John Stuart Mill was wrong. It is absolutely possible to convince someone who holds a correct opinion that their opinion is wrong.

This is a major blind spot of otherwise intelligent, thinking people: they believe that once a person is presented with the truth, it magically reveals itself to them as the superior piece of knowledge and the scales suddenly fall from their eyes. It's utter nonsense, and people don't work this way.

*Edit: To my replies, I'm addressing an epistemological assumption with this particular comment, not making a broader judgement one way or the other about Twitter's handling of speech. I don't care about Hunter Biden or whatever pet issue you have with the media.

And it is even easier to convince someone who holds a correct opinion that their opinion is wrong, if you ban and suppress correct opinion.

“Correct” opinion, is also subjective. Someone thought let’s say the hunter biden laptop story was true at first, then someone convinced them it was wrong, because of censure.

And maybe that opinion was “wrong” because it didn’t promote some agenda or worldview that the majority hold.

What is true, and what is correct aren’t always the same thing.

In 1984 the correct answer to 2+2 is 5.

And do you think an environment where undesirable ideas are suppressed would be conducive to believers changing their minds? Or do you think maybe those ideas would become further entrenched and evolve into QAnon and vaccine microchip theory?

Mill is one of my favorite philosophers, but his ideas on free speech need to be updated due to the internet. The amount of power technology gives us would have been inconceivable to him. There's no doubt in my mind the On Liberty would be a completely different book if he published it today.

With respect, the handbill or pamphlet was about the most subversive means of communication he saw, in an age when literacy wasn't universal.

The social media morass is something entirely different.

There is no precedent for the mass hysteria of something as dumb as Qanon. Dead presidents dead children emerging from the grave to save the world?

Oh wait...Jesus...David..rocks...easter.

Nvm.

The Taiping Rebellion in Qing China between 1850 and 1864. It was started by a man called Hong Xiuquan who failed his mandarin examinations, fell into a psychosis of some kind, and came to believe he was the brother of Jesus. The cult he started was wildly successful and turned an entire province into a cultist theocracy before being quashed by the Qing.

It took hundreds of years of proselytizing by some very highly educated people for Jesus David rocks Easter to have an affect on the world.

Today, people who barely can string coherent thoughts together can have an instant platform to spread idiocy.

I guess what I’m saying is the risk is much greater now for idiocy to take over than before.

The main change new technologies bring is that we can now see that a great many people disagree with us.

As many as 15% of Americans may hold QAnon beliefs [1]. Where is the evidence that "the opportunity of exchanging error for truth" is actually being seized?

It's all very well making an argument from principle, but if the real-world outcome is tens of millions of people believing absurd and dangerous conspiracy theories, I don't find the argument from principle very persuasive.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/qanon-republi...

The evidence is that it's only 15%. Free speech doesn't guarantee everyone will have right beliefs. In fact, it's a certainly that in a free speech environment lots of people will have crazy beliefs.

Free speech does, however, guarantee that no one group can control which ideas—crazy or not—can be expressed. And that, in the long run, ensures that there will be space to push back against the crazy and the harmful, which tends to be good for the less powerful.

If you're celerating that "only" 15% of people believe the most obvious bullshit anyone could possibly cook up, then your plan is flawed.

What would a non-flawed plan look like? One that results in everyone having "correct" beliefs? I'm pretty sure it would be a great deal worse than what we have now.

Nuking social media from orbit would be a good start. Any platform where what content you're shown is primarily driven by an algorithm is very suspect.

On that we can agree. Social media is a scourge. But it's also true that people believed crazy things before social media.

They did, but a more manageable dose. The current amount and effectiveness of disinformation is making society itself unstable.

Education could be a big part of it as well, not even teaching people what's correct but how to figure it out.

Income inequality isn't exactly helping either. Many people will believe any noisy asshole if their life sucks enough.

Furthermore, in the grand scheme humans beliefs being 'right' or 'wrong', people today probably have far more 'right' beliefs than ever during history. Conspiracy theories and wrong beliefs have been more prevalent in the past than today.

How does it guarantee that? What if I have information that so and so in a government is a rapist but a sea of lies implies I'm a traitor or pedophile

As usual the NYT tells half the story to advance an agenda. Ten years ago you coulda asked about Area 51 conspiracies and gotten the exact same response rates.

If you ask leading questions you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. The poll is bad and the data is meaningless if you’re trying to find out what people think. However if you’re trying to push a specific agenda, and convince a large part of the other 85% that many “others” are crazy and need to be “re-educated”well then it’s a very useful poll.

You’ve been had.

"Ten years ago you coulda asked about Area 51 conspiracies and gotten the exact same response rates."

And that's a good thing to you? I don't get what you're saying.

Clearly there are people who believe in QAnon. And that's a problem. Not sure what you're trying to argue.

Yes, it shows that we're ok with people making their own decisions no matter how deluded, trying to pretend that this is some new phenomenon that is threatening the republic is hyperbole.

Exactly. The combination of free speech and the internet has made things worse in a lot of ways.

There's a difference between opinions and misinformation, at least how I see it.

"Covid isn't dangerous" is an opinion. "Covid doesn't exist" is misinformation.

"Humans are mammals, so they are mostly either male or female" misinformation or opinion?

"Israel is an apartheid state, even one of its former ministers said this" misinformation or opinion?

"Government-funded groups like Hasbara Fellowships and CAMERA make up an operation to spread propaganda and influence our elections" misinformation or opinion?

And who should decide one or the other? If you have the names of any experts we should appoint at Twitter, Facebook etc, it would be great to know.

Who decided depends on who you ask to propagate your opinion. If they disagree with it they don't have to restate what you say.

if opinions are decided to be misinformation and censored, they don't get the opportunity to agree or disagree. that's the whole point.

My point is that Twitter or Facebook or whoever can exercise their own free speech to not propagate what you say, whether that be for the reason of “misinformation” or for the reason “contains the letter X”.

I agree, but I think they should lose legal protection for the content on their platform, because they've demonstrated the ability to moderate it. They should be legally liable for the spread of hate speech, financial scams, etc.

Lost money on a bitcoin scam on twitter? They exercised their free speech to display that scam, and should be liable for it.

Anti semitism or other hate speech? Guess who chose to publish it - Twitter.

Problem solved. Be a publisher or be platform. Be both, eat liability nobody else has special exceptions for.

but either way that's all a distraction from the original point, which is that the line between misinformation and being mistaken, or misinformation or truth, is arbitrary nonsense from politically active groups working to push their agendas, not anything related to truth.

Regarding the tangent, this sort of argument is exactly why 230 of the Communications Decency Act was enacted; court cases proved that, if a forum moderated their content (including profanity, hate speech, etc), they'd be open to all civil liability[0], while if they decided to moderate absolutely nothing they wouldn't be liable for the content the users posted[1]. This meant that companies either had to screen _everything_ by human review to ensure it wouldn't introduce undue civil liability, if they also wanted to moderate things like profanity, pornography, hate speech, etc. Congress didn't want this to be the internet of the future, so they passed section 230 to enable any service provider to moderate content for certain rules without being directly liable for all the civil crimes and torts users post on their service.

Safe to say that making them choose either extreme will lead to the eradication of social media as we know it, as there's no way Twitter or Facebook would let people post if doing so would require them to 100x their legal team to deal with all of the new lawsuits they're directly liable for.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

>Safe to say that making them choose either extreme will lead to the eradication of social media as we know it

This is by far the best possible result. I don't care about social media, I care that some companies have been handed special dispensation against liability that no other publisher gets, strictly to create a service that isn't necessary, and when they've demonstrated they can arbitrarily remove any content they want already.

Let them close. The people who care about social media as it exists in the status quo are advertisers looking to build profiles on people who have no idea how much information they're leaking through the apps often pre installed on their phones.

Let them choose to be publisher or platform, and reap the rewards and consequences their choice brings, instead of creating this special class of companies who control speech but are immune from lawsuits. They and the legal position they've been given are a cancer on society.

“Misinformation” is being used as a cudgel to suppress opinions or even facts that are, say - inconvenient - for someone’s narrative though.

Completely reasonable differences in opinion about the risk, origin, or proper mitigation of COVID were blasted as “misinformation” before they were eventually accepted by the wider establishment. The initial rush to completely censor such discussion early on is what caused all this free speech ruckus.

There’s always been nutty conspiracy talk, scams, hoaxes, lies, ignorance - especially on the internet - and we’ve learned to filter it out.

The “misinformation” label is going to backfire, though. Instead of ignoring it, people are going to take a closer look, because there’s probably something there that the labeler finds inconvenient. If it was simply untrue, then say so, call it “not true” or a “lie.”

Instead, “misinformation” is this kind of 1984-ish weasel word used to discredit inconvenient facts while maintaining plausible deniability when they turn out to be correct.

> Instead, “misinformation” is this kind of 1984-ish weasel word used to discredit inconvenient facts while maintaining plausible deniability when they turn out to be correct.

This is so well stated I’ve saved it with attribution for future reference and quoting.

You’ve hit the crux of the problem people today have with society at large. It truly feels like we’re living in the on ramp to one of the dystopian novels from our youth, 1984, the giver, etc. Large swaths of society see nothing wrong with controlling people’s thought.

As someone that was always very skeptical of the claimed effectiveness of the vaccine, despite the claims of its effectiveness by the experts at the time from both administrations. I feel vindicated when real world numbers come out like this.

https://www.walgreens.com/businesssolutions/covid-19-index.j...

Page 3, showing the unvaccinated testing at a much lower rate for covid than the double or triple vaccinated despite being forced to take a lot more tests.

I just assume it's easier to claim success than to actually achieve it. I also took a few stat courses at university, and saw problems with claims being made at that time. So I opted to wait. Now I'm glad I did.

Did you see their response on page 5? I'm skeptical like you generally but I find it a believable explanation.

"All results, including the positivity rates by vaccination status graph, are unadjusted. The team has observed that the positivity rates among unvaccinated individuals seen on the bar graph appear to be lower in comparison to vaccinated individuals. Furthermore, repeat testing among those who were previously positive in the last 90 days appear to confound the results. The team conducted additional analyses examining characteristics of the patient population by vaccination status and the impact of excluding recent COVID-19 cases (5.0% of total tests). Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups. Controlling for recent COVID-19 cases, results show that the unvaccinated group has a 17.1% higher positivity rate compared to the 3-dose group. Controlling for additional factors leads to a larger difference between groups."

Without a paper to show on how exactly they controlled for this difference its neither here nor there.

"Findings show that the unvaccinated group are typically younger and healthier, less symptomatic and less likely to report direct COVID-19 exposure or recent travel compared to vaccinated groups."

This just seems to be adjusting results until it fits your hypothesis. Release a a paper on the adjustments and lets see if it will withstand scrutiny.

Even without more details, I can already see some logical flaws here in the way they penalize the unvaccinated population.

They admit the unvaccinated are healthier and less likely to get sick, and adjust. Now the problem with this is they completely ignore the possibility they are healthier, because they did not take the vaccine.

They also discard recent results...why?

Also notice how they break down the into sub groups of the vaccinated into 5 months and over 5 months. This makes it seem closer than it really is. If you don't do that, you get even a wider gap:

6.9 % infection rate in the unvaccinated

vs

12% in the single dose vaccinated

23.5% in the two dose vaccinated.

29.9% in the three dose vaccinated.

It could easily be that unvaccinated people are more likely to get a test when they have no symptoms but did have an exposure, because they know C19 has worse outcomes when unvaccinated.

Or, as you say - they are tested more often, routinely, without symptoms or exposures because of their status.

I'd say both are more likely explanations than the vaccine makes people more likely to contract covid, which appears to be what you're suggesting.

Well except. Take two groups, A and B. If A tests more often, then the accuracy of the results are more accurate, because you have more data points confirming the results and are more likely to count all the positive cases during the 10 day window when someone might test positive. This is not a trivial difference either. The triple Vaccinated are 3 times more likely to test positive now, according to the Walgreens results, despite that group going in for testing at much lower rates.

Are there some circumstances under which we might see this pattern, sure. But there are also some circumstances on the other side of the argument like Marek's disease that lead to the disease evolving to target the vaccinated.

Anyway, we went from expert claims of vaccine being 98% effective at preventing covid, to what now? hoping they will get the same infection rate as the unvaccinated. You have to admit the standards keep dropping.

Now this doesn't even consider the economic damage done by the lockdowns. That same Walgreens is running out of baby formula. It was a mainstream story just a day ago.

Also, Ontario is showing the same pattern. Though it over counts the unvaccinated in all categories, by including those that received a single dose, and those getting sick within 14 days.

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data?fbclid=1

Seems like more is being found out about covid, and so things which were thought early, turned out to have more nuance to them. Vaxxed people absolutely don't get hit as hard by covid, therefore requiring far less expensive hospital care. Since we all pay for this, this seems a reasonable thing to do.

What is not reasonable is me trusting YOU, someone who's arguments, seem somewhat ... unconvincing, about the severity of the covid infection you would spread to me without a care.

As for your babies, supply chain issues coincided with covid, they are not caused by it. Please research the issue, you will see.

Why not take a trip to a hospital and ask the staff what they see and think? Oh, and a mortuary, see what they are seeing.

I look forward to your report, sir.