Comment by cttrhow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cttrhow | Hacker News Reader

So I'm a conspiracy theorist and at this point I have no hope of stopping to be one.

Simple example that resonates well with current situation - when covid broke out I was spending a lot of energy ingesting everything I could. To my surprise, the vast majorities of predictions made by experts did not come true. I remember back in April-May-June media would predict that cases will skyrocket in two-three weeks and everything will go to hell. But it did not; in "two-three weeks" someone else would again say "we are two-three weeks away from disaster". No one ever retracted their pieces or issued a correction, everyone just forgotten about predictions that never came true. Most of my friends are happy to keep on listening to such experts. The media are happy to promote the experts further.

So how am I supposed to not be... heavily sceptical when we don't held opinion makers accountable for what they say?

(I know what I'm saying is not 100% related to article, but I just want to see through media bullshit, and need to vent somewhere.)

I have not seen anyone make unqualified predictions of "disaster in 2-3 weeks".

It is easy to imagine you are referring to tabloids exaggerating claims to make them clickbaity ("Y2K will cause problems in traffic systems" -> "your car might explode on Jan 1st 2000!"), or twisted interpretation of the reports where a qualified statement is turned absolute ("X might happen unless we take precautions" -> "X will happen!"), fabricated alt-right news meant to politicize and divide, or any number of other confusions.

Can you give some sources, to help clear it up?

For me, "the media publishes things that are not true" does not count as a conspiracy theory. I've never seen eg. Chomsky's Propaganda Model[1] described as a conspiracy theory.

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

Edit: After brief googling apparently it has totally been described as a conspiracy theory. I guess this illustrates an issue with the term "conspiracy theory".

Edit2: Like other posters, I'd like to know what predictions you're talking about. The big, scary one I recall was the Imperial study that predicted 500k total deaths in the UK in a completely unmitigated scenario, or much lower numbers with various mitigations. As it is we've had 60k deaths so far, with very severe mitigation measures. Which doesn't look like a wildly wrong prediction to me.

The response to this way of thinking is "we didn't know stuff we know now back then", "we learnt things as we went along, and updated our models, advice, warnings"

The mask thing is hardest to justify as the whole of Asia was saying they worked back then and the reasons given for why they said "they don't work" back then is "well they had to lie because we didn't have enough masks to go around and we didn't want you to panic" which admits a lie.

Then back then they said "masks do work, but we don't have enough" which implied they were lying initially but can be explained by saying " we didn't know the full facts" again.

So an outsider might see these messages as a kind of benevolent way to effect behaviour change amongst PPE shortages and to stop panic, and another sees behaviour modification as lying and manipulation common in conspiracy theories.

Sure, I know experts may not know everything. However I'd like people taking responsibility for what they said. I don't see anyone admitting "Yes, I was wrong but I did my best to approximate the truth". I don't see anyone explaining what exactly they were wrong about and how their thinking has changed few months later; what they would have said in hindsight. That's what I'd expect from true authorities but it never happens.

Did you also make note of the things that they were correct about, or did you fixate on exaggerations which did not play out?

Probably some small scale predictions were right, but I did not maintain a complete log of everything that was said. The general picture about when and how things will go to hell did not play out. This is the single thing I care about most - that disaster scenario did not happen in two-three weeks, despite being predicted many times. And most of the time it wasn't a "balanced" prediction like "if we are unlucky millions die, but most likely only few thousands"; it was more often than not pure fear mongering.

Also, I think it's really uncharitable to use the word "fixate" here.

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