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Comment by ergot_vacation | Hacker News Reader

When you lie to people repeatedly, they stop trusting you. If you think they should continue to trust you because you're an "expert," despite your proven track-record of dishonesty, that says more about you than them. None of this is complicated or confusing. None of this needs a sophisticated academic examination to plumb its impenetrable atavistic depths. It's obvious on the face of it.

If people fail to understand something so simple, it can only be due to cognitive dissonance caused by a refusal to acknowledge their own moral and ethical bankruptcy. You cannot go around murdering people day and night and then stand, drenched in their blood, and complain that no one RESPECTS you anymore.

And lest anyone think this is hyperbolic, remember that lies have consequences, and when "experts" in power lie, those consequences are often injury and death.

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>When you lie to people repeatedly, they stop trusting you

When someone starts thinking of most of the world as if it were one person who is gaslighting them, it's a warning sign.

If an expert class were "most of the world" we wouldn't have to even talk about trusting the experts.

The point of the comment appeared to me to be that none of the "experts" deserve the label. But they are angry at someone.

When I look at the comments section of a right of center blog these days, I see people dismissing in similar language to the grandparent:

   - the federal government
   - the military
   - local governments
   - teachers
   - health care employees
   - hospitals
   - doctors
   - the corporate world
   - people who run non-profits
   - those who run higher education
   - academics
   - people who went to college in general
   - tech companies and tech employees
   - scientists
   - people who live in cities
   - political activists

and many others.

I think the above are most of society collectively, and while they are certainly not 100% experts, they are grouped due to assumed support of some sort of orthodox power structure that puts so-called experts at the top.

Well now you're the one grouping all of society together. A single person might distrust some of those groups, but not all at once generally. additionally it's hard to find a left of center individual that doesn't distrust a bunch of those groups, and then others.

>not all at once generally

I don't get the impression that anyone distrusts them all at once, more like sequentially. Like, when Mark Milley was in the news, people were going oh, the military is run by libs too.

And I'm not interested in debating whether or not the people who run things actually should be respected or not, what's disconcerting to me is that anyone who generally appreciated the military would not realize that's how the high ranking people think.

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