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Comment by treprinum | Hacker News Reader

It's a well-known fact that a tiny focused group can have a major impact on the society; that's how many initially fringe progressive ideas were implemented, like LGBT rights. The problem of fake news is that some of them turn out to be true, discrediting whoever opposed them, casting doubt on the "arbiters of truth", giving further credibility to supersharers ("what if this person is right when we know official media lied to us in this and that case?"). Now we have even well-respected people that spent their whole life in the power circles like Jeffrey Sachs casting doubt on many official narratives. This further weakens the "truth" signal and increases confusion. I suspect AI is going to make everything worse fairly soon as well.

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It’s also sometimes an important phenomenon. Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled?

Eventually mainstream media came around, but they did a lot of damage to their credibility. Not to mention the whole Iraq having weapons of mass destruction narrative that many of us grew up seeing proven false firsthand.

At this point I just don’t trust anything. It’s fortunate to be of a scientific mindset, since you can make up your own mind with some confidence that you’re not crazy. That doesn’t really work for most people, which seems like the main problem you touch on.

> I just don’t trust anything

Surely you trust a lot of things and people every day.

One cannot make up ones mind about almost anything without being influenced by others, nor without taking into account information received from others. The point is to always be willing to question and revise one's opinions while consciously making decisions despite uncertainty.

It seems like we’re saying the same thing. Trust implies that you can afford to outsource your skepticism. Being willing to question whoever you trust is at odds with that.

It’s probably more accurate to say that whenever someone says something, it’s treated as an independent data point, each of which is assigned somewhere between "probably true" and "probably false". The datapoints get updated as more observations about the world come in.

Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it.

That assigned probability is a function of trust in the speaker, prior plausibility, other available information, and the consequences of being wrong in either direction. You can't avoid the trust question by talking about probability.

> At this point I just don’t trust anything

That is what the spreaders of fake news want, it is literally the agenda to sow mistrust, and it’s working. This, I fear, is going to be the real and lasting damage of this effort, it’s breaking down our ability to find common ground and have civil discourse, it’s breaking our ability to function democratically.

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled?

Fortunately I don't think I have ever curbed my reason or logic because of possibly being "labeled".

> At this point I just don’t trust anything.

That's sad to read. It suggests those that would sow disinformation have won. All my life I have been skeptical — somehow I was raised with the mind of a scientist - likely many of us here have. But I have also learned to be skeptical of skepticism if you know what I mean — contrarians, doubting Thomasii, etc.

EDIT: I see your comment here: "Observations are different than taking someone’s word for it." You should have led with that. Still, as we can't all be on the ground in Anytown, China or conducting a scientific test on superconductivity, we have to have a framework of what "sounds reasonable based on life experiences" and accept a certain amount of what we hear/read.

It's not just about being 'labeled'.

What amount of censure would break your steely resolve? Maybe you are ok with your posts being down-ranked. What if your accounts are disabled next?

If my accounts are disabled I don't really want to have anything to do with those sites.

As an example, I'm pretty sure there are a few subreddits that would ban me for my beliefs. I have no interest in those subreddits.

To take an extreme example, I'm also old enough to remember enjoying life before there was an internet. If all of the internet tossed me out ... might be the best thing that happened to me in many, many decades.

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled? Eventually mainstream media came around, but they did a lot of damage to their credibility.

…but they didn’t. The lab leak theory is still mostly the realm of conspiracy theorists, and is (rightly, imo) treated as such. I’ve seen stories reporting on efforts investigating the lab leak hypothesis, but they’re always about how the study turned up nothing and thus the best evidence continues to point at direct animal -> human transmission.

Occasionally conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, but that’s vanishingly rare next to the number of them which turn out to be false.

> At this point I just don’t trust anything. It’s fortunate to be of a scientific mindset, since you can make up your own mind with some confidence that you’re not crazy. That doesn’t really work for most people, which seems like the main problem you touch on.

Be very careful about this. It’s crucial to think critically and evaluate sources. However, if there’s a theory among domain experts (like epidemiologists or climatologists) which is overwhelmingly believed (Covid didn’t come from a lab) and you believe something which has the reputation of being a conspiracy theory, the odds of you being right don’t look good. Your odds get worse the longer the prevailing theory has been accepted, as in the intervening time the people in the minority will have been searching for convincing support.

The lab leak theory is still mostly the realm of conspiracy theorists

Apparently including the raving nutjobs at the FBI and Department of Energy (https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...).

I did say "mostly" for a reason. A few months after the FBI director made those comments the Director of National Intelligence (who oversees the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community) released a report reiterating that an animal origin was most likely and that there wasn't evidence of a lab leak. The Wikipedia article[1] on the lab leak theory will summarize it better than I can:

> In February 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Energy Department, based on new intelligence, had shifted its view from "undecided" to "low confidence" that the pandemic originated with a lab leak. In the intelligence community, "low confidence" means the information is sourced to low-quality or otherwise untrustworthy sources. In the wake of these reports, FBI Director Christopher Wray reiterated the bureau's assessment, saying that the Government of China was doing its best to thwart any investigation. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan responded to the report saying "some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don't have enough information to be sure", and there was still "no definitive answer" to the pandemic origins' question. The reassessment renewed the political debate around the issue in the US.

> In June 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified their report on the virus' origins, in compliance with an Act of Congress compelling it to do so. The report stated that while the lab leak theory could not be ruled out, the overall assessment of the National Intelligence Council and a majority of IC assets (with low confidence) was that the pandemic most likely began as a zoonotic event. No evidence was found that SARS-CoV-2 or a progenitor virus existed in a laboratory, and there was no evidence of any biosafety incident. Proponents of the lab leak hypothesis reacted by accusing the agencies of conspiring with the Chinese, or of being incompetent. Covering the story for the Sydney Morning Herald, its science reporter Liam Mannix wrote that the US report marked the end of the lab leak case, and that it had ended "not with a bang, but a whimper".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory#Intel...

You know we have the government emails vis a vis the lab leak?

Which emails are you referring to? The ones with Fauci in early 2020? If so, they ruled that out as an option within a few months. I can understand being outraged about the suppression of those emails (though I understand why they’d want to do that), but the fact they were suppressed doesn’t have any bearing on the validity of the lab leak theory.

From when? Before or after the investigations that determined it was most likely zoonotic?

https://www.reuters.com/world/no-direct-evidence-covid-19-pa...

You know we have video evidence of the WMDs right? There were reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq's military.

> Remember when it was impossible to talk about the lab leak theory without being labeled?

No, because I saw people talking about it continuously throughout the period. The conspiracy nuts and right-wing activists making wild evidence-free claims that COVID was a Chinese bio weapon or genetic engineering mistake were rightly dismissed, but people approaching it scientifically and trying to assess evidence for clues that it might have been a mishandled lab sample were not. That’s always been the problem with this: “lab leak” meant different things to different people, and the erstwhile martyrs tried to represent themselves as representing some broader truth when they had always been trying to work backwards from a politically-advantageous explanation.

AI text generation is going to be very strong at generating arguments for whatever position the user requests.

The same models can curate your feeds of what you don't want to see. This could be a fix for the problem - you can't actually remove unwanted content from the network, but you can hide it like ad blockers. I think we need local AI to de-garbage our internet interactions from now on.

Who decides what should be hidden? You can do it yourself, or align with some trusted source, the same way we subscribe to ad blocking feeds. Yes, there is a risk of a bubble, but you have the tools to avoid it, LLMs are very flexible in how they get prompted.

This only saves you from having to endure the garbage, but if you're actually interested in stopping others from seeing it, no help. I think that's a social problem, not a technological one.

This sounds like a way to make trial lawyers obsolete.

Lawyers (especially as a collective) are well-placed to outlaw things.

I can see a sci-fi flick where a SkyNet-style A.I. world takeover is blocked by a plucky band of loquacious paralegals.

It's a well-known fact that a tiny focused group can have a major impact on the society;

It’s Pareto essentially. And yes it’s in everything. In any organization a well organized minority will exert power over the disorganized majority, or remainder of people.

It’s why you see ridiculous municipal codes, etc. Small but well organized groups of people create pressure to bring them into existence. Opposition to it is disorganized and apathetic. The minority group can’t be too small but because it’s small it’s easier to organize a larger group of outer supporters (sympathizers, useful idiots, etc) that will march with you on a nice Saturday afternoon, etc. Now your fringe idea looks like it is majority held and enough otherwise disinterested people say “sure, whatever”.

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