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Your problem here is not "lies" per se. Your problem is that you trust different sources of information from your family (or your coworkers). You believe all four of the claims you listed are lies because you were told it by sources of information you trust. Your family has the opposite belief about COVID because they were told it by sources of information they trust, and the sources they trust are different from the ones you trust. (Note, btw, that I personally agree with your "lie" judgment on only two of the four claims--the COVID claim is one of them, so I evidently have a different set of information sources I trust than either you or your family.)

Your counter argument would probably be that the sources of information you trust are obviously more reliable than the sources of information your family trusts. But my response would be that, if we actually look at track records, no source of information available to any of us is all that trustworthy; all of them will purvey lies and misinformation if it serves their interests. While I suppose one could describe that problem as "lies", it's actually much worse than that simple term suggests: as I have just shown above, not only are we being told lies, but we can't even agree on which things we are being told are lies and which are not, because there are no sources of information that have maintained a good enough track record of trustworthiness to serve as arbiters to such disputes.

I chose specific examples because this is no longer abstract to me.

* Is COVID19 a hoax?

* Is Obama a Muslim from Kenya?

* Will Hydroxychloroquine save you from COVID?

* Are the November 2020 election's results under question?

Quit hiding behind the "unreliable sources" excuse. We have actual issues at play here and ultimately determines the course of my family.

Lets put it this way: do I go to New Years celebration or not with my family? Do I follow them to Disney World next month? How much should I work to convince my family that flying on an airplane is a bad idea? Do I just watch them recklessly endanger their lives to see Mickey Mouse?

What I'm finding is that cutting myself off is counterproductive: they'll continue to perform recklessly and I simply lose my ability to communicate with them. A degree of balance is needed. But the lies perpetrated in the media are not helping me at all.

"Shamelessness as a strategy". The lies perpetrated by those in power have an effect on my family. Politicians are shameless about it: they don't care about the personal effects its having.

> We have actual issues at play here

The only actual issue in play for you personally is COVID, and I've already said I agree with your judgment about the "COVID is a hoax" belief being a lie. My point about "unreliable sources" was not that your particular judgment about COVID was wrong; it was to try to get at the root cause of why your belief is so dramatically different from your family's, and why I think it will be so difficult to get them to change.

However, I am perfectly willing to give specific answers to the specific questions you ask:

> do I go to New Years celebration or not with my family?

Based on what you have described, I wouldn't go if I were in your place. My wife and I have refused to participate in some gatherings with her family for much the same reasons (their belief is not as extreme as "COVID is a hoax", but we are not confident enough in them taking the proper precautions to risk it, particularly as my wife already has some chronic health issues).

> Do I follow them to Disney World next month?

Same answer as above. (Note that in this case, you also have to worry about how reliable other people at Disney World are at taking proper precautions.)

> How much should I work to convince my family that flying on an airplane is a bad idea?

Based on what you've described, unfortunately I think you have very little chance of succeeding between now and next month, so to me it's more a matter of how much risk of permanently alienating your family you are willing to take in an attempt that will almost certainly be futile.

Why do I think you have very little chance of succeeding? Well, that's what my discussion about sources of information was about. You think the problem is to convince your family that "COVID is a hoax" is a lie. But I think your problem is much harder: to convince your family that the sources of information they trust are so unreliable that they should stop trusting them and start trusting the sources of information that you trust instead. Which is going to be a very heavy lift since the sources of information you trust have also told lies.

It's possible that you refusing to go, and explaining why, will move the needle some.

> Do I just watch them recklessly endanger their lives to see Mickey Mouse?

I'm very sorry that you find yourself in such a position, and I'm also very sorry that I don't have any good ideas for how you could stop them between now and next month. Unfortunately, for the reasons I have given above, I don't have any such ideas, other than refusing to go yourself and making sure to explain to them why you are refusing.

> the lies perpetrated in the media are not helping me at all.

I'm responding to this separately because I want to keep this more general point separate from my responses to your more specific questions.

I agree that lies perpetrated in the media are not helping anyone; but my point is that the lies are on all sides--every media source perpetrates lies. To take just the COVID example, even the simple number of how many people have died "of COVID", which is trumpeted in the media all the time, is a lie. The fact is that nobody knows what that number is; it's impossible to find out because the relevant data is not even available for every case. And even if it were, judgment calls would be involved in individual cases as to whether COVID was really the primary cause of death.

One could argue that the number used in the media should be close to the "real" number, because the various errors involved should to some extent offset each other. But nobody makes that argument. The number is simply asserted as fact and no argument is allowed. What's more, if the argument were made, it would be a weak one: once we admit that there are sources of error in the reported "COVID death" number, the best way to allow for them is to estimate excess deaths due to COVID--the deaths that would not have occurred had the person not caught COVID. Nobody has a reliable estimate of that number; the excess death estimates that are available (e.g., the one on the CDC's website [1]) explicitly say that they can't pick out the excess deaths due to COVID from the excess deaths due to other causes, and that they also can't estimate whether some jurisdictions had fewer deaths than expected--which of course would lower the overall excess death count for the country. What information we do have indicates to me that the reported COVID death number for the US, at least, is probably a substantial overestimate. But that's a judgment call about which reasonable people can differ--which in itself is enough to make the media insistence on that number a lie.

Furthermore, even if we have established that some particular death or set of deaths had COVID as a primary cause, that still doesn't tell us why it happened. Did that person not take precautions? Did someone else close to them not take precautions and they didn't allow for that? Was it just bad luck--someone who did take reasonable precautions but got COVID anyway because no precaution is perfect? Or were they, say, in a nursing home which was forced by a state governor to accept COVID infected patients from hospitals even though the nursing home had no way to quarantine those people and keep them separate from the other residents? We have some estimates of how many deaths were due to the latter cause, and they're not small numbers--yet that same state governor got an Emmy award. And for most cases in the US, we don't have that information at all. Which means the overall numbers tell us nothing useful about what to do to prevent further deaths. Certainly lockdowns don't seem to be helping: the areas with the strictest lockdowns also seem to be having the worst spikes in case numbers (although much the same caveats that apply to the death numbers also apply to the case numbers). Yet we are told constantly by the media and public health authorities that lockdowns are necessary.

In short, while it is true that "COVID is a hoax" is a lie, so are many other claims about COVID made by politicians and in the media. And, as you say, the politicians and the media do not care about the impact their lies have on everyone. They only care about the benefit to themselves. Not a good situation.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

And your problem is going in circles and not listening to the person you're replying to. You are guilty of doing the exact same philosophical run-around that he's complaining about.

The fact is, this person is watching his close family commit a slow-motion trainwreck, and he's asking for ways to prevent it or mitigate it. If they do nothing, it's quite likely that his family or friends will suffer serious health consequences. Theoretical exercises about whether COVID this-or-that is really a lie or not, aren't of any help.

Imagine berating a someone who got lost in the woods and has been lost for days and is starving, for not having the right map or not following the trail, or debating the legitimacy of hiking for recreation at all, instead of feeding him or giving him water.

> this person is watching his close family commit a slow-motion trainwreck, and he's asking for ways to prevent it or mitigate it

And my point is that talking about "lies" will not do that. In order to prevent or mitigate the trainwreck, he would have to convince his family to fundamentally change which sources of information they trust. That's a very, very hard thing to do, but telling people that their beliefs are "lies" doesn't help at all; in fact it makes it even harder.

> Imagine berating a someone who got lost in the woods and has been lost for days and is starving, for not having the right map or not following the trail, or debating the legitimacy of hiking for recreation at all, instead of feeding him or giving him water.

False analogy. The person who is lost for days and is starving knows he is starving and needs help; he doesn't have to be convinced to eat. So of course there's no need to change anything fundamental about his beliefs.

The family in question, however, does not know they have a problem. Imagine a person who has been lost for days and is starving, but says they are perfectly fine and refuses to accept food or water, no matter how hard you try, and won't even let you force food or water down their throat but violently attacks you when you try. Now what do you do?

> And my point is that talking about "lies" will not do that. In order to prevent or mitigate the trainwreck, he would have to convince his family to fundamentally change which sources of information they trust. That's a very, very hard thing to do, but telling people that their beliefs are "lies" doesn't help at all; in fact it makes it even harder.

Oh, I'm telling YOU GUYS that these lies are around. Because apparently, unless I bring it up, people forget what's going on in our lives.

I don't talk to my parents through the contexts of lies and misinformation. I'm not that stupid. But when I'm complaining about issues online, I think its more clear if I just point out the lies directly.

> I don't talk to my parents through the contexts of lies and misinformation. I'm not that stupid.

You might not say it directly, but if you're trying to convince them, for example, not to celebrate New Year's or not to go to Disney World, you're going to have to say things that amount to telling them that their beliefs are lies. If they were open to any gentler kind of persuasion, you would already have succeeded in talking them out of it. Even if they don't consciously realize that you're telling them their beliefs are lies, subconsciously they will. At least, that's been my experience in situations of this kind.

I mean, you've taken the analogy to mean something other than what I intended: in my mind, the lost hiker is equivalent to the person asking for help to save his family (i.e. he is starving for methods to convince them/save them). I understand what you mean though (i.e. that the hiker is the delirious family member who doesn't know they are in danger), and that's fine, it's a different and worthy analogy all the same.

But identifying what won't work is only marginally better than doing nothing, because we're still no closer to suggesting what will/might work.

> in my mind, the lost hiker is equivalent to the person asking for help to save his family (i.e. he is starving for methods to convince them/save them)

Ah, I see. Interesting that the same analogy could have two opposite interpretations!

I just wanted to say that regardless of how anyone defines a lie, I personally know what your going through and it really sucks. And for what it’s worth your not alone.

I don't know if this will actually help, but I do think it's important to keep in mind two underlying principles:

- People generally cannot be argued out of positions using facts/logic/science, if they didn't use facts/logic/science to come to that belief in the first place

- As cold/brutal as it may seem, do not set yourself on fire to keep others warm: if the rest of your extended family is beyond saving and won't listen to reason, you must prioritize yourself, your partner, your children, etc.

Now, with that being said, I think it's worth having a final "come to Jesus" type of talk, and adopting a very frank/blunt attitude. I would try something like this: "Mom, I'm not going to argue with you about whether COVID is real or not, how serious the risk is or not. What I want to do, is discuss how to handle your affairs, should you go into the ICU or die. Is your will in order? Which hospital do you want me to take you to (knowing that some are filling/full)? Do you have a burial plot picked out?". Make a last-ditch effort to shock them with the realities of how seriously you are taking things, how matter-of-factly you are preparing to deal with their likely illness or death. Don't make it a political debate, and just tell them, if you do things your way, I want to know how you want me to deal with the aftermath.

It probably won't work, but I would say do your best to make them confront the likely consequences of their choices. And you could also try to show them more articles like these [1], [2], or [3], though I'm sure you've probably already tried.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/im-doctor-tried-plan-extremely-204117...

[2] https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/31/judging-patients-covid-1...

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/how-talk-your-f...

Fortunately, I'm still just a single male. So I only have myself to worry about. Given COVID's characteristics, I obviously don't want to get it... but its more important for my parents to not get it.

The good news is I'm not entirely alone: only about half my family are on that thinking. I can lean with my younger-sister, who is a medical doctor, for the shock-and-awe strategy. She's seen the issues first hand and can describe them in more detail than I ever could.

But these family COVID19 talks are non-trivial to talk about, and require strategy and preparation. Maybe others don't care what happens to their family and just ignore it, but I lack that level of apathy.

Maybe you should let go of the feeling that you are responsible for what these other people believe or chose to do. If you don't want to go to Thanksgiving with 20 people, simply don't go.

If my mother is no longer competent to reason on her own, it is my responsibility as the eldest male in the family to take responsibility. Is it not? This is the job of the middle-age: the turnover point where the children begin to take care of their parents (instead of parents taking care of children). As the elderly lose their mental capacity, it falls upon the shoulders of my generation to take care of them.

> If my mother is no longer competent to reason on her own, it is my responsibility as the eldest male in the family to take responsibility. Is it not?

Believing this particular set of lies is not, however, a reliable market for mental competence. You yourself note how widespread these ideas are among your family, most of whom are presumptively mentally competent adults.

Any chain of reasoning that leads to a conclusion like "half of the country is mentally incompetent" should be suspect.

In a way, this whole situation is where a whole suite of ideas like postmodernism, epistemological/cultural/moral relativism etc., come home to roost. After all, these are just alternative facts, and what we hear from so-called experts is just, like, their opinion, man.

I never claimed that.

What I'm saying is: my mother's wellbeing will soon be my direct responsibility.

Obviously I'd rather have my mom take care of herself... Less work for me. But her ability to handle money has appreciably degenerated, and now this COVID thing is proving to me that she is unable to fully analyze the news on her own.

What I am saying is that since mentally competent adults also believe these lies, you mustn't use that belief as evidence one way or another.

Doing so is basically falling victim to confirmation bias.

I suggest you try to base your decision on other evidence (such as the ability to handle money you mentioned) only.