Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator | Hacker News Reader

Why don't Americans trust experts? Just ask a paranormal investigator

bigthink.com

19 pointsPaulHoule89 comments

>If our institutions can communicate their work better, supernatural beliefs will dry up a bit. We’ve seen this historically.

I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith.

In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (in USA at least) get caught in a massive scheme of lying and manipulation. The church was caught harboring pedophiles, the education system told us trades were bad and we needed to spend $100k+ to have a good job, the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits, the government sided with insurance companies, banks, etc over its own people at every turn then proceeded to lie us into war after war after war, and all the the while the news has been proven to support almost every lie happily if the ad dollars go their way. Not a single institution hasn't failed us.

Asking why people distrust institutions is the wrong question. Any partner that lied to you that much would never be trusted again, distrust is a defense mechanism that comes from years of betrayal. But still there's some implication that we should still trust them, despite the lies, and along with it a sense that distrusting them makes you crazy (paranormal/alien beliefs are a good example). This problem does not originate from the people, it's the result of a world where truth only gets in the way of profits and power and actual people are the lowest priority.

Nah, you're exhibiting the fundamental problem which is effectively conspiratorial thinking. Not in the UFO sense, and I don't mean it disparagingly at all -- I mean literally ascribing behavior to some type of superstructure that doesn't really exist.

"The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying to combat it, and neither side was merely the decision of any conscious agent that could be said to be deciding or "saying" anything. All of the outcomes and the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena from a confluence of countless forces. Sometimes they yield bad outcomes!

But that doesn't mean you can just toss out the system, largely because unless you alter the larger dynamics that produced that system, any replacement will just come to mimic the prior one. The individuals involved hardly matter.

The health care system is heavily subject to licensing of various kinds, and academia is heavily defined by grant funding. If just a tiny handful of people in the government decide the healthcare system will say X, then it will say X.

As a case in point, GP refers to "the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits"

That would point toward the business interests of actual provider organizations (like hospitals) or insurers, who have different incentives from each other and very different incentives from individual healthcare providers, who also have very different interests (and are very different people on a variety of dimensions) from those in academia who are "heavily defined by grant funding."

Perhaps you could share a concrete example of what you mean, because right now we're talking about 4 or 5 completely distinct, individually gigantic industries that all interact to produce "the healthcare system" and its behaviors.

The industries don't matter. They are all subject to very broad and powerful government licensing rules that can overrule their own opinions at any time.

For example, during COVID there were doctors who lost their license to practice because they disagreed with the government stance on vaccines. Therefore, the remaining doctors spoke with one voice. The government used them as sock puppets, in effect. Whether you agree with this policy or not, it is an example in which the healthcare system became one system that "said" things in concert.

No, they aren't "all" subject to licensing rules. That's why the specific industries do matter.

Can you share some examples of these doctors? AFAIK the only doctors who lost their licenses are those who created fake medical documentation or who shared verifiably false medical information. Not for "disagreeing" with the government stance on vaccines.

I don't know if you lived in a different timeline than me, but I remember a lively debate throughout the entirety of COVID. Consensus (and evidence) was overwhelmingly on one side, sure, similar to how consensus is that you should go to the hospital if you get a heart attack. And yeah, if a doctor advises someone against that despite strong clinical evidence that the patient is best served by going to the hospital, they'll jeopardize their license.

The problem is that when the government itself spreads verifiably false information, there are no reprocussions like there are for the individual who does it. Just like when an individual steals money they tend to face consequences, banks who do the same thing on a much more massive scale face nothing.

You're suggesting the government shared information that was verifiably false at the time it was shared?

Can you give some examples?

Just to preface. Covid is the new Nazis, all arguments end up devolving into its discussion. Im tired of talking about covid but it's hard to get past how our country handled it, both the people and the government. To answer your question: https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/jun/06/did-fauci-say...

>He said the 6-foot guideline “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on any data, and that such a study would be difficult to do. He also said he didn’t recall any studies about masking young children, but said the guideline was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision.

https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci...

Making up arbitrary rules and then enforcing them saying "trust the science" is not coming from a place of honesty. Especially when combined with the deletion of emails.

Excellent example!

First the strong rebuttal: "Verifiably false information at time of sharing" in this case would mean you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway. You have no evidence of this, of course, because this is not what happened.

The more general rebuttal is that you are revealing exactly the type of "can't be trusted with details" that kneecapped public health communications throughout COVID.

The question is why Fauci selected 6 feet instead of 4, 5, 7, 8 or even 6.1, 6.148, or even 6.489598365983 feet.

The reality is that there's no real reason to select any of these over any other. There's a continuous curve of difficulty of adherence and a continuous curve of transmission reduction.

Any specific number would have been "arbitrary", but very obviously a clear guideline is better than a completely non-actionable "stay as far away as you reasonably can."

This is like hauling out the guy who set interstate speed limits at 60mph and not 59 or 59.5 or 59.84846898 and then blasting him for selecting the "arbitrary" 60 miles per hour.

Does that make sense to you?

The number isn't the point, the messaging of "this number is science" is. If it were delivered clearly as "we done have all the information, but our best judgement based on a, b, c says the number is X" that would be far better and most of all honest than "it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces"

Does that make sense to you?

What?

There's not "a lack of information." The information is there's a continuous curve of transmission. You could have complete information and you would still need to pick an "arbitrary" point.

> it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces

Link to which guidance you feel most closely stated this. I have never seen any guidance from CDC, NIH, FDA, or anywhere else that resembles this.

Again, I do not care about covid and have no interest in arguing with you about covid. This is a discussion about eroded trust in institutions. And denying that the government's handling of covid had a causal relationship with the current distrust of institutions is as insane as denying covid itself. If you think that during that time the government exemplified honesty which would build trust, I do not have any argument that will convince you beside saying to increase your media literacy. Good luck.

As is typical: "The government did x y z things to destroy trust!"

"Can you show me where?"

"No, but there's less trust now, ergo the government did it!"

Another hypothesis for you: You were peppered with bullshit from non-government sources so thoroughly and so frequently that you abdicated your responsibility to understand what's true and what's not.

This is, of course, the goal of such information campaigns.

In theory, I buy the argument that the government should be able to successfully overcome the 24/7 bullshit machine that you plugged yourself into, but I personally struggle to imagine a good/safe/non-authoritarian way for it to achieve that.

So I'm left with the conclusion that we each bear some amount of responsibility to try to counteract the game of telephone when it comes to understanding matters of personal or national importance, and you (like many other perfectly fine/smart/honorable people) failed to meet that obligation. Not really a personal critique given you didn't know the game you were playing and how proactive you needed to be in it, but here we are, and I'd recommend a high-agency look at how you chose to find and interpret information. The institutions were not the problem here.

You just echo the institutions you defend so fervently by being sanctimonious. I hope you're a politician or healthcare exec, someone who at least has an interest in defending this mess. Otherwise it's just sad. Again, good luck.

Ah yes, you're right, it's the CDC's job to prevent you from seeing and believing whatever you read on x.com

Can't see how this goes wrong!

> you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway.

There are three options:

1. Fauci knew the correct answer to some degree of accuracy and picked a rounded off version.

2. He didn't know the correct answer but thought he did.

3. Fauci didn't know the correct answer, was aware he didn't know, and he made one up in order to sound knowledgeable.

You're arguing what happened is (1). What actually happened is (3), which we know because he admitted it.

Social distancing had no effect, and this was known early on. There is no known distance curve that correctly models SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the real world, largely because it spreads via aerosol clouds as well as droplets. The data for this was available nearly from the start because:

1. SARS-1 acted this way, as do other coronaviruses. Outbreaks of SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind.

2. The outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random, even though everyone was confined to quarters. There was no physical contact in that case and it made no difference whatsoever.

Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried. What did work was high quality air cleaning equipment, as found on planes - places that remained remarkably infection free despite everyone being much closer than 6ft together.

It never takes long to get from "I need to be trusted with the facts!" to demonstrating just gobsmacking levels of willful ignorance.

> Social distancing had no visible effect anywhere it was tried.

> Our search identified 172 observational studies across 16 countries and six continents, with no randomised controlled trials and 44 relevant comparative studies in health-care and non-health-care settings (n=25 697 patients). Transmission of viruses was lower with physical distancing of 1 m or more, compared with a distance of less than 1 m (n=10 736, pooled adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·18, 95% CI 0·09 to 0·38; risk difference [RD] −10·2%, 95% CI −11·5 to −7·5; moderate certainty); protection was increased as distance was lengthened

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

---

Can you explain step by step how "SARS-1 could be found spreading between apartment buildings on the wind" and "the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed cases appearing all over the vessel at random" are evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?

This would be great evidence against the claim "if you are more than 6ft away, you will not get sick," and your airplane example would be great evidence against the claim "if you are fewer than 6ft away, you will get sick," but neither of these claims were ever made.

Such papers aren't worth much. For example, that meta-review claims masks work. Some other scientists did a different meta-review (the A122 Cochrane Review) that concluded the opposite (strictly speaking, that there was no useful evidence masks worked). If you dig into the details of why they disagree, you'll find none of the studies claiming this stuff works are scientifically valid whilst the Cochrane meta-review is very careful. Real-world reliable evidence > models.

So what happened: activists went directly to the head of Cochrane and demanded the review be disowned, which it was, despite it having been signed off on by the org previously and there being no scientific problems identified with the study. That's how they manufacture consensus in the healthcare system: top down orders from corrupt leaders who suppress beliefs and evidence that makes them look bad. They do this because it works. After all, look at this thread. People say, look at all the evidence! Look at the consensus! They can't all be wrong!

Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything. The institutions of science failed during COVID, and frankly are failing most of the time hence the replication crisis. It's not specific to masks or social distancing. We can play that game for any claim you want to make about COVID, or many other topics. Science is broken.

> explain ... evidence that standing close to someone is equal risk to standing further away from them?

There are two components to this:

1. There's a threshold value beyond which a non-immune person becomes infected and that viral load in the exposure over that doesn't matter much. Given that viruses replicate that's not surprising.

2. That a sick person can emit infectious aerosols that can hang around in the air for long periods and travel long distances e.g. via air ducts.

The intuition you're working from is that SARS-CoV-2 viruses are created in the body, that they travel only in large droplets that fall to the ground quickly due to gravity, and that risk of infection is linear in dose. Thus, being far away from an infected person should reduce the risk linearly. That's the idea the "professionals" used to justify their policies, but it's based on a model that's too far from reality to be useful. It might work for a hypothetical spherical-cow type person standing on a perfectly empty and flat 2D plane, with no air movements. It doesn't work for real world scenarios with complex layouts and complex movements of people, which is why when you look at the behavior of the virus in real settings like the Diamond Princess or jet liners the results are completely different to what the model would predict.

Hold on there amigo.

What you said is that Fauci had no reason to believe that social distancing would be helpful and knew that it wouldn’t be helpful.

I just linked to very clear reason to substantiate his beliefs. Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, and even regardless of whether this view ended up actually being correct, this evidence existed.

It is empirically, obviously true there was reason to hold this belief.

> Yet a system that concludes both yes and no simultaneously isn't worth anything

I see that you’ve never heard of science… which concludes: “we don’t know yet” on most questions most of the time. The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions and even still they’re open for debate. But we have to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty all the time! Even the decisions that ended up being wrong during COVID (of which there were plenty) were well within the aperture of reasonability given the conditions they had to be made under.

None of this gets even close to the threshold of the government propagating verifiably false information. Not even in the same ballpark.

> Such papers aren't worth much.

Lol. “How am I so confused about what’s going on?! Must be the institutions’ fault!”

You're citing papers which came after the public health authorities decided it would work, not before. Before the sudden about face the WHO had guidance for how to handle a respiratory virus pandemic. It said don't shut the borders, don't try and socially distance, don't restrict travel. All that was torn up and replaced overnight.

But there's nothing to speculate about here. Fauci explicitly told us the idea of social distancing "just appeared", which is easy to confirm just by looking carefully at the timelines. There was no evidence that led to the policy, it was just invented out of thin air. Not my claim: his. And then because academia is corrupt they promptly produced reams of papers claiming it worked great, although real world evidence showed it didn't. You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

> The reality is we didn’t have high certainty on most of these questions

That's correct! There was uncertainty because there was no evidence these policies worked, which is why people got pissed off when they were presented as 100% dead cert things that only crazy Anti Science People could doubt. At no point did public health officials say, well, this might help or it might not so we'll leave it up to the citizens to decide what to do. Everything was 100% critical and had to be forced via law overnight because Science™.

You're trying to excuse what they did by saying they had to make decisions, but they didn't. They could have simply admitted they didn't know, done nothing and left it to individuals and their doctors to decide what to do for themselves. They chose instead to impose policies on the whole world by force, justifying it by claiming they were doing solid science when in reality the policies "just appeared".

Social distancing dates back literally to the 14th century dude. It is a standard tool in the contagion toolbox. The null hypothesis is that you would apply it to this contagion too until you have evidence otherwise.

No, he told us the number 6 "just appeared," as compared to the numbers 5 or 7.

> You can read these papers for yourself to see how motivated the reasoning is.

Please link to said papers.

Again, you're just wrong on all the facts. There are plenty of good reasons to have defaulted to social distancing. Not only was this logical at the time, but all evidence still points to it having been the correct decision in retrospect. I know you're in the habit of simply dismissing countervailing evidence, i.e. you've decided to give up on yourself, but there is literally centuries of evidence behind social distancing.

The fact that people caught COVID while far away from each other literally isn't even a dent in this body of evidence. And I don't mean that because it's weak evidence against it, but that it's not even evidence against it. Nothing about the social distancing hypothesis suggests one cannot get sick at a distance.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/

Thank you for providing all of your evidence (none). It is illustrative for other readers.

Details matter! Medieval quarantine ships worked against plague and cholera because those pathogens spread very differently to aerosolized coronavirus, and had very different mortality profiles. You can't just lump every possible pathogen into one bucket labelled "contagion" then claim you now understand it. That's exactly the kind of broken thinking and fake expertise that led to so much loss of trust.

Your choice of papers is an example of this problem in action:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966666/ - it's about school closures+flu, but people got upset about school closures because unlike flu COVID overwhelmingly affected the very old and very sick, so it didn't make sense to close schools to protect kids. It's also the kind of analysis that's likely to be P-hacked.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1929395/ - a mortality report on Asian flu. What point are you trying to make with this paper? If it's about school closures again, it gives attack rates of 59% for asian flu in schools, but attack rate for SARS-CoV-2 in schools was measured at more like 4% (again, with mild cases that didn't endanger the kids). You can't reduce infectiousness and impact by 10x+ and say they're the same.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2808319/ - SARS-1 this time, which is at least a coronavirus! But it's also one that had very different mortality/spread profiles to SARS-CoV-2 (I don't personally think it should have been called SARS-2 because of this difference, even though they're closely related otherwise). It's an observational regression analysis again, so low quality evidence, but what it shows is that even for SARS-1 where quarantine was more effective the number-needed-to-quarantine was uselessly high, with 7.5 infected needed to be quarantined to eliminate just one case. That's completely unworkable especially as social distancing isn't even close to the same thing as an actual quarantine. This paper is the sort of analysis that led to the pre-2020 WHO recommendations against quarantine and travel restrictions for RV epidemics, and supports what I'm saying: they could easily have known social distancing wouldn't work, and probably did know.

Again: what you said is there was no basis to believe social distancing would help.

I have just linked to basis to believe exactly that.

Sure, it may have turned out that COVID-19 would be totally different (though it didn't -- we now know empirically social distancing was helpful here too), but even if it had, clearly there was evidence to assume from the start that distance from infected person would be a component of infection rate.

I'm not going to get into the weeds about COVID because you said:

> the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena ... Consensus was overwhelmingly on one side ... [those who disagree] jeopardize their license

Rephrased, it's not happening and it's good that it's happening.

Pick your side: either you want agreement in the healthcare system to be trusted because it's the result of many independent decisions pointing in the same direction, or you want a system that punishes dissent. You can't try to claim the benefits of the first whilst cheering on the second.

Wait wait, can you tell me what was actually inside the [ ellipsis ] that you substituted out?

Arguing in bad faith is one thing, but I suspect you might even be tricking yourself!

You're claiming healthcare advice is an emergent phenomenon and also agreeing that people who spread "verifiably false" misinformation lost their license - a totally non-emergent phenomenon. I get that your faith in authority is so strong you don't really believe there were any mistakes made there, and thus that the people who were fired for opposing public health mandates weren't really part of the healthcare system at all in some sense. But they were a part of it, and mistakes were made by public health officials, many of which they later admitted to.

Again: pick your side. Advice motivated by career-ending penalties for non-compliance cannot be said to be an emergent phenomenon.

How many licensure boards are there in the US? Roughly 60.

How many allow their doctors to relay verifiably false medical information with their patients? Roughly zero.

Is this because there's some big conspiracy of all 60 licensure boards getting together to suppress information, or is it because each of them has independently reached the self-evident conclusion that licensees spreading false information destroys the credibility of the profession?

Emergent phenomena, amigo.

You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense. You can read the Slack logs of the channels where conspiracies were organized (e.g. the papers denying lab leaks were organized that way). You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders. You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed. You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying, and you can observe that the entire medical profession went along with that. The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.

By all means, try and wordsmith your way out of these facts. It doesn't work. Trust in the medical profession has dropped through the floor, and it will keep falling further for as long as responses like yours are common in discussions of it.

As for your 60 number, those are mostly state level boards, who have a monopoly over licensing in that state. If a doctor gets struck off in a state they could move to another, lose all their customers and home, and try to start again, but in practice those boards don't approve doctors who were struck off in another state regardless of reason. So in reality it's not much different to having one. The wider argument is of course silly, akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships because all decisions are emergent phenomena arising from the wisdom of the crowds.

> You seem to be under the impression there were no conspiracies during COVID, which is nonsense.

You seem to be continuing to put words into other people's mouths.

> You can read emails where people were given their top-down orders.

This is literally not true (I've read the emails)

> The synchronized flipflops on masks alone was enough to destroy many people's belief in doctors and public health.

One man's "synchronized flipflop" is another's "appearance of new evidence and tradeoffs."

> You can read meeting notes and journal reviews where people say that whilst claim X is true it would cause people to stop following government orders so it should be suppressed.

Can you link me to this?

> You can read interviews with public health officials who say they organized conspiracies to lying

Can you link me to this?

> akin to arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision their countries aren't dictatorships

No, it's like arguing that if two dictators happen to make the same decision, it doesn't mean they are acting in coordination with one another. Which is obviously true.

All I see in this thread is someone confidently asserting that he needs to be trusted with the truth despite reflexively dismissing data that doesn't fit his priors and, apparently, believing that it's unreasonable to assume that being physically closer to a person with a respiratory virus produces a higher risk of infection than standing further away. (I find that you're never far from truly insane opinions in convos with these "just a skeptic" types)

You have done a fine job of demonstrating the loss of trust in the profession though, I'll give you that! It is almost entirely (not entirely, but almost entirely) due to people who have simply decided to be confidently wrong and, when asked for examples or sources over and over and over again, fail to produce them.

You obviously have a right to form your own opinion on all of this stuff, but demonstrably don't have the capability to do it. Many such cases!

Everyone needs to simply go to a pharmacy or a doctor's office outside the US one time. If everybody did that, the US Healthcare system would be doused with gasoline, lit on fire, and be burned like the trash that it is.

A system that naturally occurs as a result of the context like you describe sure sounds like a superstructure. Which in our case is a government that allows anyone with the money to steer the ship while actual people have little power to change anything. And when you put enough of those people with money in a room with people who take money and give them laws, it absolutely results in a single unified direction for that system. Of course there are disenters, but they are ineffective compared to those with actual power.

Yes, it is a superstructure but not one that "says" things and "makes decisions" in the way people imagine.

> it absolutely results in a single unified direction for that system.

Like below, you must live in an alternate timeline. There are lots of people who chose to "go their own way."

It's not a consipracy theory that the Catholic church harbored pedophiles, it's fact. Yes, there are many good people within the institution who are horrified by this. Not all participated in the conspiracy, and "conspiracy" might not be the right word. But the fact remains, this was the net behavior of the institution.

I totally agree, the Catholic church is actually quite monolithic/coherent/directly culpable for output behavior.

That's why I didn't list it in my response, though I think there's even a meaningful difference between "the church" (a super heterogenous type of organization) and "the Catholic church" (a single, highly centralized organization).

The institutions have failed to follow their own (supposed) standards, and failed to purge bad actors that subverted or abandoned those standards. Yes, ultimately it is the people at those institutions that have failed not the institution in the abstract, but their failure to be accountable triggers the only response the public has: to distrust or abandon existing institutions and seek or create new ones.

Do you have some examples of these standards, bad actors, and failures to meet and purge them respectively?

The church, the education system, the healthcare system, the government, and the banks, are all actual people. You guys are doing this to yourselves in an effort to scam each other.

A couple years back I was at a really really low point in life, I wanted someone to talk to. Not like counseling or anything, literally just someone to talk to one time over a cup of coffee, because it's not great to go without talking to people at all. I reached out to the churches from my small town to the nearest city. In addition I reached out to the above organizations, asking 'Is there anyone they can connect me with to get a cup of coffee and talk for like an hour at their convenience'. Most useful response I got was for paid christian phone counseling services and asking for my insurance provider information to see if it would cover it. No bible thumper preacher offered to talk, no Catholic priest, no one. I always kind of thought one trait of those groups was their willingness to talk to people.

This is not how society was the majority of my life. Something is very wrong, and very broken.

So I just searched if there was anything to connect and found this. The modern state of our society. I hate it:

https://priestchat.com/

From the front page: Is there an AI behind the priests on this platform?

No, our priests are real people who are here to offer you spiritual guidance and support.

https://priestchat.com/en/legal/terms-of-service TOS: The Service provided by PriestChat.com is a platform facilitating simulated and purely fictional exchanges which are intended exclusively for entertainment and novelty purposes.

14. AI Disclosure Nature of AI-Generated Content: All interactions, responses, suggestions, or communications made available through the Service may be partially or wholly generated by AI-based processes. These processes leverage algorithmic models, machine learning techniques, and potentially third-party computational platforms.se to any Content provided through the Service. Etc. etc.

Your perspective on religious institutions is very different than mine and I'm very curious how that came to be and how much different your experience was than mine. I'm in my thirties and since I was very young I've known *not* to trust most religious institutions and --being raised on Sesame Street and Mr Rogers-- instinctively was not fond of the people in them. Most church goers I would meet were usually not friendly to others who were different than them and were seemingly interested in their own "salvation" before others. Leadership was mainly interested in power/money and would be aghast if anyone dared question anything about the church - even something as stupid as a talking snake. Oh and Pikachu, Harry Potter, music and asking questions were all a ticket to eternal damnation even though you are loved. 25+ years later, I'm not at all surprised about the catholic church's rampant sexual exploitation of children or christians' downright hatred of others and complete lack of Jesus's teachings. Even the rise of christo nationalism and fascism in the US seemed like an inevitability. Seeing a church organization lie about a for-profit chat bot seems on-brand and has seemed on-brand for as long as I've been an inquisitive child.

> being raised on Mr Rogers

Mr Rogers was an ordained minister. Within his denomination, his ministry assignment - his congregation - was television.

The purpose of a system is what it does. In the US, 'the system' makes money for some at the expense of others. If rational thinking supported this system, it would be rewarded more. The fact that conspiratorial and supernatural thinking is on the rise suggest that it better aligns with the purpose of 'the system' - i.e. the transfer of money from the many to the few.

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

Not just a problem in US but I'd say one of the issue is that we have expert inflation, and not all expertise are equally valid.

We have some insight from Decision theory. Klein and Kahneman have both identified required properties for valuable expert intuition (or knowledge, tacit or not) to be available to aquire. (here's a simplified version of this by Veritasium [1])

Most people would see through the conartist claiming "I'm a roulette expert. I've done roulette for 10 years, I have 10 years of roulette expertise, you should listen to me when it comes to what number you should bet on a roulette!" Yet we all fall for other form of expert where their problem domain follow similar structures that makes expert knowledge acquisition either hard or impossible.

But every expert with a PhD want to claim their expertise to be as valid as the actual valid expertise. Combine that with internet, short form (tweet etc) communication, we tend to dumb down the conversation using "expert" to cover all the domains, to the fraud-experts advantage.

Certain fields, you should probably trust the expert almost blindly (Emergency Care, firefighters) but others, maybe not (clinical psychologist, policy maker, economists). Problem is that if we just bundle them all up, people will end up not trusting either.

"bundling up" is a recurring tactic by conartists of all kind (subprime mortgage anyone?)

If we would "rate" different field on their expertise validity (or scientific validity etc) easily understandable by layman, we might regain some institutional trust.

But that would cause a crazy amount of resistance from certain fields (macro econ, psychology, nutritional science, etc) and in real term wouldn't happen

[1] Vertiasium https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?feature=shared

Is there any category that you should blindly trust? What would you do about, for example, a bad firefighter?

And on the opposite side, should no clinical psychologist be trusted? Is nutritional science all wrong?

This is my pet peeve topic because this alleged need for "trust" has become so ubiquitous. It's like a meme that is parroted blindly. At a closer look, it's in my opinion not so clear whether trust should play any substantial role in dealing with potential knowledge and insight, especially since the term "expert" is interpreted ranging from "a guy who wrote an M.A. thesis about some related topic" to "internationally renowned researcher with 100+ publications in a specific, narrow subtopic of a field who is highly estimated by their peers and has served in various panels to inform decision makers."

Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical.

What people miss is not trust in alleged or real experts, what they lack is intellectual humility and the ability to determine when someone else likely knows more about a topic than you. That doesn't mean that they have to trust that person's opinion about the matter, it just means that they should have a tendency to believe that person's informed opinions more easily than their own uninformed preconceptions.

For example, people shouldn't trust authorities and the experts these rely on. It's perfectly fine if they constantly scrutinize these authorities. However, they should be able to recognize when they clearly know less then these and act accordingly. Whether that means remaining agnostic or acting upon the expert's knowledge (even if it is taken with a pinch of salt) depends on the decision situation, how much need for action there is.

By the same token, you should also not trust text books. You should be aware of your own limitations while trying to check the information in the book. When you know you don't have enough knowledge to check it, you're going to have to trust some of the content. The more you build up knowledge, the more you can check the book, and at some point you will find errors in it.

This is why COVID was the breaking point: it was one of the very rare scenarios where highly technical and shifting scientific understanding was directly attached to meaningful lifestyle impacts for people.

Science is always at least as messy (generally more so) as it was during COVID, but generally it doesn't matter because only "settled science" gets turned into technology and deployed to people's lives. All the input chaos has been abstracted away by the time it matters at all to most people.

The general public is not, has never been, and never will be cognitively and intellectually equipped to grapple with shifting science directly -- nor should they need to, they've got other shit to do that scientists can't do!

> Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical.

It is actually built on probability.

That is the most important thing missing from a lot of discourse, imho. Modeling reality is a lot of "this is very probably true/false" rather than "this is true/false", but everyday communication is almost exclusively in the latter form.

Authority/expert status is just a heuristic used to guess the probability of what is presented by that authority, but proper communication about what is presented should include indications of that probability. This is however so uncommon that almost everybody thinks of ideas in a binary way, leading to distrust, tribalism and antagonism.

Compare "eggs are bad for you" with "eggs are probably bad for you". If a year later the same authority states the opposite trust disappears rapidly if it was stated as absolutely as in the former case. A lot of overly confident communication by authorities in the Covid-19 days in an effort to improve compliance caused massive distrust, I'm sure.

Something to try in your own life is to include probabilities when you state something. How sure are you of what you're saying? Having to think about this quickly leads to the intellectual humility you mention. It also antagonizes people less, because you're inevitably going to leave more room for opposing views.

> To rebuild public trust. Hongoltz-Hetling argues that institutions must respectfully engage with unconventional beliefs and offer inclusive frameworks instead of dismissive critiques.

No, we don't need "inclusive frameworks" because some beliefs are idiotic.

We need experts who put reason and data before political agendas and they need to be able to say "I don't know" instead of lying.

It’s bad when an expert doesn’t say “I don’t know”. It’s worse when they lie because “we don’t want the public thinking dangerous thoughts”.

Nearly every example I've encountered of experts allegedly lying under that rationale was actually a case of the public being effectively illiterate.

E.g. experts saying "we don't know if masks work" (stated over and over) the general public heard as "we know that masks don't work" (I've found exactly one instance of this being stated by a US public health expert, USSG Jerome Adams).

"must respectfully engage with unconventional beliefs"

No ... no, I don't.

We've got an inclusive framework right now for alternative theories of medicine in my country, and a guy who believes in miasma theory instead of germ theory is shutting down medical research programs and getting rid of vaccines.

I think I've had enough of the inclusive frameworks this article advocates for.

A big part of the problem is the whole a lie gets halfway around the world, before the truth has a chance to get its pants on thing.

Generally speaking, between your average conspiracy theorist, and the average university scientist, rhetorically speaking, the conspiracy theorist will probably run circles around the scientist.

To a lay persons understanding of argument and rhetoric, unless you have a good bullshit detector(and bullshit detector’s are imperfect, you’ll get it wrong a certain percentage of of the time) the conspiracy theorist is more convincing and usually has “better” arguments.

Bullshit detectors are a huge part of the problem (and a big part of conspiracy theory methodology). If something is fundamentally true but is also counterintuitive, it will never pass a bullshit detector. On the other hand, a statement that is convincing but is actually false is relatively simple to make and hard to argue against (just ask ChatGPT).

Trust isn't given, it's earned.

This is why deception by officials or experts is dangerous, even if they think "it's for the greater good".

The logic follows that if experts are in charge, and experts are correct, then we will see positive outcomes from following expert advice. The US, and other parts of the world, has seen some decades where experts have been in positions of authority, but there have not necessarily been positive outcomes.

Does this mean the experts are wrong? Nope. It’s for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the largest is that experts are handcuffed by corruption.

A real doctor knows best, but there are negative outcomes because of the insurance industry. A climate scientist knows best, but corruption and fossil fuel industry prevents implementation of the correct policies. Some financial advisors are scam artists and others are legit, leading people to trust neither.

For experts to gain trust they have to deliver visibly positive outcomes, and they have to greedily take credit for those outcomes. When people experience a good result, they have to make the connection that it was the advice of smart, correct, educated people that got them there.

"A climate scientist knows best", lets talk about this one as it is a perfect example of lost trust. It is not corruption that destroys the message, but constantly being incorrect.

Just a warning, I may agree with them overall, but they are constantly getting the numbers wrong. We have been 3 years away from the point of no return for the last 20 years. I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter. There are a ton of video clips showing Al Gore predicting things that never came to past.

I read the science and I agree that climate is changing, but to the layperson, they have been saying wrong things for years now and they are tired of hearing them "cry wolf". The moral of the "cry wolf" story is that the falsehoods are what causes people not to be prepared. It is not helping the cause.

"I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter."

I'm nearly 60 and I don't ever remember anyone talking about an imminent ice age - given my fondness for skiing when I was younger I'm sure I would have noticed.

Surprising. I'm 54 and the coming ice age was pretty widely published in my childhood. Lenard Nimoy had a movie about it, it was in Newsweek etc (and before you laugh, Newsweek was "real news" back in those days and my parents had a mail subscription).

I remember being extremely worried about it as a child and thinking "I am the last generation to know civilization as it has been before the world freezes over!"

It probably goes without saying but I haven't been especially concerned about global warming this go around.

There was one Newsweek article about it, and the Leonard Nimoy movie you are talking about is most likely “In Search Of…”, which also covered Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.

You might want to double check that claim about Newsweek being the only coverage. I've seen climate crisis promoters say that, but it's misinformation. Global cooling was widely discussed by scientists and journalists from about the early 60s up to the mid 1970s, when recorded temperatures stopped falling.

They held international conferences to discuss it and wrote to the US President with their conclusions, warning him of the certainty of an impending ice age. This tweet [2] has the first page of the letter and an article from the Guardian headlined, "Space satellites show new ice age coming fast", by Anthony Tucker. The first paragraph says:

"WORLDWIDE and rapid trends towards a mini ice age are emerging from the first long term analyses of weather satellite data [...] an analysis carried out at Columbia University by climatologists Doctors George and Helena Kukla indicates that snow and ice cover of the Earth increased by 12% during 1967-1972"

Note that this claim about the data is incompatible with modern claims about the climate. If you try to look up the data they're talking about you'll find it's hard because modern graphs are truncated in the 1980s or even 1990s. The original paper is here [1] and argues the next cooling period will last 8000 years, driven by solar factors.

Back then climatology was obscure, because the idea of climate change being important hadn't been invented yet. You can see the seeds of it being planted with journalists, though:

"The trends appear to be cyclic, fairly long term and extremely important. It is therefore surprising that, in Britain at least, support for historic analysis of the climate is almost non-existent."

The letter to the president warned him to prepare "agriculture and industry" but also said that the ice age had a natural cause.

You can dig up endless pieces of evidence like these, especially if you go back into the journal archives. The papers read just like modern climate papers do, except that they talk about cooling instead of warming and blame natural astronomical cycles (here's another [3] and another [4]). Just search Google Scholar for papers published between 1960 and 1975 containing the phrase "climatic change".

The Leonard Nimoy documentary was part of a pop-sci series. The series did include episodes on the paranormal especially early in its life, but it also had plenty of episodes on general science topics like the study of earthquake prediction, bees, ants, hurricanes, DNA research, biblical historicity and so on. Anything the general public might find interesting. The episode on the coming ice age was grounded in and triggered by claims by the climatologists of the era.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/quaternary-research/...

[2] https://x.com/Kanthan2030/status/1758729686434320645

[3] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/627434

[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1974...

But isn't that just science working as expected - there are a set of different views and over time a consensus evolves? Nobody ever agrees with everything - that's not how science works (at least in my experience).

Edit: I haven't worked in academia for a long time and I wasn't working in anything even remotely related to climate science...

That's not how science is meant to work. These things are fine if they happen in order:

1. We lack data on a topic so are collecting it.

2. Our data is certain but our understanding isn't.

3. Our understanding has been proven and here are some policies.

What's not OK is:

1. Our data shows X and our understanding is certain that Y is happening, so do Z.

2. Our data shows the opposite of X and our understanding is certain that the opposite of Y is happening, so do the opposite of Z.

The Newsweek article mentioned above says: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” So the gap between proposing to melt the polar ice caps and James Hansen testifying about global warming to Congress was only about 13 years.

The point of the scientific method is to build an understanding of a phenomena based on robust evidence, as well as to understand the limits of our own understanding. If a group of people claim to be scientists and then one day invert everything they're saying, then at some point the scientific method has broken down. If they admit that this happened and implement really convincing changes to prevent it ever happening again, then maybe that's recoverable. But if they ignore and try to cover up what happened, that should be the end of that group's credibility and funding. Unfortunately, in this case they have indeed tried to cover it up.

> I'm smart and paid close enough attention to see through the bullshit

> [relays bullshit]

There was never anything like a scientific consensus on a coming ice age.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...

> One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. "Collectively," the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey "tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling" (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978).

> we [also] conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society's electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR)... The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.

Here's an alternative explanation: you were duped back then just like you've been duped today, but in the opposite direction than you thought.

Wasn't duped then, not duped now. All I am saying is that I heard people talk about it. You even agree, right? or you would not have said that there was not consensus. That means you at least heard it. Lots of people did and now they trust less because of it.

No where in my statement did I say that I agreed with anything, just that constant "false predictions" causes people to quit listening.

But as you have proved, reading comprehension can be a big part as well.

> I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter.

You are remembering a fringe theory amigo. If that's what you expected to happen, it's because you were listening to fringe scientists.

You are continuing to listen to fringe scientists.

Science happens in public, so you will hear all sorts of different theories thrown out. If you are latching onto these and then perceiving divergence from them later on as "creating a loss of trust," that's on you. It means you are incapable of reasoning about the world and is probably something you should try to address yourself instead of externalizing blame.

Dude, I agree! You are missing the point. I know it was a fringe theory. But that is my point. We are talking about losing faith in experts here. Not my beliefs. "Experts" and I use that term loosely, predicted a global cooling. It was not all of them, but when a few cry wolf and the press run with it, then people start dis-trusting "experts" even those that could be correct.

You keep harping on my beliefs, but I have not stated them. I did not believe in an ice age, and I have already stated that I believe in climate change. Why do you keep trying to talk about what I personally believe when you dont even know what they are?

When have I hurt you in the past? Go back to the article on what it is about. I am only trying to add to the discussion on what could be a cause.

Okay then, apply the "you" to "one who your comments ring true to."

I understand the dynamic you're pointing to, but it's simply not something that's solvable from the institutional/scientific-community side. We cannot allow institutions to actually control media, nor can we allow science to "go private."

The responsibility, which you and I both should reaffirm, is that individuals need to better manage their own information ecosystem and diet!

Do you have another solution?

sorry, you are missing the point on the first one. I gave my opinion on what is affecting the situation. I used simple examples that did not apply to me. Sorry.

As for solutions? What about ramifications for any media that cannot backup what it says? What about people being held responsible for what they spread?

Apologies for my misunderstanding!

> As for solutions? What about ramifications for any media that cannot backup what it says? What about people being held responsible for what they spread?

I mean... effectively not possible in the US (First Amendment). Gnarly situation as the cost of producing bullshit plummets to zero, or goes negative since you can earn money from it, while the cost to find and publish truth continues to rise.

Agree. The First Amendment, which I totally will fight for, comes with good and bad doesn't it. I personally feel (means a lot doesn't it :) that there should be a way to punish "commercial press" for spreading misinfo, but I also see the slippery slope come into play.

It has its warts, but the first amendment needs to be protected.

Who is the 'cry wolf' here? A scientist that made an incorrect assertion that was rightly excoriated in the court of peer review? An underqualified writer publishing sensationalism in a tabloid? Lobbyists and politicians literally paid to amplify bullshit?

Hint: it's the latter.

Covid taught me that there is a large percentage of the population that trusts the experts to the point of ignoring all critical thought, which is just as dangerous.

Covid taught me that there is a large percentage of population that won’t trust experts to the point of ignoring critical thought. Also dangerous.

VAERS database shows otherwise.

We now have 8,000+ mRNA products awaiting field testing and trials.

What does this comment mean? What does VAERS show and what do the MRNA products awaiting testing indicate?

I agree. Lots and lots of them died, as result.

is this how modern survival of the fittest work now?

There was a joke going around for awhile renaming Darwin awards as Herman Cain awards. A bit mean, but it had some merit.

Here is an example: in the early days of Covid around February 2020, the messaging from public health authorities was that it was important to wash hands regularly but wearing masks wasn't important. This went against my non-expert intuition and thought, since news out of Wuhan was already clear that it was like a kind of pneumonia, so it affected the lungs. I discussed this with my mom who shared the same thought. I went on to buy masks when they were still readily available back in early February 2020. Later I learned that the reason public health authorities de-emphasized masks was because they thought they needed to prioritize masks for healthcare workers due to a foreseen supply chain shortage. This of course made sense from a whole population perspective but not from an individual perspective. Do you prefer to be selfless and do what's good for the whole society or do you want to be selfish and do what's optimal for yourself?

Here's another example: the various screenings with age cutoffs. For example colorectal cancer screening is only recommended for people above 45; statins are only recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease after age 40 with risk factors. I've had a few primary care physicians who follow these guidance like gospel and refuse to do screening because I haven't met the age cutoff. The reason why these cutoffs exist is mainly a cost/benefit analysis for the entire population, not an analysis tailored for an individual.

> Later I learned that the reason public health authorities de-emphasized masks was because they thought they needed to prioritize masks for healthcare workers due to a foreseen supply chain shortage.

Feels like rationalising? No masks were the prior recommendation for the public and status quo.

Before openAI release gpt3, we had tons of experts on hacker news explaining with what seemed like reasonable arguments how openai was a joke in the machine learning community and how their approach couldn't work

Because "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" hasn't worked for 50 years. Why start now?

That's a big question, and a narrow article. People tend to distrust experts when they think they are being lied to, or manipulated.

That seems a bit circular to me. Of course you distrust someone you think is lying to you or manipulating you. That is what distrust means isn't it? The question is why you think you are being lied to or manipulated to begin with.

To me the question is - why do people feel like they’re being lied to or manipulated by university scientists, but not guru’s, and the conspiracy theorists who write “ancient aliens”. I may be skeptical of institutions, but I’m also skeptical of Dr. Bob Bigfoot.

Politics.

I have three ideas here. (I present these as "one or the other or both", not as any kind of a cohesive package.)

1. Many people find the default accepted worldview to be empty or unsatisfying. Aliens or bigfoot give them something else, something "out there" to believe in.

2. Aliens or bigfoot give them the sense of being "in the know", one of the few who "accept the truth". It lets them feel good about themselves, that they are special.

3. Aliens and bigfoot don't ask them to change their life in any way. University scientists and government experts say some uncomfortable things sometimes.

We have no caretakers in society. People that care about and watch out for society. We have only political creatures now. When I was a kid the majority of political people/institution people were caretakers. Even the political pundits on TV put those things above party. Then grifters learned to weaponize being a caretaker against the caretakers by calling them RINOs on the right, and centrists on the left. We've optimized our politicians based on snark and media propagandists that only care about their audience numbers and ran off the RINOs/centrists that were the caretakers of society.

In institutions, we ran off the caretakers/removed their roles and replaced them with optimizers and prioritized max profit/optimization over institutional caretaking.

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