I'm sorry, but I'm totally over this type of nonsense. "Expert says" just signals bullshit to me at this point. Clickbait. I'm exhausted at this point.
I feel your pain, but let me ask you: how should we manage this as a society?
The fact that air pollution kills massively is not 'new'. Should we stop reporting on it? Should we continue, but use other headlines?
Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I'm heading up infosec in our company, and it's a similar "inconvenient truth" type of situation. My approach so far is to appeal to "coherence". You can pretend that disk encryption isn't necessary, but only if we all agree that leaking data is not an existential threat.
That's what this type of article does: put in context the number of Covid deaths, and ask "is that coherent?"
If COVID crisis has been any indication, common gut feeling has proven right on many occasions such as mask, airborne, lab leak etc. It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work. The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
You don’t need to be an expert to understand air pollution is bad. Common sense and symptoms tell you it is. If anything this is an excuse for experts to collude with policy makers to pass on whatever the agendas they are working on.
I share the mindset with OP that experts as they exist today in the form of soulless gatekeepers feeding their egos with peer reviews can’t be trusted.
For the COVID stuff... the worst thing was the communication failures and outright lies all around.
> It was very clear early on masks might help, until health experts chimed in with their poor messaging saying masks don’t work.
The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad, they just went ahead and claimed against better knowledge that masks were not needed - at best, some asked the population to leave masks to the hospitals and help themselves with woven-cloth selfmade masks.
> The virus being aerosolized and spreading airborne was also quite clear given how common symptoms tended to be to flu, yet there was hyper focus on hand washing etc instead of cleaning air or ventilation.
I would only classify this as a partial communication failure. All the hygienic measures introduced worldwide drastically brought down the numbers of virtually all infectious diseases, which meant that hospitals now had more capacity to deal with COVID cases. On the other side, while a lot of German public offices (most notably, parliaments) have air filtering systems installed, the rollout of these devices in schools is ... underwhelming (and that's putting it mildly), with courts denying lawsuits asking for their installation with the simple excuse "if ventilating by opening the windows every twenty minutes makes you cold, use better clothes" [1].
Given that ridiculousness, it is definitely legitimate to claim that there is a significant interest of the governments to save money at the expense of parts of the populations that don't have political representation.
> The administrations (not just the 45th, we had this shit worldwide) suddenly realized that they had no stockpile of masks and other PPE, and instead of communicating to the people and admitting fault for about three decades of globalization gone bad
How is that the fault of globalisation, and how is globalisation the fault of current governments? For reference, France had mask and PPE stockpiles for the swine/bird/whatever flu, but the last administration let them expire because they were considered a waste of money. (Decades into globalisation)
> and how is globalisation the fault of current governments?
Specifically for Germany, the last 16 years had seen a Conservative-led government under Merkel which had done virtually nothing to react to a number of analyses and warnings (e.g. after the OG SARS/MERS pandemics) that the pandemic and other crisis preparation was inadequate - after the German reunification, the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the subsequent end of the Cold War, a lot of the stockpiles that Germany held had been torn down and sold off.
As for other governments: Sometimes one has to admit as a politician, that the country has failed, even if the blame actually lies on a previous administration, and promise that at least the current administration will learn from the failure and make things better.
Dismissing stuff because just you can attach a particular label to it - in this case "expert" - is intellectually and socially weak sauce. Why not instead engage with the claims and dispute them at face value, rather than resort to name calling? (Especially when the insult of choice here is "expert")
> Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I predict that is what the solution will be. The path to reduction in total consumption worldwide (a proxy for pollution) will only come about from reduced population.
Similar to how any other organisms reach the boundary conditions of their environment, and then experience population loss until they are within survivable parameters again.
> Because the solution can't be "keep chugging along as if nothing were".
I think increasingly that will be the solution. The rational approach to threats is exhausting. People are going to go back to "ignore" and "panic" as the two outcomes, neither of which will be well grounded in actual risk measurement.
A laundry list of institutions lost functionally all of their credibility in the eyes of the public during covid. Speaking on behalf of the government, a prestigious university or having a blue check, none of those things mean squat anymore. Sure they make you credible than some Youtube talking head but that's a low bar. Rebuilding that credibility (or building replacement institutions) will take time or it will take force.
So yes, "just ignore it and keep chugging along" is an option and IMO it's probably the better one.
We've both been on this site for a long time. I've signed off from the typical news for quite some time at this point, but it keeps seeping in. This site used to be full of enthusiasm, but it's changed.
It is what we make it. And yes, it has changed, this has been observed many times now in the last couple of months, but that's no reason why it can't change back.
Use your voting power, submit good articles, upvote good articles on the new page and message hn@ycombinator.com about behavior that crosses the guidelines.
Also: the 'New' page has a 'more' link at the bottom, this really should be used more often, the new pages moves ever faster as more stuff gets submitted to HN so plenty of good items scroll off the new page before they catch enough upvotes to make it to the homepage, so you can have a disproportionally high impact by voting for something that is at 3 or 4 upvotes on page 2 or 3. (The 'new' page only gets a fraction of the traffic that the homepage gets.)
