Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.
The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.
Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?
The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.
Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.
> Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc.
Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support.
If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%.
They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.
While I'm not privy to YouTube's organizational structure, I'd be very surprised if their customers don't receive plenty of human support.
Note that you are not their customer. Advertisers are.
And I am a customer, I pay for their services.
I don't think this is a good takeaway, they can always replace bans with deprioritizing, so banning is a conscious choice.
This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.
It’s encoded in their business model: the paying customer and the source of revenue is the advertiser. Thus, their interests are radically different from those of the users.
I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about such models, especially applied at scale, that I would not even oppose some light, focused regulation that brings it in check.
Otherwise, adding human moderation could maybe help in short term but the business model with find its way to ruin things again.
My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.
Which, due to the business model, is more or less incompatible with presenting the truth. Truth is often uncomfortable, full of caveats and subject to change; rarely does it make for a good story. If it turns out that presenting outright false information (including lying by omission, etc.) as established fact keeps eyeballs for longer and engages more people, then the algorithm would be doing just that.
Sure, if you watch technical content and train the algorithm by watching videos from solid, trusted sources, you can (for now) get it to give you sound recommendations, but I doubt this is reliable or representative. Thus, I believe acting as if YouTube was designed to boost misinformation is not necessarily wrong, and may be more or less an approximation of the average case.
And the problem is not quite people. If people are expected to constantly counteract the efforts of a sophisticated machine that doesn’t have their interests in mind and can spend a million dollars just optimizing its GUI and algorithms, which are then deployed against each individual user (who comes alone, tired after work, low on willpower and with lowered defences from the safety of their home) to exploit the darkest in them in order to show them more ads, then the problem is not quite people—the problem is that we are dealing with an adversary.
I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
- Jen Psaki 7/15/2021
When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
https://immunizebc.ca/ask-us/questions/are-there-long-term-s....
Is there some common knowledge that counters this that I'm missing?
And it's utter BS in the real world - did they even stop to think that some countries have given out millions of doses of Pfizer over the last 8 months, and if "all cause mortality was unaffected" compared to the pandemic situation in 2020, it would be obvious as hell. It's therefor a very extra-ordinary claim, no proof whatsoever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699864
Why are they pushing this disinformation?
> Why are they pushing this disinformation?
either one of the following groups: russian/china disinformation bots or paid shills. people that like to be "in on the know" and take contrary viewpoints that are not mainstream. people that have fully bought into the above misinformation schemes. people that have taken to it like a political fight where reason goes out the window unless you are "winning".
I ultimately think that a lot of people "broke" during the pandemic looking for some "enemy" to fight since the reality of a wild virus that just happened was too scary a thought. many people need the world to make sense and want control. some control of that is making up enemies like china releasing the virus intentionally and all the world governments working together in tandem to somehow control everyone.
"During the blinded, placebo-controlled period, 15 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 14 in the placebo group died; during the open-label period, 3 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 2 in the original placebo group who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered to be related to BNT162b2 by the investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4)."
Look into statins if you want to understand bias and corruption in clinical studies.
Giving a medication to over 20,000 people and not saving a single life in 6 months is pretty weak. An NNT of over 20k is unheard of. Anything above 10-20 (not 10k) should make people at least be allowed to ask questions.
The number of people that got covid or severe covid in the control group were many, many times more as the vaccine protected many from getting it in the first place.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
I’m fine now but it was scary.
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
Do you have any principles when it comes to freedom of information? Just curious how far authoritarian you are.
I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.
Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.
Mind you, damn thank you for saying that out loud. People on the internet sure love to jump on the wagon of pointing out the differences of instances from a general case that often aren't even relevant for the argument.
These devices have various messaging/social media services that due to social expectations we use to interact with friends, family.
It's very, very hard to laser curate the kind of messaging you get, even if you know how to do it and are willing to do it (for example for some stuff you have to mute friends and family or otherwise block them).
Newspapers were much more hit and miss. You'd have to go out and buy a newspaper, their region was at best national, etc.
It's the proverbial drinking from a firehose.
The printing press was huge in relative terms, though. There was no mass media before that. The average person was unlikely to be able to read, much less to own any books. Communicating across even relatively short distances was infeasible. Most of the media they consumed was either from the church or at least regulated by the church.
The printing press was huge because the normal person's sphere of possible influence grew 100x. Much in the way that we've 100x-ed again with things like YouTube. The relative increase in sphere of influence is similar, the absolutes are massively different.
The printing press was still running at humanly achievable speeds. The new stuff is super sonic. We can't cope with it. Plus with people living longer and longer and the natural neuroplasticity decrease that comes with age, more and more people are vulnerable.
It's the kind of thing that will need to be regulated very carefully and very strongly, because that's what laws are: barriers for when the human psyche fails. Imperfect barriers, but better than nothing.
Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.
> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.
The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
Stuff like this was impossible before.
And the case that Eisenstein makes, at book length, is "yes".
She's building off earlier work (notably McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy), and you can find numerous prior and subsequent references.
I've copiled a few here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?
A bit different eh? It's unaccountable bad actors on the other side of the world.
I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.
53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.
The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.
I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.
[citation needed]. Popper's personal opinion that you linked to (and that is now used in a much more absolutist way that originally intended by its author, who never intended to cheer for censorship and crackdowns in name of democracy) isn't data and Full stop isn't a proof. Yes, Popper was smart. No, he wasn't an oracle of unquestionable wisdom.
Tell me, how was legalization of marijuana in the U.S. won? After all, chucking people into prison for decades is quite some intolerance. Did the MJ lovers stage an insurrection?
No, they won at the ballot box, which is the tolerant way. Not by reverse oppression of their enemies.
To disprove a sentence that says "every time", one example to the contrary is enough. This is your example. For another, take gay rights. There wasn't a gay revolution that would smite the religious conservatives and crush them.
I'm not proposing full tolerance of the intolerant. Rather, as Karl Popper explained, political institutions within a liberal democratic society are the most appropriate scope within which the people's will regarding what to tolerate is expressed. In other words, contact your representatives about what needs to be outlawed, and until something is outlawed, show liberal tolerance—which absolutely includes refuting bad ideas in public debate.
Regarding YouTube, their choice to deplatform people is their choice -- and it's not against the law, since they own the platform. I certainly disagree with the wisdom behind their choice. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves; but I'm tolerating it even as I argue against it in public debate.
(also, I didn't downvote you)
How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?
How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.
For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.
As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.
And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.
Democracy and liberal freedom is best upheld when (a) the government is founded on the principles of liberty and rule-of-law, and (b) the people treasure those principles and refuse to tolerate a government that fails to uphold them.
Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course.
Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem.
Why do we always have to be Doing Something(TM)?
So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.
Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).
Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.
And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-childrens-...
But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?
And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.
The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.
2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.
And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...
Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:
Alberta: 2.3
United States: 3.01
Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:
Alberta: 268 / 4.421 = 60.6
United States: 62.5
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths...
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-icu-patients-per-mi...
https://globalnews.ca/news/8244271/delta-variant-covid-19-st...
And even 4chan has moderation.
Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.
I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.
Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.
Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.
In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.
You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.
A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.
The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.
In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.
I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan
So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?
There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.
You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.
Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.
The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum
>4chan has moderation
Please, elaborate
Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?
The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.
"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.
Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.
4.5 Million Deaths Later...
"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.
Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.
Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.
You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.
For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.
The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).
People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.
But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.
Censorship can keep good information out.
No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications.
I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.
Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.
With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
Better to have it out in public.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time, so in a way deplatforming worked.
And I believe that it's better than the alternative of letting disinformation run amok in a pandemic.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
Got any ideas that might actually have a non-zero chance of working?
Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden.
Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.
The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did.
Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there.
> Just a no win situation
I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.
If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.
But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.
YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.
And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.
I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.
In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.
But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
It's not necessarily that simple, although it probably is under current state laws.
Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.
0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.
wildly wrong take on what the first amendment means....
I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.
I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.
We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.
Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.
But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected..
Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform.
It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it.
The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder.
What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
Not only is it misused, the doctrine Holmes established was walked back (by Holmes himself!) and hasn't been the standard since 1969.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
The analogy simply does not hold.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
Kids living with their grandparents should definitely get vaccinated.
Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies.
If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
Conjecture is as conjecture does
You didn't see it so it must not exist?
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
That doesn't work. It didn't work for climate change and it won't work for vaccines.
BTW, ever heard of Duane Gish?
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
There are roughly 53,300,000 people aged 18-29 and ~3400 deaths (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...), which works out to 1 in 16,000. Of course, you say, that's assuming all 18-29 year-olds have had COVID, which is wrong. There's only been 7,400,000 cases among that age group (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254271/us-total-number-...), giving a 1 in 2200 risk.
Which has the amusing paragraph:
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
As someone with a pre-existing heart condition I'd like to read that research. Do you have any links?
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
>At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand vaccine skeptics.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
Problem: TOTALITARIANISM!
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
TOTALITARIANISM!!!
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.
There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.
Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).
A large media company like Google banning content that is heavily politicized by partisan politics is a big threat.
After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.
In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”
Distrust of government and authorities is a big factor. You have much more vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. than in Nordics (high-trust societies); Russians and Bulgarians are extremely sceptic of their governments, and extremely sceptic of vaccines.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I have seen Trump boast about vaccines, in his usual distasteful way. I have seen him recommend vaccines. I have not seen him disparage or discourage vaccinations (though he's been extremely clumsy, as he was with everything).
It seemed to me that originally, when Trump boasted about the vaccines, his political opponents (the Democrats in US, and others elsewhere) were the ones who were sceptical about vaccine development - simply because of this tribalism.
(Note: I'm not American, not in either tribe.)
And in what timescale, 2 generations?
I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube?
Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm.
What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic.
The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb.
By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation.
What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.
"[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided.
And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own.
Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.
(I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)
This is called "spite". Turns out that the aphorism about one cutting of their nose to spite their face is incredibly apt.
https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters...
No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.
I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form.
I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.
https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsi...
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/privacy-and-...
Individuals can always control what they see by not using YouTube.
... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.
Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics.
YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be).
> Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results.
The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.