly precede Donald Trump ever running for the Presidency.
Unfortunately, for every "questionable relationship between the authorities and the industries they regulate' being exposed by citizen journalists and the power of the internet, there are 10 wild conspiracy theories with no basis in fact being spread. And for every 1 of those conspiracies being spread, there are 10 grifters out there making a buck selling products and services based around them. The Internet was a great idea that has not held up against stupidity and greed.
That is unfortunate, but also, I'd rather choose the situation where truth about abuses of power by authorities can spread with the trade off that some wing nuts are also making up stories out of whole cloth, than the one where truth is crushed under power of authority.
As a person who a lot of folks would consider, to use the kids' term, "noided up", I don't know if I agree.
My experience has been that in general the fact that there are so many folks able to get traction with their poorly-informed ideas and who face little or no consequences (rhetorically) for being show wrong time-and-again has led to a situation where we can go from "limited hangouts" to "we just publish facts and folks ignore it thinking they are just like all the other dumb things people say".
Like, it's incredibly hard to talk about how many horrible things the US has done and published abut over the years (I am thinking of Pheonix, Bluebird, Artichoke, etc) without sounding like a crank even when the government itself is the primary source.
Authoritarian governments crushing truth directly, but that doesn't mean that liberal governments don't have heavy layers of propaganda to maintain their control.
As a principle, "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" probably just results in the same destruction of the truth, as you might see in this thread.
Many "liberal governments" of the West certainly have some authoritarian elements to them. I don't see that as a conflict with advocating for free speech. If the government is running the propaganda, who is supposed to push against that other than dissidents protected by free speech? It certainly won't be the government or "the authorities".
I don't understand what "YOLO anyone should say whatever and never face rhetorical consequences" means. Who should be enforcing these consequences? What even is a "rhetorical consequence"?
As ever, the problem with creating an authority to regulate what is truth, is who is going to be that authority, and how are we going to prevent it from being corrupted by human nature.
You don't need a ministry of truth to have a bit of shame when you say say something incorrect or to recall what really bad and false positions people take or to remember when you've put out bad ideas that were incorrect.
Once again finding the "diversity of opinions" so so so bizarre a recent invention. Which is so weird, because I do believe there's plenty of corruption in the medical system, that the US's is a deeply corporate affront. I'm so near to finding "anti authority" vibes to resonate on.
But everything happening now is a deep insult, to inquiry, to science, to this nation, to life. The people running the show right now embody everything you are saying, are exactly this case. But not a one of the folks running HHS seems able to hear anything except what they've a-priori chosen to believe. Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right? I believe accurately reflects a delusional hyper-reality, where health is being governed by a select few who have wrapped a deeply politicized reality around themselves as shield to the world, and alas these very few very special actors are now running the show. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/rfk-jr-public-h...
Diversity of voices is once again, just as it is at universities, being used to try to force it's way through the paradox of tolerance, to demand a seat at the table not for interesting suppressed voices, but for violent active harm seeking & destruction. That is not well founded either, that does not even attempt to engage to make its case.
Call it what you will, but the ability of dissenting voices to be heard is the basis of free speech, and also integral to the pursuit of science. Blind trust in authorities is anti-science, and suppression of dissenting views is also anti-science. Those in position of authority like to cast out all who have opposing views as lunatics, but that isn't true. When those in position of authority lie to feather their own nests and cement their power, the truth will be found among the dissidents.
Specifically to Kennedy, in his congressional hearings I've watched does not present himself as a doctor or a scientist, and also not anti-science. His main thrust appears to be that there are a great many problems in the status quo, the "authority" scientists and institutions don't have any reasonable explanations for them, and there are other scientists that are not financially entangled in the status quo that have theories that look to be worth pursuing. That is pro-science in the meaning of exploring the world in pursuit of truth. He is trained as a lawyer, and it is within his profession to be leading inquiries into intent and motivations of various parties in a dispute.
The characterization of him as anti-vax is a slur, and greatly simplified from what he actual advocates.
We should all be concerned. I was watching Ken Burns, and it seems Washington ordered all his troops to be inoculated for Smallpox, and it made a huge difference in that war. Vaccines are good science, and the amount of testing we do to check safety is simply astonishing. We got extremely lucky with Covid-19, it was a warning shot, and we are taking away the wrong lessons from it. When bird flu comes with 50% mortality (half of the people you know will die, mostly children) we will go into complete lockdown with a required MRNA vaccine and we will thank God or Providence that we have people with the knowledge to make them.
Doctors should wear pharma sponsorships on their coats like Formula 1 drivers do. Would put things into perspective.
Doctors do, as required by federal law. You can look up any doctor you like:
https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov
They do, on their publications. It's all there. And it's not as pervasive as you might think.
I remember a very famous cancer researcher who destroyed his career by not disclosing these relationships:
https://cancerletter.com/the-cancer-letter/20180914_1/
Now, he's on the extreme end because no other cancer researcher has ever gotten quite that much, as far as I know. But there aren't even accusations that he gave favorable results to any drugs form companies that sponsored him, as far as I have every heard, it was merely that he didn't disclose that destroyed his career.
This is a level of honesty and transparency that does not exist in most of society, and we should be proud in the US that science is so clean compared to every other aspect of our society.
And for all the big money, pharma is far far more honest than grifters like those in the anti-vaxxer space who do not disclose how they are making their money, and who do directly benefit from pushing unproven experimental treatments that do not go through the same rigorous vetting that standard pharma does.
Between this and defunding of Univ. research plus the banning of $ for mRNA vaccine, the US just handed the future of Medical Research to China.
I have seen articles recently that states China now leads the word in mRNA research, which is the future of vaccine research.
Soon I expect the US to only allow praying over people for medical treatment, we are not far from that with the recent ACA changes.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Hilariously blinkered.
It really did work like that. Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics. You do your day to day work and wouldn't even notice a change of administration.
The political appointees set the overall direction, and so projects come and go -- more or less at the same rate as they do even under the same administration.
Having the President interfere so directly with ongoing operations is unprecedented. Maybe that's a good thing; people wanted a change and they got it. But it's not usual.
> Government agencies in general are largely insulated from politics.
This was obviously false during the pandemic when these “health” agencies did what the White House wanted, from the actual “science” to the messaging.
Same president both times. Same bad idea.
You can both be right. Goverment agencies can do their own thing under normal circumstances and be politicized when their activity is the focus of a huge political event, like a pandemic.
"largely insulated from politics" note that claim they made is that in past there was no political interference at all, not that it was smaller or manageable
"largely" does not mean "completely".
yes, exactly. And article makes the "completely" claim
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
which is just wrong and further erodes trust.
You're adding words that aren't there.
If in the past they could do 98% of their job without political influence most people would describe that as being free to do their jobs without influence.
If there's now political hacks interfering in 50% or more of their job that's a big change.
If in the past the political hacks were never interfering with THEIR role, just affecting what projects get funded, and now the hacks are interfering directly with them and controlling what they can say or publish - that's obviously new and significantly worse influence.
There are moments when it looks like the plan is quite literally to cause a mass die-off. White that seems paranoid at best, and very cynical at best... that is the obvious outcome of low vaccine compliance. We can see this from death rates before the vaccine era.
I agree this is how it feels, its like the evil and corrupt of this country are actively convincing huge swaths of the poor and uneducated to basically undermine and kill themselves. A good chunk of this thread is a handful of people so detached from the actual plot that they are hell bent on carrying on a vendetta against a doctor and scientist they've never met, because they feel like his advice to the american people personally wronged them in some unforgivable and most egregious way.
When people can’t distinguish between the opinions of YouTube or Fox News commentators and decades of scientific research, it’s hard to know what the rest of us can do except watch in disbelief and abject horror.
> The privilege that American scientists have taken for granted—one that is now being trampled—is the ability to go about their work free of political interference.
Communism style solutions ("it is better to have everyone being extremely poor, rather than having some poor and some rich people") is a terrible solution. Trampling on everyone because other group got trampled earlier is not a solution at all.
Presenting insane and deadly pseudoscience as science is stupid, dangerous and will kill people.
But claiming that there were no problems whatsoever and no political interference at all is a really dubious claim. This kind of reality denial is unhelpful and further erodes whatever trust was left.
Both Repubs & Dems have lots of blood on their hands for their intentional mishandling of COVID (continued to this day, since the pandemic is not over) in service to our archaic consumption-first economy:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
Capital interests own and control both parties, so it's no surprise we are getting results where it's okay to set the meat grinder to high.
I think you're taking issue with the wrong thing here lol. There may have been something before (it's the real world after all), but what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
> what RFK is doing is quite frankly insane.
oh definitely - that is why I have not commented on this part of article, as I agree that such pseudoscience is simply idiotic, dangerous and will kill people and I am in agreement that it is bad
But this part made me go "really? really? really?" - this kind of reality denial is not helpful either and prompted my comment. And they could phrase it a bit more mildly for far greater accuracy.
I edited my initial comment a bit.
Even in communism some were richer than others
COVID protocols destroyed social ability in young people and I don't know if that was a price worth the small death rate in those below 50
They also furthered the anti-vaxx crowd, which is a bad thing
I think what people don't understand is that effects of the vaccine are smaller than the effects of the actual virus.
It was an accidental leak of a crafted virus from an internationally funded lab. The world was just SOL
This essay rubs me the wrong way in that it continues to invest in this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts. These people continue to miss the forest for the trees by avoiding the question: why have Americans lost faith in institutions?
I largely consider Trump a symptom of a larger disorder, I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
Two thinkers come to mind to me in this case:
1. Hannah Arendt, particularly her writing in The Human Condition (and maybe as an analogue: the Anthony Downs book on Bureaucracy and perhaps Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society I think?):
> Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
Another comment talks about accountability, but a bureau is composed of people "just doing their jobs" without the personal accountability that helps keep systems accountable.
Per Downs, bureaus eventually become mainly obsessed with their own survival over their original mandate, and it requires careful design to avoid this consequence.
2. Christopher Lasch: The idea that government institutions are required to force an centralized objectivity for democracy to survive is just about the opposite of what I think we actually need, per Lasch:
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
The attitude as espoused in this essay will not do any work to re-establish trust with Americans, it continues a long line of unaccountability or reflectiveness from the "adults in the room" on their own contributions to the degradation of the system by pretending Republicans or Trump are a unique aberration.
>this coastal elite attitude that the masses should do what we say because we are the experts
I think this attitude, that the work the CDC and other boring agencies do is elitist, or that those who defend it are elitist, is the root of distrust. The fact is that these agencies do the long slogging boring work to establish what works and what doesn’t, only to be undermined in social media for clicks and ad impressions.
The CDC had a very good reputation around the world for the work it did. Since covid everyone on the internet is somehow a health expert and the actual people doing the mountains of boring and thankless work are now seen as nothing more than gatekeepers to the social media platforms.
On the recommendation of the CDC, large outdoor events were canceled because of the risk of disease spread. Then came the BLM protests and the CDC said "no, actually those are different." If you want to be a scientific authority, you must avoid saying things that anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit.
As far as I can tell, this is false. The CDC did not offer guidance which said that protests should be treated differently from other outdoor events. If you can demonstrate otherwise, please do so.
>anyone with an elementary school level knowledge of science knows is bullshit
I’m not familiar with the facts of your anecdote, but clearly the CDC is a government agency and banning protests would be an unconstitutional prior restraint on freedom of speech, you would depend on the Supreme Court to get an exception.
> "[Specialized expertise is] the antithesis of democracy."
> "Democracy works best when men and women do things for themselves, with the help of their friends and neighbors, instead of depending on the state."
These are nice sentiments to have but it does not work in the real world. At a certain point certain problems are too complex for a regular person to understand.
If the world is too complex for a “regular person” to understand then universal suffrage is a mistake.
Just say what you mean: you want technocracy or some other non representative or democratic form of government.
That seems like a radical reading of the text.
It is impossible for every citizen to fully understand every scientific issue. Part of living in a society—in fact, one of the primary purposes of living in a society—is having different people specialize in different things, and trusting each other to actually be good at what they specialize in.
None of this implies that people don't know enough to vote.
Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the available evidence suggests that a major part of the problem right now is people's votes being suppressed and people being poorly represented by their supposed representatives (both due to deliberate gerrymandering, and more simply due to the fact that the size of the House of Representatives was capped in the early 20th century, leading to one person representing hundreds of thousands or more, rather than the ~10k or so each they represented prior to the cap).
You don’t think it’s more one party spending 40 years undermining Institutions to be able to gut them starting with Reagan’s “The Most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”? partially caused by the business elite working to gain influence over government since the Powell memo and partially caused by irrational fear of communism via socialism and partially by conservatives never wanting another Nixon and starting their own mouthpiece with Fox News, etc etc?
Seems more like a well concentrated effort to me.
Reagan's words resonated because the public already believed them. He is not the cause. The public's fear of government power is not remotely irrational. It is the responsibility of the government to maintain public trust, not the responsibility of the public to trust their authority.
The Powell Memorandum (1971) explicitly building the case for business takeover of democracy (by in many ways undermining/sabotaging the public's belief in the United States as a government), for the record, was a decade old when Reagan was in office (1981).
The Powell Memorandum is famous for being incredible explicit, for the scope & scale of how and where it would seek to dominate and control the media and abuse courts, for example. But no, even 1971 was not the first business plot to takeover the government, to foment dissent to try to rip the nation apart & assert a capitalist / oligarchical government on/against these United States.
I agree the government has the obligation to maintain the trust of it's people. But my heavens, it is deeply woefully & sad that there is such a loud angry butter popular political party whose axis is revanchist hatred of the state. It's not grounded, it's not trying for better, it's not honest: it's a constant attack on the USA at all levels, and the party exists only because that is the only message most rich people will fund: the Powell Memorandum style plot to get rid of as much government as possible.
Reagan's words against the government are indeed old ideas. Part of a long scary tradition against the state.
There is no smoke filled room. The government lost public trust by sucking. It turned itself into a bureaucratic hellscape for rent seeking lawyers (of which the number has gone up 3x since 1970). to feed on. Its model of restricting supply of necessary commodities like housing and then subsidizing them has reached its limit. They lost public trust because they don't deserve it.
I reflect on the asymmetry of where we are now.
There's people who want a government, want to do good, want governance.
But if they also have to win the hearts and minds, ongoingly, against an advanced persistent threat of disinformation networks and the most well funded US citizens, working for a Powell Memorandum revolt of the elites, well...
It sure seems like doing governance is much much much harder than it used to be. The enemies of the state are making it much most costly, creating a vast unrest that saps constant energy and attention.
I can't 100% disagree with you. But there's been 50 years of well spoken plot to overburden the government and topple the state's ability to act. Whatever people are feeling today has certainly been deeply shaped by the centuries of the rich & their opposition to democracy & governance. That seems more clear and present than ever, seems so clear that people have been lead so strongly to dissent. We don't have any control groups to assess this by. But pleading that it's all genuine, none of this is manufactured, that it's all objectively deserved: I cannot imagine polarizing yourself so hard as to deny the air we breath, the information environment we've drowned in with Hastert Rule democracy, tiny little Tea Party shenanigans ruling the airwaves (vs vastly bigger No Kings getting barely mentions), and the Grok-goverened brave new X world. The propaganda of dissent and obstruction has been working, and it has fed and shaped and sharpened the crusade against the United States as a competent capable governing entity.
I do not think it is fair to label a fear of communism or socialism as irrational.
Why have Americans lost faith in institutions? Because other institutions convinced them to.
Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, etc. This has been an organized effort for decades. It's embarrassing how "out in the open" the endeavour has been the whole time, that it can hardly be called a conspiracy.
Fox News was created because they didn't want another Watergate-level scandal be able to make R presidents lose popularity. It's surprising how effective it is.
> coastal elite attitude
There's definitely a Science communication problem because Science isn't about who is saying the things, but facts speak for themselves. The reliability, repeatability, and accuracy of what people say is far more important than who they are or where they come from, or whether they live on the coasts or in the "heartland" or whatever.
It's a real problem that there are a lot of ignorant people in the US that cultivate and defend themselves from the "other"--those elite liberals. They make it about identity and in-group dynamics rather than about facts.
The rest of your comment is just flat-out attack against all institutions and government without even considering whether this evil "bureaucracy" is just another mundane structure to administer the boringness of a functioning government.
> I think it is lazy to assume that he and his administration is the source of the breakdown here.
I mean, come on. Trump called COVID a "Democrat hoax" just weeks into the pandemic. Pile that on top of thousands of other lies and anti-science bullshit. Trump didn't build the bus that's carrying us off the cliff, but he and his supporters in the media have the gas pedal to the floor. They love people being ignorant and misinformed, and it's disgusting.