How? I barely have enough time to do my day job. You think I have the time or expertise to research the origins of a virus?
Where does it end? Do I grow my own food? Make my own clothes? Build my own car after mining ore, smelting it and doing a million other things?
Trust the experts if you've no time for more, but this is the likely result.
Put time into your own research, and maybe you won't be caught off guard.
Why? What guarantees are there that I'll do a better job of research than the experts?
When you're not the product, you'll get more truth.
(The most important takeaway is to ignore Twitter - not "social media", but specifically Twitter).
There is something distinctly missing from education even through undergraduate degrees: gathering, evaluating, and criticizing conflicting high quality research.
I took a philosophy class in the spring and one of the most striking things about it wasn't the material but the other students (most of whom a decade or more my junior) reactions to the material. A few of them were openly upset at the disagreement and inconsistency of philosophical opinion on every topic discussed; I didn't really understand it at first but then... What seems to have happened is basically for their entire education up to their senior years in undergrad, these people had only really ever been taught the Truth as though everything presented to them were solid facts and as a corollary, in general things should just be known and true or not.
There is a really big gap there. Sure, there are plenty of things which are quite certain, but people need to be driven to realize the truth doesn't just pop out one day, it is arrived at through a long process of disagreement and development and there are few ideas out there which weren't in their time quite controversial, and there is plenty still which is being presented as True which really has quite a bit of room for doubt.
The "experts" rarely have a unanimous consensus on anything. If you actually listen to all of the experts, you'll hear all of the possibilities. But that still won't tell you who's right and who isn't.
On a question like "lab leak or meat market?" the answer isn't of importance to me, or any other average person. It's important for the experts to know the truth, in order to be able to prevent it next time. But other than that, finding someone (or several someones) to pin it on isn't going to give everyone the past 15 months of their lives back.
Why are you assuming my beliefs on this topic were set in stone previously?
At some point, you have to trust someone or some institution or organization or system.
My point is that maybe you shouldn't stick your oar in in that case. The polarisation was exacerbated by a lot of non-experts who not just trusted the WHO (reasonable in itself) but felt the need to pile on anyone who was questioning them.
As we all know, media often gets thing wrong, as nobody are arbiters of Truth. So one reads it like that.
When president turned traitor, that was more damaging than this virus itself.
I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't seem like this happened before, but we ban accounts that do this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. There's far too much content here for us to read it all, or even see it all. People can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
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