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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

>The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities.

What caused that trust to be lost? Is it something they did?

Absolutely. At least here in the United States there’s a full on collapse of trust in institutions and supposed expertise and for extremely good reasons.

Over and over again those with authority have squandered it. An opioid epidemic devastated so many communities after doctors, health care executives, and McKinsey and Company said the new class of drugs were non-addicting. Our manufacturing sector evaporated after economists and politicians said free trade would benefit everyone. Thousands of young people were sent to die in the Middle East in a war all the experts said was necessary and would be relatively painless.

Those are just the first three examples off the top of my head. I could keep going. We were promised technology would improve our lives. We were promised borrowing money for education would improve our lives. And on and on and on.

All bullshit. All promulgated by supposed experts with impeccable credentials. It’s a full on disaster and the chickens have come home to roost.

> in a war all the experts said was necessary

Just to clarify, many experts from generals to peacenik linguists to gonzo journalists predicted immediately that the wars would be an expensive and unwinnable series of atrocities. They weren't given airtime.

Well yes that’s the point. By literal definition the people who were so obviously wrong weren’t experts.

But at the time, if you were observing “expert” opinion that was it.

That's not the way I remember it at all. The government were very obviously going into war because they wanted to and scrabbling around for anyone who would support them. You only have to look at the death of David Kelly.

> Lawmakers knew from the beginning the shakiness of the Bush administration’s case for going to war with Iraq, and Biden not only went along with it, he championed it.

- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/15/20849072/...

> [Biden] was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position.

- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/joe-bi...

More?

> Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.

> Senator Dick Durbin, who sat on the Senate intelligence committee at the time, was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said.

- Also from the Guardian link.

And that's just war. We were lied to about sugar; about margarine, about recycling, about oil spills, about agricultural pollution, about public transport. We were lied to about trade, espionage, healthcare. Repeatedly, barefacedly. Lies are the most bipartisan issue in America.

In the face of all this, we're told the enemy is distrust itself, told to trust the science, told to believe that Biden and the Dems are fighting for us. We're told anti-war news outlets and comedians are secretly communist, Russian funded. It's all such utter wank.

You've touched one of the real veins of this issue that very few really want to talk too loud about. There are still a handful of good journalists doing good work out there, but they seem to have been shoved over into "crazy man on a blog ranting" corner, making it much easier for propagandized coincidence theorists to shut down all discussion from them as crazy conspiracy theories.

I think a good analysis of the history and changing landscape of media is highly in order if we want to get to the bottom of this.

As for me, I like to remind people of Operation Mockingbird quite a bit lately, and rest assured the name just got changed after the Church Committee and given the explosion of the internet they are certainly extremely pervasive in the new system.

As CIA director William Casey said: "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

Which is also why the trust in the institutions that give people airtime is virtually nonexistent, and people on the internet, sometimes those censored experts and sometimes people masquerading as censored experts, are getting all the attention.

There has also been a huge emphasis on institutional misdeeds, driven by the outrage economy.

Nobody takes note of the hundreds of life improving drugs developed in the same time period as opioid epidemic. Nobody takes note when cops arrest the right guy and saved the day. Nobody takes note when a country doesn't militarily threaten or invade the US.

Interesting point. Do you think were it not for outrage economy, would US tackle it faster/slower/at the same rate? Maybe the reason for outrage economy is that there is a fair amount of things to be outraged about.

I personally think the majority of the outrage economy is counter productive. It is important to identify and communicate areas for improvement, but I think most of the solutions generated from the state of outrage are off target. I think emotional outrage is a natural response to some of the injustice in the world, but rarely helpful in actually solving a problem.

Is the life of one innocent person an acceptable price for success?

What do you mean by success here? Depending on your definition, I think there are times where the answer is yes. There are clear analogs to the trolley problem in public policy every day.

Is the life of one innocent person an acceptable price for the lives of several innocent people?

Note well: I'm not actually a consequentialist. I'm just pointing out what "for success" actually means, at least some of the time.

The answer we have generally come to is based on a psudo kantian interpretation of causality. One innocent can die due to inaction, but you can't actively kill one to save many.

We don't allow nonconsentual body snachers to harvest one person to save many. Alternatively we may allocate finite funds to save several lives instead of a single life. We may also choose not to spend the money to save a life

Sorry nobody gives a fuck that our global military dick swinging prevented Senegal and Guatemala from sailing into New York harbor and carting off our treasures.

The outrage economy tends to focus on people and interpersonal drama. Some comedian said this, or maybe some company did something stupid and there’s a walkout.

If anything there’s a massive shortage of outrage. Given the degree of misery the entrenched elite is inflicting on the masses, the fact that we don’t have a general strike or torch wielding mobs swarming over the gates of billionaire’s houses is frankly astonishing.

Outrage is only good in that it generate interest in the topic. There is a surplus of hot-headed illogical people bogging down any real constructive discussion. There is a shortage of people that understand the realistic challenges involved and working to come up with viable Solutions on either side of a given issue

The problem is that the only viable solution is for an entrenched elite with disproportionate power and money to lose much of that power and influence.

It’s a struggle between the masses and the ruling class about who gets to make decisions in our society, not like lunch meeting where we can find common sense action items to agree on.

How does outrage help overcome this challenge. A good chunk of the country stands with the status quo and elites on any given topic.

I don't think outrage changes minds, just engages your base. It also encourages the working masses to lash out at each other. Most outrage topics serve mostly to pit the masses against each other, based on skin color, gender, or who has bigger scraps from the economic table.

If you want real change, the solutions are relatively simple IMHO. Ranked choice voting, proportional representation in senate and congress, and less winner take all closer to a Parliament.

Outrage economy is about making the opposite decisions from the "ruling class" no matter what those decisions are

Eg, a doctor at a jail tested Covid treatments on inmates to see if it helped. That's a ground-shaking loss of trust! Where that's one crazy doctor and an isolated case, it's hard for the disenfranchised not to generalize to the rest of the medical establishment.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arkansas-inmates-ivermectin-fed...

It's the noble lies more than any direct action that erodes trust the most.

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