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Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

What epistemic trust? Perhaps in the west where it wasn't 100% obvious everything media says is a lie. In the countries of the ex-Soviet block everyone is very aware of the propaganda back then and now. (propaganda is not just lies - every form of distribution of information with a goal to influence the receiving person is propaganda, propaganda can be true or false, it can be true and twisted into a different meaning, it can be deliberately false to out across a counterpoint etc). In short this is why people exposed to propaganda for decades are inclined to trust full length videos recorded by identifiable individuals on the ground a 100x more than any editorial on TV or uploaded by any organisation. This is why telegram and in a way twitter exploded as a source of news during this war.

Is it possible to insert deep fakes in there? Sure, but the technology is defonot good enough to not be able to tell it apart.

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Majority of Russian population believes everything said on their news services.

I need to see the video before I can believe this.

This.

Obviously it got downvoted to "grey".

I'm always fascinated that hacker news, a forum for many developers and other, what I'd assume, "higher intelligent" people, fails to see this.

Intelligent people stay away from sentences such as:

> 100% obvious everything media says is a lie

It's an assumption, in light of which you interpret information. It's really puzzling, why Americans so zealously trust everything - MSM, politicians, advertisements, corporations, economists, youtube, shitty software, ecelebs, everything.

Epistemic trust essentially means assuming good faith unless shown otherwise. If societies didn't have that, they wouldn't function (or even be able to have become societies in the first place). Like morality - human society would not have been able to survive if everyone simply acted in their own self interest.

That approach is not a dogma, but means to reach a specific goal, and works only in trusting environment, it doesn't work in adversarial environment. Everyone already acts in self interest, not sure where you got that myth, that works only in small communities of 100 people where everybody know each other for a long time.

If you think altruism is a myth, or that everyone you don't personally know is acting in their own self-interest, then I think you have a much bigger problem than what we're discussing here.

What am I missing? Still as you can see the sky doesn't fall.

>Epistemic trust essentially means assuming good faith unless shown otherwise. If societies didn't have that, they wouldn't function

Having lived in an authoritarian state where everyone had pure "eat or get eaten" mentality I strongly disagree. Epistemic trust is not a requirement for a society to function.

It is much safer to assume everyone is there to get you (by scamming, misinformation, theft, or plans to hurt you physically just for the fun of it) than otherwise. Having tgat mindset has never stopped me from trusting people that have shown themselves to be trustworthy.

The comment is clearly, completely bullshit. As an example see Russia. Or that doesn't count as ex-ussr.

The problem is that using your own sources of news only works if you understand why news is being distorted in the first place. There is no automatic reason why an identifiable individual on the ground is more trustworthy than any other news source unless you have better metadata about what they say. Otherwise it's just "CNN = voice of imperialism, person with 10K followers = voice of freedom"

> This is why telegram and in a way twitter exploded as a source of news during this war.

By that logic, the Russians would have kicked Putin out of power by now.

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