You are right. No one person can know everything about everything. Heaven's know I defer to experts if I know I can trust their opinion. The issue is trust.

And US has about only one institution left that people seem to trust. Military. It does not bode well for the fate of the republic.

I wouldn’t agree that Americans universally trust their military.

Gallup poll numbers are at https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as....

I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is.

6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.

Technically, they primarily recommend not chewing gum at all. The “9 out of 10 doctors agree the 10th is an idiot” is a meme.

The meme is 4 out of 5. So yeah, most of them say sugarless gum, then there's the ones that ignore the rules of the poll and say don't chew gum. Those aren't the dentists we are talking about.

There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news.

Hard to believe, but these people exist.

People trust the military precisely because in the last several decades it has been studiously apolitical. This is a fragile state of affairs, and unusual by historical and international standards.

> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?

Good book by Tom Nichols:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

Not anything recent:

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

* “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19.

* PDF: https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_...

'Special' thinking has been part of the American DNA since the beginning (Jamestown, Puritans/Pilgrims):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...

I'm a bit irked by these 'always been a thing'-responses.

Yes, it may be true that the thing (whatever it may be) is not a recent development, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have steadily gotten worse over time and might eventually reach a tipping point that would be worth worrying about.

From Fantasyland it's gone back and forth over the decades.

> I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.

The least thing Twitter could do is allow us to see who started a specific hashtag. Hashtags can be pushed using Tweetdeck through private accounts.

In 2016, @jack asked which feature we want to see https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480

I replied with "ability to see who started a specific hashtag" https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060

@jack thought it was interesting and mentioned VP of Product at twitter. https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 I got excited, but nothing happened.

I got excited because I thought I would in no time be able to, not discern the truth, but identify whether I can trust the source. After all, there is a name for content which does not identify its source: Grey propaganda.

Wouldn't this encourage false-flag hashtag squatting? Just figure out what your "enemies" are likely to hashtag, and set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.

Who is the enemy here? The people or governments? Arab spring succeeded in Tunisia because real time news sharing was faster than state-sponsored-media. The same thing happened in Egypt.

>set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.

That's what governments tried to do, but they failed, and were failing. Bots with aged accounts and Tweetdeck got better in 2015.

What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence.

Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.

The thing that makes society work better is accountability, which lets us cooperate at ever larger scales without cheaters. The book "The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations" describes how the advent of double entry accounting meant that you could detect fraud, and suddenly you could do things like give your goods to a naval merchant who will sail away with them and bring you back the money and it works because you can detect any cheating and this is the foundation of capitalism (textbook version). You can think of the arrow of progress as pointing in the direction of increasing accountability . So, the problem with social media is that people lie, always have, and it's like we are just noticing this for the first time ever, and now we are responding to that. Social media is making us more accountable, not less! See #MeToo, etc

But hasn't Trump (and others) shown that if you repeat the lies enough people start believing them and those who could debunk them slowly gives up by lack of time or resources ?

The trouble is that our gatekeepers inevitably go beyond being neutral arbiters of truth and allow their personal biases to color their analysis. And they might even believe that they're doing the right thing by guiding society in the "correct" direction. But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.

>But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.

That's not the fault of the "gatekeepers," nor should it be their problem. Disbelieving everything a source claims because you find "inconsistencies" and "bias" when no human being is ever perfectly consistent or unbiased in their views is an irrational and infantile way of thinking.

> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.

By "our current technology" you mean social media. If you need evidence that it is time to do something about social media, consider this:

28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648

Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.

> Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.

Are you sure about that ? The Red Scare, the Cold War, nuclear weapons on Irak, and so on and so on ... I'm pretty sure a said nonsense would find a way to spread just like history showed us in the past.

There are two main perpetuated methods to this:

1) Project your crimes unto your opponents (smokescreen + taking out targets).

2) Using priming, anchoring and repeating the same message exactly over and over. Ie. this is code for the "smooth transition" of power:

Pompeo Promises 'A Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration' (2020)

https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/1...

Many people forget consciously. This works without social media, but the amplification may accellerate and strengthen the signal that much more when effective.

Yes, it is brainwashing techniques.

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752

> 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people

The craziest part is, the Gates Foundation did fund something very close to that: not microchips, but Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination.

It's essentially a tiny tattoo visible only in infrared light to track who has been vaccinated. So that rumor is more of a misunderstanding (of the difference between quantum dots and microchips) than misinformation.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-cou...

https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162

> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?

It's pretty obnoxious and exhausting to read about "Oh yeah, I know that's X, because..." on Twitter. Like the whole "It's Antifa ambushing the Capitol", because "the Antifa sign is to wear your hat backwards", "those are Antifa helmets", or just a screenshot of a photo of some guy with the text "phillyantifa.org" next to the picture is enough to convince some people that, "Yeah, it's Antifa".

It's a cheap grasping for evidence to reaffirm your views/world belief though, to fix your cognitive dissonance. Because trying to find the whole truth would mean confronting yourself and maybe figuring out you've been dumb enough to be lied to. That your "team" are the ones who are ready to be violent towards members of the government. Or that maybe your views are based on your fear of the other...

Also, written 5 years and a month ago https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-... :

> I would, however, add a casual observation: at this point Trump has been the front-runner for long enough that it’s very hard to imagine his supporters suddenly losing faith, because it would be too embarrassing.

> Bear in mind that embarrassment, and the desire to avoid it, are enormously important sources of motivation. [...] Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren’t.

> Now think about someone who has been supporting Trump since the summer. For the Trump bubble to burst, many people like that would have to slap their foreheads and say, “Wow, he’s not a serious person! What was I thinking?”

> And very few people ever do that sort of thing. Someone who has spent months supporting Trump despite establishment denunciations — which means something like a third of Republicans — will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that he has been foolish. At this point such people will insist that any negative reports about Trump are the product of hostile mainstream media; Trump’s very durability so far is likely to make him highly resilient looking forward.

>> I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is

There are people out there who know exactly what to use you for.

> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.

And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses.

> And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses.

Stopping one particular narrow class of violent incitement is still allowing a wide variety of flavors of garbage.

And what "flavor" of garbage is "hang Mike Pence" exactly?

The kind that's so disgusting that it'd be asinine to infer that my comment refers to this specific instance, rather than the overarching topic of Twitter (and the rest of the social media cabal) controlling what constitutes acceptable discourse.

And yet, only this flavor is actually being removed, so it’s almost as if you have no point at all and are just riding a wave of populist indignation, entirely ungrounded in reality...

> I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.

Very honest!

> As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right.

No! They don't always get it right?! They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information.

All I would say, is that you need to ensure that you act on what you know. Not on what you believe. Verify everything you accept as true or discard or assume it but be prepared to be corrected if you get better information. And if it turns out that you don't know a whole lot - that is fine! At least you're not acting incorrectly and causing problems!

At the end of the day if you are acting on stuff that you don't know, you can inadvertently cause more harm, even though you mean well. You can be manipulated (easily) to go along with the crowd.

All the best.

> They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information.

> Verify everything you accept as true

Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?

The problem with the Internet nowadays is, it's already like a Library of Babel [0], if you want to have your views confirmed on anything, you can find someone saying "Yes, it's like that.".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

> Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?

Its obvious. If you look at what is presented, you are given lots of claims, but very few facts. Its just a load of evidence-free noise. What's to evaluate?!

Seriously, look a little deeper at almost any article. There is no actual information there. The question you should ask - critically - is how do I know this to be true? And if you don't know it to be true, why do you believe it to be true anyway?

UPDATE/EDIT

And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.

Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?

I also get the "you're posting too fast" messages...

Sarcasm follows: But oooh yeah, it's a giant conspiracy, everyone's out to suppress your views!

If your views are aligned with what the echo chamber agrees with, you will be able to reply. If you do not get the echo chamber's approval, you are downvoted and cannot reply.

What's the conspiracy?! Its a fact.

But yes - it really does mean that my views are suppressed. I cannot reply to others as I would like.

Hmm, how do you differentiate between claims and facts? What are facts other than just things where you can verify? Where you can think "Ok, I agree that this is true". Like 2 + 2 = 4. We probably can both verify this, so that's a fact. How about e = mc2 ? Well, it's stood the test of time and many physics professors saying what it means, so to me this is also a fact. Same with the fact that the earth is spherical; but if you talk to a flat-earther, they'll start saying all sorts of nonsense (at least to me) because they don't believe the hundreds of years of research, and "want to see it for themselves", and what they "see" is that the earth is flat (because they have confirmation bias)

Yesterday MSM reported live as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. I see that as factual information, there were thousands at a Trump rally nearby, presumably because they wanted to hear their leader talk; and nobody's said these people dispersed and a bunch of others came from the bushes...

The media also said "x thousand more people died due to Covid-19 yesterday", here I do have implicit trust that the reporting is correct, then again they're just reporting numbers from government agencies. TBH I'm not that invested in this that I need to proof whether the number is correct or not, but that's the thing isn't it; a Covid-denier wants to think Covid is a lie, and therefore the number of deaths is a lie, because there's something in it for them, maybe it's because their business is currently shut down and their bank account is being drained and they're going to lose their house and go hungry soon..

I've been reading a bit of Noam Chomsky this afternoon, not a person I'd agree with politically but many of his observations ring true regardless.

"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information."

What is the benefit the governance structure derives from general misinformation on most topics? Governance is harder when people don't know things.

Think about it. If people have the wrong information, that means that they cannot respond meaningfully. If you are swimming in a world of lies, how will you give the correct answer?

UPDATE/EDIT

And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.

Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?

If you're swimming in a world of lies, how do you feed yourself? Because not through government; they don't want that job.

What do you imagine government's goal to be? Especially in a country like the US where half the elected are trying to shrink it?

People believing lies led to a mob storming the US Congress. Do you think the goal of the people in government was to get lynched by a mob?

(I use hacker news because it is moderated. That's not part of the problem)

How do I feed myself? I don't know what you mean.

Government's goal is to implement whatever governance is decided to be best to manage people.

You say a mob stormed congress. I saw a dramatic event, that justifies a lot of authoritarian actions to be undertaken on others. Including de-platforming the president! Isn't that amazing?

Other dramatic events are perfectly fine, of course, such as the BLM protests.

Why is that? The answer for me is that some protests suit the governance agenda, and some don't. A message needs to be given to indicate rightthink and wrongthink.

I think you must believe that the government (lights, camera) 'action' you see on TV are far more than a simple soap opera intended to distract you. Perhaps you believe that one side is 'good' and the other 'bad'. If that's it, you are falling for the good cop/bad cop routine, and being sold down the river by both sides.

(I don't mind moderation - but what we have on HN is no room for free thinking, consensus opinion wins the day. Was I really posting too much, was I undertaking a DDOS attack? Or was my opinion, if reasoned, unpopular and not to be heard. Let me know.)

You got caught by the spam filter dude. No conspiracy here.

Its not a spam filter.

I am not posting too fast in trying to reply to responses.

The reason I am blocked is because my opinions are not popular and they are downvoted.

This is the issue: HN is an echo chamber. Those who can downvote (those with 500+ upvotes) can downvote others and maintain the echo chamber. A function of the design is to take away the right of reply from those whose opinion they do not like.

It is probably a spam filter, downvotes are an imperfect proxy for post quality. Tons of low quality posts is a form of spam. You don't have to be posting links to things you want to sell to be spamming.

No offense to you but typically there isn't a ton of value to someones posts that are repeatedly downvoted. They tend to be repetitive. I didn't look at yours so am not making a judgement on your statements but instead on others I have seen.

So an algorithm to slow down posts of that kind make sense even if it isn't perfect.

No one sees a post with a huge number of replies and assumes that since not every reply is replied back the person gave up. It is generally known that keeping up is hard when you are outnumbered.

You should keep that in mind and focus your efforts. If you get a bunch of replies focus on the upvoted ones first since then your reply will be more prominent as well. Ensure you aren't repeating your points, while some people carpet bomb replies most only do that when they are substantially similar.

On the topic of the post I replied to you got caught by several reasons for downvotes:

* Spreading a conspiracy. You emphatically say that those in power are lying. * Providing no evidence or even examples really. You have to back up extreme rhetoric with robust supporting evidence. You didn't provide any. * Bad place to make a stand. You chose to complain about overbearing tech companies on a topic about Twitter stopping people calling for the death of the VP. Direct calls for violence are agreed to be bad for everyone so using it as a jumping board for overbearing tech companies is a bad idea. * You finally used yourself as the example of overbearing tech companies. Never ever do this. You are incredibly biased about your own actions. You understand why you are taking them and give yourself immense benefit of the doubt. Using a literal spam filter as an example of what is wrong with tech because you personally got caught by it is a fundamentally flawed argument. You are incapable of reasonably inspecting the quality of your own posts.

Finally your original post is woefully ignorant. No one can know whether the election was stolen based on their own knowledge. No man is an island I believe is the phrase. The actual information required to prove that without a doubt is impossible to obtain. You need to have the data summarized to stand a chance. So by saying "acting on stuff that you don't know" after making it obvious you don't believe in secondary sources you are showing that you are making a fundamentally flawed argument.

:)

I appreciate you attempting to 'set me straight'. All the best.

We really need to slow down and examine our premises more carefully.

1. Gatekeepers (in this case, any media labeled "mainstream" and any popular social media corporation) exist to spread disinformation.

2. These gatekeepers are part of the government (or governance structure); they operate on the direction of the government.

3. They will not give you "good information." Any of them.

All of this to argue that President Donald Trump, perhaps arguably the most powerful man when acting President is speaking the truth about widespread election fraud, which - in 2016 would make him look better, as he claimed he won the popular vote, and in 2020 would preserve his position of power and influence over you.

To accept that lie, you need to believe that the vast majority of news outlets and social media corporations are all secretly conspiring, planning, communicating and executing alongside election officials, bipartisan judges, etc. and all at the behest of a "deep state" shadow government, but the only people that are willing to "admit" this exists are people that are Trump's biggest fans.

To me, it was always the case. I think TV was set up to be the most powerful propaganda delivery mechanism. That's pretty clear, when you look at how the BBC was created.

But - for more info, so that you can confirm this is explicitly the case, you should look up 'Operation Mockingbird'. Or the way that the CIA sponsored arts and culture.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...

The media being part of governance is not a conspiracy.

UPDATE/EDIT

And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.

Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?

> the CIA's secret campaign to turn American art into anti-Soviet cultural propaganda

This is perfectly credible. But extrapolating that example of government influence over culture to the premise "media is 100% under the control and direction of the government" or, furthermore, a hidden or shadow government... is stretching well beyond a logical conclusion. (It would have to be a shadow government, because mainstream media and social media were not going along with the Republicans led by Trump, when they were in power over several branches of the U.S. government.)

You need a lot more evidence to dispel the notion that this is "not a conspiracy."

What would you think if I said to you that there is a conspiracy so broad and deeply embedded that a small group is able to take a set co-ordinated actions, across the planet, with every country taking part that constrain individuals to their houses and restrict their movements and interactions, and to force individuals possibly at gunpoint to take injections that they object to? And that governments would be able to do so, with most cheering them on?

Is that a conspiracy? If I had said that to you last year, you would have called me mad.

Contrast that, with what would happen if you tried to prevent just one individual coming near you, even if they had provably caused you harm. You would need to go to court, prove your case, get a restraining order, etc. And you would never be able to exclude them from work, enforce a passport, mandate good citizen score for loans and travel!! Apparently none of the legal stuff is applicable if the whole world is being locked down. No one needs to go on the record to state why all this is required.

This is where we are at! Do you really want to trust CNN? lol