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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

There are a few people in my circle that are overburdened by conspiracy theories to the point where they think that humans are corrupt and everyone is out to get them. It's exhausting to live like that. My goal is to be my 13 yr old self's hero. Do cool stuff, be in a good relationship, and fix things that bother me to the best of my ability.

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Hear hear! Our current and 13 year old selves sound like we could be a lot alike!

I'm really doing my best to make past/teenage me proud. I know about 5 years ago, I'd probably have kicked my own butt.

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.

Sometimes, it seems the difference between facts and conspiracy is 6 months or another presidential administration, whichever comes first!

This is the stuff that is exhausting.

Why focus on it? What good does it bring to you?

"Why keep looking at the stars through these telescopes? We all know the Earth is at the center of the Universe, the Pope said so. What good does it bring to you?"

I find it disingenuous to conflate “consuming news media” with “looking at the stars through telescopes”…

It's reality.

And in your day-to-day life, how does a deep understanding of the psyops being run against you and your countrymen do anything to help?

Knowledge is for action.

Your rights are being eroded, your purchase power is being drained, society around you is slowly collapsing.

Change that happens slowly is insidious to notice, but it surely is impossible if you choose to actively ignore it... until it becomes unbearable, and then it's even costlier to act.

How are you acting in response to this knowledge?

In a democracy the solution to problems is to spread the word and ensure many more people know, so that it can influence future elections. So exactly what he is doing here.

Yeah, I've tried doing it but nobody listens to me, they think I'm just stupid for having opinions "not like everybody else" or say "yeah, but what can we do about this?" or "yeah, but I don't trust that new candidate". I want to do something to better everyone's lives, but after seeing their actions day after day being anti-progress, I no longer care. Of course progress is as defined by me, they just have their own opinions which they consider as more valid. If all the people around me have other opinion about what's good for them, maybe I'm in the wrong? How would you deal with such situation?

You will own nothing, and be happy.

So are you doing anything about it?

Would you say ignorance is strength then?

Ignorance lets you live happily when you are not strong. Problem with strength is that it requires a lot of strength to get more strength.

The nice thing about strength though is that the more you get, the easier it gets to get more. Friction is greatest at rest. Maintaining existing strength has inertia.

Viewing this sort of issue as equivalent in personal magnitude and meaning to Galileo’s heliocentrism dispute with the renaissance church is exactly the perspective I seek to avoid by framing my mindset like the earlier commenter, personally.

I mean, it was an unfounded conspiracy theory before, wasn't it? When new evidence came about then it shifted into legitimacy. That's just how evidence works.

It was not unfounded for scientific reasons, but because some people decided it needed to be so.

Isn't the difference evidence? There were people jumping to all kinds of theories without evidence at the beginning, but acting like they knew for sure whatever their theory was. Some happened to be right, but that doesn't mean that the lesson to be learned is truth can best be found by jumping to conclusions without evidence.

If that was the lesson, then we should be jumping to exciting new conclusions without evidence like "actually, it's only changing now because US propaganda wants to harm China for their failure to align against Russia, and pinning COVID on them is a super convenient way to do that." Or whatever other exciting new theories you can come up, unbound from any evidence other than it sounds like something that could be plausible. Who knows maybe I will turn out right and I can rub it in everyone's faces later.

In this context I think you're pattern matching too deterministically on the term "conspiracy theory". I just read it as "random negative news headlines of the moment". Ironically this kind of poor pattern matching is what led to the situation you speak of, where anyone talking about the lab leak hypothesis got pattern matched as sinophobic / a conspiracy theorist.

Do you also remember COVID is a hoax, the vaccine is killing people for population control, 5G causes COVID, ivermectin is the real cure etc? The sheer volume is what is exhausting.

Lab leak != lab origination. It could have escaped the lab, but that doesn't mean it was created there.

Uhh. The facts are off the map for media companies and the government media.

Society alternates between 3 functions. Hiding away facts, milking good times and taking valuable resources off the map.

We're just the weird people who remember the old-school world, where the public knowing the facts was a point of order and the science would settle it all.

Conspiracies theories appear to sound the alarm on it all, but they have no unique, private facts to share with the public, just like everyone else.

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