It's exhausting to see my mom and dad succumb to a new conspiracy every other day. I don't see how else we can curb this other than for the tech companies to start aggressively moderating, just like how HN is moderated.
What about improving education, building functional (and trusted) institutions, and having more independent (non-profit driven) media?
It really bothers me that there is a group of people begging for corporate overloads to control and think for the population. Its literally the opposite of everything this country stands for.
What would education do except promote good ideas and reject bad ideas? What would trusted institutions do except promote good ideas and reject bad ideas? What would independent media do to improve things except promote good ideas and reject bad ideas?
Oh, my god! You want someone telling us how to think, only allowing the right groups to provide information, and having anyone else under the thumb of some financial interest?
They do not work, because the time and cost to create and widely disseminate falsehoods is much less than the time and cost to refute those falsehoods.
See "Firehose of falsehood" [1], which is an apt name for what happens now thanks to the internet and social media greatly lowering the barriers to getting information widely distributed.
As RAND researchers put it, "Don't expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth."
It's not about countering falsehoods, it's about giving people the tools to think critically and not be duped by falsehoods in the first place.
There is a societal change that needs to take place to fix that. Not caring about truth is a sign that a person has given up, it feels like a lot of people have given up.
People don't believe QAnon, or that Bill Gates created COVID-19 as part of his secret plan to implant chips in everybody, or that 5G towers caused COVID-19, or that the earth is flat, etc., because they do not have access to the tools to find and critically evaluate the refutations of those idiotic beliefs.
All the necessary tools are readily available on the internet. But using them takes more effort than they want to put in. And if they do put in the effort to think critically about something they saw on social media, there are dozens more to take its place.
The falsehoods can be designed to be entertaining and to appeal to the fears and prejudices of their targets. This makes it easy for someone to get into it because they can start out just for the entertainment. They aren't going to seek out opposing views and critical evaluate them at that point because it is just entertainment. Somewhere along the line, it changes from being just entertainment to something they actually believe in.
You can't educate people out of that kind of stupidity.
I don't know what the answer is, but that's not it.
You don't, and you won't, because the decision has been made for you.
You honestly think there is no legitimate information to be added to the equation from outside official sources? And that official sources, are, by definition right about everything?
I fear something along the lines of education and critical thinking is the only way to deal with this problem. I just don't know how to get there :(
thats seems to be the root of the problem. we're a fear driven economy now. That's why conspiracy theories are rampant, as well as actual conspiracies.
I liked the quote from Apocalypto:
> Fear. Deep rotting fear. They were infected by it. Did you see? Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it. It has tainted your peace already. I did not raise you to see you live with fear. Strike it from your heart. Do not bring it into our village.
Does it represent both sides of the controversy equally or is it only nitpicked facts?
I hate the guy as much as anyone. My wife was crying. It was a shock.
The DNC could have examined why they lost the key swing states by the thin margins they did in a deep, meaningful way. But that would have required acknowledging mistakes made by their highly paid political consultants and their own power brokers. But who wants to be the person to admit they screwed up and lost to a tangerine/chicken strip/cheetoh?
"Nah, let's just blame the Russians. They hacked our emails, they put out ridiculous lies on social media..... yeah, that's it.... the Russians and dumb morons who believed them."
At that moment, the party that has always defended civil liberties, always fought censorship by the right wing theocrats, suddenly decided it was just too dangerous to have uncensored speech. They pointed the finger at Twitter and Facebook, and threatened them. They whipped up the tech employees, making them feel responsible for the tangerine, when it was their own horror show of a primary process that doomed them.
What's really weird is that if you think about it, the people who they think need curated, safe, censored information are the people who voted for Obama in 2012, but voted for Trump in 2016, or stayed home. They think their own voters in 2012 are too dumb to weed out misinformation themselves.
We will find out soon, since these protests were vastly larger than the ones against the lockdown (you remember how the media talked about how dangerous those ones were due to covid19, but immediately ignored that when the protest was something that they personally support). Yeah, the virus doesn't care whether your protest is journalist approved.
I know you know that, and I'm wondering if you think the protests are going to cause a large spike in infections?
I don't expect anyone will be able to definitively identify the effect of protests in the context of imminent or continuing reopening of much of the country.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The one admittedly lagging indicator that I'm watching is hospitalized cases.
So far that's ok, and ideally you could possibly have an increase in positive cases throughout a population without more hospitalizations if high risk people isolate themselves. But yeah, hope it doesn't go sideways.
Here's something to think about - total cases for the world were up about 2% yesterday. US cases were up a little over 20K. If US cases were increasing at the average rate of the whole world, it would have been closer to 40K. Similar story in Europe, but more so; there more than half of the new cases are in Russia. So considering Western Europe, the epidemic has been greatly reduced and is growing elsewhere.
What's happening very quickly is that Asia and South America are now having a disproportionate amount of the new cases, even with China, Japan and S. Korea reporting almost none. And the spread is happening in countries where the testing capacity is relatively low.
If the lockdowns had had no effect, I can't see how to explain the dramatic shift over the last month in where the new cases are.
The general reaction of authorities to the epidemic seems to me very similar to an immune reaction. You have a strong initial reaction to an infection, and then it moderates. Earlier is better, but either too much or too little can kill you. Once it is slowed, you can go back to a relatively normal metabolism.
What’s worse is the new trend of digging up something you said/did that was of little societal impact at the time, but is now unforgivably offensive, and society punishing you retroactively under the new rules.
Just saying, if you're going to have a conspiracy, there's a much better one to use as your basis.
the actual technology is a a sub skin electronic ink that is implanted during vaccination that can be read with a cell phone, used to track vaccinations in less developed countries
The Mark of the Beast has been interpreted to refer to social security numbers, license plate numbers, credit card numbers, dollar bill serial numbers, bar codes, RFID codes, and any number of numbers throughout history. This is just the latest paranoid fixation of the Christian right attempting to justify their constant fear of the future. Tomorrow, when it turns out Bill Gates wasn't the antichrist all along, they'll find another number to obsess over.
It's still nonsense, even when the context is understood, and it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously, or treated with respect.
so these could be said to be prefigurations of the end time pattern, as in satan keeps trying various ways and keeps getting defeated, which would in their mind lend credence to constant concern about these things
Do you have a source on that?
1) Bill Gates was convicted of monopolistic practices while he was running a global company attempting to seize power.
2) Almost immediately after this conviction, he suddenly becomes philanthropic and donates most of his wealth to a non-profit that he's in control of.
3) This non-profit runs social experiments throughout the world, including mass vaccination programs
4) He has a motivation (the exact nature of which is fuzzy in the right wing stuff I've seen) to have everyone vaccinated. (this is where some folks talk about microchips, others talk about financial motivations).
5) He is partners with George Soros, working together for a globalist agenda. According to the theory, their aim is to end nationalism and replace it with a unified earth type structure.
Who decided this is over and in the past tense? That's what troubling me, personally. I feel there's a point at which people are going to look down and realize we've run off a cliff into midair. We may not be in danger of having the hospitals overrun, so it could be ok, but it makes me nervous. If reopening goes well in the US and western Europe, what about the countries where the epidemic is spreading now at an ever increasing rate?
Daily new cases have been trending up for roughly a month, and daily new deaths have been declining, but may be turning a corner right now.
That has been the most reasoned, data driven debates I have found since this all started and the narratives are basically nothing like the consensus in mass media.
The real story is not that a few nut jobs believe it - a huge chunk of the population actually believes it. https://news.yahoo.com/new-yahoo-news-you-gov-poll-shows-cor...
YouGov is a joke. Massive selection bias in their polling.
And it's not like academia is immune to this. Selection bias? Claims of causation? I bet half of the researchers on this list could have their work criticized in a similar manner.
>"marijuana makes young black people mentally ill and violent."
Interesting framing of his quoted passage. He doesn't say it makes "black people" mentally ill and violent, he says it makes all people mentally ill and violent. Whether or not that's true (I don't believe it is), that's a bad faith interpretation of his argument.