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Comment by h4b4n3r0 | Hacker News Reader

That’s an incredibly naive and narrow view. In most of life’s circumstances “facts” can’t even fully be established, and are better referred to as “strong beliefs”. And the definition of “hate” depends on perspective as well as varies over time. Moreover, there are circumstances where hate is definitely not “wrong”.

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I disagree with this. I think you can find facts in most parts of life. What has changed is how we use those facts to try and build a narrative, by chosing the facts that support the story we want to tell and ignore the facts that don’t.

Anti-vaxers are a good example of this. They’ve read that vaccines are dangerous, which is actually a fact, so they chose to not vaccinate their children. But they are ignoring another vaccination fact in the process. The fact that not-vaccinating children is more dangerous than vaccinating them. As a result we now live in a world where westerners are once again dying from the measles even though they really shouldn’t be.

Politicians are especially great at misusing facts to build their agendas. Possibly because they’d be too agreeing if they weren’t and they simply don’t know how to work together across party lines.

I once saw a climate change meme, asking if you’d cross a bridge which 99.9% of the worlds leading engineers said was unsafe. Every day we see more and more people cross that damn bridge. :p

I also agree with you though. Because things are this way, it would often be more reasonable to talk about “strong beliefs” rather than “facts”, exactly because people are chosing to ignore the facts.

It was also a "fact", in the times of Galileo, that Earth is in the center of the universe and the Sun rotates around it. But that might be too ancient, so how about another: before the 80's there was "scientific consensus" that ulcers are caused by all sorts of things other than bacteria. Dude who discovered they were, in fact, caused by bacteria, was nearly kicked out of his field.

History is rife with "facts" that weren't actually, you know, real facts at the time, even though there was "scientific consensus".

Note that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, and I'm not a climate change denier. I also don't imbue "scientific consensus" with magical properties, seeing how often it was dead wrong.

The people who discovered H. Pylori causes ulcers received the Nobel Prize for Medicine, so that's not the best example to be quoting.

The point was that it was considered a 'fact' that ulcers weren't caused by bacteria.

There's been a breakdown in trust.

People who accept vaccination as good, do so because they trust the scientific and political institutions which have developed and tested those vaccinations. A relatively small number of people have actually done the scientific work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination themselves.

People who do not believe that vaccinations are effective/an overall good do not have trust in this scientific and political institutions. Perhaps because the system has failed them economically, educationally or otherwise.

We have all been part of a massive real world experiment that shows a pretty obvious correlation between the introduction of vaccines and the reduction (and even elimination) of associated diseases.

Saying that a relatively small number of people have done the work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination is really disingenuous.

(Also, there's a pretty big difference between doubting an n=50 sociological study and deciding not to believe the very public historical record of global disease patterns.)

Do you trust the statistics that show how effective vaccines are and that the downsides are small?

Great! Me too! I wasn't involved directly in that work, but I trust that it hasn't been manipulated.

This is what I mean, I still trust these institutions (in part because I'm part of the technical/scientific community, and understand how it works). Many people appear to have lost trust in these institutions.

Do you realize that many "scientists" are paid to generate and publish research that supports a specific outcome, for political purposes? You should do your own research on climate change and come to your own conclusions. Blindly trusting "experts" is a very dangerous game.

Are 97% of scientists paid to generate and publish research that supports global warming?

Blindly criticizing experts and putting the word on quotation marks is a very dangerous game.

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