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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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kstrauser

Like one where social media algorithms weren’t shoving anti-science conspiracy theories at half the population?

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Social media? Try world leaders directly. Hell, try reading an HN thread anytime it comes up. The lies find a way.

HN is social media.

and there are clear, active shillbots here.

HN is a lot simpler than a lot of other platforms, too.

The church was responsible for making sure that useful lies were the only legal source of truth for millennia. Now it's the fault of a website?

Religions act like governments - their first inherent preference is stability. SV ideology is explicitly anti-stability, exemplified by the phrase “move fast and break things”.

Worth paying attention to whose things are being broken and whose things are being reinforced as a result.

The social order was never on the table for breaking. SV depends on banking and state violence for enforcement just as any other wealthy businesspeople do.

A brief study of the history of SV will show you that it was actually the US military (and its money) that is in many ways responsible for creating the culture of groundbreaking that exists there to date.

This is why civilians can't have nukes.

The conventional media seems to have a huge axe to grind about social media, presumably because it's affected their own influence and prestige, which has warped people's perception of reality a tad. For example, there was a BBC article a while back that made it on to here aboutt how the UK was supposedly at risk of a measles outbreak because vaccination rates had dropped due to Facebook misinformation - except if you actually looked into the details, it turned out those childhood MMR vaccination rates were only down a fraction of a percent from the all-time high. The bigger danger that our medical experts were worried about was all the adults who hadn't gotten vaccinated as kids decades ago due to Wakefield, long before social media or most people had internet access, and the BBC was of course one of the main organisations that spread those claims.

I think that didn’t make much difference relative to the Influenza pandemic a century ago? Modulo what tools they had at the time, things like masking.

One was trust the experts, the other was we need more proof. Which was anti science?

This is disingenuous for two reasons: (1) where else does proof come from if not from experts in their respective fields? and (2) various forms of crackpot denialism persisted long after proof was (repeatedly) given.

People were peddling horse dewormer as a COVID treatment even after multiple studies that demonstrated no benefit.

It's disingenuous to group one group of trust the experts as proof and the other as crackpot. Both groups blindly believed claims that a new treatment or repurposed drug would prevent covid. In neither case did it work.

I did the scientific way of not contracting coronavirus: isolation. Neither the dewormer or the mutiple experimental shots were as efficacious.

there is a clear cost-benefit hierarchy. isolation is low on this, ivermectin is even lower.

And we were still better off since those of us who were reasonable could get timely information.

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