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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

If you've had a family member or a friend go down the rabbit hole, you'll understand both the zealotry and the difficulty in peeling it back. Here's what I've observed:

Youtube videos of sermons & bible study -> youtube videos of sermons preaching the end of the world is nigh -> youtube videos of deep state / conspiracy discussion -> youtube channel for a particular conspiracy theorist -> alternative website that isn't youtube[0] to consistently dole out conspiracy information (end state)

The end result a couple years later is that it now sounds crazy to suggest that Dr Fauci is not a mass murderer, to suggest that the US is not currently engaging in a shadow-WWIII with China, and to suggest that covid-19 is not a bioweapon produced by China. Forget about peeling back "ordinary" disinformation like the kind that gets flagged on twitter.

[0] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Wengui#G_News

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Sorry for asking, but is this shadow-WWIII supposed to be a hot war? An economic cold war seems obvious from my steady diet of such conspiracy-minded websites as Reuters.

(and if covid-19 were a bioweapon, why would people be anti-mask anti-vax?)

> Sorry for asking, but is this shadow-WWIII supposed to be a hot war?

Well, I try to avoid talking about politics with her, but last I heard the US is "soon" going to be assassinating the leadership of China and potentially it will be sparking a nuclear war.

> (and if covid-19 were a bioweapon, why would people be anti-mask anti-vax?)

Theres different groups of conspiracy theorists. In this case they are not anti-mask at all, although for vax I was recently warned we don't know if the vaccine is actually part of China's ploy to infect people so we should be cautious.

Ah, ok. Good luck!

> Well, I try to avoid talking about politics with her, but last I heard the US is "soon" going to be assassinating the leadership of China and potentially it will be sparking a nuclear war.

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

On 3 January 2020, a United States drone strike near Baghdad International Airport targeted and killed Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani while he was on his way to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi in Baghdad. Soleimani was commander of the Quds Force, one of five branches of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and was considered the second most powerful person of Iran, subordinate to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Four Iranian and five Iraqi nationals were killed along with Soleimani, including the deputy chairman of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and commander of the Iran-backed Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis – a person designated as a terrorist by the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Indeed the variables (and values of those variables) are not identical between the two scenarios (of which the Soleimani incident is just one example from a very long historic list), but anyone who interprets such concerns about geopolitical relations with China as "crazy" might want to turn their critical lens on themselves and see if anything appears (and while doing so, one should keep in front of mind that seeing faults in one's own thinking is far more difficult than seeing it in the thinking of others).

To me, those who enthusiastically and confidently underweight risk are a bigger danger than those who overweight it, and from an aggregate societal perspective, there are a hell of a lot more of the former than the latter. At the end of the day, the amount of actual risk in the system, is the amount of actual risk in the system, which is distinctly different than how most people perceive it, which seems to be roughly that the amount of risk in the system is that which someone says is in the system (aka: an opinion). Reality is risky/problematic enough as it is - layering on this unnecessary phenomenon of completely mistaking our [opinions of X] for [actual X] (and getting angry and anyone who dares to disagree) exacerbates the problem.

This is getting a little off-topic, I was just answering a question. I don't consider the existence of risk of conflict with China to be misinformation, what I consider misinformation is interpreting Trump's december 2nd speech in which he mentions "waging war on slavery" as a confirmation that the missiles will soon be flying.

If you want to understand what kind of misinformation exists on GNews, please feel free to peruse it and see for yourself.

That’s funny there are signs in my neighborhood that say “PEDOPHILE ALERT” with a Gnews link.

>conspiracy theorist

The confirmed CIA operations are enough to make someone a radical. To suggest the US hasn't been in a shadow war with china would require ignoring what our intelligence agencies have been continuously telling us.

It would not be difficult to assemble the same kind of narrative based on plentiful evidence of the same abstract psychological behavior, except from the radical left.

I happened to read a BLM post on Medium once, and I now get a daily email of several blog posts that are at least as delusional as the above beliefs about how all white people are not just racist, but fundamentally and immutably racist.

Underappreciated (and rarely discussed in the media) is that this sort of radical content amplifies the sentiments of those who are on the alternate end of the spectrum (and vice-versa), in an ever intensifying negative feedback loop. I often wonder if politicians and forum/media commentators are completely oblivious to this notion, or if they are aware of it but have some sort of a "the ends justify the means" thing going on. I also often wonder why there is essentially zero initiative whatsoever to reach out to these communities and establish some sort of a dialogue, as is done with peace talks with warring terrorist organizations - again, has this idea literally never crossed a single person's mind...or has it, but the utter lack of public discussion of the idea is a ~"strategic decision" of some kind? (That it never seems to come up even in forums suggests the former is the more likely of the two explanations.)

Human consciousness is a hell of a drug.

> It would not be difficult to assemble the same kind of narrative based on plentiful evidence of the same abstract psychological behavior, except from the radical left.

To be fair, I do think this is an underappreciated point. Despite the fact that I'm a leftist, I do see lots of misinformation coming from the left, and I've seen leftist facebook groups that quickly devolve into memes about killing landlords or other extremist drivel.

> I happened to read a BLM post on Medium once, and I now get a daily email of several blog posts that are at least as delusional as the above beliefs about how all white people are not just racist, but fundamentally and immutably racist.

Although I agree the left can spew out all kinds of BS, the difference here is that your example is lukewarm extremist content at best. This kind of content paints wild ideas but does not contest reality or directly incite weird actions. Here's some examples of what I mean:

* (contesting reality) My family member who reads GNews will sometimes randomly start conversations with absolutely out-there tidbits of misinformation like "oh my god, did you know JFK Jr is still alive? I just saw a video that proved it"

* (inciting actions) My family member who reads GNews went out of her way to acquire HCQ as a "just in case", and also tried to convince family members in China who had a fever (unconfirmed covid) to take it without even seeing a doctor. At some point she considered taking HCQ as a preventative for covid despite being being at nearly 0 risk of exposure (never going outside)

> I often wonder if politicians and forum/media commentators are completely oblivious to this notion, or if they are aware of it but have some sort of a "the ends justify the means" thing going on.

I strongly suspect this is the case.

> the difference here is that your example is lukewarm extremist content at best

That is "a" difference, not the difference

> This kind of content paints wild ideas but does not contest reality

It describes reality in ways that are not actually true.

> or directly incite weird actions.

You do not know the direct or indirect consequences of such content. Understanding causation in a complex, chaotic system is far beyond the cognitive capabilities of the human mind. To make it even worse, the mind typically (and incorrectly) perceives itself to be capable of such calculations.

> Here's some examples of what I mean

I belong to a wide variety of communities - I could also provide similar examples of silly thinking from those who fall into various categorizations. I don't disagree that the "far right" types may indeed pose greater risk (but to be clear: whether that is actually true, is unknown, and a body count perspective strongly suggests otherwise [1]), but to speak as if they are the only risk worth worrying about is itself contesting reality.

Reality is infinitely complex, but the conscious mind does not perceive it this way. Even worse, it (the mind, which is in ultimate control of each comment posted on forums like this) seems to refuse to even consider (almost without exception) that it is infinitely complex. I believe that this may be much more dangerous than it may appear (to the mind...which may happen to be just a little biased on the subject).

[1] Here I refer to war, in general, which is not the fault of "the far right", who seem to very conveniently get all the media attention.

I wouldn't say only far-right extremism is dangerous, any extremism that incites actions and contests reality is dangerous.

Gnews (or atleast the Guo stuff) is arguably not even far-right, most of their content is orthogonal to US left/right divisions and they just happen to be supportive of Trump as Trump is vocally anti-China (and because they allied with Bannon in the past year or so)

To clarify: have you modified your opinion on the matter such that you now no longer consider far right beliefs to be especially dangerous, but rather only note that they are one of many risks, and that the true risk in the system is unknown and largely unknowable due to the inherent complexity of a large chaotic system?

> have you modified your opinion on the matter such that you now no longer consider far right beliefs to be especially dangerous, but rather only note that they are one of many risks

This was always my belief. If you examine my original post[0] I do not even discuss left/right framing, your response to my post introduced it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345741

> and that the true risk in the system is unknown and largely unknowable due to the inherent complexity of a large chaotic system

I hadn't previously considered where the "true risk in the system" lies because my concerns with misinformation are more local (will my mother-in-law do something crazy this week?), but yes I would say that I think this is a reasonable assessment. If you're thinking of society as a system, then it is impossible to determine precisely which elements introduce risk of social instability/destruction for precisely the reason you mention.

Ah, my mistake...I attributed a portion of the general topic to your comment (ah, the sweet irony)!

Rather than far right, I actually meant the subculture that you (seemed) to be referring to. But your last response here well illustrates that you seem to appreciate the complexity (and uncertainty) of the system, which is the fundamental idea I was hoping to introduce into the memeplex.

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