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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

This is really a crisis of modernity.

People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology that was never before available in history, like image editors, audio editors, video editors, and desktop publishing software.

Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.

At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.

Moderation isn't going to change any of this.

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> because authorities time and time again have misled them.

I personally feel like most of the problem is exploitation.

When the news has some piece, "New research blah blah blah," you and I and most of our peers know that "new research" is unlikely to stand up to the test of time. Yet it's breathlessly reported by one station, and derided as nonsense on another station.

When the weather report predicts no rain, and it rains, you and I and most of our peers know that the prediction wasn't wrong, that we're just talking about likelihoods.

When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way. Plus, reporting those polls probably impacted the outcome.

The news, and politicians, and talking heads, want our outrage because that's engaging. So they exploit us, by misrepresenting research, science, polls...

Which erodes trust in authorities.

And yes, sometimes authorities did horrific things. Like the Tuskegee Experiment. Or silencing Li Wenliang. Or MK-Ultra. Gulf of Tonkin. Red Flags.

I feel obliged to point out that reputable poles predicted Clinton's chances at significantly lower than 99%.

Also there was undo foreign influence on the election that didn't become evident until afterwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

Not to distract from your point ... this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_... suggests the value was always between 40-50%

... however I assume you meant "reputable polls", not Polish people :)

> the value was always between 40-50%

Those are the raw data from polls (an estimate of the popular vote), not the predictions from them ("who will win" - which is what the original commenter refers to).

Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/...

> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out

I.e. a couple weeks before James Comey announced a reopening of the investigation into the email issue?

I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data, but I think this is a bad example because the "facts" on the ground changed significantly in the time period.

I generally put a very high stake of credibility in fivethirty eight. They ended on 71%.

> I agree that 538 was likely over-interpreting their data

I did not say this.

I'm illustrating the original poster's comment about these forecasts being guesses of likelihood.

Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself.

Yet I'm sure all of us knew folks who had opinions riding on the 85%+ forecasts, and then losing faith in the predictions as they wildly changed over the course of weeks.

I missed your point in the original.

As you say, "88% chance of winning" is not "expected to receive 88% of the vote".

The 538 model attempted to weigh the reliability (recency, reputation, magic pixie dust) of polling data and project a range of outcomes.

And even with a "perfect" model, it can take a while to absorb exogenous events like the Comey surprise.

The causes of 538's prediction error might be unknowable. Or, to be fair, if it was even an error! Would we expect probability to approach 100% in the moments before polling opens? Maybe in some fields, but 538 did not attempt this. IIRC they ended at ~70/30 Clinton. A single roll of a die (1d6) will frequently come up 1 or 2.

"Of course Nate Silver and co. did not have Comey reopening the case as a factor in their models; that is not an indictment of the model itself."

Why is that not an indictment of the model? Stuff happens in politics. Things change.

A month out you should ordinarily have much less certainty than a day before. But their predictions were the opposite, where certainty was falling. Sure, there can be reasons for that kind of inversion, but usually it's just arrogance and neglecting the long tail of black swans.

> Stuff happens in politics. Things change.

"FBI Director going rogue the week before the election" isn't something you could factor into a prediction because it just hadn't ever happened before. It'd be like trying to factor in "What if an asteroid hits Kansas the week before?"

By itself, that's unlikely. But the point of black swans is not that a particular thing will happen, but that there are zillions of low-probability events and they add up to a high probability.

> Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day

And the way statistics work, a 90% forecast is truly a 90% forecast - they weren't wrong with this. It's just people think 99% chance of winning basically means "they won". But that's not how it works. So the idea that these numbers are misinformation is incorrect, it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.

> it's that media is using a metric that the average person has trouble comprehending.

Isn’t that a clear case of disinformation?

The public being too ignorant to interpret analysis isn't disinformation.

I wish everyone thought this way :/

So it's ok to mislead people so long as you are not lying directly?

It's ok to pass on accurate information that requires the public to put in the work to accurately understand it.

It is probably impossible to have the complex dialogue sufficient to inform people both intelligent and willing to put in the work in a way that is not apt to either be misunderstood accidentally or more frequently on purpose.

We're talking about metrics with objective definitions that are taught in schools around the country, not headlines like "The President is cancelling his trip to Africa because he hates black people". I don't know, seems like a huge difference to me...

No. If the media reports that the average salary is $50k/year that is not disinformation even if a lot of people will misinterpret it as meaning "most people make $50k/year" simply because they don't understand that an average is a measure of central tendency, not distribution.

Something like this only rises to the level of disinformation if the media (or whoever) deliberately presents an accurate piece of data in a way that it knows will not be understood.

If metrics that average people don't understand was disinformation than 90% of my job would be disseminating disinformation. It's not. Instead, a large part of my job is explaining the metrics.

>Fivethirtyeight had Clinton at 88% less than a month out from election day:

It is funny seeing this here because it is a great example of how it is hard to fight misinformation.

What you said is technically correct but it is extremely misleading. There is no reason to use 538's projection a month out from the election when you could be using the one from the day of the election which had Clinton at 71%. You seem to have chosen the moment in which Clinton's odds were the highest to suggest the projection was wrong. Your comment is just as factual as if I said "538 was one of the few outlets that had Trump favored a few months before the election". That would also be technically true but it glosses over the fact that they only had Trump favored on a single day out of the several months they did projections.

Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538? Is this just run-of-the-mill bias? Is this an honest mistake? It this specific date chosen intentionally and your motive is just being misunderstood? There is no way for a third party to know the definitive answer to these questions, but if I was 538 I would certainly feel a little attacked by your comment and might jump to calling it misinformation.

A parent commenter stated projections from reputable outlets were "significantly lower than 99%." Given the original claim of "polls predicted a 99% chance," focusing on a reputable source's highest prediction lends credence to the statement.

That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well. It's not irrelevant (Oct. median was 85%), and calling my providing a link misinformation is pretty bizarre.

I suspect this is not the first time you've felt obliged to stick up for 538 but you're purely wielding a strawman in this case. I've expressed no judgement.

Anyway, we're talking about the general populace's sentiments around the predictions. Why would we possibly talk about the predictions made the day of the election – those numbers had done no work in shaping that sentiment.

>Given that comment train, wouldn't you focus on the moment they were at their highest? That projection was made scant weeks out from the election, as well.

No, because that 88% was basically a prediction of a prediction because as other people pointed out that occurred before news that changed the makeup of the race. You can't blame them for not knowing the news ahead of time.

It would be like if I predicted the Rams win the Superbowl this weekend, then we find out on Saturday that 10 players will miss the game due to Covid. I might then revise my prediction to the Bengals winning. If the Rams win wouldn't you say my prediction was wrong because of my final prediction? My initial prediction might have been right but that was made with less information and I revised that prediction once I got more information.

Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information. As they got more information their predictions became more accurate. It should be obvious that they weren't changing their model in a vacuum to push the odds towards Trump. More information was coming out that improved Trump's odds and the model reflected that.

And to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation. I used it as an example of why it is hard to categorize misinformation. Some might view your comment as misinformation and some might not. The only value judgement I made was that it is "extremely misleading" and I stand by the categorization regardless of the motive behind your comment.

> Similarly it doesn't make sense to criticize 538 for being less accurate with their early projections when they had less information

It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.

> to be clear I didn't call your comment misinformation

Earlier:

> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?

>It must be a good feeling, then, that I have not criticized them.

You were trying to correct someone who was defending the accuracy of the general industry predictions. If you were not directly criticizing 538, the criticism was certainly implied.

>> Is this "misinformation" meant to smear 538?

Are you familiar with the concept of scare quotes? I specifically used quotes there to indicate that I was not directly calling your comment misinformation but was instead using that term with some detachment.

Polling numbers are different than predicted chance of winning. A five point difference in polling numbers is likely to be a 90%+ chance of winning.

You're comparing apple and oranges. The 99% prediction[1] was based on the statistical significance calculated against the polling results, and was not the actual polling numbers suggested in the wiki that you linked.

1. https://archive.is/enzvh

>you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong

They were wrong though, multiple key polls in battleground states were far outside their margin of error, indicating methodology failures or bias. As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.

I also don't think anyone needs to misrepresent research and science, since huge swathes of it are fraudulent anyway. From the reproducibility crisis to outright fraud and lies, trusted institutions have been desecrating their reputation for years.

The CDC now enjoys a trust rating around 50%, because of incompetence and lies. News media is worse, because they lie more than they tell the truth.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/po...

That poll has it 47% to 43% Clinton when the actual results were 48.2% to 46.1% Clinton. The only real discrepancy is they overestimated the vote totals for 3rd party candidates. The numbers they had when excluding 3rd parties was 49% to 46% Clinton. Do some blending of those two and they basically nailed it. Is this really the poll you want to call out as fundamentally flawed?

>As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error. [1] That's an indictment of their methodology, and it's an indictment of Nate Silver who weights them as an "A+" pollster.

Your link says 2.5% margin of error and not statistically significant. What am I missing? Ironically the comment appears to be misinformation.

>Clinton’s edge in the Post-ABC poll does not reach statistical significance given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support

>As an example, the national ABC/WaPo poll on November 3-6, 2016 claimed a +4% Clinton result, with a 2% margin of error

The end result was roughly Clinton: 48%, Trump: 46%, which is right at the margin, not "far outside".

My own trust in authorities is eroded by more recent and basic things than your list of horrific things.

For example, Afghanistan - decades of war, thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars - all for no clear purpose and whatever we did accomplish there seems to have been reversed in a weekend. The Taliban are still in charge of the country and there was never any accountability for the policy and military failures.

Trump is another example. I often feel like I've walked out of a theater after seeing a convoluted movie. I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?" If our intelligence services thought he was, then their plan was just to run him down in the press for several years? If they didn't then the mainstream media was misrepresenting them for years?

Most major things fall into this category of "I can't believe our government could possibly be this bad." Climate change - we need green energy but also haven't approved a new nuclear reactor in decades. Infrastructure - it costs infinity billion dollars to build a train, and a new public restroom will take most of a decade. Economy - we're just going to create trillions and trillions of dollars at ever increasing rates and that will be fine somehow. Pandemic - almost too much to talk about stuff going wrong.

I could go on and on but the main thing is that the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief. Why should I trust these people?

I'd even add basic things like the TSA to the list: the government says this is required for everyone to be safe, but every single study or analysis shows it is ineffective and security experts universally deride it; and yet, the "authority"--which might literally be the agent at the scanner with a smug attitude about the whole thing--is adamant this is important and that maybe you are a terrorist for nothing other than making a sarcastic joke about the situation.

No one wants to sign a bill pulling back TSA, and then see the headline "TSA would have stopped this terrorist."

Voters are not reasonable, and the media fans those flames.

Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? ;P I will say that if everyone (including the agent at the gate who doesn't seem to want to admit this to even themselves) said that out loud--instead of claiming it was a critical security measure--it would make me feel a lot better about the whole thing and I might not even be upset about it anymore (though at that point you might also see the public opinion holding it together change).

My elderly parents were both submitted to full body pat downs and my dad had to pull up his pant leg to demonstrate that yes, his leg brace was a medical device.

Neither of them are physically capable of overwhelming my preschooler nephew let alone an air flight attendant.

So much theater for so little security.

Looking back on this comment, I probably should have included that this happened within the last month, as if we haven't had 20 years of practice figuring this out.

Note that leaving known agents in place is a recognized approach. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Blunt

I don't think the approach is applicable if the agent is in position to do serious harm.

Not even the ballsiest, most scheming intelligence officer would let a known agent have the nuclear suitcase, though.

do they usually let them be President for a full term of four years with no consequence aside from relentless media assault?

I'm left asking things like "So, was Trump a Russian agent?"

The fact is, he never had to be. He is a fool and it was easy to predict his behavior would be far better for Russia than that of Clinton, and so Russia did everything it could to support him and damage his opponents, no collaboration necessary.

And yet Crimea and east Ukraine happened on Obama's watch and Kyiv will fall on Biden's watch. Cool eh?

All the stage setting for them Kyiv on Trump's watch. If Trump had won a second term it would still have happened. We ascribe entirely too much power to the office of the President sometimes.

It is clear Russia is taking advantage of Biden's fear of military action. China, North Korea, Iran all have been more aggressive. The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone the impression America will back down. Trump kept everyone off balance.

> The outcome in Afghanistan gave everyone the impression America will back down. Trump kept everyone off balance.

You mean the outcome of the withdrawal plan that Trump agreed to? Biden was damned if he did and damned if he didn't:

- The US is weak for withdrawing

- The US doesn't stick to its agreements

That's a false dilema. Biden wasn't criticized for withdrawing from Afghanistan, he was criticized for doing a bad job at withdrawing.

What should he have done differently to have done a good job?

Kept Bagram air base until the evacuation was complete for starters.

Not droning innocent civilians and then fibbing on the way out would have been nice as well.

Maybe not left so much heavy equipment and arms?

And stage for that was set by those laughable red lines in Syria. Remember that?

US resolve is non existent that much is true. It has little to do with Trump or Biden for that matter. When Obama let Assad use gas Putin took notice, everything else comes from that.

About Afghanistan.. it was not the withdrawal it was the laughable way it was done. Abandoning Bagram.. what dumbfuck thought of that? We DO know what idiot approved it though.

Governments are incentivized to do everything wrong at every level.

* Unlike a business, governments don't earn revenue from providing services that people want. They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.

* Unlike shareholders, politicians have zero skin in the game and are therefore incentivized to be as wasteful as reckless as possible. If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever.

* Unlike monarchs, politicians don't own the state, its land, or its resources. They merely get to control the state for a short period of time. That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.

I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?

> They earn revenue through taxes, which they get to collect regardless of how well they govern.

Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?

> If a politician passes an overly generous pension plan that ends up bankrupting the state several decades in the future, the politician will suffer no consequences whatsoever

Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

> That means they are incentivized to extract as much personal wealth out of the state as rapidly as possible during their short tenure.

Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

> I'm not convinced you understand how representative democracy actually works. Are you really arguing for establishing a monarchy in the US, as you seem to be?

Not at all, I was just juxtaposing the incentives at play between the two systems.

> Who is the "they" earning revenue? What does "how well they govern" mean, and who is the "they" doing the governing? These definitions are important. What are you actually complaining about here?

I thought the subject of the sentence was clear ("they" meaning the government). The government earns money by demanding it through force. Private businesses (and non-profit charities) earn revenue by providing services that people are willing to pay for. Businesses that sell stuff people don't want will earn $0 in revenue. Do you disagree?

> Really. Gosh, that sounds very different from every corporate executive ever. > Really. Gosh, that also sounds very different from every corporate executive ever.

I agree with you to some extent. However, a corporate executive is generally compensated with shares in the company, so they have a pretty large incentive to keep the company in tact at least. Politicians have no such incentive whatsoever.

Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have the power to take out a democratically elected president. To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.

My recollection is probably a bit off, but IIRC, the FBI knowingly and repeatedly lied to the FISA court ("material misstatements") in order to obtain secret search warrants to spy on the Tump campaign based on opposition research which was directly funded by the Clinton campaign, who had hired a former MI6 spook to find or make up dirt who also happened to be working for the bureau and was secretly leaking everything to the press! There were basically no consequences for anyone involved, including the FBI. I wouldn't believe that story line in a movie.

The FBI continually goads citizens into being terrorists or on occasion, convinces them to kidnap a governor, then arrests them and claims victory! We could look a little further back in time to the aftermath of 9/11, and the role the CIA played in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the even the FBI doing its best to destroy the civil rights movement.

That's certainly the Republican narrative of that FISA warrant. The inspector general report that found "material misstatements" found no evidence of politically-motivated or intentional abuse. It was basically technical sloppiness.

The Iraq WMD lies were driven directly from the White House, it was not a rogue CIA. For J. Edgar Hoover's FBI you have a point, but it led to many reforms by the Church Committee in the 70s.

Have you read the key judgements from the 2002 NIE on Iraq?

> High Confidence:

> - Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

> - We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.

> - Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.

> - Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Iraq_NIE_Excerpts_2003.p...

That unclassified public NIE "summary" was manipulated by Bush and Cheney. If you can find the classified full NIE it has much more nuance and strong dissents. Instead of showing rogue agencies it's evidence of full White House control.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB254/index.htm

I would agree that the White House placed a ton of pressure on the CIA to come up with a justification to invade Iraq, but the whole thing smacks of them trying to cover their own asses after the fact. Yes, there were dissenting opinions, but the IC still signed off on the NIE, including the summary, and top officials at the CIA have their share of the blame as much as Bush and Cheney:

> On the other hand, senior CIA officials mentioned the uranium claim in congressional testimony at the same time, permitted it to be included in a December 2002 “fact sheet” on Iraq, and mounted only tepid opposition to inclusion of the charge in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, where it would become notorious as the “16 Words.”

If they knew it was a lie, and repeated that lie to Congress, pawning it off as just 'Bush lied, people died' (which, not saying that was your position, but that's what your comment initially came off as, hence my reply) absolves the CIA of the blame they justly deserve for their part in Iraq. But you're right that they certainly were not a rogue agency.

I think GP was referring to Kevin Clinesmith who pleaded guilty to deliberately falsifying documents presented to FISA courts.

Both of those are certainly wrong.

The intelligence services are rogue in the sense they violate our rights, lie to Congress without punishment, and have zero effective oversight. Common people don't control the intelligence services, the legislative branch doesn't, the executive branch doesn't (unless Trump's plan was to make himself look bad), and the intelligence services have their own secret courts. There is no sense in which they aren't rogue. They don't even explain how they spend their budgets

They also have the power to take out a democratically elected president. For instance, they could've published the information they had linking Trump to Putin. They could've convinced the House and the Senate to impeach or Trump's cabinet to remove him.

The intelligence services are a perfect example of the unbelievable malfunction of our government. They are evil, in the sense of being torturers and murders who violate American rights and ignore the law. They are incompetent in the sense that they fail in spectacular and embarrassing ways even against adversaries that they outmatch on paper.

Intelligent services have been abused by presidents many times but there is no credible evidence that they act in opposition to a sitting president. Obama's FBI issued the Trump campaign FISA warrants but Trump installed his own people at the CIA/DOJ/FBI etc. The closest rogue agents against Trump were the whistleblowers like Colonel Vindman that were mostly rooted out and attacked relentlessly to discredit them.

>> Our intelligence services are not rogue nor do they have the power to take out a democratically elected president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

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

>> To think otherwise is just conspiracy theories with no basis.

Your certitude here is making you look quite ignorant of history.

In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[28][29] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".[30]

I think you and I blame different people for that.

I blame voters for wanting easy answers, having a NIMBY attitude to anything, want scapegoats, won't raise taxes in good times, won't help their neighbors in bad times, blame everyone else for their problems, demand instant results, get bored waiting for long-term solutions, care more about style over substance...

Politicians exploit all of those things. And so do talking heads.

> ...the people in charge, the government and the media, seem incompetent to a degree that beggars belief.

Not exactly true, two important things intersect:

1. Running a country is much harder than it looks. The machinery they maintain is older, hoarier and covers more diverse topics than anything and they are constantly being lied to about whether it is working. It is a point I struggle to get across to people as a small-government proponent, but the people in power physically cannot understand the levers they are pulling and the effects the pulling achieves. Most of them aren't even numerate and the complexity at work here is beyond any human. They're flying blind and often setting up bad systems with bad incentives.

2. The goals of the polity are not your goals. The swing voter, in the moment that they vote, appears to be a different and much simpler creature from anything that turns up in normal conversation. The politicians have to deal with that swing voter rather than do what the politician may think is prudent (which, to be honest, is a good thing even if it sometimes throws up terrible results).

You missed the subplot where the Hillary Campaign via intermediaries paid a foreign national to 'develop' the Trump Russia Conspiracy.

It's not your fault it was poorly edited and paced.

Looking like there may be a sequel and probably a spin-off.

A note on Afghanistan, the military started the war paying farmers to stop growing poppy in an attempt to defund the Taliban. The next season farmers planted more, expecting to be paid to burn thier crops again. No dice. Crop production ramped up, flooding the market with Heroine and subsequently rounding out the pain pill opiate crisis in the US with a swell of Afghanny (circuitously routed through south American drug Lords) heroine. And the Taliban got funding for decades. Now the media is aghast at how much regular people hate the government now. Trump support is just a big fat middle finger to an inept establishment that currently has it's pants down around it's ankles.

I think it's more accurate to see the government's primary function as deciding who gets what sinecure, not accomplishing things. I would wager that's the historical norm.

Your list of failures, among others (homeless industrial complex), make much more sense through this light: they're all wealth transfers to political friends.

I don't think any polls themselves gave odds, but I would say any aggregator that gave 99% odds was definitely wrong. Nate Silver gave about 70% odds, as did prediction markets - that is much more reasonable.

you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong

I mean, sure, if you don't think pollsters have any responsibility for due diligence. The polls were an accurate representation of what people were willing to admit to planning and doing, but a lot of people weren't willing to say they were voting for Trump. Popular culture and media spent months telling those people they were isolated deplorables who had no chance, but in the voting booth nobody can shame you. Asking people over the phone whether they were going to vote for Trump was like asking them if they liked being spanked in bed.

One thing to think about here is that US electoral system practically counts different peoples votes differently. A voter in Georgia mattered a lot more than a voter in California or Wyoming. Small polling errors in either state are inconsequential, but hugely consequential in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, etc. Lots of polls are national polls, not state polls too. As it happens, the average of national polls predicted the vote totals overall very well. But that doesn't matter. Because it still came down to a few thousands of voters in a handful of states.

> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong.

A bit of a tangent, but polls don't make predictions, people make predictions based on the polling data. Some people predicted Hillary with 99% chance, and 538 predicted Hillary with 66% chance. When dealing with probabilities it's not as simple as "wrong" or "not", but if people were betting then those that bet 99% would have lost a lot of money, and 538 only a little. As a result I trust 538 a lot more now; that's the nice thing about people making specific predictions, you can over time learn who to trust.

Anyhow this tangent ultimately agrees with your point, as you and I know that if a talking head makes a "99%" prediction, it's got at best an 80% chance of actually happening.

And if 538 were consistently wrong, say wrong 80% of the time, then ~538's prediction gets you right 80% of the time. Win!

Doesn't this only works if an election has two possible outcomes? Revotes and voids are possible as well in most cases. In 2022 these things somehow feel like they're much more likely than before...

Sure. Though in many cases these types of events are pretty low probability events.

And lots of people still said 538 got it wrong. No, it didn't.

Or about how Omicron defies statistics. No, it doesn't.

People just don't fucking understand statistics.

How can you objectively say that 538 was right or not?

They use numbers to come up with probabilities, but there are a lot of baked-in assumptions about things like turnout, various sampling errors or biases, etc.

They have reasons for their assumptions, such as using information from previous elections. But the current election may violate those assumptions, but it's hard to say how much and with what probability.

I trust 538 for the most part. But it's just models and those models have assumptions and it's quite possible the assumptions were just wrong in 2016. We only have one data point, so we'll never really know.

You can’t over one poll. It’s really consistency that you’re looking for over many, many polls.

The worst part of figuring out the trustworthiness of a source is putting in the time and effort to comb over all of its output and comparing it to reality, an effort that can take a long time.

Which lends me to ask: how can you say that you trust 538 if you also say there is only one data point? Because there shouldn’t be: 538 made big news during the election of 2008. 538 has been around since 2008 so you should have a lot of polling predictions to comb over.

I actually don’t have an opinion of 538 as I haven’t put in that work.

You can't blame People. Even some Statisticians, with Phd's and written books, don't understand Statistics and confuse basic concepts of their domain:

"The p value and the base rate fallacy" https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/p-value.html

"Misinterpretations of Significance: A Problem Students Share with Their Teachers?" "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heiko-Haller/publicatio..."

Polls also only count the people you poll. If your poll pool has an inherent bias the poll results will reflect that bias.

Right now the press is fuelling a frenzy over Russian troops, trumpeting "eminent war!!" daily. It is rediculius, completely unfounded, incendiary, false, and just plain dumb...but clicks matter.

Russia has has something 130,000 troops positioned just outside Ukraine's borders and in Belarus. They have tanks, missile systems, amphibious landing ships, medical units, established supply lines, etc.

They actually invaded Ukraine in 2014 and took Crimea.

I mean, the possibility of an invasion is not exactly far-fetched.

Did you not get this memo? https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-fe...

> When polls predicted a 99% chance of Hillary Clinton winning, you and I and most of our peers know that the polls weren't wrong. Sometimes chance comes out that way.

Andrew Gelman just wrote about the difference between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/03/epistemic-...

And it sounds like you're confusing them here. "Sometimes chance comes out that way" is something that applies to aleatoric probabilities. But major elections are not uncertain in an aleatoric sense; they are uncertain in an epistemic sense, and the polls were correct to worry about why they were wrong.

you're missing the underlying crux of the problem, which is scale. at small scale, authority can be roughly verified amongst a group. someone is good at building houses, another person is good at teaching, one is trustworthy, another is not, etc. you can sense these things directly. but (mis-)information scales geometrically/logistically with population, and we have to increasingly rely on imperfect proxies, like certifications, titles, hearsay, etc. to verify and trust each other.

that in turn leads to a comfortable insularity for authorities, which allows them to abuse popular trust with fewer and fewer direct consequences. that is, authorities become more disconnected from the consequences of their actions. as soon as corruption (of any sort) happens frequently enough, the populace has no choice but to move to distrusting all authority because nearly none of it can be verified personally. and then we have this whole dynamic of everyone trying to claim authority over all sorts of stuff, most of which we have no deep knowledge/experience about.

that's the real crisis of modernity, trust at scale. and what we're rediscovering is that most of what we say is bullshit and should be disregarded en massé. we even have terms like 'serious' that point to the timelessness of this general problem.

I would also like to add to your point that there's a delusion that tech can moderate a couple billion people.

In the past, we distributed the moderation but now it seems everything, including moderation, needs to be done by a single entity. There are attempts to automate things but they aren't working.

Perhaps, we should quit trying and only build “small” communities that can self moderate.

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

No, that's wrong model.

Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.

What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.

> That's not to mention that it's gotten easier than ever to falsify evidence using technology

Again, not true. It is easier than ever to point out untrue. With so many data points on every event it is very difficult to completely falsify a piece of information. You can fake somebody saying something publicly but you can't easily ensure there were no 50 other people who have recorded it in some other way.

You say you can fake photo. You had NO photos back in the past. Police did not have cameras on them. A lot of events were not recorded or the records were not easily available.

There was only a very, very short time where data was easily available for everybody but the tools to subvert it at scale were not yet usable.

What happened is that there is more information noise that completely overwhelms most people who don't have "mechanism to sort true from false". In the past you would have other people sort true from the false for you (say television or Catholic Church or whatever organisation you have trusted) but there were not too many of those organisations. If those organisations lied and were caught it was possible for enough people to remember that.

My concern is that western leaders agree with your assessment, have studied the strict information controls that governments like the Chinese CCP have implemented over the past 20 years, and concluded that model is the only strategy for western governments to move forward as well.

Western leaders didn't need the Chinese to teach them about propaganda and the control of information. The fact that we immediately associate the Chinese with this is a result of their work.

The only thing special that the Chinese have done in the past 20 years is not to accept the US imported internet as an unpoliced forum, knowing that it was going to be used as a weapon against them. The US didn't want to leave the internet unpoliced either, but they also didn't want to spend a bunch of money on it. Eventually a private tech censorship industry arose that they could just piggyback on.

I’m talking about the government banning unapproved narratives and criminalizing political dissent. These controls exist currently in China but not in the United States.

What's the evidence that the Clinton/Bush administrations wanted to censor internet content, but decided it was too expensive?

> The only thing special that the Chinese have done

I really don't think this is fair. The Chinese have had an incredible economic boom, modernization, and lifted a ton of people out of poverty, while maintaining totalitarian control of the nation. That's what's unique about China relative to accepted wisdom. It was widely predicted that economic prosperity would inevitably lead to liberation of the people, politically. While the jury may still be out on this long-term, I think the opinion is now pretty pessimistic about the democratization of China. What China has done is shown that economic success can come in a locked down nation. The strife and policy failings of the Western world post-Cold War have also given the Chinese government a narrative about the strife and uncertainty that come with politically heterogenous liberal societies. If you're on the right side of the government, which most Chinese citizens are, the thread of chaos can help keep you in line. Hell, our own government uses this trick to manufacture consent, albeit to a lesser degree.

This challenges a lot of notions in the Western world that liberal democracies are required for prosperity. The Western nations weren't always convinced of this. One need only go back so far to find successful European autocracies. What's "dangerous" to liberty-loving people about China, IMO, is that it may resurrect old ghosts of the Western empires. The social contract people have with their governments gets devalued when said governments think they can press on the people more, or in fact need to, in order to stay competitive or dominant on the world stage. The calls that "we need to be more like China" are more frequent in the press than I'm comfortable with. As Adam Michnik said, "the crucial distinction between systems…was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state."

>> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

> No, that's wrong model.

> Authorities have always misled us. There was no time in the past when authorities would be truthful.

> What changed is us, our access to information and our ability to shout out whatever you want and reach another person on the other side of the world.

I think actually both are true. Authorities have always misled, and people have a deteriorating trust in (especially political) authorities. The reason is because the frequency of lying to the public increases with an authority's access to the public. Before 24-hour news and the internet, there simply wasn't as much motive for leaders to lie with any real frequency. Now they do so constantly because they are in constant dialogue with the public, and are susceptible to frenzy.

What's changed is our ability to detect authorities are lying to us. It's higher than it's ever been. That erodes trust, because over and over we see authorities lying to us.

Then, add in disinformation and propaganda that makes incomplete truths look like total lies, and truths look like at best half-truths. That makes us perceive lying more perhaps more often than authorities actually lie.

I think so too.

With a camera in every hand and an independent (or at least controlled-by-competing-power) news outlet just a click away, all the dirt can no longer be hidden from public view.

Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.

> Our levels of trust are approaching the level that actually matches the dishonesty of the political and managerial class.

Ouch. That may be the most depressing thing I've read in a while. (Not saying you're wrong, though...)

How naive. Why would any lowly person have ever trusted what their lords told them?

To a great extent you have to and with some regularity. Anyone who spends or accepts currency as payment is exercising some trust in the government and the authorities who manage the financial system. When Kennedy told the country about the Cuban missile crisis, the country had to believe he was largely telling the truth about the situation, etc.

Society is built on trust.

Trust isn't necessary at all when faced with a behemoth that can and will crush you without noticing or caring. "Going along to get along" has nothing to do with trust and everything to do with survival.

Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.

Information access might be related in that credentials probably mean less in reality if the information is more widely distributed.

Scribes were more critical in ancient societies where literacy wasn't common.

>Some of it I think is an overemphasis on credentials. I think this is a problem in many domains of society, but credentials are vastly inflated in importance. The result of this is that uncertainty is underacknowledged and valid uncredentialed perspectives are under weighted.

Absolutely. My plumber watched a bunch of youtube videos about coronary bypass surgery. And since I know him, I trust him to do my quadruple bypass surgery[0] much more than someone with useless credentials like a an MD or board certification[1].

Those "doctors" think that just because they went to school and trained for a decade, that they somehow know more than folks who haven't. That's just elitist claptrap. Anyone who wants to watch some youtube videos and read some WebMD articles about brain surgery should be allowed to perform such procedures without all this regulation about "training" and "licensure." /s

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/coronary-bypass-...

[1] https://www.abms.org/board-certification/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

N.B.: It pains me that I had to add a '/s' at the end of my comment, but given the current environment, it's important to remember that Poe's Law[2] applies, even about something like this. More's the pity.

It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.

>It almost goes without saying, but in some cases, there's a fine line between sarcasm and strawmen.

Are you claiming that I set up and knocked down a strawman? Please do elucidate. This should be interesting.

Sure. I don't actually know a plumber who wants to perform coronary bypass surgery on me. In fact, I don't require such surgery, at least not at the moment.

My comment was more "reductio ad absurdum"[0] to make the point rather than a strawman.

And that point being that "expertise is not an illusion" in many cases.

While it's true that there are folks who claim to know some things better than other folks, there are many areas (like medicine and a variety of other fields) where credentialed expertise is not only valid, but essential.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

> People just don't trust authorities anymore

I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:

People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.

This 110%

> I would argue that the issue is not mistrust of authority per se, it is rather the rampant politicization of authority. To wit, I feel like a more accurate reflection of the zeitgeist is:

> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.

This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.

In the past, I think we probably had more "norming," where people were guided into trusting certain common authorities. I feel that's degraded, probably for a whole host of reasons (e.g. erosion of community by technology, intensification of individualist ideology, discovery by some actors that fomenting division is a short-term winning strategy for them, etc.), and the result is what you describe.

Policing misinformation is also kind of norming, but the way it's been done seems kind of ham-fisted due to the demands of technopoly [1].

The failures of too-centralized authority are pretty well known and understood (e.g. through the example of the Soviet Union). Honestly, I feel like our current era may end up being the example of the failures of too-decentralized/too-fragmented authority.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly

>> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.

> This. People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that.

Never have people always gone to first principles on all of the evidence. They have always looked towards people they trust to prime their beliefs. There were times when experts were that trusted authority.

Sadly it’s more common that your crazy conspiracy uncle is now trusted by more people than in the past and authorities are trusted by fewer than in my lifetime.

"People aren't really looking at "the evidence" to make a personal decision on an issue, they search out some authority that appeals to them and follow that."

Far more complicated than this, sorry. I agree with that observation if you gleen your evidence from portrayals in the media...and to some extent this is true but the populist power base in aggregate is far smarter and more purposed than this. What you described in the above quote could also be attributed to flatly thumbing their noses at the evidence because they want a certain outcome and they know they can get it by chaos. You create chaos by appearing to believe outrageous bullshit and acting on it within an approved political arena. It's protected chaotic behavior that serves the populist agenda.

Take the Supreme Court judges and how their rulings, and take issues that you can assume.

For atleast some of the judges, one can clearly have predicted how they would have voted. The justices might have just taken a vacation on the beach and just call in the vote...

Where there is power there is politics. The implication that authority can be depoliticized is ludicrous.

Or perhaps by politics you really mean culture war leanings.

I am not at all saying that authority can be depoliticized, I am simply pointing out that the underlying politics are what guides adherence to or rejection of a particular authority, depending on whether the authority's politics are in alignment with the recipient's or not. So I feel that statement that 'people just don't trust authority anymore' is not accurate, as people seem perfectly willing, in fact sometimes overly-willing to trust authority, with the caveat being that that authority must align with them politically.

To clarify: I am talking about the reception of authority, not the innate linkage of authority itself to the authority figure's politics, but the linkage of the authority figure's politics to the politics of the people deciding whether to be receptive or not to that authority.

I think the problem is that literally everything seems to have a political leaning these days.

"Everything is political" and the like?

Yeah, it certainly seems like there are groups pushing to make everything political.

> People just don't trust authorities with different political leanings than them.

This. The CDC could do well to hire some conservatives to help with their outreach. Put them in positions of power.

Both political parties should do this rather than engage in destructive and polarizing brinkmanship.

I'm afraid focus on the short term and on "winning" makes this impossible, though.

This seems like accelerationism, not a solution to CDC’s issues.

No, hiring more “conservatives” in a bureaucracy doesn’t balance the political polarity. Our current authority trust problems aren’t fixed by political stance (eg. Trump advocating the COVID vaccine, Fauci is a Republican). There is a strong anti-science, anti-academic, anti-government, anti-expert streak in the US political right. It is not exclusive to the right, but the right massively outranks the left in these characteristics. And pro-conspiracy/paranoia propensity is high, so I suspect facts simply won’t break through to some people.

The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics. It:

  - failed to build a test for COVID in the critical first weeks,
  - failed to allow many US labs to import and work with COVID samples, and
  - has continuously given dictates (eg. about masks) which were too simple.

They didn’t trust Americans to say that “masks might work, but we want to reserve the best masks for medical workers and those at highest risk of death”. Michael Lewis had a book which describes how the CDC and FDA are simply too risk averse as the pandemic started (and before). They were unable and unwilling to change.

Also, the problem I see isn’t that the CDC doesn’t hire conservatives. It’s more that conservatives don’t enter lots of fields in large numbers. Academia, journalism, science, art are dominated by liberals because conservatives don’t encourage their kids into those fields because modern conservatives don’t value these jobs. That and training for these jobs can easily disabuse people of several tribal attributes of conservatism (eg. It’s hard to be a biologist, geologist, or evolutionist and remain a Young Earth Creationist). It’s hard to retain a literal interpretation of the Bible after learning about other religions and myth stories.

> The problems the CDC had aren’t related to politics.

Some of them were certainly related to politics. The trump administration sidelined the CDC, pressured the CDC to change their recommendations, suppressed reports, publicly contradicted their statements etc. Biden has managed to influence their recommendations as well. The shortened isolation times were the result of a direct request governors made to Biden. At first the CDC said it was changed because of the science, then they backpedaled and said it was just what they thought Americans would tolerate. Political interference in the CDC has been weakening our faith in them.

I agree it'd be a terrible idea for the CDC to try to "balance things out" by adding more variation in the political influences. They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.

> They should really just stick to facts and science and try to eliminate the politics as much as possible.

It's worth noting that, for public health measures, social considerations like effects of planned enforcement measures and expected public response given those measures, including both compliance, failure to alter behavior to comply, and altering behavior directly against the policy (rather than what the policy would do if there was magic perfect compliance with no enforcement effort) is a key set of facts. (And, in the CDCs case, also includes expected enforcement, resistance, nonenforcement, and outright hostile policy responses by State governments, which the CDC does not control but are structurally going to be responsible, realistic, for much of the concrete implementation of CDC guidance.)

The CDC can't both stick to relevant facts and science and ignore politics, because public health has an enormous social component, of which politics is a central part.

That's a fair point, but they don't have to compromise the truth. "The science we have says to do X, but if you can't do that at the very least do Y and here is the outcome you can expect as a result of failing to X"

Keep to hard science and let politicians use that information to make less than perfect policy decisions. That way, people can at least trust the CDC to always tell us what we should be doing and we can blame or sympathize with politicians for making less than ideal choices to satisfy corporate interests or out of a lack of faith in the American people.

That's much better than the CDC saying "The science says do Y" and then facing a massive amount of backlash as groups of experts say "That's a lie. The science says X" while advocates for Y say "See everybody! We were right!" and many people are left wondering who to trust. As a bonus, those who can do X, could choose to do the best thing no matter what the government policies are, including other nations with less petulant citizens who look to the CDC as a trustworthy source of information.

It's pretty much all the same to the unwashed "Trump Supporter." There is a populist movement in America that is somehow being missed for what it is. The populists will use and discard politicians on a whim. Whoever is perceived to piss on the establishment the most will curry favor and be elected at that moment.

This is what Roger Stone and Steve Bannon we're looking to do with Trump. Slam dunk.

This all arises from deep, deep mistrust and a perceived lack of representation on the part of the establishment toward the unwashed.

The establishment is on the ropes right now.

> This is really a crisis of modernity.

Indeed, one identified 60 years ago by philosophers like Marcuse and Derrida.

"As the circle of human knowledge grows, so does the circumference of the shadows surrounding it. That is not an endorsement of ignorance, but a warning that our philosophy and socio-politics must expand in proportion to our technologies."

>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth.

I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue.

>Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.

One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis.

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

Remember how, just a few months ago, one could get banned from Social media for suggesting Covid-19 originated in a lab? "Fact Checkers" were hard at work silencing that content and attributing it to "conspiracy theorists".

Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab. The Chinese authorities certainly didn't release any more data, the only thing that changed was the presidential administration. How can this be explained? Why would the “authorities” try to initially divert attention from the evidence pointing to a lab leak from China?

> People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

Honestly, I don't think it's that. I think the cause is the perception that the "authorities" have a different set of values than "you" (and they're trying to impose them through orthogonal expertise-derived authority). Cataloging all the times the authorities have been misleading is a downstream activity to help justify pre-existing mistrust.

That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.

> That's two sides of the same coin. When authorities invoke their expertise or science for a position, but are really making a values-based argument, then people will feel misled.

Yeah, but it's important to emphasize the values aspect, because I think that's where the emotional energy comes from. IMHO, that energy is fuzzy, resentment against one authority in one area transfers to a different authority in a different area, just as long as they're perceived being alike in some vague way. For instance, I don't think there'd be so much distrust over COVID response if there hadn't already been a bitter culture war where medical authorities sometimes take sides.

Authorities, moderation, and the mistrust of both are nothing new. The modernity crisis is that we can't trust our instincts any more about what's a centralized authority, what's an individual, what's a moderated environment, and what's a public square. There were always battle lines to contemplate, but now the front line is everywhere.

There was a brief window during the latter bit of the 20th century and early 2020s during which public trust in the media and academia were relatively high. The relevant factor as far as I can tell were that these institutions aspired toward neutrality and objectivity (someone will predictably miss the distinction between aspired toward and successfully delivered 100% of the time, but hopefully the rest of us can enjoy a fruitful discussion). It really feels like there was a significant shift in these fields away from integrity and toward activism in the most recent couple of decades, and that this is driving mistrust (and consequently causing people to feel around through the fog for more reliable institutions, often unsuccessfully).

There are two points of view on the cause of the 20th century media trust.

One: The media aspired towards neutrality

Two: The media was consolidated and Overton window kept so tight average people couldn't find contradictions.

I can't bring myself to subscribe to (2) for a variety of reasons.

1. The post-2010 media has been as consolidated as it ever has been--around coastal elite / woke left ideologies and Democratic activism (I say this having only ever voted Democrat in POTUS elections for whatever that's worth). Granted, social media provides a diversity of opinions--even still, there are other factors.

2. The post-2010 media unanimously and widely publishes high-profile, objective, and trivially verifiable falsehoods (a few from memory): characterizing the Google Memo as an "anti-diversity screed", the coverage of the Nicolas Sandman still photo, the coverage of the Rittenhouse saga, the coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, etc. Note that all of these errors support the same woke left viewpoints (as opposed to random errors). There's also a long tail of more subjective issues ("why does the media keep bringing up racial disparities in police shootings without exploring obvious follow-on questions?").

3. The post-2010 media landscape includes reporters and entire publications who rather proudly consider themselves activists, who insert themselves into their stories, and who loudly broadcast their biases (typically woke-left biases) on social media. This is a stark departure from the 20th century journalistic ethos.

4. The academic fields which became openly activist have similarly experienced a degradation in public trust, while the more objective fields have retained much more trust. This mirrors what we're seeing in the media.

All of this seems to boil down to a failure to pursue neutrality in my view.

I suspect the tight 20th century Overton window was a result of 20th century epistemological institutions' pursuit of neutrality. The institutions were much more fact-based and opinions began to converge around facts.

I would love to see what folks in the 90s would've made of this, for example: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1078977416/race-chat-emoji-sk...

>because authorities time and time again have misled them.

I think because people are more comfortable believing what they want to believe.

That may be true in a non-general sense. There are many people that take the time to research and learn the truth, and there are probably a number of people that prefer to just go with the flow of their peers. I really couldn't tell you what the split is, but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group.

> There are many people that take the time to research

Not directed at you but "research" and internet topics. I think that term has been ruined for me. Lotta folk's "research" is they saw a youtube video the told them what they wanted to believe .. .or they even sought it out.

Really hard to know what anyone means by that anymore.

And honestly even I don't research much, most research I last did was looking for a new dishwasher... and that wasn't a lot.

Let's take this even farther. Let's say I'm going to do "research" correctly (at least how I would interpret it)

So I get a subscription to Nature and The Lancet and Science and read the literature. Except I'm now stuck. I cannot attempt to reproduce any of the studies, so I'm stuck either taking every study at face value, or trust someone else to tell me which studies were done correctly, which have merit, which were methodologically flawed, which were purposely skewed to fit some desired outcome etc.

At the end of the day, everybody has to trust someone else. In my parent's generation, I think most people trusted their doctors and other "credentialed" people, but now for some reason millions are listening to fucking Joe Rogan for health advice.

Maybe a difference is, back in my parents' generation's time, nobody was willing to publish crackpots and quacks, but today, literally anyone can create a YouTube channel, and build viewers. Modern platforms exercise very little editorial control, and are willing to publish anything. So, the dry, boring experts are getting drowned out by popular Joe Rogans.

That's just the promise of the internet isn't it? If YouTube didn't exist, I'm sure joerogan.com would be more popular than some university professors website.

Do you want to get rid of the internet?

I'm not sure many or even a handful of people really research. I feel the many go to youtube to be told by their favorite talking head how to feel or rationalize a subject. That is not "research".

I did not make a decision about masking or not because I conducted primary research, nor did I read dense medical papers from peer reviewed journals using terminology I don't understand. I followed the advice of sources I trust.

That is not research in any sense of the word. If my source has chosen to deceive me for whatever reason then my echo chamber is never going to allow me an escape. In fact, I'll most likely dismiss any counter evidence as propaganda even knowing full well that is what my echo chamber is feeding me.

People used to trust subject matter experts and now they trust personalities in stead. It is a natural evolution of newscaster to entertainer and reliable source to propagandist.

I think the largest disservices were done by unethical scientists such as tobacco "researchers" and military sponsored clandestine medical experimenters.

Now we would sooner trust a reality TV personality than a phd subject matter expert. We reap what we sow.

> , but I would hope most here on HN would fall into the former group.

Of course. That’s what allows us to talk about the foibles of People in this thread as if we were Martians.

I think it’s a little more complicated than your wording.

We don’t go all the way to first principles on every topic, so we have to make decisions about who to trust and when. We tend to trust people like us. When there were still gatekeepers, the sheer number of stupid opinions and fringe paranoia was rare for us to be exposed to. Now those things are two clicks away and they tend to be recommended by engagement-focused algorithms.

Confirmation bias is a very strong force, but before we have an opinion on a topic, we look towards trusted authorities. Sadly our crazy conspiracy/paranoia uncles are greatly trusted in recent years.

> Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they

Or maybe they (and other tactics) are the primary cause, not secondary.

Regardless, the sad and ironic thing about it is that it seems likely many people aren't learning the lesson about institutions practical limitations, but instead just exchanging for worse ones. Even more fun, plausibly in some areas this seems to have created a negative feed back loop on the institutions themselves.

Wouldn't it be more like a crisis of post-modernity? They say high modernism and all that 20th century stuff is behind us.

People never trusted authorities outside of the first world. The Western governments were hiding their true nature much better for a long time. In the last 20-30 years the world previously known as civilized has degenerated enough to exhibit the same problems people living outside of it are used to. Europe's fate was arguably sealed by WWII. But what happened to America at the pinnacle of its power will keep historians busy for a century.

Younger people need to be reminded that one man's terrorists are another man's freedom fighters. There is no universal truth in human affairs, just a fight for survival of your people against other groups. You need to learn which side you belong to and support them. Typically your government is your worst enemy, not some foreign dictator.

Censorship is binary. Freedom of thought is absolute and you are either free or not. There's no "moderation", just powers that be positioning to demoralize and exploit you if not drive you to extinction.

There is no such thing as "more good" more "more evil", simply "existing to survive" - but there is an absolute binary of freedom vs. non-freedom? There is no such thing as moderation(pragmatism) in policy? There is no power(government?) except those trying to demoralize and exploit you to extinction?

Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?

>Fellow HNers, I don't know where to begin dismantling this post or what to say that wouldn't be construed as a personal attack. Can someone with more skill call out the terms for the paranoia and hypocrisy here?

Given the lack of specificity and details, GP's claims are absolutely suspect. I'd suggest just leaving it alone, since the vagueness of the assertions made makes it impossible to refute or argue with GP about it, since we really have no idea what they are blathering on about.

Pull at one thread and the response can be "that's not what I was talking about" with more unsupport[ed|able] assertions, potentially with a goalpost move as well.

To quote a terrible movie[0], in the case of the comment you're replying to "the only winning move is not to play." IMHO, YMMV, etc., etc., etc.

As such, I recommend backing away slowly.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

> People just don't trust authorities anymore,

This is true.

> because authorities time and time again have misled them.

But is this? Here's a chart of U.S. public trust in government since the late 1950s: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...

Was government really more trustworthy in the 1950s than the 1960s and 70s? Did governments back then not mislead people? Surely there was plenty exaggeration or propaganda about the Soviet Union and communism in the 50s? Johnson misled the public about the Gulf of Tonkin, but was it so different than Roosevelt misleading the public about the Greer incident?

I suspect the real cause of the decrease in trust is not a change in the way institutions behave, but a broad cultural change towards individualism that began in the 1960s, when institutions became "the man."

> At the same time people want certainty and simplicity, and when they find they live in a world where nothing can be trusted they double down and cling to whatever reflects back to them their most cherished beliefs and what vilifies those they deem evil. It might not be true, but at least it makes them feel good, and so they can pretend it must be true if anything is.

Like for example this simple theory? We are all people.

No it's a crisis of COMMONS, if we have enough commons this would not be a problem.

When you monopolize commons into private things you get this..

Yes this is a rehash of a former Presidential candidates own arguments, some of you may remember his law works such as the CC mark.

I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess.

That's in an environment where people demand simple and concrete answers because we are conditioned to pay for something and receive a full service for it has become the norm. Unfortunately, humans are not in complete control of everything, there's no global CEO that leads the efforts and even the most knowledgeable people don't know that much. As a result, services and the information on cutting edge are not spotless.

> I don't think that it's Authority trust issue at all. I think is communication issue because most of the "misleading" that had happened is a result of oversimplifications in an attempt to communicate very complex issues that require deep expertise to have a theory or an educated guess.

the assumption you're making here is that Authority is always correct (or at least knows when it's not 100% correct) and always truthful. this is false, as demonstrated by early on pandemic rhetoric of "masks don't do anything, don't buy masks." we now know that, regardless of whether masks actually do anything or not, this was deliberate misinformation designed to get citizens to not deplete mask supplies so they could be saved for medical professionals early on in the pandemic when things were crazy. I have seen people on this very website admit that they are aware of this fact yet maintain trust in these Authorities because although they were deliberately misleading us, They Were Doing So With Righteous Intentions, So It's Okay.

once you've admitted that you're aware that an Authority has lied to you, but only because It Was In Everyone's Best Interest, how can you continue to trust that everything the Authority says going forward is the Truth?

I don't talk about authority at all, that doesn't interests me. Just to be sure, by authority I mean people who hold authority over something due to their appointment.

For example, the mask thing is an USA issue as the people who said that had no authority outside of the USA. Our right wingers often import American propaganda and it's death giveaway when they start talking about something that some American politician like dr. Fauci said.

In the case of authority, there's close to 0 trust in what they say where I live currenly, no one cares about the authority, Therefore we here don't have a case of "We trusted the authorities but we were misled" because we always assume that they are corrupt and incompetent. In fact, the health ministry showed better than the average competence and just as they start building some trust, they were exposed to be lying shamelessly.

Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago? Governments lying and people trusting them is a myth, trust diminishes extremely quickly. Politicians constantly rank at the bottom of the most polls about trustworthiness, everywhere.

Besides the outright lying politicians, the misinformation happens when people try to digest very complex information beyond their capacity to understand it and when a person who is actually in control of the complex information tries to simplify things to the layman.

If physics were more mainstream, we would have people misunderstanding science and data. Oh wait, we have those. It's just that those people are not marching on the streets(yet). We have flat Earthers , we have perpetuum mobile builders, we have all kind if ridicilous stuff build around layman misunderstanding things and building alternative realities over oversimplified scientific topics. We also have the sharlatans, sure but when people say "authority in physics", that said only colloquially and when they speak publicly they commit the sin of oversimplifications and best guesses presented as clairvoyance due to their god-like understanding of the universe.

"Seriously, who cares about what the authorities says? I thought that ship sailed long ago?"

All the major religions are alive and well, and have billions of believers who care very, very much about what their authorities say.

I don't think so, they usually follow local spiritual leaders. That's why no issue is ever resolved by their authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the time.

There are some glaring counter examples to your assertion.

The Catholic Church is the largest sect of Christianity, the largest religion. Protestantism (typically a smaller, more local organization) is actually a smaller branch, but has many megachurches.

"they usually follow local spiritual leaders"

Whoever they follow, those are their authorities.

"That's why no issue is ever resolved by their authorities, they keep fighting and dividing all the time."

They fight because their authorities tell them to.

Authority is NOT a synonym for a leader or a consultant.

I don't agree, unless your definition of modernity is the set of unfounded and unvalidated beliefs that have been largely imposed on people against their will for the last 100 or so years.

I agree though that "moderation" is not going to change any of this. What we are witnessing though are the trows of a transnational regime (liberalism, globalism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it) that is inherently schizophrenic and is trying to desperately maintain its slipping grasp on power and control… and reality for that matter. They reject reality and substitute their own. That can only go on for so long, but it cannot go on for ever, even if it can outlive all of us. It is an attempt to violation of the laws of natural order and life, and it will always fail eventually.

It's terrifying, the only thing that can combat this is to win at a critical thinking cat and mouse, that will become ever more in the favour of propagandists.

>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

It certainly has to do with trust in authorities, but for many that loss of trust happened in childhood and left them with a paranoid mindset and diminished capacity for logical reasoning.

See:

“Associations between adverse childhood experiences, attitudes towards COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine hesitancy: a cross-sectional study”

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053915

Should have fallen in line like all the intelligent kids.

Facetious: I'm not gonna curve with the road like all these lemmings, I'm gonna go straight off the cliff!

The majority isn't always right, but instinctively going the other way isn't better.

> Moderation isn't going to change any of this.

Oh yes it will. Whoever is in control of moderation controls the information.

Everybody knows there is misinformation or whatever they want to call it. That has always been there. Authorities unanimously agree that information needs to be controlled and the argument is simply over who gets the power to do it.

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