> It's a crying shame that given the choice, the voters picked the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism[1].

Those voters (who needless to say had never heard of Lysenko) were told by trusted, well-spoken, authoritative, legitimate seeming sources that this was a mainstream position and a very reasonable one. The people who needed to say it was bullshit were deliberately excluded.

And yeah, that applies specifically to Fox News and Facebook, but also to Rogan and the manosphere, and to 4chan.

And to HN, quite frankly. If you want to know why people turned away from science just go back and watch the discourse around late COVID or whatever. And note how it was utterly dominated by the loons in throwaway accounts. Some of us tried fighting back and ended up incessantly flagged and rate-limited, so we gave up. "Reasonable" HN posters fled the field in favor of bland tech discussion (or retreated in the face of "moderation"), and someone looking at the issue without context might assume that the modern Lysenkos must have had a point.

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protocolture a day ago | parent [-]

Modern social media teaches you to either engage if the topic gives you happy brain feels, or disengage completely so it never shows up in your feed. The more you "fight" a cause, the more you promote it and the more you see it.

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ajross a day ago | parent [-]

FWIW HN doesn't have personalized feeds like that. We all see the same front page. But regardless:

The loons loved it indeed, and it was all over the front page. Right here. Blaming that on the rest of us seems ridiculous, but sort of besides the point. I don't care about blame, I'm saying that whoever you want to blame, it is us, right here, on HN, not some abstract "voters". We made this problem. We told people that masks didn't work and vaccines were poison. If not you and I personally, people writing prose in proxy for us did.

On balance, Hacker News stood solidly on the side of RFK2 and against the CDC in this particular war. It just did.

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krapp a day ago | parent [-]

I think you're overestimating how influential Hacker News is on the discourse of society at large.

Many people here were (and still are) solidly anti-vaccine but in the grand scheme Hacker News was just one of innumerable maelstroms on the internet, and far from the biggest. More realistically, Hacker news is just full of people who aren't any more immune to propaganda than anyone else.

	▲	ajross a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not blaming HN specifically or especially, I'm saying that tut tutting about all those dumb "voters" and "Lysenkoists" is shortsighted. The problem is right here. If you want to know why "they" were so dumb you only need to answer why WE were equally dumb. My general sense is that the tut-tut set is very much an overlap in the Venn diagram with the libertarians who deliberately enabled this nonsense originally and refuse to treat with their own complicity. But I've spent most of my limited budget on posting about this, so I'll stop now.