How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out | Hacker News Reader

How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out

niemanlab.org

86 pointsjitinnair1148 comments

I don't think echo chambers are a bad thing. You can't verify everything yourself, so you can delegate some subset of your opinions to someone else, and be diligent about verifying that they're not leading you astray.

I've gone through a lot of different echo chambers in my life. From a traditionalist Catholic school to an ultra-liberal public university, and then spent time trying to orient myself and bouncing through a few different ideologies.

Some lines of thinking I've used to determine if I've found the right echo chamber, which, thankfully, I now have.

1. Is the world-view grounded in positive rhetoric? Do the practices and beliefs encourage building up both group members and the group as a whole? If not, there's a good chance you're being manipulated to serve someone else's purposes.

2. Does the group encourage you to think and reason for yourself? You're choosing this group so that you don't have to think about everything for yourself. But in the end you are responsible for your own life, so if a group is telling you to defer to an outside authority, tells you not to critically think about decisions, or tells you that certain topics on inquiry are off limits, stay away.

3. Does the world view accurately predict what will happen? Many ideologies are great at shoe-horning their narrative on past events, and many are great at coming up with logical arguments that are meant to be confusing and hard to refute, but the proof is in the predictive nature of the world-view.

4. Related to the above, when there's a failure in world-view, does the group have a mechanism of incorporating and learning from those failures?

I think the term echo chamber specifically denotes something bad.

An echo chamber happens specifically when a group's internal belief's enter a positive feedback loop and become insulated from any external (and often internal) dissent.

What you've described sounds more like a group with common belief's that has not devolved into an echo chamber. And that is what we should all strive for.

yes, this correlating effect is specifically argued against in the book 'wisdom of crowds', which discusses the conditions under which group decisions are better than individual ones. echo chambers are defined by their strong correlative impulse, which means they're statistically much more likely to significantly deviate from objectivity.

another relevant phenomenon derived therein is that a range of opinions, most of which are wrong, is completely normal and acceptable, as far as reasonable group decision-making goes.

but correlation of opinion is the core issue here, and human social dynamics constantly corral us into such correlations. only folks sufficiently and intrinsically principled have a strong enough will to incur the social costs of having truly independently-derived opinions from the herd (which doesn't guarantee objectively better perspectives either, but does help the herd hedge against catastrophic over-correlation).

The standard rhetoric of some groups is "do your own research, don't trust the authorities". Does this qualify as thinking for yourself? They say yes, I see a problem.

The problem is their definition of “do your own research.” This problem is probably largely unavoidable because, human nature. But it’s made markedly worse by what has clearly been a long term, mass scale failure of the education system to teach most people to think clearly.

It's become a thing because saying, "do your own research" is infinitely easier than investigating the current accepted body of knowledge to risk wasting months or years of your life only to find out that the current accepted body of knowledge was already correct.

"Do your own research" is the "trust no one" of the 2020's. Anyone who says it simply wants you to go away and isn't interested in debate and is unwilling to accept any information that might imply that they are wrong. If someone says "do your own research" to you and you are not both currently scientists working in the same field then it is safe to ignore them and everything they have ever said (and quite possibly everything they ever will say).

If this is the only rhetoric, it fails all the other criteria I laid out. If it's not a useful, predictive, and positive worldview then this is not a good group to be in.

As for trust or distrust in authorities. There are many authorities that give you a good reason to trust them, namely a track record of telling the truth and acting in your best interest. There are also many authorities that give you a good reason to distrust them, by abusing their authority for personal profit, exposing themselves as an enemy, or selling out their built up goodwill to the highest bidder.

I don't think this is ideologically problematic. It's just that the people rejecting the authority have very little practice doing research.

Not just that, but if one is researching for confirmation bias then said "research" is pointless.

If there's no willingness to accept that a belief is mistaken then there's no room for reason.

Think for yourself but not like that.

The splintering into groups, the otherization of "not us", has existed for a very, very long time. Chimpanzees brutally murder other groups of chimps, females and children alike, and they have even been seen eating their enemies' corpses raw.

For Homo Sapiens with Neanderthals, we suspect they both inter-mingled, shared genetics via sex, as well as brutally attacked Neanderthals. Is it surprising that, along with mega-fauna and easily killed prey, Homo Sapiens seems to have killed many Neaderthal groups as well?

Is this that surprising, then, when Homo Sapiens attacks other groups of Homo Sapiens? When humans have seen those evil "others", it usually leads to violence and domination by one party. Look at colonization of the Americas, enslavement, genocide, justified by religion, profits, "self defense," manifest destiny -- any excuse will do if it's just "the others."

So, from a historical and biological lens, I'd say current echo chambers are not surprising, they're an extension or outgrowth from very ingrained biological reactions.

> What might a public signal like that that look like in today’s biased landscape? If there were a way to objectively quantify a news outlet or newsperson’s track record with accuracy, that might be a start

Arguably, a track record for accuracy is the exact opposite of what policymakers and other influentials would want to use as a metric, because it is not dynamic and it would reduce their options.

In terms of echo chambers, I have been through a few of them, every "scene" is an echo chamber of sorts, and they aren't local anomalies - they are an overall effect on everyone of the general fragmentation of discourse. People who watch mainstream news exist in as much of an echo chamber as those who get their news from 4chan because there is so little crossover between the two groups. It's that lack of crossover and interaction of which echo chambers are the effect. They aren't really chambers, they are more like a grid of conceptual wells of varying depth, where you need a certain intellectual energy to reach the necessary escape velocity to leave one and see the others up close. Polarization makes those wells deeper, and hence harder to interact with people in nearby ones.

The people capable of this this are a politically irrelevant minorty and are more likely to be used as exotic scapegoats than allowed to distort the local echoes. The more interesting question is, what is a viable strategy for a person who indexes on the things that others can't see?

Survive, certainly, but it also means you need a reliable exit from any echo chamber you visit, as they all work pretty much the same way, and at some point they're going to need a scapegoat, so keep a couple of outs handy. There isn't a lot you can do for them, and engaging too long just takes on risk of being marked among the impure when they do their purges.

But you were born in an echo chamber.

There is no "exit from" echo chambers.

There is no outside.

Your echo chamber is the source all of the stories and symbols that you use to make sense of the world.

The reason we are dealing with lots of little echo chambers is because we are in the middle of a war.

Our echo-chamber-keepers were replaced, and the new ones are leading us to our deaths.

Many different groups of people realize this and are trying to build replacements, but the current keepers are still dominant and there are many candidate replacements, all competing.

There's an easy mechanic to understand about recommendation machines (which let's face it are the main reason for so-called echo-chambers to exist [1]) it's decontextualization. Any good scientific work has a introductory section explaining the stakes of the field, a section about related works, an auto-critic section about shortcomings and possible future improvements, some declaration of interest. It might seem artificial but it is key for turning bare information into useful and digestable information. It explains how, why and by whom this blob of content has been made.

If we actually took down facebook and co and promoted content using a liberal network of peer-reviewing (in bazar-style of wikipedia, not in cathedral-style of big academia pubs) then i'm pretty positive a big chunk of information and institutional mistrust would go away. But then again really putting the true power of contextualized information in the hand of everyone is not something control-structures like states or multinationals have any interest in doing.

[1] "fake-news", deceitful information, pseudo-science and fantasy-conspiracies have always existed, what's new about them is that they're getting so big. Yet they're not getting big out of nowhere, they spread on plateforms that (1) promote content based on past performance (which is not a curation method) and (2) ease low-context sharing like reposts, likes etc. They are also aggravated by goverments and entitled newsoutlets being pedantic and dogmatic, by fact-checkers that act like judges instead of investigators.

Which is exactly how the "think for yourself" logic works. They call you specifically to ignore authorities, and once you filtered out the specialists, what is left? Opinions of loud nobodies where the results will be all over the place.

I'm not familiar with the "think for yourself" crowd that you describe, but i'm definitely not calling for ignoring authorities/specialists. The thing i'm calling for is to map it out, identifying, contextualizing and comparing all the information flows. Scientific method cannot a priori exclude any source. Your allowed to be scientifically convinced of something only when you're confident that you know the full map of what other people think about it (eg understanding your peers ideas better than them).

That's a very sensible approach you suggest, indeed. I was referring to the "don't trust the establishment" crowd, which by definition truncates a priori your information flows.

For me it comes down to data. I don't mean in how I reason (I mean I try to use data) but in deciding whether a place is an echo chamber.

I used to be more libertarian, and I still lean that way. But after reading and posting a fair bit in that kind of forum, I decided most of my libertarian friends weren't actually using data. They'd say intelligent sounding things, but in the end it was all just "common sense" rather than data. "Minimum wage won't work because you'll cut out unproductive people from the labour market", that kind of thing. This is the kind of thing that tends to point towards an unstated theory of markets work, which is both unspecific and unfounded in most debates. I'd hear a lot of these arguments over the years, and there was always a gap between what I'd learned studying economics and what people were saying.

Part of this is our culture of discourse. Discussions are overwhelmingly in the format of text and speech, and mostly informal. You never get told what is being assumed, and things always make sense because essentially the arguments are tautological: vague ideas that refers to each other in a circle, heavily dependent on latent definitions of every concept (eg "work" as a thing you do but you don't want to do without motivation).

The arguments that actually matter are data. Almost nobody you meet in daily life understands statistics. They'll all tell you, because there's a book by this name (How to Lie with Statistics), that stats are easily manipulated. Very few people care to dig into things like how stats are assembled, what they mean, how noise is dealt with, or what way cause and effect goes (because of that other trope, "Correlation is not causation"). The fact is we can figure out all of these things if we are careful enough.

I definitely agree with the data argument.

I used to be more ideological myself (in another direction, but it doesn't matter), and still cringe at my past self when I think about how factually incorrect some of the things I used to believe are.

Since we're talking about tropes, paraphrasing another popular one: some models are useful, but all are wrong. Some ideas, while somewhat abstract, can in fact be useful lenses to enhance your understandment of the world, but failing to take into account the data and trying to fit your worldview regardless just reeks of intellectual dishonesty.

I believe most disinformation problems we face could be eradicated by reading more books. Not because the book might be 100% accurate, but because most social media debates are as a deep as puddle (not HN) and epistemologically lacking, and books prevent that and offer avenues for debates. It’s not a cure-all of course, but it gives it scaffolding for meaningful debates. The best online debates I had were on moderated IRC channels set up for that purpose.

I agree with the unskilled use of discourse and the data factor.

Is it possible that, with your reference to «books», you mean "preliminary to participating to debates, one should have an education (in-depth intellectual training), and a continuous effort towards it"? This should go without saying.

The issue is to find the best sources for information and analysis, and the "book" form does not solve the issue.

Certainly an essay being written in book form is not a guarantee of higher quality, but incentives and dispositions towards different types of media do matter at least a bit.

The act of reading a book encourages the - let's admit it - painstaking act of actively questioning what's being said, cross-checking when necessary, and eventually reaching your own conclusions in a way that Twitter hot takes don't.

The intuition and discipline it takes to apply that kind of rigor takes time to develop, arguably a lifetime.

Can you see educated people «reaching [their] own ["]conclusions["] [with] Twitter» - apart from getting elements for judging the speaker (not the matter)? Who would seek knowledge from stubs - and disorganized, "latest without history", and thrown in the unregulated chaos?

We have been educated through books since substantially forever, who would call "writings on a daily repainted wall" credible competition?

The new ways recently born, and quickly massively misused - for not wanting to see them for what they are, in their limits, and to ride the wave of new games -, seem to have deviated the attention of some to the preexisting context and its already present issues: a large amount of imperfect material (in credible formats) was published. In many Countries critical thinking is (was?) taught with basic education: we have always known that problems are not trivial (centuries of theological debates in front of a Revelation?!).

Now: books are what you must have used and continuously use for intellectual preparation; in the current fast dynamics we need more of articles for information and competent analysis. The problem does not change: identifying reliable sources.

And the typical solution has always been: identifying the most convincing "authorities", and following them cum grano salis et caveats, judgement always alert, for as long as they will be human.

As long as you doubt, you learn. And as you doubt you also keep striving for the best quality sources or insights. It’s indeed a lifelong skill, but it also starts with picking up the first book that helps you contextualize information.

People approach things at different levels of abstraction and argue with people at a different level. You saw this all the time in the pandemic. At one level of abstraction it is about the physics and biology of body fluids. At another level it is about reducing some statistics in a population. And at another level it is about economics. One person is thinking about snot dynamics and another about the economy. That's crazy!

All these things have models and data. And when you mix it together you get politics. The underlying data gets lost in that mix of things that would be a false dichotomy in an ideal world. We all have to become more nuanced in our understanding of the world but can't keep up. Instead we battle it out with increasingly strained heuristics.

"The arguments that actually matter are data."

Clearly an argument that purports to be based on data is fatally weakened if the data don't support it. But as Hume posited, "You can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'".

Presumably the data showed that Zyklon-B and napalm were very effective at what they were trying to do. But the data is not the end of the story.

This is a good point, decisions are not obvious just from understanding how reality works. But you'll certainly get a lot of decisions wrong if you don't.

This is all worded rather technically to describe identity alignment.

If a lot of the world operated like Wallstreetbets, we’d have more sanity. Everyone there knows they are dumb, greedy, desperate, gullible, dumb.

Now if Wallstreetbets was a serious place, then the guy who went to this school, works at that company, would have more people trying to align their identity with that person via agreeing (formation of the echo cult).

But instead everyone on WSB is given one identity, that of a dumbass. That is the same as having no identity. You can’t even align, since it’s just another dumbass you’d be aligning with.

Small example, I’m not antivaxx, but if you even entertain antivaxx, even in my own head, I immediately think ‘shit, am I trumper?’. That’s how concocted our real identity based lives are.

———

Edit:

I want to add a little more to this point. Echo chambers are formed in the presence of ambiguity, as in, there’s enough ambiguity to carve out the tribe you belong to (which is a natural human desire). It takes an overwhelming amount of evidence for consensus to form where this natural inclination is short circuited. The perfect example of this is Afghanistan, where no one can possibly rationalize the validity of that war at this point. There are no echo chambers to run to in the face of overwhelming evidence.

I completely disagree. The WSB retard/ape is absolutely an adopted identity. It's relatively recent too. Mainly by newcomers who sauntered in to partake in whatever the newest hyped stock cult is.

Comparatively many years ago it was mostly just people posting their disgusting OOM options and terrible DD. No one was under the impression that they were getting back at hedge funds by buying any of it. No one thought they were taking a bold stance against wall street corruption. It's making me laugh even typing those things out.

I wonder what percentage of WSB thinks they are secretly smart and just playing a dumbass. That seems like it would be an attractive role to be in, especially for humans.

100% of them. In the face of trying to win the lottery, all human fallibility is accepted. It’s such an agnostic thing to take part in that we don’t judge anyone’s hubris, impulsiveness, recklessness, and of course, stupidity. It’s like being in a prison and watching someone think they are smart enough to make an escape attempt. There’s no judgement, every prisoner wishes to.

It’s freedom.

Here is an algorithm that usually works for me: 1. An idea pops into your mind and you truly believe it. 2. You use the full force of your intellect to prove it wrong. You seek out evidence to prove the idea wrong. You throw everything you have at the idea. You ask people with different opinions to prove it wrong and listen carefully to the arguments/evidence given. 3. You keep the ideas that so far have withstood the attack. But whenever new counter evidence appears, you repeat step 2 again.

Better regulation of news, I believe in absolute freedom of speech for individual, but if the business of news is reporting news it should at least have a licence to do so and when caught selling fiction instead of news, it loses that licence. Imagine a bar selling booze, one time you order beer and get a beer, the next time you get poison ... most people would think that it's good that you at least take their licence away.

It is sadly ironic that in the comments on echo chambers so many posts are being voted down. The first step towards freedom of speech and freedom of thought on the internet is to voluntarily stop the down-voting. Opposing views will not do you harm, contrary to what you may have been told.

blame whoever made the downvote button. we're just using the site as intended.

An upvote for you -- also using the site as intended...

One does not just choose to change their mind, and is born anew.

The journey out is likely as long as the journey in, with many challenges, and much sacrifice.

To better understand, seek the experience and wisdom of other former cult members.

We will not break free from our echo chambers until brain computer interfaces proliferate(and maybe not even then).

The world is too large; there's too much to know. Did you know about these terrorist attacks this year?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Auckland_supermarket_stab...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Kabul_airport_attack

Maybe you heard of one of them but there's a very strong reality that you haven't. Do you know specific details about the terrorist attacks? I sure don't.

We have a blindness to reality in whole. But how much do you know? You might use news aggregators to give you a better than average view of reality. However those aggregators are going to be biased. The reality you will perceive will not match up with actual reality.

Worse yet, the bias breeds worse bias. which is immensely worse when it comes to subjective issues. This is where 'bad actors' are created. If you oppose climate change for example, you are now a Nazi.

Does reason exist or is it all just post hoc justifications of their brain chemistry?

I listen to or read probably 8hrs of news at double speed (so 16hrs) a day.

I intentionally listen to as many varied opinions as possible. For stories I try to find the source material and then can decide better for myself any bias.

The most interesting part is trying to explain to people when they are incorrect about a story. 50% of the time people won’t believe it even when presented with source material. One particular faction almost always ignores the facts.

A site I’ll recommend people to explore bias and all sides is https://ground.news/

It’s not perfect, but if you explore it you can at least see all perspectives and stories you may otherwise miss.

A few personal observations about echo chamber regions in news:

1. Corporate news (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, New York Times, Washington post, etc) is never the fastest or most detailed to report anything. Imo it’s completely government propaganda, primarily far-left leading.

2. Populist news & podcasters (New York Post, Daily Mail, Joe Rogan, Tim Pool, WarRoom Pandemic, Lex Friedman, Michal Malice, Eric Weinstein, Sam Harris, etc) typically breaks news or investigates topics which inform the listeners or readers. The discussions and articles are typically in-depth. Often this content is moderate, but can be left or right.

3. Pundits (NPR, DailyWire, John Oliver, stephen colbert, etc) they are critics, often masking their critics in comedy or discussion. News is never broken, but opinions are more digestible. These people are pitching their view point, rather than validating facts and are often incorrect in assertions. They range wildly from left to right, there are few moderates.

I think those are the three broad categories of media echo chambers. People tend to fall into one branch of one of those chambers, so “left populist” news or “right pundits”. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the best way to form opinions. I really wish there was straight news, but there’s really not a ton of journalism. Most of the “journalism” is really done by the populists or podcasters who end up interviewing experts for long conversations.

“Information” seems to primarily spread via social media, and imo that’s why journalism is limited. Corporate news can simply respond to Twitter trends. Podcasters tend to go into interesting topics with guests. And pundits do something in-between.

That's quite an enormous effort! Do you do it for professional reasons, or to keep up?

If your objective is really to have an understanding of the world, it may not be that effective though. Watching US news 8 hours a day does not broaden your news diet by that much.

Have you considered investing some of those 8h in learning French or German, and reading the international press? Being Dutch I read NRC. Since I live in France I read Le Monde, which is 'ok', except during election season. And I follow vaguely BBC and CNN, although they are becoming more and more unreadable. Through HN I get some articles from the economist and NYT / WaPo.

I've always found the difference in coverage between countries more interesting than the difference between sources within a country.

In France there is a weekly magazine called Le Courrier International. They translate articles from all over the world, so you get for example one page about a diplomatic incident between China and Korea, with one article from each country. Each source is contextualized, when the paper was created, who are the owners, etc. Maybe something like that exists in English?

Le Monde also has a publication in English - Le Monde Diplomatique: http://mondediplo.com/

I find it gives helpfully different perspectives on foreign affairs, and when it reports on my country (UK) it escapes the day to day press allegiances because it looks from the outside in. I'm having a go at learning Esperanto to read the edition they publish in that language, because I suspect the view will be even further from that of the English language edition.

To GP: the populists are, in my experience, just partisans. There's not much value to any of them. Save your time and find international publications.

First, yes I listen to various items from around the world. I think I even put a couple in the short list.

That being said, most of the stuff around the world is effectively propaganda. It’s good to see sentiment, but it’s generally paid for by government or for government.

Even Le Monde started by request of the government and is own largely by someone in another country. IMO it’s pretty partisan. Not saying it’s bad by any means, just that you have to weight it.

> Le Monde Diplomatique

...which also uses RSS ( mondediplo.com/rss )! Unfortunately, that other suggestion, ground.news, does not seem to.

> Do you do it for professional reasons, or to keep up?

I tend to do it to keep up. But broadly politics has a massive impact on everything in our lives. I invest and typically do very well and my trick has been seeing the difference between these groups and moving prior to all the groups catching on.... so basically tracking “populist news & podcasters” and investing when they start mentioning. Then selling when the “corporate news” starts commenting.

> 1. Corporate news (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, New York Times, Washington post, etc) [..]. Imo it’s completely government propaganda, primarily far-left leading.

Either you slipped a bit in the heat or i misunderstood something but it's pretty wild to qualify "government propaganda" as "far-left". There's hardly any government in the world that is far-left. Besides one could argue that governing far-left isn't far-left anymore since any governing party has to compromise because inertia.

"I listen to or read probably 8hrs of news at double speed (so 16hrs) a day."

So you spend more time trying to optimize input than comprehension or thoughtful contemplation.

> I listen to or read probably 8hrs of news at double speed (so 16hrs) a day.

> I intentionally listen to as many varied opinions as possible. For stories I try to find the source material and then can decide better for myself any bias.

How do you have time to track down sources? Last news story that I track the original source for took about 30mins (from mainstream, to local news, to primary sources), and it revealed that mainstream story was correct. I'd need a big team of people to critically look at 16 hours of news a day.

Most of the more populist news & podcasters tell you where to go. I can easily follow a link on their website.

In contrast, go to CNN or MSNBC, you won’t find any links off their website. Their sources are “anonymous” as well, so real sources are more difficult.

For science news at least, it’s a warning sign when populist publications pick up a story but the more reputable ones won’t touch it. There’s probably something wrong with the story.

For science in particular, nobody but science publications or commentators is worth reading. Even reputable newspapers publish things which are bunk. More places need to engage with organisations like the science media centre[1] since they engage specifically with journalists and try to act as a bridge.

[1] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/

I know three languages and before I've tried to read news in different languages to get supposedly "more complete" picture.

I've abandoned this approach completely after 06/01 when the next day I went to read news from EU and they were repeating word to word the same BS as American news.

I understand that USA population is brainwashed and all their media are under tight control. But I was hoping that this situation would be portrayed from a different angle at least from another countries.

In the end it just proves two things I've believed before:

1) USA controls almost all of the world media

2) Europe is a colony of the USA that cannot make any independent free choice - it just does what is ordered by the USA

> Europe … just does what is ordered by the USA.

Except for that large Nordstream 2 pipeline with Russia.

Except for that large Nordstream 2 pipeline with Russia.

Without that pipeline, Europe (or Germany) would collapse. Germany needs that pipe because it needs energy for the industry and maybe to some extent because it destroyed it own energy system earlier (e.g. closing nuclear powerstations).

Yes, it is the only case where Europe did something that contradicted orders of the Big Brother. But it's similar to the the situation where one person tells another to jump of the cliff: if you jump off the cliff you're dead anyway, so most people would disobey in this situation even under heavy pressure.

Stop reading «world media» then and start looking for worthwhile analysts.

This is why I suggested not listening to the corporate media. Independent podcasters are the most effective, albeit not perfect, at providing actual insights.

>If there were a way to objectively quantify a news outlet or newsperson’s track record with accuracy, that might be a start.

The problem with this sort of "fact checking" is that its keepers are biased as well. So you need a "fact check" on a "fact check" which might lead to stack overflow eventually. Unless you can objectively judge the accuracy yourself. And track record means nothing if say a reputable news outlet is purchased by a billionaire with a political agenda.

I think many people break through the walls of their echo chambers when they stumble upon some basic inconsistency and discover they are being lied to by seeing e.g. raw footage of an event vs. its media interpretation.

For many people however finding the truth is not interesting or important enough. I guess echo chambers are for those who deserve them.

> Unless you can objectively judge the accuracy yourself.

As restrictive as it seems, this is actually the only way you can depend on when push comes to shove. And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the accuracy yourself, you simply won't take the information on board. Imagine how different the incentives would be facing a news outlet or a government official if most people adopted that policy.

While a reasonable basis, I'm not sure how a society of more than say 100 people could function if everyone did that. At some point you have to trust people.

I mean, have you even been to Finland? According to your philosophy you don't know if it exists then.

Sure. But then the problem becomes the highly political question of who should be trusted. If you rank people from most to least trustworthy, fact checkers just aren't at the top of the list. In today's world we can go right to the academics or people with primary sources.

Why would a fact checker have any authority to declare Finland does or does not exist? It would be better to listen to someone reliable who is interested in satellites. A fact checker might easily turn out to simply be reading Wikipedia.

Small Voice Does Taiwan exist?

Any proper fact checker states the conclusion, and then spends multiple paragraphs describing how the conclusion was made, with sources.

Anyone can and should attack that reasoning or sourcing if it's lacking or faulty. It usually isn't.

That's because it doesn't: https://www.reddit.com/r/finlandConspiracy/

The conspiracy theory that Finland does not exist, has been debunked as a hoax. However nobody was yet able to actually prove that Australia is a real thing.

"Australia doesn’t exist!"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2018/apr/15...

https://open.spotify.com/album/3jSxZ6F7euTQJDe0fZHjBV

https://u.osu.edu/vanzandt/2019/02/14/the-greatest-lie-ever-...

> At some point you have to trust people.

This is true in some respects, yes. For example, I have to trust that the supply chain that brings food to my local grocery store isn't introducing toxic substances into the food, so when I open a package of food and prepare and eat it, I'm not poisoning myself. I can't possibly fact check all of the steps in that supply chain. The best I can do is to keep track of which sources have a track record of trustworthy behavior as far as I can see it.

However, the scope of things for which I have to trust other people is much narrower than most people appear to think. For example:

> have you even been to Finland? According to your philosophy you don't know if it exists then.

My question is, why should I care? What part of my essential life activities do I have to condition on whether or not Finland exists, or what it is like? If there are people living in Finland, of course they care, but they're there--they can see for themselves that Finland exists and what it is like. But for me, in the US, unless I am planning to travel to Finland, I have no reason to care who is a trustworthy source of information about Finland and who isn't. Even if I buy products from Finland, I can judge their quality by the same means that I judge my local grocery store; I don't have to know what Finland in general is like, or if it even exists. Maybe the products that are labeled "Made in Finland" are actually made by some high-tech automated factory on a seasteading platform in the Atlantic. If they meet my requirements for quality and price, why should I care?

This same reasoning applies to much, if not most, of the information we are inundated with in our daily lives: we don't actually need to have an opinion at all about how trustworthy it is, because it doesn't affect any choices we are actually going to make. We could just ignore it and it wouldn't make a difference to our actual lives. It only makes a difference because we are surrounded by governments and media organizations who have an interest in manipulating what we think, and one of the ways they do that is by trying to convince us that we do need to have strong opinions about all kinds of things that we actually don't.

That is pretty much a Stoic argument: focus on what you can control. Ignore what you can’t. It is a very practical way to live.

> And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the accuracy yourself, you simply won't take the information on board.

How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? It may seem silly, but this is the same logic that anti-vaxxers adopt.

Personally, I think the actual problem[1] here is not that people aren't critical enough, it's that they don't know how to perform, contextualize and interpret research, and in particular to do this for work that lies outside of their domain-specific expertise. The kind of work graduate students learn to do: find meta-review papers, drill into the work of early pioneers, survey the current state-of-the-art, and then, after all this: identify any gaps and omissions to critique; which then gets tested in the humbling environment of advisor-meetings, conferences etc.

This is why I think the people most vulnerable to this kind of "I must objectively judge the accuracy or I won't take it on board" are people who are educated enough to be comfortable with technical concepts and jargon, but are not actual domain experts and haven't done any actual research themselves. It's how you get large numbers of anti-vaccine nurses, and engineers skeptical of climate change.

[1] Actually, I suspect the actual problem is the discomfort people have with reality's liberal bias, and its corresponding reflection in historically trusted media sources (i.e. BBC, CBC). Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus.

> How do you judge information you're not qualified for?

Why do you need to judge it?

If you absolutely have to make a choice about something, and that choice absolutely has to depend on some particular piece of information, then your best option is to make yourself qualified to judge that information. If you can't do that, then your next best option is to have someone you trust independently of that particular topic (such as a family member or close friend) who is qualified to judge the information and whose advice you can rely on.

If neither of those two things is possible, then you should think really, really hard about whether you actually have to have that information to make the choice you have to make (or whether you absolutely have to make that particular choice, instead of finding some other choice you could make that wouldn't depend on that information).

My personal experience is that, when I actually apply the above principles, I find that most of the information with which I get inundated every day, just as all of us do, is irrelevant to the actual choices I have to make. It's mostly just trying to get me to signal something, or to get me to have a strong opinion about something because some politically active group wants me to, not because I actually need to.

> Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor?

Me personally? Not quite (there are no "underlying equations" for medicine anyway, so some of what you describe is impossible), but I try to come as close as I can. I never trust anything a doctor tells me implicitly. I always look at other sources of information. I also always ask critical questions to see if the doctor really understands the subject or is just repeating some kind of conventional wisdom that they don't actually understand. (Unfortunately the frequency of the latter in my experience with doctors is much higher than one would like.)

> how to perform, contextualize and interpret research

All of the things you describe are important, yes, and I do all of them. The only thing I would add is making use of cross-domain knowledge, something in which our current scientific community is, unfortunately, weak.

> Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus.

In some cases this is true, but I think it's a lot less frequent than many liberal advocates (or indeed advocates for any ideology) claim. Claiming "mainstream scientific consensus" for what are actually ideologically based political opinions and nothing more is a common example of the weaponizatlon of information that I referred to. (Which is not at all to say that only liberals do this: ideologues of all political persuasions do it. It has become more frequent in recent years because we have allowed politics to control more and more aspects of our lives, so the stakes in political controversies are higher and higher, and hence so are the incentives to weaponize information.)

I agree; there is no news agency or experts I blindly trust. It's generally workable for most important things but it takes a lot of time and and practice in the skill of research.

And I'm not sure enough of the populace does have the skill, time and interest to make such an approach workable in a democracy.

Maybe it would be possible with much better education and tools, like high quality news sources.

I agree but don't think I can imagine such a world in any meaningful detail. At least not accurately

Here's one of my favourite Futurama quotes

"If [blank] becomes legal, imagine the horrible things that will happen to our children, then imagine we said those things, since we couldn't think of any. As a mother, those things worry me."

Unfortunately I don’t think most people are capable nor motivated enough to adopt this policy.

I think there's a big if on whether most of us can objectively judge the accuracy of most things ourselves. I worry about the biases that we have and lack of experience in new and rapidly growing fields of knowledge. But mostly I worry about deep fakes.

I actually believe that we may have to rely even more on trusting others in the future and less on believing our own senses.

Do you believe we can objectively judge so many things?

This is something I talk about quite a bit.

Modern society requires trust.

Trust that bridges are built correctly, airplanes maintained correctly, water treated correctly, etc.

No one person can manage all of that. We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will.

Destroy that trust, and you destroy society. Violence destroys trust. Censorship, however packaged, destroys trust. Ignoring consent destroys trust. Lies destroy trust. Unequally applying rules destroys trust. As does being creative and selective with the truth.

American institutions, public and private, have burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office, and are running on a sort of psychological credit balance that they carry with their supporters ("we don't care because our team is winning").

Historically, this does not portend great things at the next intersection.

> Trust that bridges are built correctly,

The interesting thing about trust in bridges is that it works even after people witness spectacular bridge collapses in their country/area.

For example in 2018 a bridge collapsed in Genova, Italy, killing 49 people. At least another two smaller incidents involving collapsed bridges near where I live.

And yet people keep crossing bridges every day. You just couldn't function in a modern society if you got paralyzed by fear of bridges; there always were bridges since you were a child and long before; thus you reach the conclusion that such catastrophic events are outliers. I don't think it's because you trust in engineers or society or something like that; you trust yourself and your past experience that you and your friends and family crossed bridges thousands of times and you're still alive

Two factors are at play.

The total percentage of bridges which have their collapsed, as well the the frequency of collapse, plays a role. A bridge collapsing every week for two months would likely have an impact.

And there's also a sort of mental inertia: this has been fine for a long time, so everything is still fine now.

The latter is why people have died in airplane fires, sitting calmly in their seats, insisting that everything was fine and that they didn't need to evacuate.

I think the mental inertia factor is dominant here.

Generally speaking people are very bad ad judging objective likelihood of events.

Most people don't know often bridges collapse. The wrong estimation goes both ways: a few years in italy there was an outcry for deaths of babies forgotten in the cars by parents (a parent was meant to drive the baby to the nursery but instead drove to work and forgot the baby in the car for hours). It happened a few times over a few years, and as with every random event following the poisson distribution, it also happened that a few such events were clustered in rapid succession such that people thought there was a "baby forgotten in the car" epidemics going on that required some action to be taken; some politician took it on them to push through a law that required every single citizen driving a child up to 4yo to install a device in their backseats that would ring if it detects a weight on the seat and you walk away (and people have been fined for not having bought one). The emotional resonance of the problem was big, but the frequency of the event was blown out of proportion: since 1998 there were 8 cases in a country with 60M people.

> We have to trust that other people will do their jobs, and that they don't bear us an ill will.

To an extent, yes. But we can also keep track of who actually has a track record of trustworthy behavior and who doesn't.

I do agree that open and free sharing of information is essential for that keeping track to scale, and that institutions in our society have undermined that and have sharply decreased the trust level in US society as a consequence. The appropriate response from us as citizens is to penalize all those people by voting them out of office--even if they are of your favored political party. Whether that will actually happen enough to make a difference is another question.

A potential solution: give large monetary awards to people who prove that a bridge isn't built or maintained properly, that an airplane is faulty, etc. This will ensure people are properly incentivized to do it correctly in the first place, and that somebody is likely to look into the matter.

Open adversarial system like this is hard to balance. If you give private people the privileged access required to effectively investigate, it also gives them a lot of leverage be a harassing nuisance. "Bounty hunter" is not a positive epithet for a reason.

If you give the targets the power to shield themselves from that nuisance, it becomes too easy for them to impede rightful investigation.

While I personally do not believe that those orgs "burned literally every ounce of trust they had to get Trump out of office," as I still trust many of them in terms of their skills and intentions, I greatly appreciated how, before that, you laid out your argument for trust overall, so thank you for taking the time to articulate it as you did.

You don't believe that, when any discussion of the laptop was banned to right after the election, and it was considered racist to believe in the lab leak theory, right until the president changed and now it is officially considered a possibility worth investigating?

I don't agree with Trump, but I can easily see why somebody might have lost the remaining trust in the institutions.

I'm not saying that people don't have their own personal reasons/stories/experiences for losing trust, I just wanted to say that I haven't. And I'm also not saying it's wrong that someone has lost trust, more so to say that not everyone has lost trust.

Probably because your team is winning, at least in terms of institutional power.

Perhaps, I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team and distrust is believing they aren't, whether the other people believe they are or not.

So because I generally trust those institutions, yes, I don't believe they're against me. However, I think it's more of a perspective of who's on my team rather than clearly demarcated teams.

> I think a key component of trust is believing those people are on my team

If this means you don't take an objective look at what those people actually do, and judge it by standards independent of any "team", I think it's a very dangerous strategy. The idea that "my team" should win, regardless of what it takes--that the end always justifies the means--I think has caused more human misery than any other idea we humans have had. If you find that your "team" is using unsavory and unpalatable means to achieve what you think is a "greater good", you should not accept the means--you should rethink the "greater good". Based on human history, it's far more likely that the "greater good" is a lot less than you think and will be more than outweighed by the damage done by the unsavory and unpalatable means being used.

I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team. I didn't mean to imply that just because I think they have good or neutral intentions towards me that they won't do something that will harm me or others. I strongly agree they could do things that most people would consider bad, evil, harmful, etc. I think most of us do things that both help and hurt people. Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them, as I believe they both blind us to the good and bad people will do.

> I was trying to say that it is hard to trust someone (or an institution) when we believe that they are not on our team.

And I am saying that the whole concept of "our team" is a dangerous one. We all have to live in the same society. The idea that we should view things in terms of "teams", where our goal is for "our team" to win and for the "other team" to lose, is wrong. We need to all "win", because all of our fates are tied together by living in the same society. We can't "defeat" the "other team" without also defeating ourselves.

That's not to say that we must always agree. Of course we will disagree about things, often strongly. But we should disagree as individuals with different opinions about difficult issues where reasonable people can disagree, not as "team members" who feel like we need to play for our own side and against the other.

> Just as I'm against demonizing someone, I'm also against idolizing them

To me this means you should be against the whole concept of "teams", since that concept by its very nature involves demonizing the "other team" and idolizing "our team".

> And I am saying that the whole concept of "our team" is a dangerous one.

I agree. I think more dangerous is "the other team."

> To me this means you should be against the whole concept of "teams"

In theory, yes, I don't like how we split into different teams and fight against each other, and would get rid of the concept of teams. In practice, I find that if I have to use the team concept (and this in-group/out-group dynamic seems to be strongly embedded in many cultures), then I try to get rid of teams by extending my definition of "my team" as much as I can, to include friends, enemies, strangers, other animals, and other lifeforms.

I would like to eventually get rid of the concept of teams, gradually through expanding and integrating other teams into one huge team until there are no "other teams" left, and also getting back on the same team when we get into conflicts.

Anyways, thank you for following up with me and helping me think through this and reflect on this more deeply.

> I would like to eventually get rid of the concept of teams, gradually through expanding and integrating other teams into one huge team until there are no "other teams" left, and also getting back on the same team when we get into conflicts.

This is how you kill a hundred million people without breaking a sweat.

Yes, that's one way to do it. Or one could just change their perspective to see the other people as people, focusing on the similarities rather than the differences.

I'd argue that if one has so much hatred to try to physically get rid of the "other team" instead of trying to expand one's own definition of team, then that person is likely to subdivide people into teams once those people are gone. That's why I think uniting over a common enemy doesn't work, because once the enemy is gone, people just carry their anger and fear of others into seeing new enemies and splitting off into more and more teams.

At least what I've found for myself is that it is much cheaper, quicker, and longer-lasting, to just redefine the boundaries of my team instead of strictly enforcing those boundaries through violence.

Speaking as a non-American who doesn’t consider either Democrats or Republicans to be “my team”, it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system, and Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws.

Certainly there was sufficient trust by Democrats when, say, Bush Jr beat Gore or Trump beat Clinton, despite the popular vote in both cases. Grumbling about the unfairness, but still accepting who won the presidency.

And that’s despite Trump being a birther: claiming Obama wasn’t even eligible to stand for office? That whole thing represented a lack of trust.

> it looks to me as if Republicans chose Trump in the first place because they have no trust in the system

First, I'm not sure Republicans "chose" Trump; it's more that they suddenly found that he had gamed their nomination system and was their candidate and they had no choice but to make the best of it.

Second, I'm not sure Republican politicians in general have no trust in the system. They are part of the system as much as Democratic politicians are.

> Democrats don’t trust Republicans now, not because Republicans chose Trump, but because (and to the extent that) Republicans continue to defend even Trump’s most egregious flaws.

Defending egregious flaws in whoever happens to be the current party front man is nothing new for either party. That may be at least partly because everyone who ends up being a party front man has egregious flaws. Trump's just happened to be more colorful than most.

This really is the only workable stance.

except it's not since the people misleading about things use the fact that you don't know much about the subject matter to know if they are lying or not. look at the just abject horror that is covid reporting and the right wingers screeching about socialism/communism without even knowing what it means(or if they do... caring about it).

> The problem with this sort of "fact checking" is that its keepers are biased as well.

No, the problem is that we're not seeking facts. We're not after a scattering of data. We seek meaningful clusters of information. Being human, we often want stories built out of that information, and we find these stories much more compelling than facts.

Presumably, we all enjoy sharing good, true, informative things. So when NiemanLab wants us to "share this story," we do.

Some things are objectively measurable. Now, some party might claim to have measured and obtained one value when they have not (perhaps not having made a measurement at all). But if a source’s claims are only* about the measurements they’ve made, and other parties can reasonably cheaply make the same measurements, and different parties measuring the thing in question will get results that agree, then it should be fairly doable for reputation to keep track of who is an honest source for these objectively measurements.

Other claims are not so easily reducible to measurements that are cheap to independently verify. However, perhaps sometimes these other claims have implications about the measurable things, where the implication is straightforward to verify upon considering it. In this case, a fact checker could perhaps show that some claim contradicts some objectively measurable fact as reported by an independent organization which is broadly trusted to make and report on objectively measurable things which can reasonably cheaply be independently verified.

Such a system would perhaps still have nothing to say about many claims we care about, but it could at least largely avoid that tower of fact checks for a restricted class of statements.

I believe the first pre-condition is that people actually need to care about their opinion being reflective of the truth. This is not a natural thing to care about, because it doesn't give you social capital directly (quite the contrary: having an opinion that is reflective of the truth can hurt your social standing in many, many places).

So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this?

While believing the truth does not always provide social capital, it very often provides material capital, which is why humans over eons have evolved mental faculties that make us want to know true things.

These faculties aren't perfect, obviously, we're just primates, but they work better than we give ourselves credit for.

If I'm trying to decide which lake has the most delicious fish, the actual true answer is very important when it comes to deciding where to drop my line, regardless of whether others think I'm wrong. Reeling in dinner—confirmation from material reality—is its own reward.

> So before we ask how people could maybe we should ask how we get them to actually want this?

I've never understood that sort of mentality* in the first place, and I'd be very surprised if I was the only one.

So I'm guessing this isn't an "everyone" problem, but more of a "most people" problem. So maybe the question to ask would be "What makes turns people into truth-seekers vs. agreement-seekers?"

* Edit to clarify: the mentality of seeking "social truth" rather than objective truth, and ignoring or denying evidence in favour of group policy.

> I think many people break through the walls of their echo chambers when they stumble upon some basic inconsistency and discover they are being lied to by seeing e.g. raw footage of an event vs. its media interpretation.

How about someone with authority pretending to be in the echo chamber, who, at some point, starts spouting inconsistent statements? Will that wake up people?

Of course not. Have you not seen how often public figures change their tune? They don't have to answer questions; they can just turn around and walk out of the room and everyone will forget.

A phrase that I rarely, to the point of never, hear is: "I was wrong." Followed by "Here's why, and how I realized..."

Seriously, think about the last time you said this. About a position you consider contrary to your worldview. Not deeper into it -- a total, come about engines full scenario.

I've had a lot of those, especially in the past two years.

It's been hard to try and put those together into a cogent worldview, and mandated that I offer up some apologies to people whom I had been rude to in the past. Not to mention having to deadline more than a few people that booked a one-way flight to Nutsoland.

And no, I am not referring to the "medical freedom" crowd. Pure propaganda to label them as "anti-vaxxers" when they have literally every standard vaccine on the pre-COVID schedule. I can get along with these folks, even where we disagree (If you're over 50 or have a risk factor, especially obesity, you probably want the jab). But I respect their right to choose.

The "if you don't get the shot, you don't deserve to have a bank account, or a job, or the ability to travel" crowd are full-bore Nazis and don't even realize it.

Does anyone outside of propaganda or extremism actually, literally, take the stance that bank accounts or travel (blanket! Not certain countries) should be denied to unvaccinated folks?

I ask because some situations where vaccines are required are present in my European country, eg. healthcare. But there’s democratic consensus about it.

The USA does have a strong current of authoritarianism these days though. That much is pretty obvious. It’s very worrisome.

> Does anyone outside of propaganda or extremism actually...

I'd say yes (since I know people in real life with the view). Well, not bank accounts, since I don't see how that applies to covid, but certainly travel, restaurants, crowded events, school, etc.

Aside, how do you define what is extremism here? The only way I see it is that extremism is defined by your views, so the only way that this view isn't extremist is if you do not define it as an extremist view.

Well, in all friendliness, discussions that start with "how do you define" generally end up in a discussion of semantics, which is rarely an interesting place to go.

I should preface this by saying I know very little about what's going on in US rhetoric and politics, except that it seems quite bonkers and distracted from the discussions that would actually improve people's lives.

My point was that someone who e.g. says "if you don't take the covid vaccine, you should be denied a bank account and never be allowed to travel anywhere in your car" has an extreme opinion in the sense that it's shared by very few and the vast majority disagree.

So if you're discussing policy, it's sensible to just filter out this loud but tiny minority. You can find any stance among the world's 8 billion people, but representing a tiny minority as relevant just serves to derail the discussion. One could certainly label them nazis or facists, but if you filter a large population enough, it's not hard to find people holding literally nazistic of facist opinions.

If these groups become large enough to threaten approaching relevancy, however, that's an interesting and dangerous development.

> bank accounts or travel (blanket! Not certain countries)

This is also the first I’ve heard of even considering denying banking to unvaccinated. Denied banking seems pointlessly vindictive to me also.

Travel, however… well, I think it can be argued that any form of mass transit (including aircraft) should be temporarily unavailable without a vaccine in locations where the incidence rate is still high, but only in combination with an equally temporary government subsidy for their salaries so that the people who have genuine medical issues preventing vaccination don’t starve, and homeschool provision for kids not entitled to the vaccine and their parents, and similar for other legit exemptions.

Unvaccinated people are a danger to themselves and others, after all. Some (kids, immunosuppressed, etc.) will need a carrot because they know that and don’t have a meaningful choice to be otherwise without intervention; others I think need a stick, though I accept I’m not politically astute and such might backfire spectacularly, and has done in the past for some but not all vaccination drives.

Edit:

Banning a private family that lives together anyway from taking a trip in their own car would also be pointless, and feel vindictive to me.

> Unvaccinated people are a danger to themselves and others.

False for COVID. The available prophylaxes do not prevent spread. They merely prevent the disease from becoming acute. E.g., get the shot, get covid, and you're less likely to suffer severe effects from the disease. That's it.

You could argue "a danger to themselves", but that's their choice.

Hence, my stance is science-based: Get the shot if you have a risk factor (especially obesity!), or if you just want to. Or don't. Either way, you get to make that call.

> An Associated Press analysis of available government data from May shows that “breakthrough” infections in fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 107,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations. That’s about 1.1%.

> And only about 150 of the more than 18,000 COVID-19 deaths in May were in fully vaccinated people. That translates to about 0.8%, or five deaths per day on average.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-941fc...

Vaccines have 71% effectiveness against transmission of COVID:

> The researchers looked at 113,582 adult index cases and 253,168 close contacts of all ages; 5,394 fell under both categories. (A close contact was also classified as an index case when they tested positive.) Less than 1% (0.5%) of index cases were fully vaccinated, while 1.8% were partially vaccinated. For close contacts, 2.1% of were fully vaccinated and 1.7% were partially vaccinated.

> Overall, the researchers say adjusted vaccine effectiveness (aVE) for fully vaccinated household contacts after confirmed exposure was 75% and 79% for other close contacts (95% CIs, 72% to 78% and 74% to 83%, respectively).

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ti...

Based on your previous posts, this seems like one of those times where you could admit you were wrong and explain why.

Vaccines reduce the likelihood of getting infected in the first place, and hence also the likelihood of passing it on after exposure. It doesn’t eliminate the possibility, but on a societal level it has a significant effect.

I certainly agree that vaccination should be voluntary, but you haven’t shown that the extreme level of coercion you’re implying actually happens, or that what is policy is disproportional.

With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever. Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans), require a certain amount of money in your bank account, deny you for travel history to other certain areas, etc. A covid vaccine mandate for travel is far from radical.

(Note: I didn’t downvote you)

> With travel at least, countries have the right to deny people for any reason whatsoever.

That isn't where I was going.

There is a current hard push for border controls at each state boundary; e.g., even domestic flights.

Not law yet, but the fact this is even being discussed is unacceptable. As was the employer mandate.

> Many already mandate various vaccines for entry (even for diseases not transmissible between humans),

Nope.

All vaccinations in Japan are optional (albeit recommended, and most parents follow the standard schedule for their children). A Japanese citizen can get a Japanese passport without a single vaccine.

The US has allowed Japanese citizens landing permission for a very, very long time.

Sure, it may be uncommon for an unvaccinated Japanese person to travel to the US, but it was and still is entirely legal. Except for the COVID prophylaxis (which is not a vaccine, as it does not appear to confer any lasting immunity).

> (Note: I didn’t downvote you)

Thank you. There's more than a small contingent of organized HNers that works to bury anything that runs contrary to their nascent religion.

> Nope.

Absolutely wrong. Here's a list of countries and their various vaccine requirements for entry. Despite what you think, there's a lot of them and these requirements predate covid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_requirements_for_i...

Obtaining a passport is completely irrelevant. Countries deny people with valid passports from entering all the time. For example, if they don't have the proper vaccines.

Almost no country that Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, etc go to in large numbers for tourism ever actually asked about medical history precovid.

Making laughable assertions doesn't help convince the unvaxed to get the jabs.

> Making laughable assertions doesn't help convince the unvaxed to get the jabs.

Being unkind rarely changes anyone's mind.

Try applying for a visa to some countries and yes, they will ask. Some countries deny visas to first world royalty for disease history. China denied people with HIV for a long time. Some African countries require vaccinations for some diseases. Some places require vaccinations for people coming from poorer countries.

The angle you're coming from seems to be be that Americans, etc should be treated specially and not be checked. Go to the wrong country with that expectation and reality will hit you hard.

"The angle you're coming from seems to be be that Americans, etc should be treated specially"

Pointing out what actually happens isn't an angle, it stating the situation as it is, not an endorsement.

"Some African countries require vaccinations for some diseases...Go to the wrong country with that expectation and reality will hit you hard."

Very few people are going to these countries.

Down below is someone commenting that they had to get a yellow fever vaccine to visit Kenya.

Maybe you're not visiting these countries. But frankly, nobody cares. Millions are. And they're being checked for proof of vaccines and have been for a long time.

> Obtaining a passport is completely irrelevant.

For most travelers, it is the only document you show at the border.

> Countries deny people with valid passports from entering all the time. For example, if they don't have the proper vaccines.

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

I have never once seen a Japanese traveler required to produce any medical paperwork along with their passport (and I have flown a lot between both countries).

Could a traveler from Japan in theory be stopped at the border for a lack of vaccination? Probably. How often does that happen? Effectively never.

Well yes. But that’s because when going to a country you first check what are the requirements to cross the border. I’ve never seen a somebody kicked out of the US border because they didn’t make an ESTA, but that’s because everybody in the line triple checked that they have it.

> I have never once seen a Japanese traveler required to produce any medical paperwork along with their passport (and I have flown a lot between both countries).

That's because a significant number of countries that require vaccines also require something called a "visa."

Visas have many years of history, and they're generally obtained beforehand. When applying for visas, you submit various documentation, pay a fee, and it makes your entry process much easier. When traveling first world to first world, visa checks for travel are generally waived. Going first world to anywhere not-first world, or in the opposite direction, usually requires some degree of a visa process.

"First worlders" often are visa exempt when visiting non first world countries as well or visas are online and easily attainable.

Most tourist attracting countries that require visa for some, don't make one submit any medical info for both first world and mid tier countries.

> That's because a significant number of countries that require vaccines also require something called a "visa."

Japan is not one of these.

I have absolutely no clue why you're continuously focusing exclusively on Japan to avoid the fact that vaccine/immunization mandates have global precedents and they've existed forever at this point.

Japan might not mandate a certain vaccine. But if you're going to Bangladesh, Bangladesh does not in fact care about Japanese law.

For an example of how badly this works out, look up the UK guy who tried playing the sovereign citizen card in Singapore and pretending the law regarding disease spread doesn't apply to him. Spoilers: it did.

> I have absolutely no clue why you're continuously focusing exclusively on Japan to avoid the fact that vaccine/immunization mandates have global precedents and they've existed forever at this point.

Because Japan is a counterexample that shows your position to be de facto false.

> Japan might not mandate a certain vaccine. But if you're going to Bangladesh, Bangladesh does not in fact care about Japanese law.

Correct and irrelevant.

Bangladesh also allows Japanese travelers to enter the country without having to demonstrate any proof of vaccination.

Japan is an counterexample because they're fairly unique in that they've been wearing facemasks for decades when they have a cold, they don't have a lot of anti-vaccers, and things work because people are considerate. If that was true elsewhere we wouldn't have needed many mandates anywhere.

It's a nice thought, but obviously not the case in pretty much any other country.

Not if they're coming from a country with a risk of yellow fever.

You're really setting up very narrow condition in which someone might not need a certain vaccine. I'm saying that there's a history in which vaccines and immunizations have been required. If Japan had a yellow fever epidemic, Bangladesh would most certainly require it, just like they do if a Japanese person is coming from a country that does have such an epidemic. That's the precedence.

Saying they require a covid vaccine from a country with a covid epidemic is them applying existing restrictions. And currently, people arriving from most countries are dealing with an epidemic. 5 years ago Bangladesh authorities would deny people for not having yellow fever immunizations. They're within their rights to do the same for covid.

> full-bore Nazis and don't even realize it.

> organized HNers that works to bury anything that runs contrary to their nascent religion.

I downvote posts that can't resist aggressive parting shots like this. Honestly, just leave this kind of bullshit at the door. It will make your comment much stronger. I disagree with some of your points but you're still contributing to the discussion here if you would leave out these remarks.

Whataboutism? We better question criteria for border crossing rather than endorsing further extension of those criteria.

The cost of travel is not coincidently high for those who have less. We will add further burden on people who barely met the financial conditions to just visit a place. And the inconvenience to the already stress inducing security procedure we face each time we take a flight.

We have been tolerating radical measures. Just try hold a bottle of water through airport security. And now we are seeing another type of radical measure: show us that you are up to date with whatever health prevention injection and tests that happen to apply today within a jurisdiction. Another straw, some camel backs are breaking , some find it manageable.

Requiring immunization is a cost-saving measure for countries accepting travelers. The last thing a poor country needs is richer people coming in, getting sick, and ending up hospitalized all while infecting other people.

And the system has hundreds of years, if not millennia, of history. Before immunization was available, quarantines were mandatory even for people without visible illnesses around the world. It's only in 2020 that the idea of this become controversial and some people acted like it was unprecedented through exposure to echo chambers.

Any source you could reference about the general practice of mandatory quarantines prior to immunization?

It was unprecedented in our life time. That's all people expressed. Not acted like. At most that's what they believed. Please educate us on how the world worked. Provide some sources, and not only a reference of occurrences of quarantines used throughout history, of course the practice existed, but I read your claim is that it was general practice.

Quarantine is a measure that always existed under serious circumstances, where people would most likely spread a disease causing certain death to healthy, whether young or old people. Today these quarantines are absurd measures causing far more harm that supposedly contain the spread of a virus. Which is spreading anyhow.

Following your logic, going to some extreme would lead to any pathogen discovery on anyone could grant a total shutdown of the worldwide traffic, stop all commercial activity, have every single person assigned to residence. The logic is dangerous beyond belief. You mention echo chambers, it applies to all sort of ideas, not only those you disagree with are echo chambered. there is something even more worrying, it is how institutions influenced by profit makers use propaganda to shape the way we think, and to see that you and many others don't have the respect of other people's appreciation. Do as you please, take all the necessary measure you feel would keep your safe. But Respect other people's freedom.

The question is who pays. You want quarantine, that's fine. Pay for it. Pay for the cost of quarantine facilities and staffing where they exist. And pay for the burden imposed on those mandated to be quaranrined. Those who agree with quarantine should accept the cost, not imposing it on everyone. Why? Because you would then quickly realised the true cost of it and start realising the absurd compromise made with those measures. Right now the impact is diluted across government spending, delayed economical, sanitary and mental impacts. So we go along with disproportionate measures until we can measure their true costs

Take a serious look at whats going on across European countries with these mandates. It doesn't make mainstream news, but pick a few countries and find see the growing number of street protests, and the growth in participants. France currently has spinning up movements as a support of medical staff. Hospital employees claiming the measures such as forced vaccines are absurd, lost their jobs as a result of their stance and are actively voicing their concern. Perhaps they are more ignorant than you about history, maybe they are in echo chambers, but please don't make it seem like we have lunatic medical measure deniers on one side and conscious well educated who support ethical measures on the other.

I was required to have a vaccine against Yellow Fever (I think) in order to visit Kenya a few years ago.

I’m in favour of greatly reducing travel restrictions (and migration restrictions), but vaccination is neither new nor radical.

Edit:

Dates back to 1933, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Certificate_of_V...

I was required to take vaccines too, so what?

We are talking about a vaccine that doesn't even prevent infection. A vaccine that requires 2 doses ( apparently now a 3rd dose is coming in ) for a questionable immunity in effectiveness and lifespan. A vaccine not mandated to be taken when visiting a country at risk such as Kenya, no. Governments have been pushing for universal vaccination, whether one travels or not.

A worldwide campaign for vaccination, followed by pressure and mandating that a number of public places and businesses only vaccinated people to be, along with a tracker or pass being checked when visitors go to a restaurant, those are radical measures and a threat to individual freedom.

> I was required to take vaccines too, so what?

What do you mean, “so what?” Isn’t this exactly what you’ve been complaining about?

> We are talking about a vaccine that doesn't even prevent infection.

No vaccine against any disease guarantees that in any specific individual. Yet at a population level, all the various COVID vaccines which were validated by the trials all reduce symptomatic infection, and the one I took in particular definitely reduces the risk of non-symptomatic infection.

> A vaccine that requires 2 doses ( apparently now a 3rd dose is coming in )

Commonplace. I’ve had several like that; I’d have to look up which disease they were against.

Also, how many doses you need for COVID depends on which of the half-dozen completely different vaccines you’ve been given.

> for a questionable immunity in effectiveness

False, assuming you’re using the word “questionable” in anything other than the sense in which scientists call gravity a “theory”.

> and lifespan.

Common in vaccines, because viruses mutate. Literally why influenza vaccines only last one year.

> A worldwide campaign for vaccination,

So like smallpox? And the only reason yellow fever (and polio, diphtheria, rubella, etc.) isn’t endemic in (e.g. the USA) are the various vaccine campaigns.

> followed by pressure and mandating that a number of public places and businesses only vaccinated people to be,

Quite a lot of childhood vaccines are “your child has the vaccine or they are not allowed to school”.

> along with a tracker or pass being checked when visitors go to a restaurant,

Those were put in before the vaccine, so as to help prevent the spread. They go away when enough people are vaccinated — or get ill — to create population immunity.

> those are radical measures and a threat to individual freedom.

Nothing you’ve listed is radical, and none of it is a threat.

What is a threat to individual freedom is that immunodeficient people have to hide in their homes because too many other people think vaccination is just a personal choice.

Plausibly also when the same get ill and fill up hospital beds so that people with non-pandemic illnesses and injuries can’t get treated.

As the saying goes: “your freedom to swing your fist stops with my nose“.

FWIW, requiring vaccines to viruses seems way more reasonable than banning liquids.

> its keepers are biased as well

More biased than average, in my observation. Often much more.

Snopes is notorious for this. There are plenty of factually true/false things being dismissed as misleading because of some motivated reasoning. Or because of some rhetorical tricks that change the definitions of terms or how something is being assessed. Even something as simple as trying to compare the cost of a Big Mac between the US and Denmark gets muddled because they bring in some indexing measure or other hand-wavy things. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/.

I think a rough analogue is how theologians use scholarly and textual methods to twist the meaning of scripture into whatever they want it to say.

Looking at that Snopes article you linked, how can you possibly describe such a thing as simple? there isn't a single cost in the US to compare against a single cost in Denmark. It's impossible to give a absolute true/false answer since everything from currency conversion, relative costs of living, differences in prices between regions and individual locations, etc all needs to be taken into account to give a true comparison. They try to provide context in a bunch of different ways to see if, in general, that claim appears to be true. Do you disagree with the conclusion?

What do you want them to do? Figure out the exact cost of a Big Mac at every location in the US and every Location in Denmark and average them? Ignoring the fact that this would be essentially impossible to do, what do you expect that number to actually tell you?

Most things in life are not absolutely true/false. To me, expecting things to be signals a lack of intelligence and not being grounded in reality.

Yep agree. It’s the same when people claim that country A is “better” than country B. Your answer very much depends on what you value as “better”.

In your link, Snopes brought a bunch of evidence to bear: price of the Big Mac on Uber Eats in the two places, actual Menu prices in Copenhagen vs Oklahoma, then the Big Mac index, which I think you were referring to. It ends with a few more quotes from others that have reported on this issue.

As a fact checking org, what was missing here and what was muddied? I thought it was a pretty clear read.

Why would you adjust the price by the GDP? When people ask if a product costs more in a different country they don’t mean relative to the countries industrial output. Median income might be a better ratio for this but GDP makes little sense.

Because they mean price for normal people, not price for international traders. Money can be exchanged for goods and services; the value of your money is not how much rice it can buy in Uganda or how much paper it can buy in Kazakhstan if you live in Denmark.

Again comparing with the median wage is more appropriate if that is your goal. GDP does not have a direct connection to what the average person earns - much of the GDP gains over the last 30 years have gone to the rich.

True. Really, it should be compared to a standard basket, or maybe equivalent meals?

"Who watches the Watchmen?

when it comes to "News" these days (ie opinion) Objectivity is highly Subjective.

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