Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

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oh, yes, i'm not saying all is lost (even if that's how it may have seemed), but that it's frustratingly slow to get people to discover and coalesce around actual truths, when special interests[0] are highly motivated to undermine truths and the general welfare time and again for personal and outsized gain.

it's tempting to throw out simplistic solutions like "let's skepticism!" but almost impossible to actually change people en masse like that. which then points to your second course of action, changing processes (via the systems that implement them), and that's something i truly believe in, but still find frustratingly slow.

[0]: plus the expert fallacy, which i mentioned before. i was just having this conversation last night about doctors, who know next to nothing in comparison to how complex biology is, but we still as a society feel compelled to venerate (and remunerate) doctors irrationally because they hold people's lives in their hands (understandably). but that outsized veneration (and remuneration) often leads to egos that can't admit ignorance or doubt and that leads to millions of unnecessary deaths and countless people with worse health outcomes. and that's not a condemnation of doctors, but a realistic understanding of where our collective knowledge lies relative to the long arc of evolution, but the societal distortion persists nonetheless.

> it's frustratingly slow to get people to discover and coalesce around actual truths

But what has been tried?

> ...when special interests[0] are highly motivated to undermine truths and the general welfare time and again for personal and outsized gain

And everyone knows it (or, is in possession of knowledge about it), yet their primitive, transparent methods work every time - rather paradoxical!

> it's tempting to throw out simplistic solutions like "let's skepticism!"

Conspiracy theorists (of which I am one) being one form, although my colleagues (bless their hearts) are....* a little unrefined and sloppy, to put it nicely.

> but almost impossible to actually change people en masse* like that.

Like that: agreed.

> i was just having this conversation last night about doctors, who know next to nothing in comparison to how complex biology is, but we still as a society feel compelled to venerate (and remunerate) doctors irrationally because they hold people's lives in their hands (understandably).

That the highly educated doctors (and other The Experts) themselves typically have little awareness of their shortcomings and delusions themselves may be suggestive of something important? And don't get me started on The Scientists!!

> but that outsized veneration (and remuneration) often leads to egos that can't admit ignorance or doubt...

Implying this problem didn't exist prior to the inflation of the ego?

> ...and that leads to millions of unnecessary deaths and countless people with worse health outcomes

Sir: not to worry - see, the line on this chart is moving up and to the right. All is well, stay the course.

> and that's not a condemnation of doctors...

Maybe it should be.

> ...but a realistic understanding of where our collective knowledge lies relative to the long arc of evolution, but the societal distortion persists nonetheless

It's a tricky problem!

This is an enjoyable conversation.

i've settled tentatively on the notion that nothing simplistic works for societal truthseeking, but a series of principles like education, community, (institutional and economic) fairness, etc. do work in concert to combat mediopolitical narratives that are wholly unconcerned with truth but rather control. this need for multidimenionalism is why change is so grindingly slow, but it's totally worth continuing to support and advance these principles at a local and state level against motivated, moneyed interests.

i should note that i do believe in science and the scientific method but reject scientism and expertise. part of this faith is understanding that no one person can embody the truth of a field, but all of the practitioners together can tell you insightful things about it. it's still ultimately up to the discernment of the observer to reach reasonable conclusions based on that imparted knowledge though.

Agree almost across the board.

So: what to do? :)

dunno? do you think there could be an easy answer?

for me, it boils down to keeping the brain open and helping others do the same. but that's a personal heuristic. most people don't want to pay the socioeconomic cost of being an independent thinker.

> it boils down to keeping the brain open and helping others do the same

This seems like a no-brainer to me...but now you have two problems!

well, you always had those two problems, it's just more apparent this way.

There is more than one way to have a problem though: with awareness of it, or not. And then within that binary there is...what? A spectrum? So goes the saying. But what if that much better representation is just starting to climb the curve of competence/complexity?

Is it highly unlikely that humanity might some time in the next couple hundred years look back at us and shake their heads about how simplistic and naive we are, and I include the so-called "experts" in that. Is it impossible that there's something that no one sees? Or maybe even more complex than that?

Well, it's possible a species would not find such a thing, because it never thought to look for it. Perhaps too busy looking for other things, of questionable utility.

for sure there will be a subset of humanity looking back and shaking their heads, and some of them will even have legitimate reasons for doing so. for instance, our brazenness around (bio-)chemistry, given that we are at the very beginning of that vast learning curve. that includes drugs, synthetic materials, fuels, combustion byproducts, you name it.

but yes, it's highly unlikely that they could shake their heads at every instance of today's ignorance and hubris in totality.

> for sure there will be a subset of humanity looking back and shaking their heads

Maybe that subset could be us!

> but yes, it's highly unlikely that they could shake their heads at every instance of today's ignorance and hubris in totality.

Why not? Can you not do this?

i just meant that no future population will see each and every foible we exhibit perfectly, because that's like hitting a trillion heads in a row. effectively impossible. but they could perhaps hit a hundred.

in any case, the hard part is not finding candidates but culling them down, analogous to the halting problem (or the bullshit asymmetry problem). is it an infinite calculation? probably.

and this thread has dropped pretty far into the archives, so i think it might be time to retire it. perhaps we can continue in a future thread.

> i just meant that no future population will see each and every foible we exhibit perfectly, because that's like hitting a trillion heads in a row. effectively impossible. but they could perhaps hit a hundred.

My motto is: aim for adequacy, not perfection.

> in any case, the hard part is not finding candidates but culling them down, analogous to the halting problem (or the bullshit asymmetry problem). is it an infinite calculation? probably.

Maybe. But also: maybe not!

> and this thread has dropped pretty far into the archives, so i think it might be time to retire it. perhaps we can continue in a future thread.

Haha, not a bad idea...I enjoyed the conversation, a breath of fresh air for HN.

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