Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com