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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

The fact that people can be literally dying from COVID in a hospital yet still deny its existence has almost totally destroyed any faith I have in humanity.

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good friend of mine is a nurse. She has seen people in the ER with Covid deny that it exists too. There's people currently on oxygen who go "nah that doesn't exist I don't have it, the media made that up". So yeah

Thankfully, life has a way of selecting against people who fail to act to preserve their own.

(Said as someone whose fiance is an ICU nurse)

Social Darwinism, alive and well on HN...

This is actual Darwinism.

Unfortunately that doesn't work so well for a disease whose main source of risk to each person is the behaviour of other people.

On a different time scale it does. It’s selecting against groups/societies that reward, value or permit the kinds of behaviours and belief systems that allow such doggedly wilful ignorance to flourish.

Sorry, that doesn't work when most groups/societies are heterogeneous in ideals. Even most people being reasonable isn't enough when the behavior of the few who aren't must be tolerated in the name of freedom. So natural selection alone won't actually improve anything.

It's a strangely western phenomenon. People might be callous about safety measures here in India, but absolutely no one in my extended circle of friends and family has ever denied its existence or that it's something people need to be careful about.

Globally there's far more trust for institutions and authority than in America. Cultures which respect the elderly, the professional, and the official. Even beyond respect it extends to obedience in some places.

I definitely see it in my own culture, which is Arab. It's a double edged sword, and can be said to enable further oppression, but in a crisis situation it's useful.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/11/17/south-...

Place your faith in natural selection.

In addition to being ugly, this sentiment is pretty misguided. The selection pressure is far too mild to have any evolutionary impact.

To whit: covid selects primarily against individuals beyond their reproductive age, selects far too small of the population (unless we see these deaths continue for decades), and is only mildly selecting for anti mask populations.

Anyone who treats science as a religion ends up with a pretty terrifying morality.

You can remove science from that statement and it'll still be true. Whoever derives their morality from religion will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Thankfully nowadays even people claiming they do so often actually don't. I.e homosexuality is amoral according to the texts, but society moved on for the most part.

amoral =/= immoral

You can remove religion and morality from that statement and it'll still be true.

People will at times behave pretty abhorrently.

Stalin wasn't religious, but he still initiated a gigantic slaughter of his own countrymen. Ditto Mao.

Just trying to make the point that being horrible correlates with being human, not being religious.

Most importantly, being anti-mask can't be attributed to a clear genetic variable (although I suppose there might be some very weak correlation), and natural selection takes way, way longer than a human lifetime to create noticeable results anyway. Not even getting into the fact that there's much more to evolution than natural selection. It actually scares me that supposedly "pro-science" people have such simplified views about it.

Note that the timescale for seeing results is related to the selection pressure. You can see very fast results (e.g. a single or few generations) if the pressure is extraordinary.

AFAIK this only happens via guided intervention (see humans selective breeding of crops, dogs, foxes, etc)

What helps me to keep faith in humanity is imagining being alive during Galileo‘s time. How suffocating it must have been for him to find everyone everywhere rejecting science..? Sure we have a large number of people now that don’t believe in masks, vaccines, etc.., but keep in mind that the majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science. Progress is being made, just sometimes it requires a step back to see it.

> majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science

Why would Trump support accelerated vaccines if he didn’t believe in COVID and science?

Do you yourself truthfully believe that Trump wanted to make policy decisions based on the best science available?

The most scientific policy would be to physically force everyone to stay in a room alone for months and physically force them to wash their hands after they use the bathroom, etc. This is the best way to get rid of the virus and it describes a horrific, dystopian, society.

Trump isn’t even close to the best man for the job of handling a pandemic but to pretend we should be following science to the t is politically ignorant (as most scientists would tell you.)

“Based on science” means using science as a core part of the decision making process.

It sounds like you actually agree with what I said, but also misunderstood.

They know COVID is real and they almost certainly believe in science. They just don't care if it doesn't line their pockets.

Agree, but that doesn’t match the rhetoric above. The voter mindset is similar. People are choosing “the economy” over shutdowns, not ignoring science.

Yeah well back when YouTube started censoring videos suggesting a connection between vitamin D deficiency and covid it became pretty clear times are not particularly changed from Galieo’s.

Could you provide a source please? Were the videos making claims that taking Vitamin D would protect against COVID or some other misinformation, or were they legitimately talking about mortality rates of those with v.D deficiencies?

I think there is a clear difference in private platforms stopping the spread of misinformation (you aren’t free to use their platform to spread information harmful to society) and what happened to Galileo.

But I am making an assumption because I don’t actually know what videos you are referring to.

The fact that YouTube exists at all shows how much things have changed since Galileo.

Censoring? De-monetizing maybe but they do that with every video mentioning Covid no matter the contents.

> majority of the popular vote in the US voted for someone that does believe in science

You're an optimistic one. They would have voted for a three legged donkey with a nose ring and gold tooth. As long as it wasn't DJT.

The thing that surprises me about modern politics is how much hate there is. I wonder if it was always this bad, or if the internet just shines a light on what was always there.

It really was not always like this. At all.

Some people blame the rise of 24 hours cable news channels. Others blame the rise of the Internet. Both of these have to do with disseminating more information to more people. Is it the fact that there is more information (quantity) or is the information itself (quality)?

That’s good to know.

I don’t know, whatever it is, I really loathe it. It’s practically impossible to have a rational discussion about anything related to politics. Everything seems to degenerate into entrenched emotional arguments rather than discussing actual facts.

I think that's because a) a lot of people nowadays think their feelings hold more importance than somebody else's facts (outrage is a terrible advisor) and b) the facts themselves have become less tangible because there seems to be a myriad of sides to anything, with so many sources putting their spin on things that even just arriving at a neutral base for an argument takes more effort than people are willing/can afford to expend. Especially because that effort has to be expended against the pull of their own biases, which have gotten pretty entrenched thanks to the online echo chambers. Cognitive dissonance is exhausting, so people often just shut down and go into emotional combat mode when faced with opposing views, even when the views are presented in a sensible manner -- and mostly, they are not, because why bother if the gulf is already so large and the people on the other side are clearly idiots.

Millions upon millions die around the world each year due to poor choices. Don't let a fraction of that amount getting a bad flu change your outlook. Humanity is doing just fine. Could be better, could be worse, but take a slow walk around the block and I think you'll agree.

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