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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

You tagged it with a sarcasm tag, but I think your summary is basically what people are feeling in the large, both in Australia and America.

Perhaps people are seeing that, on the one hand, large-scale problems (global warming, global pandemics, global economic boom-and-bust cycles, etc.) are having real consequences for individuals, and on the other hand, they cannot be resolved by simple independent action (because if they could, we'd be seeing trends of improvement, not worsening).

There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. People have traditionally turned to institutional power when individuals seem less trustworthy.

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I think if you looked over the last 50 years, you’d actually see a collapse in trust in large institutions. I think what we’re seeing, in the US at least, is an authoritarian response from these institutions (government / media / academia) to the threats posed by the internet and their general decline in prestige since the 70s.

See the other comment in this thread that free speech has been “weaponized” and therefor presumably must be curtailed “for our own good.”

See I think this attitude is unhelpful. Free speech may well be being weaponised. That doesn’t mean that either a) the person bringing it up thinks it must be curtailed or b) that there might not be something other than curtailment we could do to tackle it.

It’s like even pointing out the problem makes you a heretic to the free speech absolutist creed.

The population has lost trust in large institutions, but they also don't believe in a god or in anything else, so most people are just scared and double down.

Because if the government is wrong, and "science" literally caused the problem by playing with "gain of function" research, then they have nothing left to believe in their lives.

And yet we continue to suck down news-products manufactured by "large institutions", commercial, governental and otherwise, as if they were God's own gospel.

Incongruous.

That reasoning is interesting because I know most people think it’s true, yet actually governments almost everywhere have progressively gotten larger and more powerful over the last 100 years.

Yet these “global issues” are getting worse.

To me it doesn’t seem obvious larger government is the solution. Of course that’s what most governments and media close to governments want you to believe.

> There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual.

I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swathes of people have had to public health measures like vaccination, plus political misinformation and straight out bullshit like Q. The average everyday man is a moron.

But what if you're wrong?

An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked.

It's happened before and it'll happen again.

Best to leave us our right to choose.

Did I say you should take that away?

No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.

I sometimes wonder if we have a gap in public education around epistemology.

In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources.

In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).

We take the words of strangers that we never met as gospel. As equal, if not greater in weight, to our own observations.

This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.

That's true about a lot of things.

There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.

Nice to see reverting to mean happening post the collapse and defeat of fascism and communism. It just shows people in power craving for authoritarian ways and the populace supporting them are nothing unique to past. Given the us-them mentality at any period, this situation seems inevitable.

So lets welcome the past with all its atrocities but this time for the "correct" reasons. Just like all the previous geniuses did. Who knows may be this time the F&C might win and rewrite history.

Who’s welcoming atrocities? I’m just observing that people are idiots, and it seems to be getting worse.

There are probably things we can do as a society (improve education being one) that might help.

But no, any observation that large groups people are unable to parse the modern world and come to reasonable conclusions simply must be because that person wants to implement newspeak and purge any that disagree.

Helpful.

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