COVID ended my trust in media. I went from healthy skepticism to assuming everything is wrong/a lie. There was no accountability for this so this will never change for me. I am like the people who lived through the Great Depression not trusting banks 60 years later and keeping their money under the mattress.

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ZeroGravitas 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've seen this take a few times recently, including from a relatively famous person who seemed to be on my wavelength generally but I don't quite understand what is meant by it.

Could you quickly summarize how and why you felt let down by the media in regards to COVID?

	▲	phantasmish 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Seconding this, I somehow managed to avoid encountering the coverage of COVID that people say shook their faith in institutions, despite following the news pretty closely. Like to the point that if not for others' reactions it'd never have occurred to me to regard the coverage as notably bad (unlike, say, the lead-up to the war in Iraq). I'd love to know what people are talking about when they bring this up, because I truly have no idea.
	▲	nsxwolf 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I actually kept a journal of all the things I was noticing that were becoming memory holed almost day to day, just so I wouldn’t think I was going crazy. I’m not really interested in re-litigating any of it with anyone, though. Nothing good ever comes from that.

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pron 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So the position of a sceptic is epistemologically valid: you distrust any claim that is under, say, 95% certainty. But this bar should be applied consistently, and sometimes you have to bet. For example, in the question of getting a vaccine or not, you must choose, and you should choose whatever claim is more likely to get a better result than the other.

The key is that distrusting one side or source does not logically entail trusting another source more. If you think that the media or medical establishment is wrong, say, 45% of the time, you still have to find a source of information that is only wrong 40% of the time to prefer it.