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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

> in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed.

"Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.

These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."

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> There's a growing group that believes ... certain fields are "in on it" ... some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing

I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years:

1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.

2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005.

3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat.

4. Snowden revelations.

5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions.

6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access.

You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.

> Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region.

My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.

Since Vietnam the war community has wanted one do over after another. To prove that war has a useful role in foreign policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome

Isn't it an effect of a feeling caused by governments using experts in a way letting (too often and a too large part of) the public think that they, at worst, are all (gov & experts alike) pushing their own short-termed and only self-beneficial agendas or, at best, nearly always devise some "Grand Plan" which then appears to cost much more than budgeted, gives less than promised and has unwanted unexpected side-effects?

There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects.

It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.

I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.

That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.

I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering.

CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side.

Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.

Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes.

So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.

Fox News has been doing this literally for decades, to the point where they have zero journalistic credibility anymore. CNN is rather tame by comparison.

Sure, but their goal has always been to simply appeal to their base rather than to evangelize the gospel of the GOP. They're far too partisan an institution to be attempting a shot like that.

The difference is that the left-leaning news institutions make up the bulk of the "mainstream media" and they're now just a mirror-image of fox news. And their winning strategy in 2020 is not to become the clone of the right's repugnant rhetoric. The winning strategy should be to convert the moderates or those slightly right of center; yet the more they assume the shape of Fox News the less disingenuous they appear, which makes this task ever less likely. I literally have friends who were life long liberals 4 or 5 months ago who got sucked into some strange corners of the conspiratorial right wing web and many of their grievances are against the mainstream media. Many of which are hard to argue against.

You can't expect a private sector media organization to "do the right thing." It's the old hoping for behavior B while rewarding behavior A. The only way to get a media organization that serves the public is to fund it with public money and make it an independent institution just like the judiciary and the central bank (and sometimes the statistics organization).

What can the media do when people would rather read a literal propaganda piece on facebook, watch some quack on fox news, listen to conspiracy theories on AM radio, or hear their preacher spew bigoted nonsense every sunday? We aren't taught how to continually educate ourselves about the world after school, so we would rather lean into things that confirm our biases rather than expand our perspective.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy that's been ongoing since the 80s. An entire political party's ideology is based on the idea that government doesn't work and when in power they set out to prove it by making government dysfunctional by defunding agencies and confusing their mandates.

That same party politicized clean air regulations, climate change, and wearing masks. This has crippled expertise because if one side can just pay anyone to say anything, whats the point?

The cities and States with the worst public education systems and the highest crime rates have been run by one party, the Democrats, for 50+ years. Some 100+!

They can and have continued to raise taxes and subsequently squander any money they collect. Any attempt to break that stranglehold, such as changing teachers union hiring practices or allowing for charter schools, is met with total resistance.

You’re right that government is the problem, but get it right which party is responsible.

Thats just utterly untrue and the reverse of whats actually true.

"states that were coded as blue based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as red. Students in blue states scored significantly higher on outcome measures of math and reading in grades four and eight than did students in red states."

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED503486.pdf

I note that koolba's comment was evidence-lite and really rather partisan. So it is probably incorrect.

However, claiming the reverse is true is also evidence-lite. That paper looks like it was a fairly cursory piece of work and didn't account for population size or characteristics (eg, number of disadvantaged students) in the correlation work.

I suspect what it really shows is that political affiliation isn't the biggest driver of outcomes. Looking at the table at the end of the paper and thinking about population, I suspect the aim would be more of what Massachusetts does and less of what California does (both Democrat states) if possible.

Is there any correlation at all between increased school funding and better educational outcomes? For instance, Utah spends $5k per student per year while Baltimore spends $25k per student per year. Utahan children have higher graduation rates, better GPAs, and better standardized test scores. It's the same across the US from NYC to LA.

I'm growing more and more skeptical that throwing more and more money into the furnace that is the US education system is suddenly going to produce better outcomes. How much more must Baltimore spend? $30k a student? $50k a student? $100k a student? Where's the magic number?

It could be four things:

  - Comparing two statistical flukes.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has better wealth distribution.
  - Socio-economic factor: Utah has affordable housing and Baltimore so the effective wealth gap is lower.
  - Baltimore has other issues.

According to [1] Utah spends $10,510 per student per year and according to [2] Baltimore spends $16,184. Where did you get your figures?

[1] https://auditor.utah.gov/audit_reports/public-education/

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-s...

I got it from the Annual Survey of School System Finances, U.S. Census Bureau, though on checking it again it's between $6,000 and $7,000 (I was recalling from memory). So not what I put in my comment exactly, but doesn't change my main point in any way.

That’s the most facile thing I’ve ever read. Did it control for cost of living? Did it control for demographics?

In 2019, and I’m using this because you can explore it at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups?... , Mississippi’s 8th grade math mean score was the same as New Hampshire’s, when comparing white students. Mississippi is just way less white than New Hampshire. California, also near the bottom overall, has better white performance than New Hampshire, but not as good as Massachusetts, which has always had a lot of smart people moving to Boston.

The ranking there is simply a diversity/brain drain ranking. Mississippi and California are way more diverse, so they rank low. States with nothing to attract or keep smart parents, like West Virginia, rank low too.

Yes, the whole puzzle becomes much simpler to think about when you consider the possibility that the school scores primarily reflect the quality of students admitted, and not the quality of the education administered.

From a non-US perspective, you described the dominant ideology of both your political parties. I'm not saying they are 'the same', but they both are extreme neoliberale market proponents. They also both embrace a tight intertwined government and enterprise regimen to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell who owns who, or whether it is just one organisation.

Sorry, no, that is not the dominant ideology of both parties. You didn’t say “both sides are the same” but you are equating neoliberalism with anti-science. Go bang that “neoliberals bad” drum somewhere else.

Neoliberals are pro-market, and markets are inherently anti-science.

If they weren't anti-science they wouldn't spend so much time running campaigns to discredit objective scientific research that harms their financial interests - from the effects of tobacco to lead in petrol to opioids to big oil to climate change.

The historical record on this is absolutely crystal clear and unambiguous.

Wow, that's quite a logical pretzel you've twisted yourself into. Congratulations.

Elected officials from both parties have failed us. Yes the Republicans have made it painfully obvious just how little they care about the goals of the American experiment these last 4 years, but the Democratic party isn't fundamentally any better.

The founders set the entire western world down the path of a bastardization of a republic and a representative democracy out of fear that voters are stupid. That choice has inherent risk that leaders will be corrupted and that those elected will move further away from what is in the public's best interests. The founders simply believed that this wouldn't arise, that the system could correct course and weed out the bad actors.

All the Republicans have done since 2016 is shown how that belief fails. We don't have a true democracy, and what semblance of one had been chipped away at for years. The Republican Party of old wasn't wrong in wanting small government, the best way to keep corruption out of a representative system is to keep power out of those representatives' hands. They simply joined the Democratic Party on the side of big government and massive budgetary spending with a different target audience (big business and banks rather than citizens).

The Democratic Party can't be ignored though. They have made a career of spending money they don't have and creating social programs that aren't sustainable and can't properly be defined on the scale of 300M+ citizens. Their solution for any problem is more control and more intricate rules, but that just leads to a less resilient system that is more dependant on the idea of leadership having every answer and solution.

I mean, it is hard to reason with you on your opinion, since anybody who doesn't echo what you say would be just classified by you as a member of this group and his opinion automatically dismissed. And this wouldn't even make you doubt yourself, since "half the people you know are buying into that stuff" already and you seem to be pretty confident that it is them who are fools buying into some cheap nonsense, not you.

However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious.

The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).

> I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them

I am curious about these opinions. Care to share some?

It's not that I wouldn't like to share some, but this question is simply too generic for me to be able to answer it like that.

Doctors on average know more about medical subjects than non-doctors. Engineers generally know more about engineering than non-engineers. Climate scientists know more about what’s going on with the climate than non-climate scientists.

Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people.

Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.

The best I can think besides the usual suspects is a more rare one: "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" which is being read incorrectly as "why bother learning when everything is always wrong [describes 20 major problems with human race]". At that point, it is hard to follow.

I prefer the phrasing "the more you learn, the less you know".

> doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children.

From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions.

"But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).

I definitely agree with your central point that anyone can use any ideology to endorse their own personal beliefs, but it also has to be said that giving the same weight to the feelings of a person versus actual fact, spoken by an expert, is the literal degradation of our society.

Many people lack the necessary expertise to recognize an expert when they see one.

They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert.

To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )

It’s easier to set up a system to provide nonpartisan funding and review of scientific work than it is to have everyone read and source all of the research.

It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science”

These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.

Until those apolitical bodies become institutionalized and perceived by some people as being an expression of an elite caste and then a new political current arises to galvanize people against "elites" and poasibly takes over one of the existing parties (or creates a new one, depending on the country specific political and election rules)

And then you get the Replication Crisis[1], in which we find that a shockingly large number of studies in the social sciences failed to meet the bar for scientific fact.

There are plenty of "actual facts", spoken by "experts", which a few years later turn out to be absolutely false.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Agreed. Its frustrating that the idea that "college is useless and a bad deal" is not challenged more. I see a real difference in terms of rigor, discipline, and professionalism from college grads vs those that didnt go.

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