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Comment by benjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Prosecuting Epstine would have helped. Auditing the voting system would have helped.

Just show the movement that there nothing to hide rather than yell at them and appear to cover up.

There have been audits of the voting system. They didn't believe them, and they were reported falsely in the media they follow.

It's a cult. It's like trying to convince them that aliens don't exist.

(Epstein would have been prosecuted .. if he hadn't died in extremely mysterious circumstances. Now that's a situation where absence of evidence where evidence should be expected - the security cameras - drives paranoia.)

The “cult” (if you insist) was once much smaller, so something must be driving this phenomenon, which means there is hope that we can stop or even reverse it. What makes people go from believing the media, science, etc to unwarranted skepticism? Specifically, what changed in the last couple of decades that might’ve yielded this result? My pet theory is that our institutions increasingly pivoted from truth-seeking to left-wing activism, so the right lost considerable incentive to play the game, and indeed some of the right is breaking away and finding their own institutions (and less savory than those that we’ve built up over decades and centuries).

> What makes people go from believing the media, science, etc to unwarranted skepticism?

It's the phenomenon of illusory truth. Wiki has some sources [0][1][2]. It seems inherent to discussions on the Internet as it becomes more and more accessible and popular. The only obvious way out seems to be educating people, but not enough entities seem interested in doing so right now. Maybe pessimistically, I don't think people en masse can learn on their own about the dangers of misinformation unless crises occur that directly impact their lives.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160515062305/http://www.psych....

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160514233138/https://www.apa.o...

> something must be driving this phenomenon

I think that thing is the shift from being anti-science from being uninformed and ignorant to being anti-science being praise worthy since "You can like see through all the BS man". There was once a time when facts and the act of gaining knowledge were really highly praised by Americans but that has shifted. IMO, one of the highest praised virtues today is that of grifting, if you're a scientist and smart then whatever - but if you're an idiot and manage to trick people into thinking you're a smart dude then all praise to you. You beat the system, you're playing 4D chess!

I think (again heavily into my opinion) that this shift occurred because politics shifted to a point where politicians were incentivized to support policies that were actively harming their constituents - discovering that lead was unhealthy and all of the other side effects of pollutants - put a lot of money into the anti-science campaign and let the demonization of intellect flourish.

> something must be driving this phenomenon

I’m going to go with a repeated exposure to propaganda designed to convince people that the election “WAS RIGGED” and sow distrust in our system of government. The left certainly has some questionable positions, but the “stop the steal” movement is not rooted in fact.

I've been thinking about Bayesian reasoning and propaganda. If you reason at least somewhat in a Bayesian way, and you're exposed to a repeated stream of the same lie, then if you update your priors at all with each exposure, you will eventually regard the lie as being probably true. And the main point of propaganda is to repeat the lie as often and in as many places as possible.

But it isn't inevitable that people update their priors. Many people don't when exposed to advertising, for example. If we recognize propaganda, then maybe we can do the same.

The problem with that is what throwaway894345 is talking about, that people decide that you're propaganda and won't listen, even if they are the ones who have believed the propaganda lie.

The phenomenon in question is a sharp increase in the number of "post-truth" right-wingers--those people who can't be convinced by evidence alone that their position is wrong. This largely predates the most recent election and I would argue the rise began even in advance of Trump (although I think he was a coalescing figure which accelerated the phenomenon).

It's not just the right wing. The intellectual view that "all speech is about power, not truth" is much more prevalent among the left.

Now, that wasn't a view that was largely held on the right. In fact, I suspect it still isn't. The "post truth" on the right are people who still believe in truth, believe that they have it, and won't listen to any evidence to the contrary. In fact, maybe this is the consequence of the "post truth" left - if the right believes that the left believes what the left says about speech, then the right has no reason to trust any truth claim coming from the left.

But the change may in fact be as you say, that the post-truth people grew on the right. Now you can't sway chunks of either side with facts.

You're absolutely right that there is also a post-truth left, but this thread is focusing on the post-truth right wing. Incidentally, the fix--restoring integrity to epistemological institutions--solves for both the post-truth right and the post-truth left.

I'm not sure it does. The post-truth left is post-truth not because of lack of faith in epstemological institutions, but because of a different epistemology. You can't fix that by a more honest press.

The right... if you had a more honest (or less biased) press, it might fix the post-truth right... eventually. Like, a decade or three later. You have to be trustworthy for a while before people will trust you.

And yet, I wonder if that paragraph is true. Maybe I'm kidding myself, but I think I can tell when someone's presenting an ideologically varnished version of reality vs. when they're telling it straight. If reporters stopped being cheerleaders and started reporting, maybe people would figure it out faster than I expect.

> I'm not sure it does. The post-truth left is post-truth not because of lack of faith in epstemological institutions, but because of a different epistemology. You can't fix that by a more honest press.

No, I think a more honest press (and other institutions) ceases to reward illegitimate left-wing viewpoints. They have to play the game to get the credibility (and credibility is power) which is exactly what we want. If you want credibility for your tech-gender-parity position, it no longer suffices to make blank slatist arguments because an honest epistemological institution will expose that as anti-science.

> Like, a decade or three later. You have to be trustworthy for a while before people will trust you.

I think this might be true. I think it's a lot harder to earn trust than it is to break it. On the other hand, I think we can stop the bleeding (i.e., stop creating new post-truth people) rather quickly and in time those others will slowly become more moderate and/or more marginal and eventually (like all of us) die out such that our society moderates with time.

There was a really cool article a few months ago that tried to model polarization on the political spectrum [1] -- on the premise that most people will start off moderate on issues and then update their weakly-held views to align with people they like, and against people they hate, until they converge.

Through this lens, my own theory of what's happened is that a few conservative news outlets -- conservative talk radio, Fox News, etc -- made themselves into an anchor on the political spectrum by strongly holding opinions that would capture a large audience. Christian/pro-life, pro-freedom, pro-free-market, and all the other stances ossociated with conservatives. The left is much less organized because it's trying to capture all voters who don't fit the mold of what is conservative, and there is a ton of diversity outside of conservativism a la LGBT rights, the role of police, the role of unions, how to help minorities, how to help foreigners, the state of US jobs, the importance of the environment, etc. Conserviatives are probably much more unified in their views on these issues than liberals are.

However, as time moves forward the conservative values haven't changed while liberal values have been updating much more quickly, and there's no path for conservatives to come back to the center. If you're pro-life but sympathetic to minorities, you have to choose between the side you see as murdering babies, vs the side you see as not offering help to minorities. You probably side with anti-abortion, then after a while convince yourself that not helping minorities is the right thing to do anyway.

I think a way out is to have more than 2 anchors, e.g. a way to vote pro-gun but also pro-environmental regulation. And I think a way to achieve that is to switch to ranked voting -- it makes 3rd parties more viable so you can vote for the candidate that most aligns with all of your views, which gives people more flexibility for changing their views.

[1]https://phys.org/news/2020-06-theory-political-polarization....

As a conservative, this post is the first thing I have read on this subject, ever, that neither confirms any of my pre-existing biases nor is blatant 'the right just hates facts' garbage. Thank you for some genuine insight.

But it's never enough proof, the goal posts never stop moving. We can't keep playing the game forever, or we'd be paralyzed as a society.

For example, there were two months of audits, recounts, and countless court cases. The skeptics wanted an additional "ten day audit" on top of this, which would have consequences for the transition. After that audit, how do we know they'd have been satisfied? Nothing in the past has demonstrated their ability to be satisfied.

Those voting systems were audited and that made absolutely no difference. Once the conspiracy theories were being debunked in court, they just kept coming with new ones.

Part of the problem is that people feel things are true and you can't debate or logicise that away. You can't argue against a feeling because it's deeply personal and you can't invalidate feelings. The most you can offer is another perspective and hope they're willing to consider it. Short of having them convince themselves, you can't really change people's minds when they feel something is true.

> Prosecuting Epstine would have helped. Auditing the voting system would have helped.

Both of those things happened. The prosecutors indicted Epstein, but he killed himself before the trial could proceed. The voting system has been audited many times this cycle.

> Just show the movement that there nothing to hide rather than yell at them and appear to cover up.

The real issue is "the movement" doesn't like the true result. It doesn't matter to them how fair the process is, they'll reject it unless they get what they want.

It has to start with admitting the systems are imperfect and unchecked misconduct is possible even if it's not actually happening.

The insistence that our systems infallible is not at all helpful because anyone can see that's not true.

Once we get to admitting unchecked misconduct is possible in the current systems, we can make some progress to reducing those possibilities. Right now we're resisting that path, and that's just not sustainable.

Epstein was a thing for them to latch onto. If he were prosecuted, it would be something or someone else. (Soros? Gates? Hillary Clinton? Jeremiah Wright? etc.) Or, alternatively, there's no convincing argument that had Epstein never been born, the Qanon movement would have been noticeably smaller or weaker.

If your claim is that it would have helped to deliver justice in every single case of injustice, promptly and transparently, then yes, that certainly makes for a better society and certainly everyone agrees with that goal but it's also never going to be 100% completed.

And if you remember 2004, there were serious allegations of unaudited changes to the voting system as well as coverups and hiding of important information (like what we knew about Iraq's weapons program or lack thereof), but the movement of people who objected to both of them did not storm anything. So there's something else different here.

The voting system was audited, repeatedly. Biden even gained votes because the auditing system discovered that some votes weren't being counted. It was brought to multiple courts repeatedly and the only thing done was that elector witnesses were allowed to be slightly closer to the people counting.

Also don’t change the rules right before the election.

The rules were changed months in advance. Due to this, suing only after a loss was heavily disfavored by the courts.

No rules were changed right before the election, except perhaps by Trump who tried to rail against mail-in voting and destroyed the USPS in the process.

This talking point - that mail-in votes were somehow less secure than previously - is such a post-hoc rationalization it makes me sick

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