[HN Gopher] Consensus not censorship
___________________________________________________________________
Consensus not censorship
Author : SubiculumCode
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-08-21 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.interfluidity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.interfluidity.com)
| Julesman wrote:
| IT'S A TRAP! Seriously. I love the intent here. But in my view
| the whole premise is epistemologically wrong. (A word I'm almost
| educated enough to use.)
|
| Truth by consensus is logical but not the point to which we have
| evolved. Here it seems like a retreat from our capacity into a
| pragmatic defensive stance. This is all we can manage.
|
| This is essentially the Overton Window. Truth as managed by
| mainstream sensibility. And the mainstream is primarily a point
| of view that does not question our industrial imperialism. Things
| that subtract a lot from growth are not included.
|
| And there is the potential disaster. Large parts of our history
| do not match our mainstream perception of national character at
| all. In fact, the mainstream view is one of intentional avoidance
| of facts. Dissent has never been mainstream. The forces of social
| change are not supported by the majority.
|
| Example: The Overton Window does not include Chris Hedges. In
| fact, it doesn't really include any of the real investigative
| journalists or honest historians of our time. The most curious
| and informed people we should be promoting are too subversive to
| be mainstream. And so they will not be included in a truth
| consensus.
|
| What then is that 'consensus' if it's too shallow to feature its
| experts?
|
| Something like that. Sunday morning shouting into the void.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I think the overton window plays a part and it's certainly an
| interesting window to look at the problem of misinformation
| thorough, but I think that we are seeing something that's even
| more painful to think about. We are seeing where people believe
| authority is derived from.
|
| The author makes a mistake by projecting their world view onto
| others. The author believes authority can be derived via
| consensus, I do too, but the people who spread "misinformation"
| believe authority is derived via might (by their king, whether
| it is Putin, Xi, or otherwise), or via god (as interpreted by
| their religious leaders).
|
| If I believe authority is derived from academics, how am I
| supposed to share a world view with someone who believes
| authority is derived from their pastor? If there is a policy
| that is directly derived from these differences in beliefs
| about authority (global warming, evolution, abortion, election
| integrity, education indoctrination policy), how can consensus
| be reached?
|
| Thus what we are seeing as misinformation is a much much deeper
| problem. Misinformation is the manifestation of fundamentally
| incompatible axioms about the world and how information is
| determined to be true.
|
| The true danger is where this line of thought leads, because if
| two people have irreconcilable, incompatible views of the world
| they must choose to live in a cold war, or annihilate the
| other. That is why genocide happens. That is why Russia is
| trying to erase Ukraine and China is trying to erase Uighers.
| asimops wrote:
| Its an interesting article and while I didn't have the time to
| think the topic through - so I will not share my thoughts on the
| subject - there are some points in it, which I will definetly
| think about.
|
| What I must say though, while the article is interesting, it
| certainly does not feel well written to me. While I am not a
| native speaker, I consider myself a fairly good english reader at
| this point. Still I found the language chosen to be very
| inaccessible. To me it _felt_ like some words and phrases where
| deliberatly chosen to sound smart. To understand some of the
| paragraphs, I had to look up so many words that I had to start
| over reading, because I lost context. I think this topic could
| benefit from some more simple english.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Climate Citizen Assemblies are a thing similar to the first
| suggestion
|
| https://europeanclimate.org/stories/the-growing-traction-of-...
| hunglee2 wrote:
| > We develop sincere beliefs about the world that flatter, or at
| least are reconcilable with, the preconditions of our own well-
| being.
|
| one of many beautifully written lines. An outstanding essay for
| the quality of thinking and writing
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > We could use "permissioned blockchains" (which involve no
| speculative financial tokens or environmentally destructive
| "mining") ubiquitously in important institutions to notarize
| almost everything
|
| This is a good idea, but you don't need a "permissioned
| blockchain" whatever that is. Just use git.
| rocqua wrote:
| I can force push to git. I can selectively prepare and decide
| to publish branches. I can rebase, cherry-pick, and ammend.
|
| Really git has too many features, and too little publishing
| features that prevent repudiation.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Or a database. Anyone using the words "permissioned" or
| "private" doesn't really want a blockchain.
|
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3496468
| klabb3 wrote:
| There's an intermediate option which is overlooked: tamper
| proof-ness/transparency logs/signed actions. Ie the writer is
| traditional central authority but the readers can store and
| later prove that the authority acted incorrectly/maliciously,
| should that be the case.
|
| For instance, you have traditional moderation. No hate speech
| etc. It works fine. Then you see that your comment was
| removed but it was only a dissenting opinion. You can then
| prove to others they removed it. The idea is to keep the
| authority in check through transparency.
|
| This also works well for promises of discounts, overbooking
| of tickets, non-spoofable reviews, etc.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Yes! Write-once + read-many + no-update/delete tables are
| reasonably-common in databases as well, and some databases
| natively support a ledger table type that enables updates
| and deletes while also providing tamper-proof evidence of
| all changes.
| mike_hock wrote:
| As long as transgressions actually have consequences.
| rektide wrote:
| Paul Frazee & others had some good threads last fall/winter
| about smart contracts/public transaction logs without
| central/concensus blockchains[1]. Individuals with their
| own willingness to declare their stuff.
|
| Edit: Oh this got followed up on Paul's direction is a
| little different than expected; Ii has come out a little
| less self sovereign than I expected. But, here's[2]
| _Vitra._ His follow up.ppst talks about Execution
| Transparency[3].
|
| [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462489933734
| 72359...
|
| [2] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/smart-contracts-without-
| blockc...
|
| [3] https://paulfrazee.medium.com/execution-transparency-
| hosted-...
| jancsika wrote:
| Oh my dear lord, what is the "fuck-width" font being used on that
| page?
|
| All I see is little fashionable little close-knit cliques of
| letters that make the other letters seem like they are fixed-
| width by comparison. The text is so nearly impossible to read
| that I refuse to read it.
|
| I generously assume that the author has some important wisdom to
| impart to humanity, but they hate humans, so this font was the
| solution.
| chrispeel wrote:
| What browser and OS are you using?
|
| I think the website was created about 20 years ago (and looks
| like it), yet I see no problems with the font
| dogmatism wrote:
| you know, CSS is a thing
|
| change it to something more readable
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There is a certain irony in your surface level critique of an
| article trying to address such a deep topic.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| https://ncase.me/trust/
|
| This game beautifully explains the prisoners dilemma. At first it
| might not seem relevant, but after playing the game I think you
| will see.
|
| From a game theory perspective bad faith actors that are not
| punished create more bad faith actors. So if your model of
| information does not involve the idea of defection (lying for
| self enrichment) vs cooperation (trying to achieve mutual
| understanding) and how the defectors are punished (or at the very
| least not rewarded), then the philosophical foundation is shaky.
| Bad faith actors exist and must be accounted for directly without
| hand waviness. This article has a presumption of desired mutual
| understanding but fails to account for those who benefit the most
| from chaos or from those who have incompatible first principals
| to your own.
|
| Dominance agnostic political ideas are contradictory, because
| much in the same way Kant's categorical imperative defines a
| contradiction, political ideas that are not able to maintain
| dominance are contradictory, since a more dominant party will
| destroy it. That's why countries have militaries.
|
| As a small thought experiment, let's say you live in Consenusland
| next door to Authorityville. Authorityville comes to your richest
| members of society and says "we will pay you big money if you
| write news articles that cause chaos." Because the richest
| members of your society own all the media, all the business, and
| have control over politicians, they could easily do this. So some
| of them do and some of them don't, and society pays the cost of
| the chaos. When things get bad enough all of the rich people buy
| a house in New Zealand to escape the chaos.
|
| How do you defeat that?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This is a weird kind of reflection/parallel to the Powell
| Memorandum from 1971:
|
| https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
|
| > Business has been the favorite whipping-boy of many politicians
| for many years. But the measure of how far this has gone is
| perhaps best found in the anti-business views now being expressed
| by several leading candidates for President of the United States.
|
| > It is still Marxist doctrine that the "capitalist" countries
| are controlled by big business. This doctrine, consistently a
| part of leftist propaganda all over the world, has a wide public
| following among Americans.
|
| > Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of
| American society today have as little influence in government as
| the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions
| of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake
| the role of "lobbyist" for the business point of view before
| Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the
| legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not
| exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with
| respect to the course of legislation and government action, the
| American business executive is truly the "forgotten man."
| DangitBobby wrote:
| You mean like a biazarro-world reflection where everything is
| weird, wrong, and backwards? Or are you saying the pieces are
| somehow similar?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Reflection as in they are both saying "There's a lot of
| people out there saying crazy stuff, what should we do to
| counter that?", but it seems likely to me that the crazy
| stuff we have now is a direct result of what this memo
| inspired, and that is partly because the memo itself is
| crazy, and all the people on campuses complaining about the
| environment that it's complaining about were right.
| drewcoo wrote:
| This cherry picks what's traditional.
|
| In the late 1800s, the term "yellow journalism" was coined to
| describe completely fake news published by Hearst and Pulitzer.
| (There were good yellow journalists on both sides.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
|
| People seem to think that we had general consensus in the 1950s.
| Watching TV was easier than reading and had better pictures than
| radio. Yes, the television news tri-opoly of the time managed to
| feed Americans more or less the same pap. People were told the
| same "news" and told to buy the same products. Unless those
| people lived in the south, of course.
|
| https://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-ri...
|
| I reject this forced consensus. I don't want the public to be fed
| propaganda for another cold war and like it (thanks, TV's big
| 3!). I'd rather have a thinking public that gets lots of things
| wrong and rarely agrees than a captive, mesmerized public that
| thinks "all the right things" because someone told them to.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The article also rejects this.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| Awful article advocating appeal to authority by alternative
| means.
|
| >Free speech liberalism used to seem compatible with a functional
| society in a way that it now does not.
|
| False premise. Only the censors agree with this. Free speech is a
| tenant of any functional society. How can anyone continue reading
| beyond this kind of absurd presupposition? Of course these
| statements are always followed with naive, juvenile,
| authoritative, first-order thinking. As is the case with this
| article.
| rocqua wrote:
| When you continue reading beyond this presupposition, the
| author does not conclude we need better or more accurate
| censorship. Instead his point is that we need new ways for
| building consensus that crosses partisan lines. Then he
| hypothesizes mechanisms for building this consensus without
| needing censorship.
|
| His point regarding free speech is that, in the current world,
| bad faith speech, self-serving speech and the suspicion that
| speech could be bad-faith or self-serving, are breaking our
| ability to reach consensus. This is bad because it immobilizes
| politics unless someone 'wins' which only serves to mobilize
| the faction who 'lost'.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Only the censors agree with this? What kind of rhetoric is
| that? So I am a censor if I think misinformation is a problem?
| This essay is much more thought out and rational than your
| flame-bait response.
| justforaskin wrote:
| The flame bait response, as you put it, is more terse than
| the article. We've seen the appeal to authority and the
| censoring of those who questioned the science writ large over
| Covid. We've seen it heavily on this platform. Censoring
| things that have facts is wrong.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| but the article is not even advocating censorship.
| kodyo wrote:
| You're a censor if you try to censor it.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| You're pro-censorship if you think the solution to
| misinformation is censorship.
|
| By definition.
| amalcon wrote:
| Neither the article nor grandparent said they think the
| solution to misinformation is censorship.
| Banana699 wrote:
| That misinformation is a problem doesn't make censorship a
| solution. By the time you have to shut people down from
| saying stupid things you're already far gone down the
| clusterfuck path. (and that's assuming the 'misinformation'
| is true false&harmful beliefs, not just whatever idea that
| contradicts the fashionable Current Thing.)
|
| Let's say that people think MD5 is a good cryptographic hash
| function. The worst single possible thing you can do is ban-
| hammer the promoters of this idea away. This is extremely
| dumb "Kill The Messenger" thinking, the promoters of those
| idea are exposing real communication problems (namely, the
| use of "hash function" to denote roughly similar concepts but
| are also very different in very important details). What you
| do, if you really think this Md5-is-cryptographically-secure
| problem is serious, is that you treat the success of the
| promoters of this false idea as a measure for how hard you
| failed to communicate basic cryptography to software devs. Do
| a modification to your education\media ecosystem, then
| measure how successful the false prophets are, if their
| success goes up or stays constant then you still haven't
| addressed the real problem, if it goes down then you're
| successfully fighting "misinformation", repeat till you drive
| their popularity to the ground.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| But neither I nor the article is advocating for censorship.
| Banana699 wrote:
| You are though, you just want to call it by a different
| name.
| akomtu wrote:
| "Free speech used to be compatible with interests of the
| royalty, but as the society has grown bigger, the royalty and
| freedom of speech can no longer coexist, and one of them has to
| go." would be a more honest statement.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Free speech != free brainwashing at scale.
|
| I can today start for pennies an ad and bot campaign targeting
| 100s of millions of people claiming that the earth is square
| and that n0tth3dro1ds is on the payroll from the establishment
| to claim otherwise.
|
| I must have the right to say whatever bs I want. But I don't
| think that I can demand the right to have a powerful platform
| to distribute my nonsense.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| How is that different than ads in a newspaper? ...or on
| radio? ...or on television? -- all of which have been used by
| elites to spread misinformation.
|
| Why is the solution censorship rather than better analysis
| and consensus mechanisms?
|
| I think you're ignoring the second-order effects of mass
| censorship eg, the Thailand study [1] suggests vaccine
| censorship and failure to address concerns may have been a
| catastrophic mistake. We need to seek consensus through
| discussion and debate -- to avoid lying to ourselves and thus
| engaging in horrors.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTR0w2M9-U
| Arainach wrote:
| All of those have a higher financial bar to entry and have
| never been considered free speech. Publishing/distribution
| companies have rejected ads in the newspaper/super
| bowl/radio all the time for as long as those forms have
| existed.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Yes -- the only difference between your example and those
| is that ad networks democratize information, rather than
| spreading misinformation being an elite privilege.
|
| How is that worse than Yellow Journalism?
| Spivak wrote:
| Am not a censor, I agree with this. What people call "free
| speech" is really "free mouth utterances" with basically no
| consideration of whether or not what is being said is actually
| a sincerely held belief being expressed in good faith. Because
| the belief that current public discourse is anything at all a
| marketplace of ideas or some collective Socratic circle is also
| extremely naive and juvenile.
|
| By making _no_ distinction between (picking an obviously
| repulsive view) a post that outlines someone's argument why
| they believe black people are predisposed to be thieves and
| some photoshopped stock photo of a black kid stealing
| watermelon and fried chicken with the caption "ni**, right?"
| [1] we just let hate, and the irl consequences, spread while
| choking off actual speech. You kill the very thing you wanted
| to protect with free speech in the first place.
|
| Free speech should be measured in "freedom as in liberty"
| instead of "freedom as in anarchy."
|
| [1] This was, not even exaggerated, real content you could find
| on some now banned subreddits, one of them rhymes with moon
| town.
| ipaddr wrote:
| An obvious repulsive view is a subjective statement that
| changes based on the listener.
|
| Imagine by John Lennon is a great example that caused many to
| ban him for suggesting a world without religion was ideal
| while others are emotional moved by it.
| Spivak wrote:
| We're not disagreeing on this, I picked a broadly agreed on
| repulsive view because I wanted to have an example of a
| gross view that still deserved protection because it was
| made in good faith.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| most of humanity's longest existing civilizations don't care
| about free speech, or liberalism altogether for that matter
| which is a fairly novel experiment in and of itself.
|
| You used like half a dozen adjectives in a two word sentence to
| express your discontent with censorship without advancing any
| point.
|
| Any real discussion would need to leave the ideology behind and
| ask some actual questions. Why is censorship bad? (rather than
| making the trivially wrong assumption that everyone who
| disagrees with you is a censor). Why should free speech be
| absolute, rather than differential, how does that relate to the
| abundance of information and modern technologies abuse of it
| etc.
|
| Dogmatic belief in free speech just reveals that no thinking is
| going on. It's a sacred cow, just like democracy or the
| meaningless phrase 'freedom', any criticism of which gets the
| same response you get from devout Muslims if you were to
| criticize the Quran.
|
| 'Free speech' itself is ironically enough a loaded phrase that
| tries to suffocate any view that dares to be anything less than
| 'free' right from the outset. Rhetorically everyone who
| disagrees is already "unfree" by definition, and what kind of
| barbarian wants that?
| wussboy wrote:
| Free speech is a tenant of functional society but it is not the
| only tenant nor is it the most important one. The Internet
| tends to focus on it because free speech is what it's best at.
| And while that focus is important, it's time we changed its
| primacy so that we can see its effect on other critical, more
| subtle, tenants.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The Means Justify the Ends
| [deleted]
| epgui wrote:
| There's a big part of the argument here that is that what is and
| isn't misinformation is largely unknowable by any individual, and
| that different people disagree on different experts' authority.
|
| But that's just not true.
|
| It's true that there is no easy solution, but that's because it's
| an education problem. When Bob and Steve think Infowars is a more
| reliable source of information than the journal Nature, Bob and
| Steve are just wrong, and we shouldn't help them make other
| people also-wrong, and we probably should try to prevent them
| from confusing other people too.
|
| It's relatively easy to learn enough science to be able to
| correctly distinguish the 10% most extreme dis/mis-information.
| The amount of effort we're putting into getting people just to
| that level, as a society, is extremely low.
| kodyo wrote:
| Corporate media institutions have been more wrong for longer
| and on a far larger scale than Infowars. Why single it out?
| epgui wrote:
| Because combatting mis/dis-information is largely a problem
| at the tail-end of the distribution (ie.: the crazier, most
| unhinged end of it). It's one thing to argue with each other
| about complicated nuances, it's another thing when people
| feed bleach to their children because someone on the internet
| told them it would help with the autism.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Literally, "Think of the Children!"
|
| Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing
| recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the
| dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative
| treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism
| by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as
| readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century
| nonsense you can think of.
|
| The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to
| town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's
| some glowing words on a box.
| epgui wrote:
| > Parents have claimed religious exceptions
|
| Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are
| guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of
| lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious
| counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs
| and that risks are within certain boundaries.
|
| You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at
| large.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Most of that boils down to very politely asking the
| parents to follow the recommended standard of care.
| Unless there's outright abuse, like broken bones without
| a satisfactory explanation, there's no real intervention.
|
| You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish
| child goes to the pediatrician?
| epgui wrote:
| I would guess not very often!
|
| But as with anything, you have to think about how things
| scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population,
| and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone
| will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children
| to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on
| TikTok. :)
|
| If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might
| have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about
| doing something about it.
|
| None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be
| considered as if it did.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I feel like Infowars can only exist as part of an ecosystem
| of misinformation. It's easier to talk about, because it's
| dumb, but it's probably not the most vital thing to
| address.
|
| If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate
| science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism,
| then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists
| are faking school schootings?
| rhdunn wrote:
| Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-
| end. See for example:
|
| 1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun,
| The Times, The Spectator, and others [1].
|
| 2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess
| Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2]
|
| 3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating
| climate change. [3]
|
| Then there is reporting of technical or scientific
| discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source
| for information, not to mention the consistency of
| reporting on subjects where a company or other organization
| has made a PR statement.
|
| There is little investigative journalism and fact checking
| by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source.
| This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour
| news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part
| that paying people to take time to do research for little
| gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for
| news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases
| slanting articles or news reports.
|
| Taking time to read each article (instead of just the
| headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking
| in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone
| saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify
| everything that is being reported on.
|
| Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the
| Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make
| sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to
| minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK
| government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The
| press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people
| who thought the world would end, and people who were
| preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred,
| people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part
| because of the way the media overhyped the issues and
| failed to properly convey the potential problems to
| readers/viewers.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster#Med
| ia_po...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-57163815
|
| [3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2014/04/02/false-
| balance-in...
| epgui wrote:
| > not only located to the fringe/tail-end
|
| This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far
| the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to
| focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree
| that it's a problem in the extremes.
| kodyo wrote:
| I'm willing to let stupid people sacrifice themselves
| rather than sacrifice everybody else's freedom.
| vincnetas wrote:
| don't forget, that disinformation does not appear
| magically in heads of less bright people. it is
| engineered by very smart adversaries. so this is not like
| less educated people are guilty and can be sacrificed.
| kodyo wrote:
| Don't conflate education with intelligence.
| epgui wrote:
| Don't make the mistake of thinking there are some people
| (you?) who are so innately special that they don't
| require any training.
| kodyo wrote:
| Ad hominem aside, I was thinking of the midwits with lots
| of education who conspire with their in-group to manage
| others. The right thing to do is tell them to leave us
| alone.
| epgui wrote:
| Just to clarify, it was not really meant to be directed
| at you, it was meant as a generalized statement about
| people. I don't think I made that clear, sorry.
| epgui wrote:
| That's nice, except sometimes innocent people are the
| victim. Like the children. Or, in the context of a
| pandemic, all the other people who are exposed because
| Bob and Steve won't put a mask on or get a jab.
| kodyo wrote:
| People were censored and deplatformed for being more
| correct than the public health experts.
| epgui wrote:
| You'll have to provide examples of this, because I don't
| think that's clear and obvious.
| [deleted]
| ipaddr wrote:
| Lets go down memory lane.
|
| So soon we forgot the original whistleblower who shared
| the news of covid to the west and then China censored
| him..
|
| Many doctors/nurse personnel had medical licenses removed
| because they spoke against the narrative. Doctors with 30
| / 40 years experience being told if you don't parrot what
| we are saying we are going to make a case that will
| remove your doctor title. Now we can say 99% of doctor
| support this.. It was sad seeing doctors twist the truth
| on tv. As the virus changed trying to stick to the
| narrative became more difficult.
| epgui wrote:
| Apart from the issue with China's control of information,
| I don't think we have the same memory.
|
| That last paragraph does not match what I saw in most of
| the world. In particular, this perspective does not
| really match what happened in Canada, the US, or Europe,
| at least not in the way I think you are suggesting.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Here are the Canadian examples.
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/can
| ada...
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6440227
|
| 4 doctors landmark hearing https://www.google.com/amp/s/g
| lobalnews.ca/news/8517353/cana...
| epgui wrote:
| This is the system working as it should. When you are a
| physician, you have an incredibly high burden of care
| towards your patients, and you have an ethical and a
| deontological obligation (in some cases a legal one,
| though doctors do have a lot of leeway, for patient-
| centred care, in Canada) to give them the highest
| standard of care.
|
| As far as I can tell, these are all examples of serious
| breaches of this duty. These physicians didn't just
| accidentally cross some fuzzy line, or slip off a tight
| rope. They were way off in their conduct. Heck, with the
| exception of one, they apparently didn't even show up in
| court.
|
| In all of the above cases, it is the public and the
| patients who are being protected.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The ones being protected are not tbe patients. They lose
| access to many good doctors who should still be doctors.
| Many more now don't get the highest standard of care and
| in some cases any access to care because of these
| decisions. Removing experienced doctors for political
| reasons does not provide the highest quality of care..
| epgui wrote:
| This is not a "political reason", it's a "professionalism
| reason" or even arguably a "malpractice reason", whether
| you like it or not.
| kodyo wrote:
| Journalist Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter for
| saying the covid vaccines don't prevent infection or
| transmission.
|
| He was correct.
| epgui wrote:
| Except that's not exactly true either, depending on how
| you look at it. At the population-scale, they do prevent
| infection and transmission, and they prevent it very very
| well.
|
| This particular individual has said many other things
| during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a
| much broader line of messaging that was, broadly
| speaking, both incorrect and harmful.
|
| (I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular
| vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of
| interest.)
| kodyo wrote:
| Alright we'll I'm opposed to censorship over pissy word-
| mincing. He wasn't wrong.
| peyton wrote:
| People say dumb and destructive stuff about my area of
| expertise too. I don't think they should be silenced.
| epgui wrote:
| Does it spread like wildfire and cause people to lose
| their lives in a way that could totally be prevented?
| (What field?)
| jsnk wrote:
| I think the world could benefit immensely from banning
| some mainstream publications that ferment hatred, instill
| unjustified fear, destroy innocent people by labeling
| them with unspeakable labels. Their narratives for
| decades have destroyed nations, killed millions of people
| and locked the entire world down for 2 years.
|
| Do I still think they should still be able to have an
| outlet? Yes, I do. Just like every other publications,
| individuals and outlets banned by Twitter, FB, and
| Youtube.
| peyton wrote:
| Yep. Finance. Resource allocation has life-or-death
| impact.
|
| Whether your immunology research finds applications, a
| hospital gets acquired instead of wound down, or an N95
| factory gets built can be a few parameters pushed through
| a model. Parameters dictated by sentiment.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > this was part of a much broader line of messaging
|
| When you start to do this, you've drifted into censoring
| people rather than misinformation. You can't censor
| things that are true for fear that they'll _embolden_
| forces that you are against. Well you can, but that 's a
| dictatorship.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I'll replicate the tweet, since I think it's useful when
| discussing these matters:
|
| > _It doesn 't stop infection. Or transmission. Don't
| think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a
| therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and
| terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN
| ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity,_
|
| "Don't think of it as a vaccine" is trivially false, as
| it is literally a vaccine. "terrible side effect profile"
| is false: we now have data that shows at population-scale
| the vaccine was overwhelmingly effective with minimal
| side-effects. (We knew that _before_ then, too; anyone
| looking at the efficacy rates knew it before it hit the
| gen pop.)
|
| "that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS": that's how
| nearly all vaccines work, yes. Your body can't really
| fight an infection with the effects of the vaccine that
| it hasn't had the time to produce the corresponding
| antibodies for. (AIUI, rabies is _the_ exception to this,
| where you can be vaccinated after infection, but that 's
| due to rabies being a very slow moving infection.)
|
| "It doesn't stop infection. Or transmission." And the
| rest of the tweet is just misleading: nothing is
| guaranteed in life, but we can look at the probabilities
| and risks associated with and without the vaccine and
| know which choice has a lower risk profile, and make a
| sane recommendation based on that. Wearing your seat belt
| can't stop death in a car accident, but it is still a
| good idea. Tweets like these very likely drove people to
| not get vaccinated, leading to either them dying, or them
| passing it on to someone who did.
|
| Using some small technicalities around things that cannot
| be guaranteed not being guaranteed to try to push a bad
| policy and decision making is not "correct". The
| evaluation of risk here in the tweet is absurdly bad.
|
| Whether Twitter should be forced to promulgate such
| idiocy is a conversation that's been had many times since
| on HN, but it _is_ idiocy.
| epgui wrote:
| Thank you, I tried looking for the original tweet but
| with less success. I agree with your comment.
| kansface wrote:
| What _doesn't_ this argument cover? What wouldn't it
| allow or apply to?
| epgui wrote:
| If people want to do something that puts their own life
| in danger, and they ought to have known the risks (ie.:
| in ethical jargon, they have both "moral competence" and
| autonomy), then that's their business.
|
| If people do things that can hurt other people, and these
| other people don't have a say in the matter, then with
| the exception of certain fiduciary-like situation, that's
| not okay.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| That's quite a claim. Any [reliable] sources to back it up?
| ctoth wrote:
| I'll play:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/4121509
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| features/iraq...
|
| Or has Infowars started a war that killed hundreds of
| thousands of people which I haven't happened to read about?
| [deleted]
| amalcon wrote:
| I can ask GPT-3 to generate headlines. Most or all of
| these will be either incoherent or incorrect to at least
| this degree. It won't start any wars, because GPT-3 just
| isn't that influential.
|
| You're not necessarily wrong -- I don't know -- but don't
| mistake relative influence for relative inaccuracy. I
| suspect -- but don't know -- that giving Infowars the
| amount of influence you're citing here would result in a
| tragedy of at least similar scale.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Infowars wasn't "given" influence. It earned it by making
| news for wingnuts. Putting wingnut headlines in the NYT
| would just trash the NYT, which is why they had to work
| closely with the government to craft messaging that would
| be convincing to their audience. It wouldn't turn the
| world into wingnuts.
|
| edit: The world moves towards wingnuttery when outlets
| like the NYT knowingly (but deniably) lie about very
| important things, and make it clear that they would do
| the exact same thing again by not accepting
| responsibility. Then you've left the public completely
| adrift. Why not listen to Infowars? The worst they could
| be are liars.
| amalcon wrote:
| I'm not going to argue with that (not because I agree,
| but because it's not a discussion I feel like having). My
| issue is that it seems to have nothing to do with what I
| said. I was posing a hypothetical in which Infowars had
| influence comparable to the entire U.S. media apparatus,
| not making a statement about their history or how they
| obtained what little influence they have.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > The New York Times determined that several stories she
| wrote about Iraq were inaccurate, and she was forced to
| resign from the paper in 2005.[2] According to
| commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller's Iraq reporting
| "effectively ended her career as a respectable
| journalist".
|
| > She worked in The New York Times' Washington bureau
| before joining Fox News in 2008.
|
| Some shade being thrown by wikipedia there.
|
| It seems relevant that she literally outed a CIA agent,
| at the express request of the Republican President's
| team, to maintain a fictional reason they had invented
| for starting a war. The President then later commuted the
| sentence of the person involved, when their appeal
| failed, and they later got pardoned by Trump.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Libby
|
| I'd suggest this perhaps points to the root of the
| problem being in neither wingnut TV shows, nor The New
| York Times, but somewhere deeper. When Oliver North and
| other people who betray their country are getting fat
| checks to spout lies on Fox News, then really what hope
| is there for truth to prevail.
|
| edit to add: minor but totally typical detail, the guy
| who leaked the CIA agent's info, got his licence to
| practice law back, because this same Judith Miller,
| claimed that her initial testimony was a mistake. There's
| just no consequences for lying.
| epgui wrote:
| How does this point to a special failing of the media?
| Judith was let go and prosecuted, was she not?
|
| What other system of publication would have prevented
| these things?
|
| How is infowars protected from things like this, and how
| can anyone argue that it has an overall better track
| record?
| ctoth wrote:
| Let's hear from James Risen, reporter at the Times at the
| time. :)
|
| > What angered me most was that while they were burying
| my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving
| banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had
| weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding
| that I help match stories from other publications about
| Iraq's purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this
| that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had
| turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to
| match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington
| bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk
| carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him
| that the story was bullshit and I wasn't going to make
| any calls on it. As a small protest, I put a sign on my
| desk that said, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish
| the war." It was New York Journal publisher William
| Randolph Hearst's supposed line to artist Frederic
| Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the
| "crisis" there before the Spanish-American War. I don't
| think my editors even noticed the sign.
|
| So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a
| convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog
| has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the
| internet just like any random person can make. It has no
| authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the
| flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten
| writers into following the narrative.
|
| The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples
| of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If
| starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not
| sure what you're looking for.
| epgui wrote:
| > You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection
| is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any
| random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no
| special recognition.
|
| Except in a universe where there are no news
| organizations and only blogs, then blogs will naturally
| attain a similar amount of influence, but with even fewer
| checks and balances, and probably lesser
| liability/responsibility. This is just a natural
| consequence of the graph-theoretic properties of social
| networks.
|
| If we agree that the media started the war (just for the
| sake of argument), then yes, it does count, it seriously
| counts and it counts for a lot. But you've selected one
| of the most extreme examples, in a sea of otherwise
| unremarkable examples. When we talk about an org's track
| record, we're not hoping to find zero mistakes: we're
| really hoping to find relatively few mistakes, and
| accountability and recognition of important mistakes.
| Also perhaps a self-correction mechanism.
|
| I'm not saying any of that is perfect, but legitimate
| news orgs do have some of that.
| kodyo wrote:
| I'm not here to convince you. I can tell you that if
| there's a desire to combat misinformation, clean up the
| institutional dishonesty, secrecy and never ending shilling
| for the establishment that causes mistrust.
| ok123456 wrote:
| So the plan to increase trust in our institutions is to
| control how you can criticize them, and label any dissent
| "disinformation?"
| peyton wrote:
| Nature endorsed Joe Biden for president [1]. What if Bob and
| Steve see Nature as a political organization? Are they
| incorrect? Should they be silenced?
|
| [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02852-x
| pjscott wrote:
| I went to check on this a bit further. Here's a list of
| editorials, in reverse-chronological order:
|
| https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=editorial
|
| Many of the editorials seem approximately apolitical, e.g.
| "Get childhood immunizations back on track after COVID" or
| "Protecting the ocean requires better progress metrics".
| People of most any political stripe could have written them.
| If the editorials were all like this, Nature would look
| impressively unbiased.
|
| Then there are a bunch of editorials that are obviously
| political, but in a science-adjacent sort of way. "Equity
| must be baked into randomized controlled trials" has a very
| pious vibe to it, though thankfully it also has some obvious
| points about RCT design thrown in. "Europe must not backslide
| on climate action despite war in Ukraine" contains some
| legitimate information, but its message would _not_ play well
| for most of the ideological spectrum. At one point there 's
| an article titled "Science must overcome its racist legacy"
| and subtitled "We are leading Nature on a journey to help
| decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative
| justice and reconciliation."
|
| Finally, there's a category of editorial that's just taking a
| stand on [insert current hot-button topic here] and
| sprinkling in enough science mentions to lend it an air of
| authority. The endorsement of Joe Biden falls squarely in
| this category (I read the whole thing to make sure), as does
| the condemnation of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
|
| So, yes: Nature's editorial section is a completely one-sided
| ideological monoculture. You can tell that it's mostly one-
| sided just by scanning the article titles, but the true
| magnitude becomes apparent when you read the articles
| themselves: there's no serious attempt made to persuade, nor
| to rebut the usual counterarguments. It's unmistakably
| preaching to the choir, and I can't help but think that this
| reflects a lack of people at Nature willing or able to play
| devil's advocate.
|
| Not sure how much this affects the non-editorial part of
| Nature, but _man,_ it makes me suspicious. Which is very bad
| for Nature 's credibility. If I were in charge, I think I
| would either get rid of the editorials entirely or move them
| to a semi-adversarial back-and-forth format like the monthly
| discussions at Cato Unbound (which has a strong ideological
| bent but has a format that prevents it from being one-sided.)
| epgui wrote:
| Nature is one of the world's most prestigious scientific
| journals, and it is read almost exclusively by scientists.
|
| It is not exactly a secret that science itself supports
| more left-leaning ideas than right-leaning ideas (depending
| on what exactly we're talking about and where the Overton
| window is at a point in time or at a specific place on
| earth). I think this has less to do with whether left or
| right is fundamentally right or best. Unfortunately, a lot
| of what passes as "the right" these days is just... a bit
| crazy. Of course they had to take a stand for Biden, the
| only other choice was a lunatic. Love him or hate him, one
| thing Trump is, objectively, is a bullshitter (in the
| academic sense of the word). And scientists really just
| don't like bullshit.
|
| If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased
| (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense,
| because of course any politics that affects science will be
| met with strong views), I think that should serve as a
| signal to check what your biases are.
|
| Remember that the people reading this are all the top
| experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love to
| write back and argue if some editor wrote something stupid.
| It simply is the case that the publication is of
| exceptional quality, and that for the most part, people who
| read Nature are not people who care about political
| nonsense.
| option_key wrote:
| >Of course they had to take a stand for Biden, the only
| other choice was a lunatic. Love him or hate him, one
| thing Trump is, objectively, is a bullshitter (in the
| academic sense of the word). And scientists really just
| don't like bullshit.
|
| There was an obvious third option: not endorsing anyone.
| There's no law that requires every publication to endorse
| a presidential candidate. In fact, most of them don't do
| that.
|
| >If you get the feeling that Nature is politically biased
| (and I mean this in the usual everyday person sense,
| because of course any politics that affects science will
| be met with strong views), I think that should serve as a
| signal to check what your biases are.
|
| I'm sorry, but this feels like gaslighting. GP has listed
| numerous examples of editorials that were biased in favor
| of a certain political platform, including an explicit
| endorsement of a presidential candidate. I really don't
| understand how, in spite of that, you could arrive at the
| conclusion they aren't politically biased.
|
| >Remember that the people reading this are all the top
| experts in their own fields, so you can bet they'd love
| to write back and argue if some editor wrote something
| stupid.
|
| Only if they don't mind committing a career suicide.
| epgui wrote:
| > Only if they don't mind committing a career suicide.
|
| Disagreeing with other scientists is not going to lead to
| career suicide. It's pretty much the norm.
|
| Which is why when there is a scientific consensus that
| forms, it tends to be mainly the crazy ones who do bad
| science that go against the grain. And oftentimes their
| career is doing just fine, because in science we really
| value academic freedom.
|
| The public has a very distorted view of this, mainly
| informed by bad priors and odd examples.
| epgui wrote:
| If bob and steve are going around saying Nature is very
| political, they're wrong, but who cares? If bob and steve are
| going around telling people masks are harmful (and that's
| causing the mistaken belief to spread), then bob and steve
| are causing direct harm, and their voice amplifier should be
| taken away. Nobody is going to put duct tape on their mouth.
| peyton wrote:
| I see you're coming from a good place. I just think taking
| away voice amplifiers (smashing the printing press, so to
| speak) hasn't turned out well in the past, and I don't see
| a strong enough reason to start doing that now.
| epgui wrote:
| I think there's a very clear line we can draw between
| different categories of smashing the printing press:
|
| - "banning books because they criticize the government"
|
| - "banning books because they have immoral content"
|
| And on the other hand:
|
| - "shutting down a viral video with advice dangerous to
| individuals, where protecting the public from direct
| physical harm is the goal"
|
| I don't know of any instances in History where we looked
| back at the latter in disapproval.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| To protect is always the initial goal, and directly
| dangerous videos are the low hanging fruits.
|
| I'd say "viral videos" are too recent to be part of
| History yet, but shutting down a dangerous viral video is
| not very far from "banning immoral content", which is not
| very far itself from "banning hate speech".
|
| It's not that easy to draw a line because it is a
| continuum.
|
| Consensus _and_ censorship is what many countries do:
| People vote for MPs, MPs vote laws against hate speech,
| pornography, etc. Or at least how it 's supposed to work
| on the paper.
|
| The same way, we _could_ decide for laws against media
| that propagates misinformation - and a judge would
| decide. We _could_ do that. The tools are on the
| workbench, why we can 't use them is another problem.
| peyton wrote:
| What we look back in disapproval upon is empowering a
| group to do the silencing. I think because those who do
| the silencing usually end up silencing their own critics.
| epgui wrote:
| I don't think this is always the case, and that's exactly
| my point.
|
| > "those who do the silencing usually end up silencing
| their own critics"
|
| I'm not even sure that this _usually_ happens. It is
| certainly the case that when that happens, it is very
| memorable. But that 's probably just a "selective
| attention bias" applied to History, that is, because the
| other cases are unremarkable.
| peyton wrote:
| I see your point, and still I don't think it's a good
| idea. We don't give power like that to expertise for the
| same reason the commander-in-chief of the armed forces is
| a civilian.
| epgui wrote:
| We do give this power very narrowly and very successfully
| to many individuals in their official capacity, in
| different contexts. Judges, professors, administrative
| committees, employers in certain situations, heck, at the
| moment, any company with a platform can apply this power
| essentially arbitrarily and at will (which I'd argue is
| not great).
| yongjik wrote:
| On the other hand, judging from the past 5-6 years,
| freely giving out voice amplifiers (Facebook and targeted
| ads, anyone?) clearly didn't turn out well either, so the
| optimum is probably somewhere in the middle.
| peyton wrote:
| I think a workable solution can be found. I don't know if
| that's necessarily a middle ground between amplification
| and censorship; feels like that could be the "middle
| ground" fallacy. We've solved problems like this in the
| past.
| yongjik wrote:
| I don't think we've solved these problems in the past. We
| simply didn't have such problems at the scale we have
| now.
| epgui wrote:
| The middle ground fallacy does not apply here. It only
| applies when one of the two things being considered is
| incorrect.
| peyton wrote:
| You already said amplification was incorrect. I think
| you're not willing to budge on censoring things you know
| to be incorrect and dangerous, so ironically we won't be
| able to find middle ground. That's okay.
| epgui wrote:
| No, "amplification" is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon.
| What I said is that there should be limits to
| amplification. Ruling out an extreme does not rule out
| the middle ground.
|
| The way this works is that there are some questions that
| have clear answers. For example, anthropogenic climate
| change (or to be more precise, the idea that "Most of the
| warming of Earth's average global temperature over the
| second half of the 20th century has been caused by human
| activities."). The middle ground fallacy is what you call
| it when you put up two people on TV, one who is an expert
| on climate change, and another who is just a contrarian,
| and where you don't frame it exactly as it is: one is
| wrong and the other is right.
|
| That's not the same thing as this conversation we're
| having.
| kastagg wrote:
| In this metaphor, are the printing presses private
| property?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's interesting that you go for masks, because the advice
| around them completely changed during the pandemic.
|
| (Of course, any media that gave the details wasn't wrong at
| any time. But the simplified advice still was.)
| zackees wrote:
| kastagg wrote:
| On one hand, there are people who say "flood the zone with shit"
| and regularly signal boost memes from Stormfront. On the other
| hand, there are people who think that the New York Times is a
| newspaper of record and want to fight misinformation. Obviously,
| there's wrongdoing on both sides here. Instead of fighting
| Stormfront, why don't we create state-backed committees at
| community colleges which label populist, right-leaning viewpoints
| as academic consensus?
| ttpphd wrote:
| Hilarious!
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > Nevertheless, we had a functional polity in that era, with
| dissidence, yes, but also with broad consensus about what was
| true, false, and subject to reasonable contestation. As someone
| who often felt dissident, I can tell you that it sucked. Lots of
| important values and ideas got no meaningful hearing outside of
| very ghettoized information spaces. At the same time, it was a
| much more livable society beyond the frontiers of ones own
| dissidence. There was a lot one could get away with just taking
| for granted, as an individual trying to make sense of the world.
| Collectively, politically, we were a much more capable society,
| we had a stronger shared basis for action in the common good. The
| church of network television was consistent with an era of
| bipartisanship, and with experiments in policy--which were often
| mistaken, in part due to the narrow and blinkered information
| environment that framed them! But at least things could be tried,
| which is more than we can say for our polity at present
|
| I'd like to see some evidence this is true and not just the
| author having a much smaller bubble, which he compared with some
| subset of the mainstream he had access to and paid attention to,
| and now having access to more bubbles which reveals the insanity
| that was always there.
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