Why are people not trusting experts?

People are trusting “experts”. That’s how they’re getting the information necessary to distrust other experts.

Dr Oz has “Doctor” right in his name! If he goes on Oprah - the show that brings on a parade of ahem “experts” to explain the world to a population of shut-in housewives - and warns that vaccinations are why your kids aren’t Ivy League Material, people listen.

It’s because they believe their ignorant opinion is just as valid as a researched conclusion.

Their opinions don’t just emerge Ex Nihilo. And they aren’t breaking arbitrarily for or against certain topics. They’re polarized around a set of reactionary beliefs because they’re trained into it by reactionary media, reactionary politicians, and reactionary local institutions.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t real. Same for misinformation.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. People aren’t “anti-intellectual” in the broad sense, they’re biased to a certain worldview or partisan to an ideological lens. You can get liberals and conservatives to agree on quite a bit if you just channel the message through a trustworthy proxy. You can get them to split by making them watch Crossfire for an hour a day.

Vaccination is a great example of this in action. Big church groups that value being able to meet in public do a 180 on the jab when they see the impact a disease has on its congregation. Meanwhile, woo-woo liberals living in heavily insulated suburban communities can get very cavalier about vaccination when they hear an Oprah spokesperson claim it impacts their childrens’ academic performance.

I remember when COVID first hit and we got an earful about needing to conserve medical masks. “Don’t bother wearing them, just socially distance, they don’t really help” was a thing we initially got from liberals. Conservatives were masked up and liberals weren’t. And then the zietgeist flipped and it was liberals clutching them while conservatives were tearing at the gazy discount paper covers screaming “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!”

What we like to call “anti-intellectualism” is, at its heart, a trust issue. Which professionals do you consider credible? Which personal experiences inform your worldview? What do you value - personal safety? financial success? self-expression? religious dogma?

If you’re living in a country that functionally eliminated measles 30 years ago, you can get pretty fair on herd immunity and never have to see your beliefs challenged. Then, when your bubble is breached by the outside world, all those warnings about Diseased Immigrants ruining your pocket paradise are reinforced by the same crop of reactionary news shows and fascist politicians who raised you.

That’s Future Ms Juan Guaidó to you

If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.

I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.

Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.

We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.

I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees

In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.

But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.

The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago

Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.

Amazon’s going through the same enshitification cycle as Sears and JC Penny did a decade ago.

It’s not a question of “Will people stop using Amazon?” but “Will people start using <X>” where X is better than Amazon. Solve for X.

I mean, if you’ve got an REI in your neighborhood, that can be handy. But even they still get their merch from somewhere that isn’t the storefront or even the city. There really isn’t a “buy local” option for textiles in a material sense, unless you really know where to look.

The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.

Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.

Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.

Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.

The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.

Freedom To Choose

I used IAU for the few instances I banked gold as a hedge. But I’ve never held longer than a year and it’s never outperformed by overall portfolio returns.

It’s just not a good long term investment.

Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.

I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.

We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.

eye-roll

Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.

Idk, man, but its a statement that gets you upvotes.

New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?

You can get a good office chair for $80-150. Hell, you can get a bench seat for $30 and its guaranteed not to give you a bronco ride. $600 buys you a couch.

I totally agree “Gaming Chairs” are for rubes, though.

Literally the plot of The Chair Company.

This is either a horrifying “Life Imitates Art” moment or some excellent bit of guerrilla marketing.

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.

Fungible, portable, valuable.

It isn’t fungible. Anyone who has tried to trade physical gold at anything close to the market rate can tell you that. And no retailer is taking a dribbling of yellow sand as payment.

It isn’t portable. You can’t produce a finite denomination of it easily or transfer it electronically or even carry it in a wallet economically.

It isn’t intrinsically valuable. It produces nothing consumable in the way an oil well or corn field or machine shop can. It’s a speculative asset with the potential to be turned into something more useful. But it has no practical use or purpose in a raw state.

Gold isn’t a scam, as far as the concept of wealth and hierarchy isn’t a scam.

The means by which commodified gold is packaged and sold to gullible investors is very often scammy. And the sales pitch promising future returns on investment are inevitably larded up with rosy predictions unsupported by current data.

The socialized mythology around gold (especially relative to peer commodities like copper or oil) radically inflates its sales price in bubble economies. But there’s no reason you’re going to see better investment performance than a purchase of real estate or commercial equity. And there’s certainly no reason you would want to buy and hold gold long term if you had an opportunity to build or invest in an actual value-accruing business.

At best, a long gold play is a hedge against deflation and economic decline. At worst, its a fad that cycles in popularity relative to cryptocurrency or beanie babies.