[helen___keller]

I agree with

> Institutional trust has eroded.

I think the biggest problem is social media. A reasonable person would make this same conclusion you have, for example:

> What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace?

And yet another person who gets their information from another source, would reach the opposite conclusion. The simple fact is that enough happened in enough locations that if you hone in on one protest here or one riot there you can paint a completely different picture.

For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests.

But I don't doubt there was arson and numerous other crimes.

In other words, I am particularly pessimistic that it is possible to have institutional trust anymore, because the events in our world are so numerous and nuanced that it is frankly impossible to give a succinct, consistent, and accountable view of them.

Same with the mask thing: Fauci and the surgeon general were absolutely correct telling people to stop buying masks when there was a shortage and hospitals were running out of them. And they are absolutely correct now telling people that, with no remaining shortage, we should all have masks and wear them to stop the spread (in particular now that most people aren't sheltering in place anymore). But that level of nuance doesn't come through, especially in a world where most "news" comes from headlines on reddit links and facebook posts.

[dnautics]

> Institutional trust has eroded. I think the biggest problem is social media.

Why do you jump straight to social media?

Why wouldn't the fault lay with the authority figures themselves? For decades we have authority figures saying "the science says X therefore you must Y" while at the same time we have an educational system that (correctly) says "science is not authoritative".

Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.

[helen___keller]

> Why do you jump straight to social media?

Social media is literally the catalyst for the loss of institutional trust. Maybe in the long run this is a good thing, and we will rebuild our institutions in a way that we can trust them in a hyper-shared hyper-aware world, but currently i just see no way that it can possibly work out.

> Maybe if we had leaders that were less hubristic and lead with uncertainty on scientific matters and are careful to get buy in on nonscientific (i.e. ethical or self-serving) grounds this would happen less.

In all honesty, I don't believe this is possible. It's the same problem as how people end up cancelled on twitter for the smallest reasons: humans are flawed, and in our hyper-shared hyper-aware world a single human flaw (or a single systemic flaw in our instutitions) becomes a gigantic crack that makes everyone outraged.

While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period.

And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome.

(NOTE: just to be clear, I'm not saying our institutions are in the right. they are frequently wrong. But any wrongness you find, as in your example the way we communicate science as a closed book done deal, is one single flaw in a massive sprawling institution. I'm saying that statistically any large institution WILL have flaws, no matter what, thus in our new world we CANNOT have trust in these institutions the way things are now because any flaws will get blown up into a full model of distrust by social media. That's simply the new world we live in.)

[anm89]

I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what?

Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things?

Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere.

We've got a better shot at finding less hubristic leaders all though those odds aren't great either

[helen___keller]

> I disagree that social media is the problem but even if we assume it is, then what?

Just to be clear, I didn't mean to say social media is "a problem" or "the problem", but rather the catalyst of the modern status quo. I should have worded my original post better. Specifically, social media (and I suppose the internet in large) allowed us to much easily share information in a way that sidesteps those institutions. This allows us to easily share information that's negative about those institutions, whereas before we could not. Thus, it was the catalyst towards the modern avalanche of distrust towards once-venerated institutions.

> then what

> Ban social media? Should we make a government review board for all social media posts to make sure people don't think the bad things?

> Even if social media were the problem, I'd start thinking about other places to solve it because social media isn't going anywhere.

I generally agree with what you're saying, I don't have an answer. Pandora's box is open, and from now on it seems impossible to have a big monolithic organization and not have a high level of public distrust (both grassroots and organized by that organizations' opposition).

Ironically you even see this effect for large tech companies. There was a time when people really trusted and loved brands like Google, Apple, Amazon, even Facebook. Nowadays it feels hopeless naive, and the newest cohorts of top startups are often viewed even worse (the Ubers of the world)

I certainly hope the answer isn't an authoritarian control of discourse, because that's probably the only thing worse than having institutions of low trust.

But what is the solution? Heck if I know.

[mistermann]

> While outrage culture exists I don't think it is possible to have high-trust institutions that are run by human. Period.

I would say that before forming such conclusions, we should actually try to do it first.

> And I don't know if it's possible to get rid of outrage culture, any suggestions are welcome.

I suggest treating it like an engineering problem, something humans are quite good at. Analyze it as a behavior exhibited by systems, in this case, roughly:

- People (the human mind)

- Society (a set of networked human minds, networked via a variety of flawed communication mediums, some of which have human minds filtering and transforming what passes through them).

This is an extremely high level perspective, there is obviously a ton of important complexity (of varying importance) here and there within the system, but a high level perspective like this seems like where an engineer would start when analyzing a misbehaving system.

[mc32]

>” The simple fact is that enough happened in enough location..”

But why with the backdrop of that violence do they characterize that one “as mostly peaceful”. They could at least have been forthcoming and said while most are peaceful this one has devolved into violence you see behind me. But they are like Baghdad Bob ignoring the bombs falling as he broadcasts...

[helen___keller]

I don't know who "they" you are referring to (plenty of organizations covered the violence...) nor why they would not cover the violence in the protests but consider the following possibilities:

1. Executives at the news agencies told the reporters to cover the protests favorably for corrupt reasons

2. The news reporters and camera crew were at the protests for several hours and genuinely got a lot of footage of peaceful protests; the violence happened at 2 AM when most protestors had gone home, and were both not filmed by the camera crew and seemed unrelated to the protest that the camera crew had covered

3. Most of "them" did in fact cover in the violence in some amount, maybe less footage or less coverage then you think is appropriate but some amount of coverage nonetheless. However, because "they" are an unspecific and presumably large number of media channels that run all day long, you probably weren't watching all of the coverage and you might have missed it (or the sources that tell you "they" didn't cover the violence hadn't mentioned that they actually did cover it a little)

I can't tell you which is true between 1-3, because I don't know who "they" refers to, and I know I don't watch "them" anyways because I never watched mainstream coverage of the protests. Just some food for thought, again that we are quick to turn to instant distrust before we apply nuance and consider the alternative.

[kube-system]

Protests aren't a monolith, though. People come and go throughout the course of the protest. They are loose in organization, and the participants are generally unaffiliated.

[llcoolv]

>For full disclosure, most of the images I got of the protests personally were from a twitch stream called "Woke" which was a compilation stream of about usually 5-10 simultaneous protest streams from different cities. I don't think I ever once witnessed arson or another crime, despite having watched that stream ever night during the height of the protests.

Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting. This is absolutely equivalent to saying - I saw Leni Riefenstahl's movies and there were no people dying in concentration camps, so Nazi propaganda is factually correct. There are tens of thousands of criminal acts documented during those 'peaceful' protests and I don't think that anyone with IQ >80 and the slightest bit of self-respect would ever take what you're saying seriously.

Btw, these days even far-left HN seems to be split in two and I was sure it would be one of the last bastions of group-think. I guess we live and learn.

[helen___keller]

> Sorry, but this is classical gas-lighting

I sincerely apologize if it came off that way, because it was not my intention.

I'm not trying to deny that there were crimes and arson and whatever else. They did happen, and they are inexcusable.

I am specifically making the point, that the GP had posed the answer:

> What intelligent person can cope with the dissonance of arson = peace?

My point is simply trying to add nuance: nobody is saying arson is okay, the people I talk to say things like:

"this protest I was at was OK. I left at 11 PM everything that happened while I was there was super peaceful and wholesome and people even brought their kids!"

The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests". There were violent protests, there were peaceful protests. There were protests that started peaceful and became violent. Sometimes there were small violent groups that were literally ousted from the larger protest group for causing trouble.

I'm not denying that there were violent protests. But I'm also not going to deny that there were a whole lot of peaceful protests.

[dgfitz]

> The bifurcation comes when we start to group everything that happened all across the country into one label of "protests".

It is interesting thought experiment to keep your sentence the same, but replace "protests" with "police."

Police brutality is wrong, full stop.