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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately with Covid we saw what people are willing to do from both pro and anti PsOV. They were both wrong. Even the CDC and the like put out bad information. Internally they had dissent but dismissed it and went so far as to misspell things so FOIAs would not find things[1]

No one can be trusted, unfortunately, including trusted sources, or platforms or governments. All of the above will abuse their trust when things prove difficult, trust be damned.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/health/nih-officials-foia...

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We need to clearly differentiate between "best known facts currently available" and "already disproven bullshit".

The first one has an expiration date in the (unknown) future. The second one has one that’s already in the past.

Thirdly there’s the category of "still useful but not true" like Newtonian physics.

"already disproven bullshit" is what meta studies are for. In regards to the covid pandemic there are now plenty of those, and unsurprisingly few people liked what they showed. No one likes it when facts do not conform to cultural views.

No, again, getting things wrong is not the same as lying, and they do not warrant the same degradation in trust.

If people were avoiding FOIA by having candid discussions on private servers and deliberately misspelling words all while telling the public a contradictory story, that is strong evidence of lying.

If the private communications matched the public ones and there were no efforts to obfuscate, then the best conclusion would be they just called it wrong.

I agree hiding from FOIA looks bad, degrades trust in general, and the responsible parties should be punished, but it is definitely not dispositive of lying.

I didn't see any emails where they were showing agreement with a different set of facts than what they were communicating to the public? Open to seeing sources behind that claim though.

It doesn't prove (but, uh, is rather strongly suggestive) that their earlier statements were lies or contradicted by the records they're hiding, but it is itself a lie.

What if they're lying about getting things wrong versus lying?

That’s bad but not an interpretation one should jump to in a context where it was very easy to get things wrong and rather little incentive to lie.

You think CDC et al didn’t know they had limited public credibility with which they could guide public behavior? These people live and breathe questions of institutional credibility all day every day. They obviously know their careers are put at risk even by being wrong never mind by lying.

The whole "horse dewormer" bullshit propagated by MSM was clearly a lie (in so far that this medicine has been used for decades by humans). So, you can't even trust MSM to not be a 'supersharer' of misinformation.

Same is true for Hunter Biden's laptop story.

Many more examples could be found.

Heck you even have Chris Cuomo coming out against many of the things he said and agreeing with some things he disagreed with regarding COVID.

The CDC did put out some info on masks that they pretty quickly retracted and admitted was a mistake. They did that because they were trying to make sure enough masks were available for health care workers, which did in fact run out. You have to acknowledge that they admitted the mistake and take that into account when comparing it to something like the Trump campaign to claim the election was stolen, which everyone knows is entirely and intentionally false but they will never admit.

The idea that you can’t trust anyone is part of the ongoing disinformation campaign. Acting like the truth of information is only binary and ignoring the intent, degree of truth, and degree of damage, is a way for politicians who are spreading misinformation intentionally to rationalize doing so by blaming and attacking everyone else just because they try to do the right thing and get it slightly wrong.

We don’t need to trust politicians, we just need to trust each other a little bit. The campaign to sow distrust and polarize voters is working. Don’t let it work on you. Yes, some people are sometimes bad. Don’t forget that people are sometimes good, and most of the country aren’t politicians. Most of the country is decent people trying to get by, and we all pretty much want the same things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_attack#Undermin...

> Internally they had dissent but dismissed it and went so far as to misspell things so FOIAs would not find things.

I hadn't heard this yet. Unbelievable. And yet all of the sites I found it on from a quick search have at some point in the past been branded "fake news." In fact, one source, the New York Post, was falsely branded "Russian disinformation" on the eve of the 2020 election and suspended from Meta and Twitter, only for its story to be verified subsequently when it had minimal consequence.

The Hunter Biden's laptop thing continues to be an intelligence op and not "real". It has not been "verified".

Of course it does contain some real content, since it was constructed from a hack of his iCloud account, but that doesn't validate anything else on it and some of the earliest claims about it seemed to involve eg planted child porn. You only find it credible because those were successfully suppressed so hard you don't even remember them.

From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...:

"In November 2022, CBS News published the results of a forensic analysis they commissioned of a copy of the laptop data Mac Isaac initially handed to federal investigators in 2019. The analysis, conducted by Computer Forensics Services, found data, including over 120,000 emails, "consistent with normal, everyday use of a computer", found "no evidence that the user data had been modified, fabricated or tampered with", and found no new files created on the laptop after April 2019, when Mac Isaac received the laptop. The chief technology officer of Computer Forensics Services added: "I have no doubt in my mind that this data was created by Hunter Biden, and that it came from a computer under Mr. Biden's control". Also on November 21, CBS News published the first photograph of the damaged Macbook Pro, which had been provided to them by Hunter Biden's legal team.

According to reports on January 16, 2024, new filings by the U.S. Department of Justice's special counsel, headed by David C. Weiss, appear to be the first public confirmation of the laptop's authenticity by the DOJ. The filings refer to the laptop connected to Hunter Biden stating, “the defendant’s Apple MacBook Pro, which he had left at a computer store.”"

Is that fake news?

Yes; notably a special counsel saying something is not "confirmation by the DOJ". A special counsel is a political entity not controlled by the DOJ and not everything they say is an official position or even true.

For instance, they said in the same case that a picture of a table saw with sawdust on it was cocaine Hunter Biden was using.

The defense in the case has said some of the material is not authentic (eg https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.827...) but it's pretty irrelevant to the case so they are probably not actually going to work this out.

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