Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by concinds | Hacker News Reader

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I'm skeptical that education is a solution to collapsing societal trust.

First, the primary organs that would be capable of this education are the media, who have a profit motive to stoke any and all fears (immigration, radiological warfare, world war, coffee being carcinogenic).

Second, I think this distrust goes beyond "the CDC said something wrong once, I don't trust them as much anymore." That could be solved with education. But we're seeing a more fundamental rise in broad-based distrust of any authority figure, and it's a much more instinctive response.

In a world where authority is more powerful and centralized than ever, some are bound to feel powerless. Someone's actions on the other side of the world have more impact on your life than they ever could (pick depending on your priors: a Wuhan wet market customer's appetite, or a Wuhan Institute of Virology employee's carelessness). With such an interconnected world, how could conspiratorial thinking not be appealing to some people?

Power inherently fosters distrust and cynicism. You can have as much pedagogy and education as you want: rational discourse just can't combat a fundamental instinctive reaction, a growing sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness that some people are bound to feel. And the response to this distrust? More control over discourse, over communication mechanisms[0], and ultimately, over citizens. Governments and corporations are more powerful than they ever were. Surveillance, and enforcement of rules, are easier and more automated than ever. How could our primitive, Dunbar-number brain wiring not react with distrust, or even hostility towards (some) authority figures?

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/politician-says-germany...

It's not just that the CDC and other institutions of scientific authority 'said something wrong once.' I think most people understand and accept that science is not perfect.

Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational?

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-sets-shor...

EPA famously did the same during 9/11. It would have been better if they instead trusted us and said something along the lines of "the dust is full of dangerous asbestos, but we need heroes this day".

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro...

Instead they prefer messaging to achieve an outcome instead of direct truth.

This kind of failure happens as a consequence of an intellectual environment: the impossibility of carrying a nuanced message. This perhaps can be solved by "more education", in the broader sense. Until then it's hard to blame individual instances of public officials who try to do their best to distill a complex tradeoff in a public announcement where they either have to talk with an authoritative tone otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak if they don't or they will be criticized for being too paternalistic if they do. They are between a rock and a hard place and various figures are trying to carve their own paths without any rule book, and most of them will spectacularly fail.

> otherwise they'll be criticized for being weak

politicians, sure, but public officials such as the EPA?

Ok. Replace weak with "shifty" and "unclear". In any case a public communication that doesn't reassure will quickly be replaced by one that does, by escalating the issue to the nearest political figure who takes on the job of providing such assurance.

I would think lying would make someone seem more shifty than making the facts known.

> that doesn't reassure will quickly be replaced by one that does

sure, just doesn't need to be the EPA that does it. pre-empting politicians and doing their manipulation for them is not justified - politicians are not a source of truth.

don't get me wrong; I don't think anything of that is justified. I just think there is a selective pressure for this behaviour to emerge. High-profile public officials are politicians for all intents and purposes. They shouldn't be, but they are.

> It's not just that the CDC and other institutions of scientific authority 'said something wrong once.' I think most people understand and accept that science is not perfect.

I disagree. I think a big part of the problem is people having unreasonable standards of accuracy or consistency. On COVID, the CDC was never going have everything perfectly figured out in the beginning, and then consistently repeat the same message from January 2020 to January 2022. There have been too many unknowns and too much of a need to act urgently before everything was figured out. To this day you still have people people justifying their distrust by saying things like "I though we just had to stay home for a few weeks to flatten the curve."

Also, there's an unreasonable expectation that messaging should be be all things to all people. If a message widely disseminated and understood, it needs to be simple and clear. However that will lose nuance, and some people will launch into distrust because the nuance they demand isn't there. The problem is those goals are contradictory, so someone's not going to get what they want.

> Instead, those institutions have shown that they are willing to publish nobel lies. Specifically, they are willing to bend the truth and publish false information if they believe it is in the best interest of society / greater good. Given an entity that has shown willingness to bend the truth 'for the good of society', isn't distrust and cynicism is rational?

I don't think distrust and cynicism is rational in that case. It would be if they "lied" [1] selfish reasons, but if you assess that their motives are pure, then descending into "distrust and cynicism" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And frankly, if "noble lies" bother you, wait until you learn the kind of ignoble lies people start believing when they become distrustful and cynical.

[1] Quotes because frankly most things people call lies aren't actually lies.

> I don't think distrust and cynicism is rational in that case. It would be if they "lied" [1] selfish reasons, but if you assess that their motives are pure, then descending into "distrust and cynicism" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Perhaps not purely rational, but predictable and consistent with emotional norms.

> Perhaps not purely rational, but predictable and consistent with emotional norms.

That makes no sense to me. On an emotional level, my assessment of someone's intentions is a far more important factor in determining how I feel about them than any statement or group of statements.

If an institution cannot give sufficiently accurate facts to me, why wouldn't it be rational for me to try to figure out the truth (to my satisfaction)?

You may assume that "I" do not have sufficient education and training to interpret state-of-art publications, and/or assume that "I" would end up trusting dubious alternative theories, but you do not know. The "average" person may indeed be incapable of finding out the truth by themselves, but I'm really sick of "science-y" people giving blanket statements on what others should believe without actually checking whether they deserve the condescending remark in the first place.

> You may assume that "I" do not have sufficient education and training to interpret state-of-art publications, and/or assume that "I" would end up trusting dubious alternative theories, but you do not know.

If you're that smart, you should be smart enough to 1) understand the pressures they're under, 2) be empathetic, and 3) seek out information that may not be adapted for mass communication.

> but I'm really sick of "science-y" people giving blanket statements on what others should believe without actually checking whether they deserve the condescending remark in the first place.

Check with who? The public? You personally? Throughout this whole pandemic, precisely zero "science-y" authorities have had conversations with me on this, so I'm speaking exclusively about mass communications.

The lies people tell to the distrustful and cynical don’t matter much. When you take the time to evaluate things from first principles, someone saying something misleading around you just isn’t that impactful.

Institutions being wrong and misleading is something that is immensely harmful because of trust.

Most of the CDC guidance has been verifiably insane from the start of COVID — often from the CDCs own advice before the pandemic.

We need to stop excusing their behavior.

I think the noble lie the parent is talking about has to do with the CDC's lie about masks early on in the pandemic.

> I think the noble lie the parent is talking about has to do with the CDC's lie about masks early on in the pandemic.

Are you talking about the "don't buy masks" thing? Because when I dig up the actual early communications, they're not lies:

https://twitter.com/cdcgov/status/1233134710638825473

> CDC does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus. Take everyday preventive actions, like staying home when you are sick and washing hands with soap and water, to help slow the spread of respiratory illness. #COVID19 https://bit.ly/37Ay6Cm

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...

> “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” the surgeon general, Jerome M. Adams, said in a tweet on Saturday morning. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

Both of those statements were made at a particular time under a particular set of unknowns, and the only way I could see them as "lies" is if I misinterpreted them by failing to consider that context.

The most egregious false statement is probably the thing about hand washing, but it's a not a lie because given how little was known at the time and the fact that the CDC isn't up in some ivory tower, so they had to say something and just recycled previous advice. In Feb. 2020, there wasn't much COVID period, so running around with an N95 to the grocery store would just waste it, especially if it's worn incorrectly (and I saw lots of that, especially using only one strap).

Also, both those statements are far more nuanced than I remember, which I think kind of proves my point about nuance. People claim they want it, but they still strip it away and remember some highly simplified version.

Uncertainty and especially admitting when something is not yet known is perhaps the most important part of science. The point is to do experiments and actually test things to get closer to the truth. One must admit epistemological uncertainty until the actual experimentation.

The CDC still has not performed or directed any large-scale experiments of any kind. They are a political institution, not practitioners of science.

Saying something definitive like 'Masks are NOT effective in preventing #Coronavirus' before the evidence is in is quite anti-scientific.

> The CDC still has not performed or directed any large-scale experiments of any kind. They are a political institution, not practitioners of science.

> Saying something definitive like 'Masks are NOT effective in preventing #Coronavirus' before the evidence is in is quite anti-scientific.

1. The statement you quote came from the Surgeon General, not the CDC. The Surgeon General is a political appointment, and as far as I know, the CDC does not report through him.

2. IMHO, the CDC's problem was actually the opposite of what you are complaining about. It was too scientific. Science is slooooooow, so if you rely on it too heavily then your problem will get "inside your OODA loop" and you won't be able to act quickly enough to tackle it effectively. The CDC has multiple hats, and it needed to push its science hat back in order to wear its crisis leadership hat in front.

Science is not the right tool for every job. It works great for things that change or move slowly (like physical laws) and very poorly for things that change or move quickly. It's an error to expect/demand every problem be solved with science

Here's what Fauci said after the fact about the CDC's early stance on masks [0]:

> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?

> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."

I think it's pretty clear that they intentionally downplayed mask wearing for the public with the goal of saving masks for hospitals, even though kn95 masks were on the market[1], and wearing masks would have saved lives.

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200407162126/https://wiphone.i...

I believe that people at large are better at sniffing out bullshit than the elitists running these institutions realize. Unfortunately most aren't as good at separating out the actual parts being manipulated thereby leading to increased distrust of "science" and to crazy flat earth groups becoming a thing. sigh

I'm also skeptical. An unprecedented percentage of Americans have well over a decade of full-time education, yet here we are. People question it's quality or assert that some degree-holding buffoon proves it worthless, but I doubt they have convincing empirical evidence that our population knew more in another era.

I agree with you that this won't happen, simply because (via an evolutionary basis) the maintenance of social order comes before the dissemination of truth. The two might coincide, but where they don't, social order comes first.

This is ultimately what happened during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It's what happens during fuel scares, it's what happened during 911 as a below poster explains, it's what happens within companies when layoff rumours circulate.

Even within the closest of romantic relationships each partner is not 100% truthful with the other because there are some things that are simply better not said.

Unless the idea is that we descend into some sort of authoritarian nightmare and the general population becomes irrelevant though, I'd argue that social order does require some semblance of trust in power even if only in the basics (e.g. if I don't cross the State, the State won't cross me).

Once that falls apart the whole thing is in ruins.

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