Unpopular opinion: I don’t like this. Would much prefer that ideas compete. Id sort of give Amazon a pass since, unlike twitter, Reddit, Facebook & YouTube, it doesn’t make many promises regarding the free exchange of ideas. But still.
That sounds like an acceptable line to me.
It has more reviews than the Matrix.
This is why the whole popular vote thing doesn't really work for stuff like this.
Humans are way too easily biased.
Sure, good, I guess, but I'm left very confused.
I personally expect Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video to provide some sort of filtering. YouTube, on other hand, I don't expect any editorial control there and also for same reasons, I will never let my kid to access it alone.
Plus, this isn't just a black and white issue. What if a specific vaccine is released some day that turns out to be harmful? Harmful drugs frequently make it passed FDA approval only to be recalled later.
If one of them happens to be a specific vaccine, are we going to be censoring any and all media that tries to sound the alarm?
I think it went more like this: “We received a request from a US congressman this morning and followed it.”
Even worse than I imagined.
I don't have a take on this particular issue. But I think censorship is generally very dangerous, and I also think the Mill-style marketplace of ideas is a bad analogy bordering on the nonsensical the more I think about it.
Humans generally synchronize their ideas with each other and generally put minimal effort into validating their ideas because the synchronization process works enough as a heuristic.
The obvious attack then is to blast out intentionally harmful material in order to do things like cause disease outbreaks.
Our position can't just be that were defenseless against this kind of attack because censorship is more evil than disease outbreaks. There must be some nuance that so far nobody has articulated sufficiently well.
And none of this really even matters because Amazon is a private platform where I can almost never find the thing I want to watch. The amount of things not on Prime Video is so vast that it's hard to get up in arms about them removing something that has no obvious value other than to cause harm.
In other words if it's not grounded in empiricism it's a "fake fact."
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/12...
The existence (and growth) of these "sceptics" is a testament to our inability to live up to your standards of critical thinking. I don't see how more pro-vaccine information could ever move the needle. The dynamics are rather asymmetric.
And the "all the information/everyone decides for themselves" strategy is fundamentally impossible, anyway: if you "trust no one", your only chance to verify the benefits of vaccines is to redo the studies yourself. That's impossible, obviously.
So one way or another, we need to delegate some editorial control to institutions/people that we can trust to take on part of the burdens of verifying information.
"Trust" does not imply blind allegiance here: these institutions have track records that you can spot-check. There will always be competition between them. And they tend to follow long-term incentives to keep your trust instead whatever short-term benefit could be derived from lying to you.
This isn't some obscure idea. It's so fundamental to the functioning of our society people don't even notice how they constantly rely on trust. Do you ever board a plane? You're trusting some FAA employees, and that they work within a legal structure that makes it unappealing for them to let a drunk pilot bribe them. Do you trust your spouse more than some random stranger not to steal from you? That's because you have known them for a decade, and (again) because they have far more to lose than to gain.
But you believing such a fringe nazi conspiracy theory couldn't kill me or my neighbour. My children wouldn't be at a real risk of dying from spending time with your kids, even if you indoctrinated them in your beliefs.
Some ideas are too dangerous to even get the chance to compete, especially in a country like USA with an education system so broken that 40% of its people believe that Psychic mediums can actually talk to the dead.
"It happened, and therefore it can happen again" is the motto here. It is the singularity of barbarism that has defined politics in Europe and the US ever since; the crown witness against militarism, nationalism, and populism.
I never mentioned holocaust denial... but let's go with that. So long as it never happens again, it's victimless. And because it's not going to happen again (nobody of consequence in any position of authority over govt, the media, or academia is a holocaust denier). Antisemitism certainly has victims, but in any case that's not the same thing as holocaust denialism.
> In fact, I would argue it's far more dangerous than these vaccine hoaxes.
Are you unaware that children have been dying of measles in ever greater numbers in the developed world due to the anti-vaccine movement? You certainly must be because some hypothetical danger that might occur in the future can't compare to children dying today.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/measles-cases-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newslette...
https://www.livescience.com/64523-anti-vaccine-movement-top-...
What did you mean when you mentioned
> it being physically impossible to incinerate 6M humans in the span of time the nazi's had to do it in the ovens that they had to do it in
in an example??
Does the implementation of the "counter" matter to you? Do you think giant corporations should be the gatekeeper on what information/ideas/speech is permitted and what is not?
Just take religion and magic and superstition which have declined a lot.
It's a made up problem to justify authoritarian solutions.
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-201...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims-...
A private company has a platform, and they can choose what content to allow on the platform. If you don't like it then enjoy your content elsewhere.
If anything, it sounds like a bit of a made up problem to declare Amazon (or another similarly sized tech company) is being authoritarian by removing anti-vaccination videos. I mean come on, we have a rich history of authoritarian governments murdering people for vocal dissent. I get that you disagree with private censorship, but let's have some perspective now...
This movement is successfully censoring billions of people. The gloves are softer than before but the scale is larger and this is a huge threat.
'This is not about competing markets of ideas', the HN users are saying, "these are real doctors -- real scientists -- saying that the 'facts' in these videos cannot possibly be true. Therefore these are 'false facts' and should be removed."
I'm also getting really tired of this "it's just ideas, guys!" as nationalism, flat earthism, anti-vaxx and more dangerous, anti-intellectual bullshit spreads across the country in this YouTube-era. I'm on the phone with my brother and he's telling me about a student teacher telling middle school students the earth is flat. I'm tired of acting like it's fine and this is unconcerning. Maybe the ever-reliable, ever-silent downvoters could express themselves and tell me why I'm wrong to be concerned.