This is correct. This is it.
I am a "conspiracy theorist" regarding most of the examples you listed, and I completely reject the notion that your average quadruple-vaxxed normie has sought overwhelming evidence in support of their position.
Especially, the idea that conspiracy theorist types are less inclined to seek counter-evidence than average is laughable. A gigantic proportion of the populace very strongly adhere to mainstream viewpoints on those topics, yet have absolutely zero knowledge of or even exposure to contrarian evidence and narratives.
Every single holobunga denier could recite for you, in far greater detail than the average person, the mainstream statistics, timeline, motivations, etc. Only a tiny minority of believers could tell you that, for example, the chimneys at Auschwitz were constructed after the war and aren't even attached to the gas chambers; the gas chambers had unsealed wooden doors with none of telltale stains indicating the use of lethal amounts of poison gas; 'death camps' featured theatres, swimming pools, sporting teams, even hospitals complete with maternity wards; the Germans permitted the Red Cross to conduct independent investigations of these camps at the time and no evidence of mass executions was found; no camp liberated by the Allies was ever found to be a death camp, curiously only those investigated by the Soviets; the Allies airforce were deliberately targeting German supply routes, including those supplying camps, and even strafed inmates being transported between camps; typhus was rampant, and Zyklon B was used globally to disinfect clothing and people to try to reduce casualties from this deadly fever.
The "experts" have destroyed their credibility in almost all fields. They are liars.
What is true is that the sense of trust has been eroded.
> what version of reality
This seems paradoxical. Thoughts?
> What is true is that the sense of trust has been eroded.
I agree. Do you think it is optimal that it should have been there in the first place?
Something seems...off about this whole conversation, and lots of others, almost like Humans are missing something fundamental.
Yeah but you're basically describing ideologues here. This is how the vast majority of political activists approach the world where, last time I checked, parties even pretending to do things by scientific consensus are rare and they tend to not, in reality, refer to much science.
> If you look at vaccines ... they don't trust experts or scientists.
My mother just caught COVID last week. I was told - by people confidently claiming to speak for experts - that this wouldn't happen after she and the rest of the population were vaccinated because the spread would cease. I personally doubt the experts actually said that because they tend to be accurate in their field of expertise but good luck with that perspective around the time of the vaccine mandates.
I suspect even more than lack of trust that the issue is experts are so rare in politics that people don't recognise them when they do turn up. There are a lot of unexperts playing pretend on such topics and expert opinions are subject to misrepresentation.
I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.
Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.
Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.
I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.
Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.
That is a bold claim you might want to walk away from. 3 posts ago you were holding up vaccine conspiracy theorists as people who, and I quote, "Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.".
Now a few posts later you're suggesting that That the public health officials aren't experts in public health and that their policies were not based on settled science.
When you are insulting a large group of people who's position was, basically, "we don't think public health officials are doing a good job, we aren't satisfied with the evidence you're showing us and we want freedom to make our own decisions" it is probably a mistake to suggest that the public health officials were doing a bad job, often not experts and caught lying with the purpose of stopping people acting in their own best interests. It makes the conspiracy-minded theorists seem pretty reasonable.
Of course in the pandemic, this is the point where people who were claiming to be following science bought up the fact that the vaccine was certain to stop transmission of COVID and it was basically advocating in favour of murder to say otherwise. Turns out that was not the case so they've had to stop doing that.
Their policies might have been based on "settled science" (e.g. research on respiratory diseases from the 70's) but I think that wasn't really the appropriate way to handle things as the pandemic developed. It might have been appropriate for day 1 but officials IMO lacked the ability to adapt to the changing reality.
The actual policies varied a lot between countries which is why I qualified my statement.
At the end of the day, you can be critical without being conspiratorial. I'm open to new information that supports the idea that the way health officials handled the pandemic was optimal but given that different jurisdiction gave conflicting advice so that seems counter evidence.
There are many specific examples that come to mind. If we can't critique the response then there's not going to be any learning. Experts and science are not perfect.
Again, point taken and maybe I'm a bit too strong, but that's what I'm trying to get at.
EDIT: i.e. I've no issue with people that are being critical after examining the evidence. These people are not conspiracy theorists and that process is a healthy part of making progress in science and policy. That's not the same thing as people saying Bill Gates put 4G chips in the vaccines or some other mysterious behind the scenes forces or conspiracies.
Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.
If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.
It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.