Hacker News Reader

Comment by phreeza | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of your points, but "both sides lie" really creates a false equivalence. Conspiracy peddlers are radically further removed from reality than the government/science communicators. Of course they are not perfect, but putting them on the same level as covid deniers is absurd.

View on HN

Government/science communicators spent the first month of the pandemic denying it ("Taiwan doesn't exist", "border closures are racist"), the next month lying ("masks don't work"), and the next year politically bickering ("Trump's vaccine shouldn't be trusted" before election, "Trump's fault that people don't trust the vaccine" now) and downplaying the "lab leak" scenario that is only now acceptable in mainstream media ("acceptable" as in "not cause of banning").

They dug their own hole (and they keep digging).

My point stands that what covid deniers put out is worse by orders of magnitude. One could argue that sci/govt should be held to a higher standard than randos on Twitter, and the criticism you put forward is probably valid, but still it is wrong to equate the two.

I disagree. That's like saying "yeah church is lying about evolution but that's nothing compared with the claims of flat earthers!" I mean sure, but the point is that the church/WHO/governments have massive megaphones which they use to spread false information (sometimes honestly believing it's true), whereas 9 times out of 10 nobody listens to loony conspiracy theorists anyways.

E.g. conspiracy theorists were spouting "China designed this virus" on Twitter from the beginning, but I never took those claims seriously (I mean, it's technically possible, but I'm 100% certain that anyone claiming this has absolutely 0 proof of it and are just saying it to stir shit up); on the other hand, government suppression of "lab leak" theory (and intentionally conflating it with the crazy "lab designed" theory) was extremely concerning.

I think we are pretty much in agreement then that conspiracy nuts spread a higher level of lies, but that institutions should be held to a higher standard?

The reason I object to the false equivalence between the two is that it helps legitimize the conspiracy nuts, which is worse all things being equal, regardless of mistakes made by institutions.

Yes, conspiracies are not built from reason. They're either something for someone to cling to, or, a scam from my experience.

My argument is that by holding ourselves to a higher standard that eventually these morons selling magical promises will be left exposed as liars to 90%+ of people.

It's not easy, the biggest problem (imo) at the moment is that when these groups latch onto a small fact and spin lies most people are branding the small fact as misinformation of wrong other than accepting a common ground. This is dangerous and erodes the position of having sane intercourse.

Calmly explaining why people are wrong and explaining the reasoning behind this is always better imo than simply slapping someone down as happens all to often.

Not meaning to sound like I'm disagreeing, just trying to explain my position.

I'm probably wrong, I normally am about something, and I've probably gone counter to published papers on human nature but this is my 2 pence based on science outreach and seeing it done right and wrong.

It is a logical fallacy to ignore an argument because of one small distruth or lie.

Now that's out the way...

Unfortunately I'm talking about people's emotions and their decision to trust a source of information. This is clearly NOT a purely logical situation.

There is a false expectation that govt groups are always correct and don't admit mistakes,even if they were correct as they could be at the time. Failure to own these mistakes publically and discuss the shortcomings and failings puts you into the same level of distrust as a scientist view's a snake oil salesman.

I take part on science outreach and one of the most damming things is having to explain when some media celebrity scientist said something utterly stupid and not correct. You then get the envetable "who can i trust" argument and the best way to resolve that is to share more information in a respectable slow and distant way...

Aka actually educating people.

also, lying requires intent - saying somthing you know to be false, and is not the same as making mistakes, errors, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com