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Comment by AzzieElbab | Hacker News Reader

It is scary how confident people are when discussing the unknown.

True, but it's probably not so important. After all, it's just more human centered talk. It might be useful now for everyone to take a step back, consider we share this planet with other living things, and maybe someone is brave enough to look at things from a perspective of non-human being. Who's the pandemic now? ;)

Besides, the planet doesn't care about our little problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHgJKrmbYfg

It the product of evolution. As a species we have to make decisions on imperfect and limited information all the time. If we were programmed to wait to figure everything out we would have died off ages ago.

indeed. here and elsewhere in the blagosphere people have taken this opportunity to opine at length on everything from epidemiology to virology to welfare economics. it's been the case for a long time that people online have had very little sense of humility about their opinions but somehow experiencing a pandemic has given them even less pause to consider what they're ignorant of.

I think the Internet makes it worse, but it's not as if it was hard to find someone who was too confident in their layman's opinion in the real world. Witness any sports event. How often do your friends say "favorite will definitely win" when it's been known that they lose now and again?

Same with the stock market, predictions about the house market, the weather, political events, and so on.

Overconfidence is the rule, not the exception.

I'm certain of it.

Consider how ill informed and criminally stupid the US administration is and I would suggest that people discussing things and coming to their own conclusions, while a messy process, is at least one that might reach the correct conclusion in the face of being lied to by authority figures.

EDIT: As a recent example, consider the lies we were told by the administration about the effectiveness of surgical masks in preventing spread. While this lie was told in service of keeping the supply prioritized for health care workers, it caused vulnerable people to not wear them and discouraged people from wearing home made masks that might help prevent asymptomatic spread. We have only overcome this lie through public discussion and eventual acknowledgement by the CDC.

I wasn't thinking about the internet. I meant the "experts", you can't be an expert on the unknown.

No it isn't! :-)

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