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Comment by dpq | Hacker News Reader

Choose your poison then. Either we let idiots run loose and we are definitely screwed, or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc, and then MAYBE we're screwed if we pick the wrong ones.

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>or we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications etc

We've been down this route in several countries during the 20th century and it doesn't pan out well.

Every nation did this until the internet. Those companies were collectively called “the press” in the western world.

Which kinda worked until the press worked out that favouring contentious topics and maintaining two viewpoints was more profitable.

You’re really going to throw the press in Britain, along with independent anti-establishment papers like Socialist Worker and Marxism Today alongside the Times and the Guardian, into the same bucket as that of Soviet Russia, Maoist China and North Korea?

Given my point is that you don’t need to be a dictatorship to do it, yes.

Not that being free from government influence frees you from the political preferences of your owner, as this recent non-sequitur headline from the Express should demonstrate: “EU BLACKMAIL: Brussels threatens FOOD AID to UK in 'last throw of dice of Project Fear'”.

Like I said, we're probably screwed anyway.

If we empower some individuals and companies to control and govern communications, we might be okay if we picked the right ones. The problem is, they have to continue to be the right ones, basically forever. That... won't happen. People retire and get replaced; people get corrupted by power; people see what they could do with power and put themselves in place to be the one to replace someone who's going to retire.

There is nobody - no person and no organization - who it's safe to trust with that kind of power.

Can we perhaps come up with solutions in which we have fewer idiots, or have barriers against the rapid spread of unverifiable information in general?

> solutions in which we have fewer idiots

Not unless you are willing to avadakedavra them all, and this avenue is also wide open for abuse, as you may imagine

I was hoping for solutions more along the lines of education than “killing the idiots”…

In a democratic society you don’t control, you elect strong leaders who guide and mentor the people to the positions that are best for society as a whole. We build a culture that believes in reason, science, humanitarianism, and progress. Then we work on spreading this culture and belief to others around us every opportunity we have.

The problem is democracy is about popularity, not reason. Most people do not elect the "best" leaders. We are very far away from that ever happening, regardless of culture.

The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious. At all. Nor do anti-vaxxers pose a significant threat. At all.

> The thing is that this outbreak isn't serious.

Every fucking outbreak is serious. Please learn something about epidemiology, and about measles in particular. I've been involved in tracking an outbreak, and have (separately) known people who were seriously harmed by measles. Dismissing any outbreak as "not serious" is truly sociopathic.

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