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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

"Trust the Science" is pretty much just a dog whistle to call for censorship through "fact checkers", which deliver checked facts such as "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" in early 2020.

That even people with Ph.D.s fall for this just shows that we, as humans, really like a simpler world, a world with known facts and truths, where you don't have to check things because someone else already did it for you. However, this is not the world we live in. The world we live in is complex, messy, almost entirely made out of shades and very little black and white. Most things are not known and won't be known. People telling and selling you things as fact are invariably acting on agendas. Scientific consensus is not a fixed thing, and concerning many questions it is not a thing at all. The closest thing you can do is "trusting the scientific method", but that is very, very different from what "Trust the Science" means.

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A credible fact check would not state "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" - it would state "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." Back in early 2020 the "evidence" to which people were pointing was the fact that there was a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan, and... general conspiracy nonsense.

If over time actual evidence emerges that there was a potential lab leak, that doesn't in any way vindicate people making baseless claims early in the pandemic.

> "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory."

But this, too, is complicated, because despite what people say on Twitter, as humans we actually can reason from first principles, assign probabilities, and discount or promote less or more likely explanations -- especially when hard evidence isn't forthcoming.

When there's "no evidence" for something, that doesn't mean all explanations are equally likely.

Again the problem was the convolution of "lab leak" incorrectly meaning "lab made and leaked" exclusively which is different to poor quality control of wild specimens held on site...

> Back in early 2020 the "evidence" to which people were pointing was the fact that there was a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan

This absolutely qualifies as evidence. If there were no such lab, that would pretty much conclusively rule out the lab leak hypothesis, right? If observation X is evidence against a hypothesis, then observation not-X must be evidence in favor. We could debate about how strong this evidence is, but it's definitely evidence.

With respect, I don't think that's true. Consider:

If MichaelDickens did not exist, it would rule out his having robbed the bank. However, MichaelDickens exists, and therefore it is evidence, however weak, that he robbed the bank.

If MichaelDickens, the bank robber, were as rare and as close to the bank robbery as the a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan was to the earliest part of the outbreak, you'd be goofy if you didn't talk to him first.

There are several issues with this argument. It's making a statement about hypothetical Credible Fact Checks instead of the fact checks that actually exists or that can exist (the "no true scotsman" fallacy). As far as contents go, in early 2020 the Fact Checked story was that there's a wetmarket selling bats and pangolins, which the Chinese eat, which is where it came from. Similarly, the evidence for a lab leak was that the ground zero is close to the lab, the lab handles SARS coronaviruses and it performs GoF research on them in a facility with a Bio-Safety Level (BSL) that's not quite right for that work. This theory was generally conflated with the "the virus was engineered at a secret Chinese bioweapons lab" theory. Fact Checks asserted this was false and people talking about it got banned. Later it became clear that the wetmarket didn't handle either bats not pangolins and The Chinese don't usually eat bats around there.

> we, as humans, really like a simpler world

It isn't that we "like" a simpler world, it's that we need a simpler world. We have to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads, therefore we don't have time to become independent experts on every subject. Even worse, because of Dunning-Kreuger, we often find ourselves with the strongest opinions on the things we don't realize we understand the least about.

And because of the particular set of values we've decided to define as the core of our society and as the motivators of all useful progress, we demand that everyone become a predator. Every source of information is actively trying to deceive you in order to make more money. This is what we can't survive. We did not evolve to constantly deal within an environment filled with trickery, with people engineering their communications with you to exploit your ignorance and desire to trust.

"Trust the Science" is just another way to say "trust us." "Trust us" worked (at least in the US) on white guys, if not anyone else (and it didn't matter whether anyone else bought into it.) It's not working on them any more, because white guys have gradually lost position while going in and out of cycles of trust in authority. And because the institutions are filled with predators working purely looking out for themselves, with no overarching ideals. At least the protection of white men (or judeo-christian western states' rights civilization, or whatever euphemism is current) is a value, and offers stability compared to the solipsistic nothing offered by pure liberalism.

White guys have come to the conclusion that institutions aren't working for them anymore, even though it's really only their working class that has lost material ground; their managers and and millionaire gentry are upset because they've lost the respect they were used to. This is where everyone else already was - others never believed that institutions were working for them.

The only people left to "trust the science" are the professionals who create it, and who have mates, children and parents who create it. "Trusting the science" is the best indicator that you're upper-middle class that there is. It's the conservative position of comfortable people who only trust institutions because they populate them. Either 1) their trust lives in a strange Gell-Mann amnesia bubble where they know that their own workplaces are corrupt, and they know their own employment is to come up with and execute strategies to deceive people, but somehow think that other institutions are different, or 2) they've decided that since they're good people, the things that they are doing must be good.

They keep airing a particular commercial about covid vaccination where they keep cutting between random doctors who repeat "trust us" over and over again like a hypnotic mantra. I don't know anyone who trusts doctors. Right now, the people in charge are the people who do; they trust doctors like white townies from sundown towns and segregated cities love cops. They identify with them. They don't trust because of their independent research into the validity of the scientific consensus, they trust because of their cultural and class affinity. They trust because they want to be doctors, or marry doctors, or could imagine their kids growing up to be doctors.

People who see that as out of reach, don't.

Sorry for rambling on. It's just that the alternative to "trusting the science" is no good either. It's tribalism all the way down, and for you too, because you're eventually going to have to trust someone.

What science should we not be trusting?

All of it? Some things and not others? Which things? Which others? Do I take your word for it? Do I not take your word for it? Do you see how I've watched 'Reading Rainbow' in questioning you like this?

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