Hacker News Reader

Comment by caiobegotti | Hacker News Reader

I typed about 3 paragraphs trying to explain it a bit but honestly I had to delete it because I don't think here is a safe arena and I am pretty sure would I would get downvoted heavily as I think a good chunk of the HN crowd sometimes lean too much towards denialism about the coronavirus. My gmail address is my username in case anyone is curious about my take on how things are going in Brazil. All I can say now is that winter is approaching and southern Brazil usually has dry flu seasons, so any "pretty good" report is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.

View on HN

> a good chunk of the HN crowd sometimes lean too much towards denialism about the coronavirus

I don't think that's true at all, I've never seen anything like that downvoted here. HN seems to be a generally well-educated, scientifically-minded crowd.

Please post, por favor!

I would even say it is rather the opposite. I have seen a lot of doomers and FUD pushers here, who pretended until very recently that the disease was much worse than the health officials were claiming, that anyone who thought the death rate was well within 1% was a conspiracy theorist, etc. There is a large educated crowd here who will believe CNN or the NYT over infectious disease specialists.

I mean, we have multiple [1] examples [2] of states manipulating the data in order to make a stronger case for reopening. I've seen multiple people here on HN claim that the virus is 'just a flu' and it's not like it's out of our president's MO to manipulate data to make things look better.

There's a large educated crowd here who refuse to believe what the health researchers are saying or what studies have found in favor of partisan nonsense.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23236613

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/states-manipulate-coronaviru...

I was called a denialist on Twitter because I thought my local government did a reasonable job in a serious situation with the information available at the time, and prevented a lot of deaths.

This was shocking to the person who was convinced that the government was secretly trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people by using 5G to beam viruses into people through radio.

So, I guess it all depends on what denialism means these days.

I’ve seen it many many times. Considering the wealth gap, there is probably a correlation between MBA-types who are in the startup world in Brazil and know about HN, and being right-leaning.

How chilling that several Brazilian posters are actually afraid of publishing negative opinions about the government.

And yet the comments speaking favorably of the government are the ones that are being heavily downvoated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com