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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why people believe that CDC must always be right, and therefore any doubt or challenge to CDC’s messages is misinformation that is worth banning. I thought every school in a modern society teaches student not to blindly trust the authority.

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Easy answer: people care about policy, not facts. They will grab onto facts that support the policy they want, and push away facts that don't. The more politicized the issue, as with COVID, the more fearful they become that any doubt or nuance will cede ground to the "other side".

And they're right in the sense that the "other side" is doing the same thing.

For example, every news headline about the pandemic had one of two policy subtexts: Democrat subtext (we need to mask up, lock down, vaccinate), or Republican subtext (we need to open up, drop mask rules, etc). Any media article, when reporting on news, statistics, or scientific studies, would always present it in one of those two contexts. So any new piece of information would be evaluated and presented by the media and by Twitter, not on a basis of how it contributed to our knowledge and evidence-based decisionmaking process, but on a basis of which policy position it seemed to support.

And of course, humans love to form political factions and fight each other ("my" group versus "theirs"), and powerful/rich people gain lots of power/money from this process by leading or feeding one side, so the media and political ecosystem encourage this dynamic.

This is really sad. Facts matter, especially for issues of life and death. Heck, facts matter, even for politics.

I wonder as well. That's just one government, as the article points out. Other governments had different responses, recommendations and policies. What made Sweden's approach for example, more wrong than the CDC?

Related: there isn’t enough discussion on actual executive decision making. The experts are supposed to give their inputs, but the buck stops with the executives who are tasked with balancing various trade-offs(including the inherent uncertainty in faulty/noisy scientific models).

https://www.slowboring.com/p/fda-cost-benefit

There never is one single “right” decision, the balancing of trade-offs is inherently political.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier

The CDC is just one such expert. Then there are legal experts, economic experts, public opinion experts, foreign policy experts.. in the private sector a CEO(or wall st trader or tech PM) is expected to weigh all of these, decide, and live or die by the consequences of their decisions . Tough job, which is why they get paid so much.

An executive has the authority to completely override the experts after consulting an astrologer, tossing a coin, or washing his hands.

This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci is completely misguided.

> This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci are completely misguided

Fair point. Doesn’t mean that people who pointed out inconsistencies in CDC’s data or referred papers of different opinions should be banned or villainfied, either

Of course.

The question wasn't whether the CDC was "always right", the question was whether - given that Twitter already actively moderated content for other reasons - Twitter executives thought that the CDC had better arguments and evidence that certain statements were false and harmful than the people making them, and that "public health" was at least as good a reason for blocking/labelling tweets as those other reasons. (Most of the better criticisms of Twitter policy focuses on the complete lack of authority of most of the algorithms and individuals actually implementing the moderation to judge whether certain claims were new evidence or nonsense). It's not like there was ever any shortage of criticism of the CDC as an organization on Twitter.

My school didn't teach me to treat statements from practitioners of evidence-based medicine and vendors of colloidal silver as equally likely to be true or that people should pick recommendations based on which got the most social media upvotes either

When there are literally millions of medical experts recommending taking vaccines, why would you expect most people to do otherwise?

We're not all medical experts. And, we can't survive without trusting others.

It wasn't really a recommendation per gov policy in many countries, it was take the shot or else type of deal. Also any talk that didn't toe the official line was deemed "misinformation".

The goalposts for what was "misinformation" moved all the time too. Making the whole misinformation information campaign silly stupid, but one just doubled down on it.

The problem is not that people "don't trust others". The problem seems to be that some people "trust the wrong people" (according to some "experts").

The biggest problem with the so called "experts" is that they seem to think that they are automatically owned our trust. But there does not seem to be any penalty for getting things wrong (don't mask, mask with cloth mask, mask with n95).

It's also quite interesting that even the ancient people knew about different modes of persuasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion

There was Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The appeal to authority, to emotions, and to the logical truth of the claim. You need all of them to convince someone to something. Somehow modern experts think that the only thing they need is Ethos and enough legal might to enforce compliance.

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