This is what blows my mind. For a group of people who supposedly rely on institutional knowledge about topics like science and tech, suddenly on this topic its one guys claim against literally dozens of institutions counter claims.
(Saddam had incentive to pretend he had WMD. He certainly didn't want Iran to know he didn't. He obviously didn't want inspectors inside his government buildings. But Bush and his team used Saddam's behavior as evidence he was hiding WMD, rather than the fact that he was hiding the lack of WMD.)
Once the CIA realized that war was inevitable, it went into cover-your-ass-mode and said Saddam might have chemical weapons so that US soldiers wouldn't go into Iraq with insufficient protection in-case there were chemical weapons after all.
Bush was unwilling to listen to counter-naratives. If Condi Rice or, more likely, Colin Powell had been willing to say "I don't think war is such a good idea" maybe it wouldn't have happened. But Bush surrounded himself with yes men. If Powell hadn't supported the war, likely he and his entire staff would have had to resign. If that had happened, Bush would have lost Tony Blair's support and with that, any international support. Bush probably would have at least thought twice about going to Iraq alone.
So in this case, it wasn't so much that the institutions weren't trustworthy, it's that they fell in line with pressure that started from Bush. It doesn't do any good to have experts at your disposal if you're not going to listen to any of them.
Source: Robert Draper's exhaustively researched book on how Iraq happened:
https://www.amazon.com/Start-War-Bush-Administration-America...
Interview with the author:
https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/21417224/why-did-america-invade...
(Also, the U.S. media didn't do its job. The cynical side of me says there's money to be made in covering war. But probably, it was just incompetence. I still haven't forgiven the NYT though.)
How does falling into line with pressure that started from Bush make them trustworthy? That is exactly the kind of failure which makes them untrustworthy.
So were the intelligence institutions trustworthy to provide good information? Yes.
Bush did an end-run around them.
Were they able to stop the U.S. from going to war? No. But that was Congress’s (and maybe the US media’s) job and certainly _those_ institutions failed.
I'm sticking with the 007 analysis that UK intel is golden and the US contact is about as cowboy as a spy can get but won't stand injustice.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-phishing-email-that-hacked-...
That said, considering the context of the election, Trumps close ties with Russia and Russian agents, and the broad and multifaceted attempts at hacking the election attributed to Russia (disinformation farms, hacking state election networks), it is very likely that Russia was also behind the DNC hack. These weak attempts at casting doubt on Russia's involvement are transparent.
You, directly above that: Assange's denials about Russia's involvement aren't credible on its face.
Yeah, I'm confused. This is all beside the point. It is lawful to publish true information about candidates that is of interest to the public.
Actually it's an established fact. They were being watched live on their computers and security cameras as they were doing the hacking.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/dutch...
Is there some connection between State Dept in 2014 and DNC in 2016?
Imaging burning a source so valuable for the sake of the U.S., only to have us elect Trump anyways and four years later pretend like its still an open question whether Russia was involved.
Yes, I guess it's a report. But it contains just assertions, so it's only meaningful if you trust the institution making it. I've read reports that actually contained the process the core conclusion were arrived at, like various opensource investigations from Bellingcat, etc. And these were indeed more convincing.
Not sure why hacker should just go by blind trust to institutions, lol.
"According to Crowdstrike..."
That's it. No one else did any investigation, just Crowdstrike. The same underhanded, dishonest company that LulzSec and Anonymous felt the needs to expose time and time again for their fraudulent ways. People who have no problem lying or framing people.
Honestly, I think "our supposed higher IQ's" (or more precisely: a self-image as being much smarter than average) can actually be a handicap when dealing with areas outside of one's specialty. It can very easily lead to overconfidence.
They go into other fields, declare that the field is just so easy, try to model things as 1m radius spheres of water, see that the four interstitial cell layers of the bovine second stomach are hyper-complex and noisy when saline levels change 2% (or things to that effect), declare that the field still needs to change, write a paper up that is simplistic and help no one in the field, get a bit of press coverage, assuage their damaged egos, and then try out landscape painting or Ethiopian cooking.
This phenomenon of overconfident and un-humble emeritus Physicists is not restricted to just them, I'm afraid, but all people.
Humility is a virtue.
I'm guessing it's a generalization from a relatively common great respect for academic science as an institution. However, even that's far from universal, which the pandemic has shown.
I do agree with you. I think there's at least as much overconfident mistrust of institutions than respect for them there.
Same old biological biases embedded within.
For example, how this forum often lauds certain non-gods and ignores the math that luck of time and place, not inherent abilities, are what bring people wealth.
Ignoring all the alternatives and historical evidence of high taxation’s value to a society, this forum likes to cling to celebrity worship of economists and tech elites who can only be elite given a tilted economic reward system tilted by biological indoctrination that’s proven in experiment....
Or how in a democracy we seem to end up in a pretty tilted political power structure.
But here they are anyway ignoring science because of biological contentment.
Western culture is as irredeemable as any other. Logistical capabilities are what matters, not ideology. Humans can’t escape their own ego though.
The more popular a site is, the more enticing it becomes to those who are interested in marketing/manipulation/etc. To give credit where it's due, I think HN is far more resilient to these kinds of attacks than most other sites. But it's still important to keep in mind that these malicious actors do exist, and are attempting to influence your opinions.
Tech culture is changing. The generation that was primarily brought up around CS and engineering in academia and influenced by the counterculture of the 70s, Free Software and anarchism is being replaced by a tech culture raised by Silicon Valley techo-libertarianism, Reddit and 4chan. The Unabomber manifesto is far more influential on the politics of modern tech culture than the Hacker Manifesto. We've gone from hackers building the web to liberate the world from the gatekeepers of information and communication to hackers wanting to burn the web down because it's too mainstream.
That's a cultural schism that Hacker News hasn't been able to deal with.
It's correlated with the recent rise in Trump's polling. Left wingers who oppose lockdowns, cancel culture and the riots are being pushed towards the right.