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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

And 50 years from now, what will the story be about say Corona virus, or global warming? Why are we so sure that this time everything is on the up and up? For instance Big pharma stands to make billions of dollars on the back of Corona, so it's not like they're just our disinterested saviours.

Maybe everything is exactly as it is reported on the news and by the politicians. I mean, they have a great track record so we should probably trust them.

But how is everyone so damn sure? I look at the history of manipulation like outlined in this story and am now mostly unmoved by the demands that we "listen to the science" when used as a cudgel.

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> And 50 years from now, what will the story be about say Corona virus, or global warming? Why are we so sure that this time everything is on the up and up? For instance Big pharma stands to make billions of dollars on the back of Corona, so it's not like they're just our disinterested saviours.

I dunno, in both cases Big Oil is probably pretty interested in research that suggests coronavirus and global warming aren't real. Big Oil is at least as big as Big Pharma and, as far as I know, bigger than any "green" energy company.

Maybe they're politically toxic to researchers at prestigious universities, but if we're going to reduce this down to "who stands to profit?", Big Oil seems hard to argue against.

You "dunno" and think "Big Oil" in interested in research that says "the coronavirus isn't real"? What are you basing that on? There is no research that says the corona virus isn't real, that's absurd nonsense.

I'm not saying that they want to prove coronavirus is literally not real, I'm saying that oil prices generally track with the kind of economic activity that a pandemic messes up [1]

> As economic activity slowed sharply across the globe, demand for petroleum and petroleum products plummeted. The drop in demand, coupled with an unexpected increase in supply, led to a collapse in crude oil prices and subsequent impacts on prices for refined petroleum products and other downstream items, notably gasoline. As economies reopened, the initial price downturn gave way to reduced oil production and some renewed demand. As a result, prices for oil products partially recovered.

so they would prefer a world in which the coronavirus is not a serious problem that merits shutdowns.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2020/article/from-the-barrel-to...

Now you're saying that as a back peddle, but that isn't what you actually said.

Yes, we're kind of at the mercy of free-market competition to keep things honest. But that mechanism didn't work in any of the cases cited above. So I just don't understand why so few people are skeptical, given the history.

because we can see these things with our actual eyes

What things? and where can you see them? And are you sure you can see them with enough clarity to truly judge the proper statistical relevance? For instance polls say that people who watch the nightly news believe that violent crime is getting worse... they can see it with their own eyes. But if you believe some purported science, violence has been on a decades long decline.

Unfortunately people can be prone to mass delusion and moral panic. Check out this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...

I can observe people getting sick with covid, i can observe 60 degree weather in the winter and weeks long heat waves, this isnt the news, or misremembering things

People get sick of things all the time of all kinds of things, doesn't mean that a global lock down is the appropriate response or that the statistics you're accepting are actually correct.

And there are many explanations that could explain heat waves, you can't use your eyes to justify an acceptance of the global warming explanation. All you've done is accepted the dominant narrative on faith.

Face it, you just don't know what is true. You can't know as an individual.. all you can do is hope that the people who say they know, actually are correct. But that requires trust and faith.

Your premises are sort of correct but your conclusion is not, because it is a hyperbole.

A physicist may not have personally built up mathematics from the base axioms, but he/she can trust that he/she can apply the learnt formulas when appropriate without it, because there are others who done so, and there are overlaps between all these. Similarly, while there are some problem with reproducibility in sciences (often it is due to lack of knowledge of statistics), there are large agreements in the science community on basic facts.

Understanding science is a mentally challenging thing, and we are by nature lazy. That doesn’t make the easier to understand alternative true.

This isn't about laziness or the difficulty in understanding anything. There is a fundamental limitation of perception and cognition. Science can only describe what it sees. But it never knows if there is something important yet undiscovered that will change the analysis, because you just can't know what you don't know.

The universe is always capable of surprise. We are trapped forever with a limitation in what kind of pronouncements we can make about truth. The best we could ever say, is that something appears to be true today.

For instance, there is a chance that we are actually in a simulation -- that we're literally just a running computer program. If that is the case, the programmers of that simulation could change the instructions that control our physics at any moment. And everything that you have declared "true" will have to be reevaluated.

This might seem unlikely, but it is not impossible, and so science has to keep an open mind and hedge its bets when making any declaration about reality. Science can only give you a probability that something is true, it can not ever say things with 100% confidence.

Occam’s razor.

Science does have some “dependency” on the philosophy of sciences, and while pedantic, simulation is a possibility, but so is “the world popped into existence this morning in a state that we have a collective memory of an imaginary past, and with dinosaur bones in the ground etc”. But this requires much much more presupposition than the scientifically accepted position with the Big Bang et al.

And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible, but not probable explanations we can make up.

> And in my view, it is only of limited importance to look for what possible

That's fine. We have to be pragmatic and can't go around worried about ghosts. But the point is that we have to be honest about the nature of "truth". It is provisional and only our best effort given our relationship with the universe.

And because we must admit that there is no such thing as 100% truth, we should be more humble than going around making pronouncements with such certainty as if we know more than we are actually even able to know.

On that basis it is impossible to literally know anything. At a certain point to function as a human some basic reasoning and common sense needs to be applied.

Yes, that's the pragmatic approach, which is necessary. But just because you apply some "basic reasoning and common sense" doesn't mean you have any more access to the truth than anyone else. Science teaches us just how much we don't know, and in fact can never know. It's worth remembering that and having some humility in our pronouncements since the very nature of our relationship to the universe leaves us largely unable to say things with certainty. As the star wars nerds say.. only the Sith deal in absolutes.

There is unfortunately no magic crystal ball that delivers absolute truth and filters out all lies, mistakes, and misunderstandings. There is no substitute for thinking.

In the case of global warming I used to be a skeptic but was brought around as I saw more evidence of actual physical effects instead of just models. With COVID we are still under a bit of a fog of war, and it won’t be totally clear which statistics were right or which mixes of approaches were best until 10 years from now.

Yes, you're right and I wish your thoughtful approach was the norm. But what I see is mob like behaviour where "the science" is presented as irrefutable fact with heaps of scorn piled on anyone who dares question the orthodoxy. I just wish there was more general acknowledgement of our limitations and vulnerability with regard to the scientific process and its current conclusions.

As for global warming, your acceptance of it makes sense. We do have to proceed in life without 100% clarity in anything at all. We can only make our best assessment and then proceed in good faith.

But i'm reminded of a story about ancient astronomers who held closely guarded knowledge not known by the masses -- such as being able to accurately predict eclipses. Unscrupulous actors of the time could perform miracles by telling everyone that they were going to shut the sun off in the middle of the day. Witnesses to such an event might start off as a skeptic, but be brought around as they saw evidence of this miracle man's ability to control the sun. The moral of the story being that even when we see evidence for ourselves, the explanation we're given about why it is happening should not necessarily be accepted without skepticism.

I like Elon’s take on climate change: (paraphrasing) no we do not have absolute proof that our fossil fuel burning will result in disaster, but is it really a good idea to do a massive uncontrolled experiment with our biosphere to “see what happens” when we do have at least some evidence the effects will be negative and we do have alternatives (and are therefore not forced to do the experiment).

For a long time the global warming skeptics argued that the only alternative was to shut down modern civilization and let billions starve. France, Ontario, and California getting almost 50% of its power from solar show that this is bollocks.

> For a long time the global warming skeptics argued that the only alternative was to shut down modern civilization and let billions starve.

Some did for sure, and I agree that they were wrong. But that instinct to imagine the worst was just working in the opposite direction to those that believe there is no chance to stop global warming and humanity is doomed.

But that's really a separate discussion. What we're really discussing is how we come to know truth, and how much we can trust our conclusions. And more importantly how we treat each other in the face of the unavoidable ambiguity and uncertainty.

If people argued with less conviction in the absolute truth of their positions, i believe they would actually be more convincing and get more people willing to start pulling together in one direction.

Is skepticism really fair without understanding even the basics of said science? It’s not like statements like “global warming” and “COVID is not a hoax” exist in a vacuum, they sit on top of multi-century efforts on understanding a world vs a long-forgotten 8-years of primary school on geology/biology (with a bit of a hyperbole). Would you trust the opinion of someone without any programming knowledge about architectural decisions? Just because the end premise is easy to understand in the case of eg. global warming, the decision behind it is similarly (or even more) convoluted.

Thinking is impossible in our society.. and we naturally rely on stats and trust.

I didn't want to sound pessimistic, I wish we had a better way to share knowledge, will power, man power to make everybody's life nicer, leaner and cleanr.

Everything that people believed in the past is not wrong. They were right about a lot of stuff, some of which we consider common sense that isn't worth talking about (car accidents are bad for your health) and others of which are now considered controversial (skeumorphic buttons are a good way to distinguish clickable from nonclickable UI).

I expect that a lot of things that I now believe will be proven wrong. I have no idea which of those things it will be.

Are you doubting COVID19 is real? How do you explain the unusual few extra millions of deads this past year?

Or do you not even have friends and friends of friends that have lost someone and you doubt those deads are real?

I don't really have a strong opinion, other than I do think the response to it is disproportionate. But to answer your question directly, I don't know a single person who has gotten sick, or even a friend of a friend. Although I follow a few people online who did get sick, and my sister is a nurse so knows of cases in the hospital. But she tells me that the facts on the ground, like reports that the ICU was overwhelmed with cases is misleading at best. That because of budgetary measures the ICU always runs at close to max capacity and it doesn't take much of a bump at all to fill it up. Also, we had other cities around us transfer their overflow to use up our extra capacity.

Anyway, the point wasn't really Covid in particular, just that it's a contemporary example where most of us believe something that might very well turn out to not be an accurate appraisal with 50 years time in the rear view mirror. Most of us just take what we're told on faith, and have no direct way to verify that it is the whole truth. That is the lesson from all the cases of scientific corruption listed above.

A good indicator is that other rich people are losing tons of money, for example the cruise industry.

That's an interesting thought. But there are many examples in history where one group of rich people profited while others suffered -- it's not like they're all one cohesive group. Like in this article, any rich person who had an interest in and ability to make money off of fats, lost tons of money because the rich people who controlled sugar wanted to get richer instead. Just because science is being corrupted for money and power, doesn't mean that it will benefit every rich person and hurt none of them.

All of these have a common issue which is that organizations were lying based on their incentives yet people took them at their word anyway.

Because science.

I'm not sure if you meant that sarcastically? The very point of the examples given above is that "the science" isn't a fixed beacon of shining truth. It is an idealized process overseen by flawed and biased humans with their own personal agendas. We often fall short of the ideal, and are led astray by those claiming to have the truth supporting their demands.

How do we know today is any different than those examples above?

Pretty sure it was stated sarcastically. It's an exact example of what you said the problem is, so I'd be quite amused if it was meant literally.

The issue is in the structure of organized production (business/finance/economy). This device has a deep cost.. and will taint peoples knowledge, effort, goals. All for the sake of high throughput I guess. But we should spend a bit of time thinking of alternative ways..

Because lobbying and abrupt, agenda-driven changes of policy and numbers (e.g., what counts as a "case" or "infection", and what number over what time period is reported) are easy to detect and collate when everything is in the open today.

The practice of science, which is not an end unto itself, is possible to indulge in because we each have a chance at examining data and methods. When those are restricted or changed without reason, that is another data point. We no longer need to, nor do we, rely on lobbyists who write legislation and policy.

Why does anything have to be abrupt? Perhaps Sars was a test run to get everything in place re the data, policy, and propaganda required to make it work? How exactly do you personally verify the veracity of the data and methods used?

Why do you think things are so much different today than they were just a few decades ago when the science in regard to sugar was corrupted? The corruption was successful then, and things aren't that much different today. Do you honestly believe that in 50 years time we wont look back and see at least one thing that was purported to be scientifically proven true, subsequently falsified?

I didn't believe the anti-fat propaganda, but I had precious few tools to convince others. Now we have an embarrassment of useful information, and most people pay attention to shoddy analysis to support anti-science ad-hoc statutes, instead. But at least I can satisfy myself on the facts.

Nothing has changed at all, really.

> Nothing has changed at all, really.

That's exactly right. So we're equally vulnerable to corrupted science as all the people before us who fell victim to the examples listed above.

Lol

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