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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

How on earth would a US citizen independently analyse information about (for example) Hunter Biden's interactions with Ukraine? It costs hundreds of dollars and most of a workweek to fly from the US to Ukraine and then at least 6 years of education+experience to competently practice independent investigative journalism.

Almost nobody has time to learn to do that, conn a ship, or butcher a hog. People spend most of their time on their their friends, family, and employer. We need have to have thoughtful and attentive sources we can trust.

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You can independently analyze the secondary information being provided. You can look for common denominators from multiple sources. You can look at trends of specific sources. You can also say "I don't know, so I won't let this idea effect decisions." Not every piece of information out there needs to be incorporated into your independent world view. This can of course lead to selection bias where your world view is shaped by only what you choose to look at. It's good to challenge your view, to consider the information and look into it even if you don't care about say Hunter Biden (I frankly don't, nor what Ivanka Trump may or may not be doing).

People need to realize you don't always have to come to a conclusion when you're presented with information, it's possible to just say here is some uncertain information and I will treat it as such.

> People need to realize you don't always have to come to a conclusion when you're presented with information, it's possible to just say here is some uncertain information and I will treat it as such.

Then most of the political information should be then inconclusive for the ordinary citizen. Which does not happen.

Nationally televised sports are incredibly successful in the US, so it's no surprise politics has morphed into a version of it. Everyone supports a "team" and is focused on winning rather than, you know, actual politics.

> You can independently analyze the secondary information being provided. You can look for common denominators from multiple sources. You can look at trends of specific sources. You can also say "I don't know, so I won't let this idea effect decisions."

Our "reality runtime" seems to support these things, but the degree to which each individual actor within our reality has the ability to skilfully perform (aka: "can") these things is both very complex, and controversial. The ability to say "I don't know" seems like it should be very easy when one is thinking about the notion abstractly, but the ability to not "know" something when contemplating or discussing object level matters (particularly those that fall under the culture war category) seems to be damn near impossible, especially in the internet age.

Based on my observations of internet and real life conversations, I have become a firm believer that most of the time, people cannot actually say "I don't know", in large part because the idea never crossed their mind (at the time).

It doesn't take a rocket science to figure out a cokehead who was kicked out of the navy who speaks 0 Russian or Ukranian, and has 0 experience in the energy industry but whose dad is a prominant politician getting millions is corruption.

I think the bigger issue is how so many people refuse to see this.

And for you people who want to write this off as partisan, Romney was in on it too by a similar line of reasoning.

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