Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–87 of 87 posts

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#81

Post by irthomasthomas »

somenameforme wrote: post #71
throw0101b wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place. This is because reporting on psychology is boring: * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-c... * https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/con... * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096372141771826... * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-consp…

I think there's another more simple explanation: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So…

  > November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified.
Not bad, but the Jack The Ripper files, from 1888, are still sealed 135 years later. Conspiracy theorists might have a field day with that, but it's done only to protect the identities of informants.

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#82

Post by croes »

411111111111111 wrote: post #79
croes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty short sighted analysis of my post. The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too. Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the…

Their analysis is much more jaded and realistic than yours and actually reasons it out. Yours is just three disjointed statements without anything supporting them.

It's pretty common knowledge that for instance the Koch brothers financed clinate change denial groups.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/climat...

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#83

Post by krapp »

colpabar wrote: post #78
krapp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one believes cloud seeding is a conspiracy, except maybe the people who believe in chemtrails, to whom the commonly understood definition of 'conspiracy theorist' clearly applies. Your comment isn't the slam dunk you think it is.

I’m not looking to slam dunk anyone, I would just like everyone to realize that the only difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact is time.

>I would just like everyone to realize that the only difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact is time.

That implies all conspiracy theories are true, and will eventually be proven so, which is obviously incorrect. Most conspiracy theories will never be proven true because they have no factual basis, and most of the rest will only coincidentally appear to be true because despite what they will tell you conspiracy theorists tend not to actually have hidden insight into the secret workings of the world, they just happen sometimes to be right the way a stopped clock is sometimes right.

I would like you to realize the difference between a conspiracy theory and a fact (an actual conspiracy) is the existence of the specific conspiracy being theorized about, and the last people to trust regarding the likely truth of such theories are the conspiracy theorists themselves. No matter how much time passes, chemtrails are not going to become fact. Neither will Jewish space lasers. There is no vast, dark cabal of elites controlling the weather, and meteorologists are not their propagandists.

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#84

Post by satisfice »

Climate change is a problem that only vast collective effort can solve. This effort must be coordinated. Only nation-states have the power to do this. Any democratic nation-state that tries to do it will face a political uprising that will replace its government.

I am against despotism, yet I think only despotism has any hope of averting the disaster.

Thus disaster is inevitable. I predict the population of humans on Earth will be half what it is today, 150 years from now.

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#85

Post by somenameforme »

eesmith wrote: post #80
somenameforme wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's another more simple explanation: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So…

> The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters? We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Eld…

Prior to the 60s, the term was occasionally used but there was no particularly negative connotation by default. Views and arguments would weighed on their own merit instead of this sort of weird and dystopic 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West.

The COVID lab leak was probably the best example of this. Lab leaks happen disconcertingly more frequently than most realize [1], even at the highest security biolabs. And COVID emerged not only right next to China's only existing BSL-4 (top biosecurity level) biolab, but one that was actively experimenting with bat derived coronaviruses and how they might be able to be spread to humans. Then the US government decided to declare COVID must have had a natural origin, and a lab leak was an impossible conspiracy theory. This is probably in part because of geopolitics and part because we were also providing funding for said experimentation. In any case, it had little to do with the merits of a lab leak.

But because some people have gained this sort of thoughtless aversion to "conspiracy theory" they refused to even consider such things, but would actually attack others for doing so. Not only was it a conspiracy theory, but a dangerous one that had to be censored from all public discussion and discourse. Even the 'fact checkers' said so! Until one day, the official position changed, most likely due to shifting geopolitical visions, and suddenly the impossible conspiracy theory was the defacto standard position. There was no silver bullet or major revelation, just a shift in the "official position" for opaque rationale, probably related to our perceived future relationship with China, or lack thereof.

In the past this never would have happened because well it was pretty dang obvious that it coming from a lab was by far the most probable scenario. But to some in modern times, going against the "official position" on something is little different than claiming the Earth is flat, and that's a catastrophic decline of critical thinking which greatly benefits the political establishment. For some they have become not only the arbiters of truth, but even of thought itself.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#86

Post by eesmith »

somenameforme wrote: post #85
eesmith wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters? We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Eld…

Prior to the 60s, the term was occasionally used but there was no particularly negative connotation by default. Views and arguments would weighed on their own merit instead of this sort of weird and dystopic 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West. The COVID lab leak was probably the best example of this. Lab leaks happen disconcertin…

> the term was occasionally used but there was no particularly negative connotation by default.

I think you have completely failed to understand my point, so I will try again.

It does not matter that the current term "conspiracy theory" with its current negative meaning was not common before, to choose one date, 1945 when Popper used "conspiracy theory of society" in The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Just because the modern term did not exist, doesn't mean the underlying human behavior did not exist before then. (Indeed, Popper is describing something already present before 1945.)

Surely there were helicopter parents before there were helicopters.

Surely there were conspiracy theories before the modern phrase "conspiracy theory" was used.

Which is why I pointed to conspiracy theories of the early 1800s to show that your 1960s n-gram date does not mean there was a deep cultural change. It could simply be a newly popular turn of phrase to describe an age-old concept.

> 'oh my gosh, that's a conspiracy theory - you can't think that' style of thought which pervades in some circles in the West.

Right, but we're talking about one specific point - the idea that there's widespread weather control using "chemtrails" to cause a drought in Spain, and a conspiracy to keep that silent, and harassment of meteorologists believed to be members of that conspiracy - and THIS circle - HN commenters.

That you have your own views about other conspiracies and other circles is not something I want to engage in. THIS conspiracy theory about weather control is not tenable.

I am more than willing to believe there was a conspiracy to hide the negative effects of cigarette smoking. The evidence for that conspiracy theory is substantial. There are many other conspiracies that I agree occurred, including the conspiracy to convince Americans that streets are for cars, not people, the conspiracy to keep the illegal bombings of Cambodia quiet, the conspiracy to hide the negative effects of CO2 pollution, and the conspiracy to prevent racial mixing in the US though methods like red-lining.

However, I believe these conspiracy theories because 1) they are within the realm of possibility, and 2) there is good evidence for them.

Quite a contrast from this weather-modification conspiracy theory!

> But to some in modern times, going against the "official position"

Why do you care more about the nameless, unknown "some" concerning an "official position" about some random unspecified conspiracy theory than you care about the named meteorologists who are being harassed by weather control conspiracy theory believers, when that specific conspiracy theory has no basis in reality?

Re: Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists

#87

Post by 128bytes »

croes wrote: post #64
128bytes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analysis is silly because it neglects the fact that the poor are disproportionally reliant on polluting infrastructure that does not have any safe and affordable alternative, while also being those most affected by its dangers. Big corporations have ways to make lots of money from so called 'green technology' and they have the capital to diversify into it and they do, poor people do not. People want to act like…

Pretty short sighted analysis of my post. The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too. Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the…

Time is not 'running out', time 'ran out'. I would encourage you to read some of the stuff on https://www.fasterthanexpected.com/
Post reply on HN