Let's listen to everything. Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again! This continual lockdown has deeply hurt our ability to actually communicate with one another in any meaningful way.

We're viewing the world through a straw.

Once there's a viable vaccine, sure. I don't disagree about your point of the damage the lockdown has done, but USA governments and citizens haven't locked down consistently enough to provide the intended results.

This is so ridiculous. I think you mean we need to have the information so if an individual wants to verify, they can and if they can spend the energy and rigor to know the research/data. Please stop requiring individuals to verify truth. Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances. Reputable media is an authority of similar civic responsibility.

Next time you buy a measuring tape, you're gonna sound ridiculous to ask for a NIST certificate at Home Depot.

No one is taking away right to assemble in public. Twitter is a publisher with no quality checks in place.

I am pointing out the difference between traditional media and internet media. One has checks and balances, and the other is wild wild west.

- Time to publish, it’s not instant like the internet

- Allows people to editorialize and review, even if they allow publishing

- Allow critics to voice their opinions before the book blows up

I’m in no way saying we need to have a CCP level control over what gets published or not, but I am just pointing out the virality of social media that didn’t exist before the internet.

You can make many arguments around it, the fact is that the internet fundamentally changed the way conspiracy theories propagate.

Even if controversial books are published, someone is going to a bookstore and buying it. There are reviews on ebooks. There is so much discussion. No such thing is exists in echo chambers.

Yes indeed. The Internet, as well as some other more modern communication technologies, has greatly optimized the proliferation and psychological impact of the echo chambers.

Suppose two long paths leading home are filled with people.

Path one is a park filled with people reading various physical copies of books, one of whom looks up from their copy of Mein Kampf to say something threatening to you.

Path two is filled with innocuous-looking people, all glued to the screens of essentially the same model of smartphone. One of them looks up from their device just long enough to tell you, "Samy is my hero."

Which path do you take and why?

Do we?

Let's address this on two levels: First do we really expect people to evaluate the facts relevant to who they choose to vote for? I mean on the one hand, the system does this, yes. But not because we have any particular amount of faith that everyone is ready to bear the responsibility. Instead, we're resigned to the fact that all the other options are worse. I mean the founders absolutely didn't trust the people to evaluate their leadership, unless you were willing to restrict the definition of "people" to "white male landowners".

Hell, even more, the constitution as written (and federalist 68 explicitly) suggested that the people themselves shouldn't select the president, but only select representatives who ultimately do the selection. The justification for this was that said representatives would hopefully be more capable than the average individual of weighing all of the requirements of the office.

So the founders certainly didn't share your faith. Nor, even today, does the constitution itself. Ultimately though, having a well informed populace is very different from having a kritarchy, and having reputable media is necessary for a well informed populace.

If you're bombarded with two contradictory pieces of information (which I'd argue is in many cases the explicitly strategy of some of the media), you either need to be an expert on the topic, or your only approach is to trust people. Like, are you really saying we expect the average American to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to economic policy? Nobel prize winners disagree!

But that's just the first layer. There's a second layer here:

At this point we're no longer talking about the political participation of voting. That's already happened. The votes are in. What we're talking about is asking people to evaluate the facts of obscure election law that's in most cases never been tested. The average American isn't a constitutional Judge. But, to use your word, the president has asked unelected judges to directly overrule the will of the people literally dozens of times. That's kritarchy (or just raw authoritarianism, your choice). The actual experts, the judges, have resoundingly said no. Like, among the experts, there is no controversy here. And yet the conspiracy theory persists. Why is that?

This statement stands in direct opposition to the primary founding principals of liberal democracy.

You call to "stop requiring individuals to verify truth" can be phrased in another, more honest way: support specific organisations to decide where the truth lies. For simple facts - the current temperature, the price of petrol at the pump, the energy content of a portion of a given food - this works. For disputed facts - nearly anything related to SARS2, nearly anything related to climate, nearly anything related to nuclear power, nearly anything related to migration, the veracity and validity of identity politics, the absence or presence of "systemic" racism - this patently fails since the gatekeeper gets to impose its own views on the public. When that gatekeeper happens to be the 500lbs gorilla in the field that means the public has to do exactly what you decry to be ridiculous: they have to go check whether the presented facts are true or just the result of the gatekeeper projecting its opinions, a task made harder by that gatekeeper - the 500lbs gorilla - blocking opposing views from its platform.

On your measuring tape comparison I can state that measuring tapes sold in e.g. the Netherlands clearly state that they are not to be used for trading purposes ("niet voor handelsdoeleinden") since they are not officially calibrated. Just like scales, pumps and other measuring equipment measuring tapes/sticks/etc. used for trading purposes need to be calibrated, get stamped that they are, complete with a calibration expiry date. So, yes, if it really matters you do ask for a calibrated measuring device.

Let me decide for me. I'm not outsourcing thinking to YouTube interns.

This idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed is the mark of every insecure tyranny. Secure beliefs don't need to be propped up with censorship, and a belief isn't secure, it's because it's just not adequately backed up by facts.

I think it's fair to say that Republicans are somewhat more likely to believe in false information, but Democrats believe plenty of incorrect things as well. And I'd rather have a broken marketplace than one where Democrats just get to decide what's true.

Especially when its taken just 5 minutes for the perceived guard rails to evaporate! We're not talking about "the earth is flat" here. We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic. We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake. Even if I'm amenable to "fact checking" something like "Obama was born in Kenya" I'm sure as hell not going to support Google deciding something is true or untrue before the courts do.

Except we're not. Guiliani said in one of the few courts that asked for an oral argument that it wasn't a fraud case[1]. Fraud requires specific proof which he/they do not have.

This is PR/fund raising disguised as comical legal filings.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/us/politics/trump-giulian...

So is it misleading to call it fraud? Or are you just nitpicking? Depends on who you ask.

Does a case really count as "ongoing" if it gets dismissed pretty much as soon as the judge finishes reading the plaintiff's complaint?

Editing to make this a bit clearer:

As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.

I've replied in more detail to your other comment which said much the same thing.

The mods on this site make similar decisions every single day, but I've never seen you post about that. Why shouldn't youtube have the same ability to moderate their site as Hacker News?

As another left-leaning person who has also had this experience recently, and who is rather disturbed by the delusions and hypocrisy from “my team”, I’ve noticed that your posts lately seem to do an excellent job of offering a more complete picture. Often, completing the picture involves clarifying the right-leaning viewpoint. It’s unfortunate that you usually get downvoted for it, even when you aren’t inserting your own opinion and stating things that are objectively true.

Just curious, has the combination of the bad behavior by many on the left in conjunction with receiving additional context from the right, pushed you towards the center or even the right? Or are you merely trying to act as more of an ambassador for Republican views?

Have they been proven to be authentic?

Censorship is why you didn't already know this. It should have been major news, being the headline story everywhere for a week. It passed by here quietly, on Hacker News, and was quickly flagged.

You're left with an incomplete view of the world that is very misleading. People everywhere are using this warped view of reality to make world-changing decisions.

Not really, confirmation bias is a real thing for all human beings. The issue here is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a fact. Objectivity in reporting is also subjective, funnily enough. If I consider NPR to be very objective because the dead-pan monotonic voice of the announcer simply says a direct quote from a member of congress, I can talk to a relative who will tell me that same NPR story is biased because they reported on something they don't agree with.

> It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.

There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society. The difference is that 20-30 years ago, there wasn't a deluge of information or misinformation readily available to get those dopamine hits from confirming biases.

Like?

This is great. Is it a quote?