[NullInvictus]

Every COVID story here is an interesting little glimpse into how a seemingly normal forum has their latent political views exploited into adopting a conspiracy theory, re: anti-vaccine rhetoric. It becomes a little more extreme every day.

This study has nothing to do with the vaccine, and yet this is what HN clamors for. I wonder how many people here understand what kind of ride they're being taken for.

[dang]

That's not an accurate reflection of HN. It would be more accurate to say that the topic is divisive and so has blocks of strongly-feeling users on all sides of the topic. That's true of every divisive topic and it would be unreasonable to expect otherwise.

[CipherThrowaway]

Honestly I do not find it surprising. I've seen it called "engineer's disease": the tendency of engineers to believe that expertise in their technical field gives them a superior insight into other technical fields. Or that their research and systematization habits transfer to other fields where they readily yield greater insight than direct experience.

This way of thinking really feels rampant in our field. I've seen developers read a Wikipedia page or blog post and suddenly think they know better than mathematicians, lawyers, doctors, research scientists, economists, ethicists etc. No topic is too niche or trivial to be safe from this effect. A little while ago the topic of Geometric Algebra swept through HN and engineers with no math theory background were posting sensationalist takes about how GA was destined to supersede the orthodoxy.

[qbasic_forever]

I sometimes wonder if a mild COVID infection could also cause behavioral and psychological changes like more aggression, risk taking, depression, or even schizophrenia and could it be driving some of the conspiracies? If you think about it any kind of behavior change that avoids vaccination, masking, or other precautions would be selective pressure on the virus to further evolve in that direction.

How would you even begin to understand and deal with this kind of situation on a massive, global scale... it's an interesting problem.

Makes you think about the sudden and almost unexplainable push from aggressive, vocal experts to have the public unmask and drop all COVID mitigations immediately after the latest surge too...

[RedBeetDeadpool]

> re: anti-vaccine rhetoric

Correction, it should be "re: vaccine rhetoric". Normality is no vaccine.

Remember, vaccination is an idea propagated by some entity - "anti-vax" as anyone who disagrees has been labeled, is in actuality the base condition.

[YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo]

This, and I don't understand why there isn't more scrutiny from the moderators. Especially the one-day old accounts are the most annoying part. If you have hottakes at least have the curtousy to do it with your primary account so we know who to ignore afterwards.