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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a number of people portraying this censorship (as I had feared) as "proving them right", or making people wonder "what are they hiding?", further fueling the anti-vax fire.

You just can't win. Hopefully this is only an initial reaction and will eventually die down.

Personally, I don't know how I feel about normalizing censorship. Freedom of information is a large part of how we reached the peak of our current civilization. How long before this goes too far?

However, any organization that proliferates plagues should be labeled as a terrorist organization. The anti-vax community is like a terrorist organization with "good" intentions, and they're just regular misinformed people all around us. Very tricky situation indeed..

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Keep in mind that access to information is one just one component of education. Curation of information is just as important.

One of the things that sets a good bookstore apart from a bad bookstore is their curation of their inventory. One of the thing that sets a good school apart from a bad one is their curation of classes and instructors. Hell, curation is the most valuable service a non-information related store provides.

I don't think this really applies in this case -- Amazon happily sells lots of books that are full of crap; they have every book by Trudeau, and I lose a little respect for any bookseller that carries a one of them.

But in general, I think the focus on access to information sometimes makes people forget the value of curation.

> You just can't win.

You can but it requires identifying and fixing the actual problem instead of trying to cover it in layer after layer of bandaids.

The problem with this issue, as it is with many other issues, isn't the availability of information, it's that a significant portion of the populous lacks the skills necessary to process information and reason about it. It shouldn't be surprising that limiting access to information does nothing to fix this problem, at best it just pushes it out of sight, thus out of mind.

>>Freedom of information is a large part of how we reached the peak of our current civilization.

This is one hell of an assertion, and needs substantial evidence to prove.

It seems obvious to me. The printing press is often regarded as the foundation of modern civilization.

Printing press allows the spread of ideas. It doesn't guarantee or imply the free spread of ideas. Many countries with printing presses tightly control what ideas can be printed.

You just can't win.

Nope. You think you just need to win the argument about vaccinations. No, you need to win the argument about how to think like a rational adult, whether you're thinking about breakfast or whether to vaccinate your kids.

Personally, I don't know how I feel about normalizing censorship.

I know how I feel about stores that refuse to sell what they feel are defective products.

> you need to win the argument about how to think like a rational adult

I was watching the flat earther special on netflix last night and I was thinking, that although its ridiculous to believe in these things, society needs people who are distrustful and challenge science/popular consensus etc... thats also part of being a rational adult.

I use to believe fat was bad for me, I need orthotics for my feet, babies need to be bottle fed in sleep in a separate crib, I need to be on all sorts of medications instead of eating healthy etc... but thats just because I was butt owned by what societies consensus was.

And we used to think Newton knew everything there was to know about gravity until Einstein proposed a new theory.

In the marketplace of ideas, some are going to be really, really bad, just like products. But over time they go out of business, just like the idea of witch trials or human sacrifice to appease the gods. It's just that for those of us that don't agree it seems to take forever because we already know it's a bad idea -- what's taking them so long?

The real problem is not the bad ideas themselves, but that when people think they know how to pick the good ideas from the bad ones and are OK silencing the bad ideas with force instead of debate. See: Galileo.

Society needs skeptics, this is true. But they need to be skeptics who value rational thinking, the scientific method, and peer-reviewed research.

It adds no value to society for someone to say "I don't trust the experts who have spent their lives studying this subject, and also I refuse to take the time to become an expert myself so that my opinion is an informed one."

Challenge science and popular consensus all you want, but do it with evidence and research, not with scare tactics and appeals to bias.

I watched the same documentary. They go beyond skepticism into the denial of evidence before their very eyes.

They made a big to-do about purchasing a highly accurate gyroscope to be able to prove their assertions about the flatness of the world.

When their experiment blew up in their faces and confirmed everything they thought to be false, they simply moved on saying [to paraphrase]: we won't stop until we find proof that we're right. Then they followed through a number of other failed experiments (failed in their parlance == proving their theories wrong).

These are not skeptics, as it were. Now a mind that explored these experiments and changed their mind based on the evidence, sure. That said—they're mostly harmless.

That's not what these books were doing, though. They were actively promoting some pretty unhealthy, potentially very dangerous, methods on helpless children.

Pretty clear line to me there.

I totally agree with this. You should question if the world is actually a sphere (most people don't), but once your gyroscope says its not you should move on.

Vaccinations is an argument that I need to win even though I don't want to have it. My mom is currently going through chemo for cancer: she has no immune system, not having deadly disease going around can save her life. My wife and I are talking about having a kid: for those first years not having disease going around is life or death. (vaccines do nothing until the baby is 12-18 months old)

That's a bit extreme to call "anti-vax" as a "terrorist organization" "proliferating plagues". This is why we are having problems having a sensible debate in this country. Every side paints the other side as extremists.

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