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Comment by tepitoperrito | Hacker News Reader

There are doctors, lawyers, administrators, and talking heads in their 80s who are well known and respected in their fields today. My knowledge of biology and arithmetic puts them at around 30 years old in the year 1972. That's the year the program ended.

If not the CDC then maybe we should just question everyone's motives and I apologize for trying the sensationalist approach.

EDIT. Maths. Unedit. Still maths

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>maybe we should just question everyone's motives

At some point, you have to have some level of trust in society and its institutions. Or become a paranoid nutter.

Maybe the paranoid nutters are right (just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you), but that's still no way to live.

The problem with paranoia is that it's one of those things that can be self-fulfilling the more common it is, as the paranoid nutters get into power and work together disable the conspiracies they perceive at everyone's expense, thus justifying and magnifying the beliefs of the paranoid nutjobs on the other side (and so on).

> At some point, you have to have some level of trust in society and its institutions. Or become a paranoid nutter.

I see this as a false dichotomy. It is possible to simply assume that everyone is doing their best, and that is "not necessarily great" due to poor system design and various other reasons, or it may be even worse due to some bad actors - but necessarily becoming a paranoid nutter is a false belief, and the commonality of such beliefs makes me suspicious that they are not entirely organic.

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