Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

I can only assume you're being downvoted because you've confused the chicken and the egg.

Partisan issues don't exist because articles like this are useless and ineffective. Partisan stances on this sort of thing is what makes people believe articles like this are useless. You have it backwards.

I would absolutely agree, though, that there is no such thing as a cultural 'shared reality' anymore. That is the base of the problem. There are very, very few shared experiences, and a section of the population is not, seemingly, even interested in trying to understand someone else's viewpoint.

View on HN

Not sure what GP's line of reasoning is, but I agree the point could be stated in a finer way, although I roughly agree with it.

> Partisan issues don't exist because articles like this are useless and ineffective. Partisan stances on this sort of thing is what makes people believe articles like this are useless. You have it backwards.

I don't know. Is it really backwards? I can see how it could be argued that partisan stances spread as a consequence of people having short attention spans and preferring short, context-less flamewars on twitter or other social media instead of reading long-form articles like this one and developing their own thoughts on issues.

Therefore it could be argued that, since people didn't pay (much) attention to articles like this to begin with, "they are useless and ineffective".

It might actually be a self-reinforcing situation, though...

We seem to agree 100%. The GP expressed hope that better information (such as this article) will be able to change people's minds and alter the course of the pandemic. I find that pretty naive. The reason the pandemic took the turn it did is precisely because research, reasoning, expertise, etc is incompatible with the existing cultural divides in the US. Why would more of the same produce a different result?

But the whole point of the chicken and the egg problem is that it is not apparent which came first.

Yes, I think an analogy about a cart and horse was instead called for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com