Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Tip of the iceberg. I just searched Amazon for "cure for cancer" and the first result is "Curing Cancer with Carrots." The cover features a carrot wearing a lab coat and stethoscope, and it has 168 customer reviews, 89% of them 5 star.

Almost all of the nonfiction books and videos on the first search result page promote similar "cures," with only one book based on medical research at spot #8 (The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer) and a book about the engineer who invented the universal microscope (The Cancer Cure That Worked: 50 Years of Suppression)

People should be able to share their personal stories, but Amazon and other tech companies have a responsibility to society, too. Claims like these can have real life and death outcomes. It's not enough to shrug and blame the algorithm because more people click on a book with a carrot on the front cover.

View on HN

Exactly. It shows Amazon is making a bad precedent. If Amazon removes books deemed to be unscientific, does this mean books have not been removed are deemed to be scientific? Should Amazon has a science department to validate all medical books?

Nowhere at all is Amazon saying the books where removed for being unscientific, Amazon only removed them without making a public statemented about it; the word "unscientific" was only brought up by this article and similar ones.

> If Amazon removes books deemed to be unscientific, does this mean books have not been removed are deemed to be scientific?

An allegory: I'm currently using Craigslist to look for an apartment in San Francisco. I frequently encounter posts which are obviously scammy. I disregard them because I know that Craigslist can't possibly have the resources to police all its listings.

That said, I still appreciate it when they take the time to remove a scammy post. And I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that the listings I find on Craigslist have been endorsed by Craigslist.

Spot-checking and removing garbage posts from Craigslist (or books from Amazon) may be a never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole, but it's still better than letting those platforms turn into the Wild West.

Edit: I wrote the original post in a fit of pique, and I regret it.

Steve Jobs was one of these people.

And? I'm not clear on what that changes.

The parent was making a pointing out that we lost a really bright person to what's currently considered to be pseudoscience.

Ignoring the the moral bankruptcy of the argument to begin with, he's someone who most people would consider a societal "loss" despite his views around alternative medicine.

I think the major difference is that he didn't push his views about alternative medicine on others, at least as far as I'm aware.

We would have felt differently about him if he had published a book titled "iCancer: How I Beat The Disease Using Alternative Medicine".

Most of the other people weeded out of the gene pool by following quack medicine advice aren't pushing their views on others either.

(FWIW if Jobs had devoted an inordinate amount of time to encouraging his audience to follow quack cancer cures it would be a stain on his reputation but wouldn't diminish the value of his separate contributions to UX or consumer electronics)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com