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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if sensible people tend to lose the war in politics because we will lament if something is not quite level headed and fair enough, if it is a little bit too much like propaganda. Meanwhile industries wanting to pollute will happily spend millions to scream lies and propaganda with no shame, buy politicians, create news networks that never paywall you to repeat the lies, meanwhile we bicker about whether someone was perhaps 20% sensationalist about their death accounting.

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Partly agree with you. My issue is just that nothing good was ever achieved by creating mass panic in uninformed public. And, we have had more than a few cases like that with far too many unintended consequences. In this case you may know what is good and here propaganda is perhaps justified as you know a lot about this topic, and the rest of the world is not taking it as seriously as it should. Would that hold true in cases where you dont have a deep understanding and instead of giving you information, experts are hell bent on creating mass panic?

It's a weird reinforcing loop. Institutions like WHO and others would publish a study with good research but also doomsday scenarios w low probabilities. Journalists and publications (institutions of trust #2) pick it up, and in order to simplify and get attention, focus more on doomsday scenarios. The other institutions (eg: govt. or non profits and advocacy groups) and fact checkers pick up same story believing the doomsday scenario to be the most likely one. They publish more opinions, studies, articles, reports etc. and end up creating a situation where no one can get a good understanding of the topic outside of her field. There is so much information that it is hard to gain a handle on that, and here is where I think even 20% propaganda may not be justified.

On the other hand, there is nothing good propaganda has that could be reliably used to distinguish it from bad propaganda (if you are not an expert in the field in question). So unconditionally throwing out _all_ propaganda and discounting credibility of its sources is the only workable choice we have.

The first rule of political change is that if you want an inch, you have to vehemently demand a mile, and then compromise down to wherever you can get.

That's the playbook your opponents will use - and if you want to get anything done, or prevent things from backsliding, you have to follow suit.

Hate the game, not the player. People don't make decisions based on rationality, they do it based on emotional appeals.

This is true because "novel" news spreads faster than facts. So people will happily share doomsday predictions but not levelheaded news.

There's also the folks that want to look smarter than scientists pointing out problems with the way we've done things. Finally, they have an advantage because of their secret or suppressed knowledge.

And to be fair, evolutionarily this is a sensible heuristic.

Learning about novel risks can keep you alive, through preparation and/or action.

While on the other hand nobody tries to fix good news.

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