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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

I actually disagree.

This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.

This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.

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Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.

This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of:

- first-hand reports from other people

- private news networks

- the governments of other countries

The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.

> first-hand reports from other people

Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.

> private news networks

You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35

> the governments of other countries

Are governments inherently trustworthy?

I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.

The idea that government institutions suddenly got more scandal ridden after 1990's is just pure golden age fallacy.

News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.

> Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.

Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos.

It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask:

- is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers?

- what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators?

- is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort?

In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy.

If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US.

> You mean rebranded affiliates?

No, I mean the Weather Channel and others.

> I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.

I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.

> People go flat earth

Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.

Modern flat earth theory owes more to fringe Christian theology and the general normalization of conspiracy theory and meme culture than anything to do with the Flat Earth Society.

Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies.

I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.

I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand.

And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.

> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged.

This is such a weird way of looking at it.

Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.

What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."

And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.

This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.

You assume that if people were better educated, they would trust science and wouldn't be so upset.

I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.

> If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.

I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.

When gov insist on a certain position, just to track back to conclusions of conspiracy theories, it does raise questions about where else they were wrong or lying.

> This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.

So what exactly would an educated person do if they were led to believe something based on false premises which affected their life?

Are they not supposed to question the authority who makes decision based on such information? Or question the source that provides such information consistently? Or just ignore it because it doesn't aligns with their political view?

Or are they supposed to just shut up and accept it because... SCIENCE(holy text)?

When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...

People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -

> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.

Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

> Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.

That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.

It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.

Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.)

Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.

There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.

I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.

Oh whatever; presidents have been lying for decades now.

I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing.

I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012.

I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden.

I can go on.

Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too.

But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.

Are you suggesting that quality and quantity of lies does not matter?

I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.

What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.

I think you are right, but only to a certain extent.

Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.

Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.

Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.

That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.

What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.

Yep. I think we are generally in agreement. I just wish I knew a simple answer - or any answer - for fixing the "whatever it is" that's infecting our culture/society these days.

Unfortunately, I'm very sure that there is no one simple answer—it's so many interlocking things: education spending, voting rights, voting reform (eg, ranked-choice), more spending on basic needs...

On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.

I like to look into wacky conspiracies and where they come from.

Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.

This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".

> often rooted in distrust of the official narrative

I disagree from what I've seen.

I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.

On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.

It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.

That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.

One of the elephants in the room, I think, is the religious dimension to the divide. Trumpists don't mistrust government per se, they mistrust secular government, but tend to approve of government that espouses and enforces traditional Christian ideology. They mistrust secular science because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Their opposition to LGBTQ people is rooted in a binary view of sex and gender based on Christian doctrine.

Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.

Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.

The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.

This is the narrative that has been spun, that somehow Fox News (the largest TV channel) is not mainstream, that a candidate like Trump who's been rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous since he was born, is anti-establishment, while a former waitress winning a seat through a grass root campaign with very little funding is.

That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...

That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.

> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.

It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.

the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted.

I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.

When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.

Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. This is just as valid as saying education has gotten worse.

It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.

There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.

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