Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinalumfoil | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand why are people so scared of distrust of authority? If it's true why does it require censorship to defend?

View on HN

Because every fact is disputed. There's no truth anymore. Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States.

> Look no further than the use of masks and hydroxychloroquine in the United States.

Masks work to help stop the spread and hydroxychloroquine has no evidence that it helps anyone who is sick.

There, was that so hard?

I completely agree with you but there's a huge swath of people that don't.

Then they ignore evidence to believe what they want to, not what is most logical.

Internet or no, those people were always going to be misinformed. Because they choose to be.

For many, yes. That’s the problem.

> anymore

There never was. Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.

With regards to my comment about the mask and medicine, what's not truthful about it? There are still people that don't believe that masks help, and that hydroxychloroquine will help them.

Not in regard to just that but to people in general. People are telling you the world as they perceive it. I don't live in the anti-mask-pro-HQwhatever world either, but I have found it much more effective to let people have their truths than to get in a never-ending fractal of battles that just make people dig their heels in and hate each other.

The fact that the truth monopolists first declared that masks don't work and now they do?

I always believed they work, even when the government first lied about that.

> Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.

Embrace... falsehood?

You're still doing it! All truths can be true simultaneously because they are a property of the observer.

> If it's true why does it require censorship to defend?

It's not Fort Knox to need defending.

What really happens is - it turns out a significant portion of human beings are vulnerable to what, for lack of a better term, could be called bullshit. It's part just plain ignorance, part honest mistake, part willful deception. As long as only a few fall prey to it, as long as times are not too trying, as long as the bullshit doesn't make them do crazy and/or destructive things, then it's more or less okay - I mean, that's basically the default state of humanity since forever.

But when those conditions are not true anymore, some feedback loops need to be activated.

It doesn’t. We don’t see that in practice, either. We see deliberate misinformation censored. It just so happens that the authorities on topics are also right a good amount of the time. Misinformation necessarily has to attack authority. You don’t need to be spreading misinformation to challenge authority.

Because this particular kind of conspiracism feels likely to get people killed. Not just the pizza parlour, but a lot of this stuff gets cited by mass shooters (+), and racial misinformation in particular, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in onwards, has been involved in most genocides of history.

(+) What happened to mass shootings? Have they just vanished from the news cycle from outside the US, or vanished under the high covid death rate, or been ended by lockdown?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com