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Comment by nathan11 | Hacker News Reader

Probably worth pointing out this twitter account is promoting the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. To me that casts suspicion on their other assertions.

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I follow this account and others like it because it allows one to be exposed to things like the idea that COVID leaked from a lab a year ago.

Skepticism is warranted in all cases, of course, but I think it's extremely healthy to keep in tune with a variety of subcommunities who are in and of themselves skeptics of many mainstream narratives.

I don't understand how you can manage, honestly. The absolute swarm of conspiracies around COVID and the election overwhelmed me and i wasn't even trying to stay informed on them. Furthermore, even if i was trying to stay informed on them it seems like a full time job trying to discern the "maybe not entirely moronic" conspiracies to the completely batshit ones. Most are batshit, it seems.

Sounds exhausting.

I find that the times it is exhausting is when I've been overly attached to my own beliefs such that there's an emotional response to being exposed to claims in conflict to them. The best way to overcome this inhibitor to open mindedness in my opinion is to just ensure you have a broad exposure such that it becomes normal and unimpactful to read many things you strongly disagree with regularly.

While I agree that it's healthy to keep a broad set of sources, I find that once a source has shown to be untrustworthy on some topic, I discount them on other topics too. There is a difference between having a certain worldview and twisting facts to your narrative.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of the Republican party in the U.S. is happily ignoring facts around the last presidential election. There is little use in exposing yourself to their faux complaints. Much like it was not useful to read up on the "Russian connection" that was invented to attack Trump. So when people fall prey to these ideas, I discount their opinion. I stop reading them. No reason to willingly absorb noise.

These people you mention aren’t generating these theories nor am I suggesting we take their conclusions into consideration - my point is they have value as relays which are connected to networks you otherwise would not have access to, and as alternative relevancy ranking algorithms over the set of published information. For example, this WSJ article gets an increased weight in being exposed to me as a side effect of not masking out this person who is promoting it based upon their own, more widely scoped, conspiracy theory.

I don't know if reading about how someone is the devil or how vaccines put 5G computer chips in my arm will ever not be draining.

Something else to be skeptical of: skepticism.

A good amount of skepticism is great. Questioning everything is belligerent and actually close-minded rather than open.

There's no objective measure for one to define what is a "good amount" of skepticism. The trap of using this as an excuse to shield yourself from people who have a higher level of conspiratorial or counter-consensus thinking than you prefer or have yourself is one worth trying to be mindful of. Claiming there are people who "question everything" is a yellow flag, imo, because that literally doesn't exist, though I know you were speaking hyperbolically. But having the capacity to bucket people into a group who "questions everything" despite the reality such a person literally cannot exist, may mean you are over-weighting this mental model.

It sounds like you agree that there is a "bad amount" of skepticism but no way to measure that either?

Then it is as easy for me to say you have fallen into the trap of being overly skeptical but are using an excuse to shield yourself from people that would call you a raving nutter.

I don't worry too much about finding a way to measure what a "good amount" of skepticism is. Like pornography, I know it when I see, er, smell it.

No, I reject the over-simplified model in general, but my argument is that whatever terms you are, in your own model, using to mean "good" and "bad" and "too much" and "too little" are irrelevant to the question of, even if you could define them clearly, if you can also place and measure a valid threshold. Given the problem here specifically is the epistemological value of consuming views you currently disagree with, by setting yourself up as judge and jury of who is considered worth listening to you're just begging the question, regardless of your framework to act as said judge.

At the end of the day, you have scarce attention, so there are necessarily heuristics you need to use to navigate information and consuming it due to opportunity costs. But my argument is that pegging some people and not others as "too skeptical" is low on the list of good heuristics.

What you describe is called pseudoskepticism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism

Conspiracy proponents act like the lab leak theory being true is some game changer. It's the stupidest thing. Even if it wasn't leaked, China sure did a lot to mess up and exacerbate the early response to the pandemic for the world. Additionally, people have been critical of wet markets in China from early on, one suspected source of where it first spread to humans.

I have no problem with investigating if it was a lab leak or anything else, but enough with trying to turn this into some political wedge issue that people wield as a cudgel against 'the sheeple'. Skepticism here isn't some neutral point of view.

> trying to turn this into some political wedge issue that you wield as a cudgel against 'the sheeple'

This thing you did here is mind-reading - nothing you wrote here is present in my original comment. You may be living in a small set of filter bubbles compared to the average.

I changed "you" to "people" since I meant it in the general sense of how self-proclaimed skeptics treat this topic and say condescending things like this:

> You may be living in a small set of filter bubbles compared to the average.

Understood - I rescind my comment since the way it was written I interpreted it to mean you were accusing me personally of doing this.

I am not sure why, if your original comment was properly interpreted the way I did, it would be unfair to posit the idea of you living in limited filter bubbles. It's nothing to be ashamed of since we are all continually being victimized by social media algorithms into being exposed to information they feel will drive changes in our behavior. Everyone lives in filter bubbles. I don't know how to properly engage someone with the idea they ought to consider they're in a particularly narrow set without them feeling attacked. The best I've seen in some areas of inquiry is a tool you can use to analyze your twitter account to understand the scope of news sources you interact with, but that's limited obviously given the domain constraint. Even then it's hard to convince a person they are living on a overly-constrained information diet.

I will add, separately:

> Conspiracy proponents act like the lab leak theory being true is some game changer. It's the stupidest thing.

On the virus issue specifically, here are three mainstream narratives that have been largely up-ended, and if you were in tune with a variety of viewpoints you would have been exposed to for your own conclusions before they became mainstream:

- "Coronavirus" was an immense threat and it was wise to prepare for it arriving and turning into a pandemic. Government actions to cut it off eg by banning travel was warranted. (Promoted in Jan 2020 in certain circles, discounted by consensus)

- Being a likely airborne pathogen, wearing masks (particularly N95s) was wise. (Promoted from Jan, in March the surgeon general and others claimed there was no reason to wear masks.)

- Given the proximity to the lab the idea this came from the lab was a worthy explanation worth investigating. (Promoted from March by my recollection)

For me, I was wearing a medical-grade mask in stores and stocking up on supplies in January 2020 due to my exposure to this information with a relatively open mind. I don't discount the possibility that, given that I have advanced lung disease, this priming reduced my prior probabilities of catching and even dying from this pandemic. I was mentally a few weeks ahead of the narratives I read in the media throughout this pandemic and made a variety of decisions around risk management that were in conflict with what felt like the average consensus. This doesn't mean I was confident in these theories per se, but when you're forced into making risk adjusted decisions having a diversity of ideas swirling in your head opens the possibility of having a better risk calculus, esp if the goal is to be conservative.

That's a broken calendar is right once a year situation.

This is a false mental model because there is no singular calendar. If you are actually exposed to a variety of ideas there is no obvious, universal set of narratives you can point to as having a clean bisection between one or two 'calendars.' Tribalism does cause things to increasingly cut that way, but the mental model is still a false one.

This comment refers to the original URL, https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402434266970140676, which we've since replaced with the article it points to (in keeping with the site guidelines).

Dismissing someone because they hold a viewpoint you disagree with is childish and dangerous to our society. By that logic we should all be dismissing CNN reporting because they were peddling Covington kids and russian collusion among other things proven to be false. We should all be striving to take in all sources of information and use our best judgement to judge and interpret them.

There is a host of terms used in that thread that point to the person as a conspiracy theorist. "The Cabal", "The Great Reset". These are terms used in the Qanon community constantly.

It has to do with the person lacking credibility based on their own statements than them holding an opposing viewpoint.

I have no idea what those things are and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but the twitter post referenced a wsj.com article. I don't think we should shoot him down for linking to a trusted source.

> Russian Collusion

There is really strong evidence that there is Russian Collusion. The Muller report is full of actions by the Trump election team that point to them working in conjunction with Russia and Russian Agents.

They also push the idea of "The Great Reset" in that thread, which is another conspiracy theory that is tied up with FEMA putting people in camps in abandoned Walmarts, Bill Gates chipping us through the Covid-19 vaccine, and Q-anon.

As soon as they brought up "The Great Reset" I found the whole thread lost credibility.

great reset is not a conspiracy theory[1]. however, attributing abandoned walmarts to the great reset is a theory.

1: https://www.weforum.org/great-reset

> "The Great Reset" in that thread, which is another conspiracy theory"

Curious to see the argument _against_ "The Great Reset" tbf.

Do you cast aspersions like this on people who think the 2016 election was stolen? They tend to be a lot more respected, but they’re just as incorrect.

I haven't heard that one.

2000 election stolen? Absolutely.

That seems unlikely. Here’s one high-profile example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...

Wow, how is it I had forgotten the FBI Director, James Comey, announcing just days before the election that Hillary Clinton was being investigated?

It's been a strange past 4 years....

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