I believe that the more perspectives you are aware of, the less likely you are to be dogmatic and extreme in your beliefs and actions. You will be reminded how dissimilar real life is to simple ideas and rhetoric, that it is a shifting ocean of nuances and caveats.
Or society can go the other route, assume you cannot trust the people and create a tyranny of disinformation and control.
I don’t know if you’ve gone to college recently but that was not my impression. It’s a woke monoculture. Discourse is gone.
Moreover, do you notice that my comment is being grayed out as people who disagree are downvoting it? A lot of people who claim to value discussion really don't; not on Hacker News, and not elsewhere.
Ideas should be thrown into the public square, in the full light of day, and judged on their merits.
Ideas should absolutely be judged on their merits; here we agree. Too bad that's not how humans work. Instead, they tend to choose whichever truth they like best based on how it makes them feel; politicians know this, which is why they don't bother crafting logically sound arguments backed with evidence. They play on peoples' emotions.
Moreover, the university is not a public square. You attend as a student, which means you are there to learn, not to share your thoughts like it's a real-life HN thread. Don't want to learn the material? That's completely fine. The solution is to not sign up for the class, not to whine about how "discourse is gone" just because the teacher doesn't want to waste time on every edgy kid's opinions. People didn't pay massive sums of money to hear you talk. They paid to learn from experts.
It’s making me question my assumptions about education. On the other hand Im just one data point.
I know it seems almost impossible–what with them basically espousing the same values that used to be generally accepted as "good" a decade or so ago: overcoming division, not burning coal just to piss off the libs, not killing vice presidents on Wednesdays and Fridays, international cooperation, arms control, caps lock control, etc...
And that YouTube guy you adore does make a lot of sense when he shouts at the camera. Not just on dietary supplements but also how the loss of traditional gender roles has specifically disadvantaged high-IQ males with STEM affinity.
That pronoun thing might even get someone killed, in a very convoluted way.
But even then it just doesn't seem to have the potential to end the republic quite as easily as, say, musing about having the military re-run the election in states you lost, in such an obvious way every living former SecDef signs a letter asking the military to disregard such orders.
This is best exemplified by someone like Michael Tracy or Glenn Greenwald IMO.
In my view they're more wrong than right, but they do have the occasional nugget where they do see through the BS. However, the mainstream view is correct more often than not. Additionally, a significant proportion of their takes are in bad faith.
The goal should probably be a balance. And probably realizing that nobody including the government or media deserves your blind trust.
Most people have limited experience in managing information that they consider authoritative which turns out to be wrong.
I think the best example of authoritative misinformation for 2020 is Anthony Fauci’s guidance that masks don’t help until they do. I’m looking forward to watching people’s reactions when he inevitably asserts they don’t again.
2020 was a good year for skeptic production, boy howdy.
Until that shortcut goes horribly wrong.
That's why it's very important to have a healthy dose of skepticism when receiving info from people who we trust, because we chose the gatekeepers based on our opinions which implicitly selects for our own biases.
For example I don't actually know that the election wasn't stolen. It's an opinion that I hold due to choosing to trust a specific gatekeeper (main stream media) and a lack of hard evidence from the other side. If hard evidence were to be presented, the I would have to reexamine my beliefs even if they go against everything I believed in previously.
In the beginning there was a real question of how this virus transmitted as well as acute supply shortages of n95 masks for first responders.
If you expect scientists to be correct the first time, every time, I guess you’ll set yourself up for disappointment. I suppose when you sit down to code, especially using a new language or framework, you get it right the first time with no bugs? If so, congratulations and let us know how you did it.
“As Fauci told the Washington Post here , at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, masks were not recommended for the general public, as authorities were trying to prevent a mask shortage for health workers and the extent of asymptomatic spread was unknown.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-...
The man was in a no-win situation, and he had to make a shitty call, but integrity doesn’t mean occasional honesty. He and many others walked through a one-way door and the best move for him is to resign so we can have someone with a clean ethical slate.
Let’s make this simpler. How do you feel about General Alexander’s testimony to Congress about surveillance of the American people?
But on this same site, somoene can literally carry on a discussion echoing the (proven false) propaganda points ("biden crime family"? dear lord) and it stays up without downvote for (checks watch) an hour and counting.
Everything this past week has been a chest x-ray of our collective spirit, and it came back solid white.
This is vastly smaller in degree but not in kind.
Time for some introspection, dear readers.
The last couple of days have been particularly hellish, with many threads that descended into flame wars which drifted far away from whatever the original post was about.
I agree that there have been many threads that were far from being good faith discussions and turned into shouting matches with too many posts made in bad faith (such as citing bad sources that did not contain anything directly relevant to the point being argued, or links to sources that just repeated the original unsubstantiated allegation without presenting any evidence). Actions taken by users in these threads seemed to reflect preexisting biases rather than anything resembling a good faith debate.
With that I want to express my appreciation for the moderators who's job I do not envy but who are very necessary to keeping this site functioning in any way.
The kind of people who get into positions of power - well, my impression is that they think they know better. Even if they are aware of the fact that in 1930 someone fucked up, they will not entertain the fact that they themselves might do the same.
Also, some events are really complex. You can educate people about the 1929 or 2008 economic crises from very different perspectives, from far-left to libertarian, and the lessons will be very different.