Isn't this whole process of debate and individual responsibility basically irrevocably tainted in the age of mass misinformation? I don't know where we get if we walk down this train of thought, probably nowhere good, but when a not inconsiderable portion of the population has been directly targeted to cause them to believe the whole thing is just Bill Gates fault, who magically caused the Coronavirus and is holding back a cure, does debate have value?
This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.
> Isn't this whole process of debate and individual responsibility basically irrevocably tainted in the age of mass misinformation?
Wasn't there an article here yesterday about the San Francisco anti-mask league [0] from 1918? I don't think misinformation and people acting incorrectly is something new.
Misinformation is nothing new and just as the amount of misinformation has increased, the amount of information has increased too. I would bet that the average citizen is better informed overall today than say 50 years ago.
Possibly. But there's been a huge signal boost for the extreme views. 50 years ago you couldn't find out about the corona protests and half an hour later be reading website after website after website about how 5G causes a virus.
That's still a much larger barrier to entry though. Getting someone to click a link is much easier than getting them to visit you in person at a particular place and time.
Probably, but the core issue (at least in the US) is that a large fraction of informed citizens have moved to coastal cities, leaving the less informed citizens with more voting power. This means that misinformed citizens are gaining more influence over time, not less.
> but the core issue (at least in the US) is that a large fraction of informed citizens have moved to coastal cities, leaving the less informed citizens with more voting power
Every person imagines they are better informed than those they disagree with, especially when it comes to politics.
There are exceptions to this rule. For example, I am better informed than those who disagree with me.
> the core issue (at least in the US) is that a large fraction of informed citizens have moved to coastal cities
No, a large fraction of citizens who think they are better informed have moved to coastal cities. Most of them are mistaken. If they are so well informed, why are the coastal cities they live in the places with the highest per capita crime rates and the highest cost of living?
The supposed "age of mass misinformation" isn't as big of a problem in Sweden as it is in the US.
For one, test scores and reading levels indicate the average Swede is far better educated than the average American.
Second, Sweden's media industry doesn't have competing private 24 hour cable news conglomerates fighting over eyeballs. In Europe, government financed media is more common, and thus there is not the same private incentives to drive fear and anger.
Does Sweden has issues with misinformation? Of course (mostly around fear of immigrants). But they don't have anywhere near the problem we have in the US with misinformation.
You right, that may be too far. But I don't know if we assume that direct democracy works well in the face of extremely important, time critical, issues requiring a lot of specialized information. I still have faith in democracy finding decent leaders, but I don't know if the populace has the required ability to consider all the nuance of this pandemic we're facing and then making an educated, forward thinking, and in all probability incredibly painful decision. It's been clear from a lot of the arguments I've heard people neither have a good grasp on exponential growth and it's consequences in terms of containment, nor on the timeline or steps required to get this all under control.
to be clear, I don't think america should have a national vote on quarantine or just let people do whatever they want. the current situation has degraded too far for that.
what I refuse to accept is that the notion of individual responsibility and reasoned debate is over forever. maybe this is naive, but I do believe that it's more effective to convince people they should work towards a goal than to impose rules by force. I will concede that the US is missing many of the prerequisites to make this realistic. people not being able to reason about exponential growth is a failure of the education system, not an intrinsic limitation of the human mind. people distrust information/directions from the government because it has repeatedly shown itself to be untrustworthy. people are unwilling to sacrifice months of income because they were barely getting by before.
> people not being able to reason about exponential growth is a failure of the education system
I think it is a cultural failure, not an educational failure. Education is available, but people, both children and adults, make excuses like "when will I ever need mathematics in real life?"... [Answer: when your life depends on it]
There is, or has been, a general lack of respect and inherent laziness toward intellectual pursuits. This is especially apparent when viewing the antagonism between science and politics.
Your comment reminds me of the that Swedish "If crisis or war comes" pamphlet sent to all Swedish households in 2018. Right on the second page is a warning about "false information":
Well, surely it's not working at the present time. A politician interviewed who went out to get the virus and then attended meetings was completely unconcerned about spreading it to his peers.
Interviewer: "But can you understand his concern [about his risk due to his health conditions]?"
Persson: "No, I do not. He's 50 years old. There is no risk to him. He doesn't get sick of this."
Interviewer: "But do you know that even younger people get sick and die of corona?"
Persson: "There is no reason to be worried. It's a hysteria. It is the same as with the climate. It is not possible to change. We cannot influence it politically."
And yet, somewhat bizarrely, Sweden has been latched onto as the model for a sane response to the virus amongst many conservative circles. I will hold my breath as they fail to take action against a disease with 10 times the IFR of the flu and many fold the transmissibility, with the CDC now reporting an r0 of 3.8–8.9 in a 95% CI.
That interviewed person is from a local party in a small municipality. Very fringe.
Of course the US right tries to score points from the lack of a hard lockdown here. But I wonder how well that would have worked without universal healthcare and salaries partly (80%?) paid by government for the time being.
> Isn't this whole process of debate and individual responsibility basically irrevocably tainted in the age of mass misinformation?
The problem is not misinformation. The problem is whether a country is really willing to enforce a law that says every citizen has a positive responsibility to not infect others.
If you really enforce that law, then anyone who gets COVID-19 because they didn't take reasonable precautions, and then infects someone else, is legally liable for damages. They could be sued for all of the health care costs of anyone they infect. They could be sued for wrongful death if someone they infect dies. Depending on the circumstances and the details of the statute, they could be liable to criminal charges.
That's what "individual responsibility" means--holding individuals responsible, legally, when they harm others. And in a legal environment like that, misinformation isn't a problem, because people who act on misinformation end up harming others and being held responsible, and since nobody wants to be in that position, everyone learns, in their own self-interest, to not act on misinformation. Which in turn means that information sources that continually propagate misinformation die because nobody listens to them. And information sources that can reliably report accurate information thrive, and have an incentive to continue reporting accurate information.
> This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.
Representative democracy will only be composed of such people if people have a strong incentive to act on accurate information and to not act on misinformation. Which, as you yourself point out, does not describe societies today.
>This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.
There's always the next election. It's hard to do unpopular things if you don't expect them eventually to become popular. E.g. lockdowns may be unpopular now, but if crisis can be avoided, it wouldn't hurt your election results. There is an exception though; if countries like Sweden don't have strict measures and still thrive, a lot of people will see that as a failure of your government.
The key bit is "not inconsiderable portion of the population".
That is a very human perception failure and one that all politics and tribal psychology use. "Others are more dangerous than they are because they are other.and we say they are" not because they have an actual threat.
The reality is that these are incredibly small numbers but the hype about them is real.
Based upon this survey, more than a quarter of people don't want the United States shut down. That's a considerable proportion. That's the amount of people who vote in a president.
> This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.
So basically, you want a return to some form of Aristocracy?
We needn't go to the margins of Bill Gates somehow creating corona virus. Here's some of the blatant lies and misinformation that came straight out of the supposedly legitimate leadership.
* Masks don't work, and you're too stupid to wear one anyways (WHO and US Surgeon General)
* There is no human to human transmission (WHO)
* The fact that there is a biolab in the exact area where the virus started spreading from is just a wild coincidence you racist (media Cathedral)
I have a hard time blaming people for going down conspiracy theory rabbit holes about Gates when all the people who should be setting us straight have no credibility.
Totalitarian China hasn't made any efforts to close its wet markets, which are the claimed source. They also have not blanketly denied the lab's involvement with the virus. They've only hinted in non-scientific language that they didn't directly manipulate the genome (with CRISPR or something).
The conspiracy is by the media Cathedral for suggesting racism is the source of the demand for answers. I have no idea where the virus came from. But we're definitely not getting accurate info in this area.
You are focused on people questioning the origin of the virus as a conspiracy. I'm focused on the lies/credibility of the people in charge.
It doesn't matter where the virus came from. The supposedly credible people haven't been answering honestly. First they gave very narrow responses, then they accused people of being racist for calling them out on the narrow, useless response.
You don't attribute any of those comments to the WHO trying to get a handle on an evolving situation, and instead to deliberate lies, even though they have changed their recommendations as time passed?
And you're grouping all these groups mistakes together when that's not really fair to the different groups.
I'm watching the coronavirus task force press release right now and the Surgeon General just doubled down and said masks don't protect you from getting the virus, and that medical professionals need them because it protects medical professionals. So he's still lying to you.
My belief is they are deliberately lying because they are managing you rather than informing you. The lie is to encourage compliance on turning over masks to the medical professionals. But even if I'm as generous as possible about their intent, it still has destroyed their credibility.
American public messaging is trying to draw a distinction between proper masks (surgical and N95, needed for medical professionals, no reason for you or I to get them) and coverings (just any piece of cloth in front of our face holes). It seems convoluted but I think it's no longer dishonest.
The Surgeon General makes two claims in this single tweet. The first is that masks won't protect YOU from catching the virus. The second is that it will protect healthcare workers.
Reading that first claim as anything but a lie intended to manage your behavior is generous beyond credulity. He told you it was a lie in his second claim. He couldn't even separate these claims into two tweets, much less some period of time when new scientific information might have been discovered.
Literally anything that increases the friction between you and the virus protects you. Even a snorkel, with no filter at all, which forces the water droplets carrying virus to travel farther and around a few corners will likely provide you with some tiny bit of protection. It will do so because the extra turns increases the odds that the droplet will hit a surface or something and get stuck before entering your airway.
It's very reasonable to suggest that a trained professional with years of experience in dealing with contamination will have better results from PPE than an average person. But that's a wildly different claim than masks do not offer the general public any protection.
Any protection greater than zero is still some protection. Reducing odds of getting it by 0.01% is a huge number of people at scale when you're estimating over a million people dying and 100+ million getting it.
To be fair at least one of those three you posted is still a conspiracy theory, unless you have a source about the virus being man made - I don't think there's any evidence outside of coincidence.
I would highly recommend parsing the statements by Chinese media and WHO very carefully. They're using explicitly non-scientific squishy language to describe the whole thing. One example:
>All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else,” WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a Geneva news briefing. “It is probable, likely, that the virus is of animal origin.
What the heck does that mean, exactly? It sounds like MAYBE it suggests the virus' genome was not explicitly manipulated with CRISPR. Okay. Was the lab growing virus in human cadaver tissue? Was the lab putting selective pressure on the virus in bats? Was the lab even studying the virus which had been discovered totally as-is in the wild?
Make no mistake. There has been no blanket denial of the lab's involvement with the virus. Only carefully worded PR responses and calling you racist for asking questions.
You do understand that the scientific method is couched entirely in current best understanding, right? We assume the theory of gravity is how gravity works up and can assume it's probably true until a better theory comes up. You'll notice they didn't mention the animal - can we then safely assume it's a moose flu? That's even better supported as they did confirm in the affirmative it was an animal.
And the other lies you posted were said with 100% certainty - how is the use of probable more evidence of a lie?
I'm explicitly not making claims about the origin of the virus. The only "conspiracy" is that you're racist for demanding answers.
Neither of your articles provides a blanket denial that the lab was involved in research that included the virus. It only makes some very narrow denials in non-scientific language.
Rather than saying something even as innocuous as "I don't know" you call me a racist.
In the most technical sense you might not be lying about B. But you're definitely being dishonest with the presumptive accusation of racism. And you're definitely using deceptive language to avoid answering the question. And you've definitely destroyed your credibility on a scale equal to "Masks don't work."
When outlined like that, it's totally fair to doubt, assuming that's the only or primary defense. Do you have some links to mainstream media outlets directly correlating questioning origin as being racist?
This might be a good time when a representative democracy, composed of people who are willing to listen to experts and make the hard, unpopular, decisions, would be the best choice.