[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How to deal with loved ones that are affecte...
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Ask HN: How to deal with loved ones that are affected by fake news?
Hey, I continuously have discussions with loved ones, that are
affected by fake news regarding the current covid-19 pandemic. It
is really difficult do argue with them, because they are well
informed in their bubble and have a lot of arguments that are hard
to counter. I don't have the time to counter-proof every single
fallacy. I observed that all these people frequently get new posts
and even longer videos. They use these to let me 'understand' their
point of view. Watching these videos to have a basis to discuss on
is time consuming, too. There are fewer videos to counter these -
and in my experience just sending back counter videos does not help
to convince them. Have you experienced similar problems? Did you
find a practical solution for your situation?
Author : GRBurst
Score : 8 points
Date : 2021-09-01 08:31 UTC (1 hours ago)
| noud wrote:
| This is what helped for me for years: I stopped having
| discussions regarding opinions based on fake news. I usually just
| tell them that I don't have an opinion on the matter and that I
| don't care what their opinion is. I prefer to talk about
| something else.
|
| In my opinion, I think it's better not to have too many opinions
| in general. This is one of the few opinions I have. It seems like
| our brain wants to have opinions on everything. But often the
| topics we want to have an opinion on are much more complex than
| we might think they are. To form a good opinion on the topic you
| must be able to understand a lot of the ins and outs of the
| topic. That takes a lot of effort. This is what fake news (and
| probably also correct news) abuses. It tries to form an over-
| hasty, sometimes completely wrong, opinion on a topic that's very
| complex to understand. Most people don't take the time to
| understand the complexity of the topic, and therefore think that
| this fake news opinion is the correct opinion. For most it takes
| too much effort to understand exactly how it works to realize
| that their opinion is not correct. Or even worse, there are many
| topics that probably don't have a correct opinion: are their more
| universes, what will the weather be in 10 years, will the stock
| market go up or down next year? Nobody can tell, even not the
| experts. I think that the only way to win the argument, is not
| participating. Just let it pass and let the experts (who have
| spend their whole life on it) deal with the issue.
|
| For example, do you understand how mRNA vaccines work? How mRNA
| is transferred in lipi nanoparticles where ribosomes produce
| viral antigens? How cytotoxic T cells and T helper cells bind to
| the secretory vesicles to create a viral response? I sure know
| that I don't understand it, and it will take me months, maybe
| years, of deliberate practice to understand how mRNA vaccines
| works. I probably need a PhD in adaptive immune systems to
| understand this topic completely and for a good opinion. So I
| decide not to form an opinion about it. I trust the experts, who
| spend their whole life working on mRNA vaccines, to be right. If
| someone else has the opinion that mRNA vaccines don't work or are
| dangerous, fine, they can have their opinion. It's good to be
| (self-)critical sometimes. But I'm not in a position to argue
| with them, because I'm not an expert on the matter, nor do I have
| the time and (probably) the brains to understand this complex
| topic completely.
| dnh44 wrote:
| The way I see it is that the covid issue has been integrated into
| the blue vs red tribalism that started long ago but really came
| to a boil during Trump's administration.
|
| Additionally, media, both mainstream and alternative, are adding
| fuel to the fire because it means more clicks.
|
| Normally in a situation where people can't agree I would suggest
| that you first try to find common ground and build from there.
| What I did was to find an occurrence where "my side" has been
| wrong and "theirs" has been right; then we did the opposite.
|
| This was a great starting point for future conversations. And by
| conversations I mean dialectical ones rather than rhetorical.
| proc0 wrote:
| What makes you so sure you have all the right answers, since you
| mention their arguments are hard to counter? I don't think the
| truth is partisan at the moment, and throughout history it's in
| moments like these, when people are extremely sure of the truth
| being partisan, that horrible things are allowed to happen. I
| mostly doubt when skepticism itself is demonized and made out to
| be the problem, and that seems to have be case lately.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| ikr. Reading HN posts based on MSM fake news is "really
| difficult."
|
| Examples of fake news repeated on HN:
|
| - corona wasn't a lab leak
|
| - Jan. 6 protesters killed 5 people (4 were natural causes, 1 was
| by Capitol police.)
|
| - Marxism "is the majority" and gives you the right to cancel
| other people.
|
| - masks prevent corona transmission (the most common masks are
| only 5% effective.)
|
| So how do we prevent HN from repeating fake news?
| tomklein wrote:
| What I did after having argued several times is to straight up
| let them know that this isn't true, told one or two examples on
| why these arguments are fake most of the time and that if they
| _want_ to find arguments against it, that they would find some.
| Then I stop talking about such topics with them.
|
| In my opinion, it's just not worth after having spent some time
| trying to discuss it with them. Especially when they don't
| provide any backed arguments but just ,,random" statements
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(page generated 2021-09-01 10:02 UTC)