Given that the reporter said (IIRC) something like 600 people were infected and a third of them had died, and the other people in the room just laughed and dismissed him, don’t you think that’s really actually worse than what’s going on right now?
But that was a direct reflection of them not caring about (or actively hating) gays, not an error of empirical fact. Also laughter/dismissal is better than taboo/sanction because you’re still free to speak out (like that reporter did) and slowly change people’s minds. With strong enough taboo/sanction we can be stuck in a bad equilibrium for much longer.
I imagine if Facebook existed in the 1980s you’d also be getting some pretty epistemically horrendous replies from people about what to do about AIDS. We just don’t have that type of evidence, but it’s easy to see that things could have been that bad.
Again what’s different now is that nobody dares to speak up against the social consensus, because they’d risk being “canceled” or suffer other strong sanctions (in part due to social media). I think that’s a key difference from 1980s. (See for example Joan Rivers and that reporter, neither of whom got canceled.) There’s going to be wrong beliefs in every decade, but by “bad epistemic conditions” I mean social mechanisms that keep those wrong beliefs frozen or move them in even worse directions. (Perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough?)
But that was a direct reflection of them not caring about (or actively hating) gays, not an error of empirical fact. Also laughter/dismissal is better than taboo/sanction because you’re still free to speak out (like that reporter did) and slowly change people’s minds. With strong enough taboo/sanction we can be stuck in a bad equilibrium for much longer.
Again what’s different now is that nobody dares to speak up against the social consensus, because they’d risk being “canceled” or suffer other strong sanctions (in part due to social media). I think that’s a key difference from 1980s. (See for example Joan Rivers and that reporter, neither of whom got canceled.) There’s going to be wrong beliefs in every decade, but by “bad epistemic conditions” I mean social mechanisms that keep those wrong beliefs frozen or move them in even worse directions. (Perhaps I didn’t make this clear enough?)