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Comment by bradleysz | Hacker News Reader

On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no? Or at least a combination of commentary and curation of the constant firehose of new information, which feels like a form of implied commentary itself.

Primary sources are only an improvement on commentary if, between you and the commentator, you are the one with the combination of expertise, time, and objectivity better suited to extract truth from the source, and this weighing of suitability is going to vary from source to source.

New Computer Science research? Maybe I can parse it better than some. New novel treatment for insert-disease-here? I need some help.

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> On a practical level, some reliance on commentary is necessary, no?

Oh yes, very much so.

Which is why it's so deeply concerning that media has become terribly consolidated and controlled by capital. The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views [0].

Examples: Illegal wars, the holocene extinction, climate change - in each case you can point to massive disparities in what media commentators present as important, and what genuine experts believe is important.

One very recent example is how media across the West presented Israeli football fans as victims of roaming gangs doing 'pogroms' in Amsterdam, when in fact, the footage shown was very clearly of the Israeli fans terrorizing residents: [1]

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60

1 - https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1857352815343210804

>The shareholders interests diverge significantly from those of humanity and the planet, and they hire commentators who align with their views

How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet? Why shouldn't everyone ask if those interests are align to own goals?

> How can we even be sure what are the interests of the humanity and the planet?

Sometimes it's really easy, and yet we're still failing.

Say a community is deciding whether to clean up a polluted river, and prevent the polluter from dumping chemicals in it that are killing fish and leaving residents with foul water.

Person A says: "The polluter's interests conflict with the community's need for clean water."

Person B says: "How can we even define what the community needs? Maybe some people don’t mind foul water. Maybe a little PFAS pollution and pesticide runoff is fine actually. We've no firm evidence that these chemicals cause harm. There's no proof that the rise in cancers since GreenWashCorp moved to town isn't just coincidence.”

I would say that person B is ignoring a clear, shared need (clean water). The appeal to the status quo will do real harm to people if they listen to it.

... Flint still doesn't have clean water. Like many parts of the US.

Which collective goods do you consider disposable - clean air, water, food? A livable climate?

How sure do you think we need to be of what the "interests of humanity" are, before we defend them?

Flint has had clean water since ~2018 and there are ongoing state and federal efforts to remove all lead from water systems in Michigan (and the rest of the country of course).

Is there some specific criteria you have in mind when you say that Flint doesn't have clean water?

"Ongoing efforts". Great.

> a federal judge recently found Flint in civil contempt for failing to meet a deadline to remove all of the city's lead service lines.

> There are an estimated nine million lead service lines in need of replacement across the U.S.

- https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1247095068/its-been-10-years-...

> Flint residents have yet to see a penny of the $625 million class-action settlement that came from a lawsuit against the state

- https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/2024/04/25/flint-water...

And it's not just Flint, like I said:

> CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together service more than 19 million people.

> A total of 118 of the 120 samples had concerning levels of PFAS or arsenic above CR’s recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead.

- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...

Specific criteria you ask: How about just living up to our own standards, for a start. Holding polluters and enablers accountable.

Then we can get those standards up to where other, more densely populated, less wealthy countries already have them.

So that study uses limits set by consumer reports, it's a misrepresentation to use it to argue that water doesn't meet standards. And it's not clear if they included private wells (where things like arsenic levels may be naturally high).

The EPA hadn't even set limits for PFAS at that time.

They only got around to it earlier this year - after the "forever chemicals" were detected in the water systems of nearly 200 million Americans.

So I guess you're right - technically, you can't meet standards that don't exist. Not sure that helps your argument that we have safe water though!

For some areas you need expertise. But some areas can be checked by everyone. Affirmations like "according to the sources politician X was accused of fraud" and "during president X, the economic sector Y experienced a growth of Xyz %".

That still takes time, though.

Very true! But I’d still argue the idea that (partially) relying on commentary is what causes bias is hubristic; in practice, it usually just means that you’re relying on commentary without realizing it. Like, take the instance mentioned in the original comment: reading “the text of a law”. This is a great thing to do, but assuming you’re not a legal scholar and a political expert specializing in that field, it’s no reason not to also seek out commentary that explains the intent and likely impact of the law. To say the least, laws are not objective — that’s why we need the judicial system.

In my experience, this overall rhetorical tactic is often pulled out by people who pride themselves on some variety of centrism/moderation, and are trying to dismiss the worries of others. This is good when they do it to beliefs like “crime is going up” or “criminal immigrant are invading our country”, but not so much when it’s used against “yes, he really does endorse P2025 even though he claims not to”.

Plus cmon it’s gotta just infuriate any interlocutor. I’ve never dealt with “well you’re just not smart enough to understand why I’m right”, and this focus on reading primary sources seems like a variety of that.

Again, not at all saying that they’re wrong to read primary sources, or that it’s not sometimes absolutely necessary; just that the “worldview”-based confidence stemming from such a practice is misplaced.

Commentary has its place, but it's in the context of primary sources. It can't stand on its own. And there's a vast quality chasm between expert commentary and mainstream news commentator commentary.

I can't speak to everyone's experience, but I have never been to an event later reported in the news where the news report corresponded to what I witnessed enough for me to believe the reporter was even there. And anymore, they aren't. They're trying to synthesize observations from dozens of different people, who themselves may or may not have been there, and doing it so fast they don't have a chance to verify whether they were. It's like a giant game of "telephone," but it's presented as though it's all fact.

In the specific example of the law, I was specifically saying, "[Politician] approved the change of a law from saying X to saying Y," so the text of the law before and after the politician's approval was the specific issue in question. I can see why there would be lots of situations where expert legal commentary would be important to understanding the impact of the change, but in this case, my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.

> my brother was trying to say that politician hadn't changed the law at all, which just plain wasn't true.

And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

One possible explanation for stuff like this is that you’re dealing with someone that has an anti-realist meta-ethic, which is not so unusual, but what is new is the blurred boundary between factual questions and ethical questions. Something like “Fair election?” would seem to be a clear and concrete question about the world, but the answer you’d get is always for a different question, and so it amounts to boo or hurrah. Even asking a simpler question about a specific policy changing or staying the same cannot untangle the discourse if that question is perceived as too close to an ethical one.

> And there’s a good chance that he rejects evidence to the contrary, or if finally faced with evidence beyond refute, it changes nothing, right?

It actually wasn't even rejection. It was this pivot to, "You live in a different moral reality than I do, and therefore your assessment of factual reality is morally bankrupt," even though I thought we were talking about whether the law had changed, not the moral value of a change.

It got ugly really fast, and frankly I'm still bewildered by it. It would have been one thing if he didn't think there was a reality to appeal to. This was just, "You have a fact I don't like, and therefore are evil."

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