This is nothing new and relates to "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Most facts can be manipulated by omission, taking things out of context, and choosing favorable metrics, so that you can lie without saying anything falsifiable. Only way to correct this is to allow the other side to present their argument in an open discussion.
How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit?
If your main objection to censorship is that it is used to hide the truth, why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit and distributors that enable that behaviour?
Just as the left–right political spectrum is actually more of a circle than a straight line, it seems to me that the spectrum of censorship vs free speech is also a circle. A bad actor may obfuscate truth through censorship; a bad actor may also obfuscate truth through massive volumes of misinformation. The latter is what is happening here. It’s a denial of service attack on human brains, and like a DoS attack, the only way to weather it is to filter the malicious traffic—you can’t just add capacity in the form of “good counterpoints” since human brains can’t scale like that.
That analogy is simply incorrect. You can spend your life on YouTube watching cat videos, no conspiracy theory in sight. Nobody can force you to watch their video on YouTube. So nobody has a megaphone in YouTube. Only YouTube itself has the megaphone, they can choose what to push to people.
It is NOT TV where you have a single stream that everybody watched, and if you insert shit, everybody watches it.
The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.
However, I am happy with letting the courts decide. Where is the problem?
I have seen lies from all big political parties in the US.
I'd never consider myself government supporter, but with Trump it's like the last bastion before the country is overrun with far-left SJW hordes swayed by misinformation.
It's ironic the ultimate win for democracy manifests itself in stolen elections.
Both groups are influenced by media and social circles but the first group tends to trust others opinions more, methinks.
The fact mainstream media was pretty much unified in anti-Trump stance strengthen that theory.
If every day for 4 years you hear just how bad is the orange man (from someone you trust) it would definitely shape a certain reality in ones mind.
It's not just some abstract 'otherwise neutral orange man' whose identity is entirely constructed by news media, and that's a strange argument to make. I think many people thought 'Al Capone bad' too, particularly if he'd robbed them or shot somebody they liked. I'm sure the greedy news media HELPED people get mad at Al Capone, and that there were redeeming factors in the guy, but the notion that there were automatically as many redeeming factors in Capone as in everybody else is NOT sensible. Maybe he just was mean, and sucked.
Likewise with 'orange man'. Way before he was a political figure, he was mean and sucked REALLY bad relative to my sense of how things work in the world. Some people just suck very, very much.
If you assume anyone who has success automatically does not suck, I admire your optimism but I sure don't share it. Seems to me that without considerable oversight, the opposite is usually true, and that the worst people, entities, companies etc. win. Hence, the invention of means of oversight, and the attempt to codify what's good and bad.
Other people also have coherent belief systems they arrived at through their personal experience, that contradict yours.
They're tested by reality. It seems to be that a lot of the people who say 'orange man bad' and think that's the heart of my position, are currently dying of COVID or giving it to others. And that is their experience, though a lot of those same people are sticking with their belief systems UNTO death, not being shaken from them by their experience.
I will keep an eye out for when things in my belief system seem to be not lining up with reality. I wish those 'other people' would do likewise, but I think I'm better at it.
Fact:
- He never shared his tax returns - He is a sexual predator - He supports white supremacy - He’s incredibly corrupt
Let’s talk about facts.
So no, I don’t prove your point. You just dislike the facts I state.
Their "arguments" are full of shit and are a bunch of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-analytical, pseudo-objective cant.
Their "evidence" is literally disinformation / propaganda.
They act exactly like those crypto-racists who know that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. It's gone so far that anything other than a rejection functions as a legitimization.
By allowing the lie of election fraud to be presented as just another thing to be discussed on HN, HN is enabling those people and their cause, which is to overturn the results of a legitimate election.
The irony is anyone was to be banned it would probably be me for making this comment. Think on that! ; )
The closest alternative I can see is reading media with opposing spin (People's Daily, RT) and yours and hoping together they composite a clearer picture. For example I would not expect to see this [2] headline in a US paper.
[1]https://www.ncta.com/sites/default/files/platform-images/wp-...
[2]https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/others/2020/05/...
That sounds like a good idea until it clicks that good scientists ask hard to answer questions and challenge consensus positions. Censorship is fundamentally anti-evidence. People can't present evidence that the channel owners don't like, and people can't model how to handle untrue opinions in conversation because they never come up.
"internal @Facebook research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation."
So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it".
I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.
It also doesn't say why people joined those groups. Maybe they are just curious to see what the crazy people are up to.
In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
The whole point of recommendation algorithms is to find missing edges in the graph, so it can easily lead you to misinformation in 1 or 2 hops.
Think of it this way: the misinformation content is highly valuable - it generates a lot of engagement. There is always a “potential energy” (people like you also liked...) between low-value content and high-value content that the platforms are attempting to convert to “kinetic energy” (engagement - views, clicks, comments) in order to monetize it. The goal is to find the shortest path to the high value content.
You're right, it's not that obvious, it's far more sinister. Cat videos are unlikely to end with you being recommended extremist groups, because there likely isn't much engagement from cat video viewers and extremist groups.
People who are deeply unsatisfied with life, however, might engage if they see it as a way out of their dissatisfaction, inadvertently training the recommendation algorithm to promote extremist content to dissatisfied people. That strikes me as at least plausible, though I don't know if the data is out there to find out what people are recommended what content under what criteria.
> In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
I disagree with this part. I don't have numbers handy for Facebook, but YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. It is physically impossible for you to see everything that gets uploaded to YouTube. Even if they stopped accepting uploads right now, you'd probably still die before you saw a significant portion of the content available.
Removing something from recommendations is, in most cases, tantamount to censoring it. If there are 500 hours uploaded per minute, and we assume that each video is 15 minutes long (which is likely longer than the reality), that's 2000 videos uploaded per minute. Assuming random distribution of views (which it's not, because of the recommendations), your video has a 0.05% chance of being viewed out of the videos uploaded in the same minute as yours. If you widen that to videos uploaded in the same hour, it goes down to a 0.00083% chance. Widen it to a day and you're down to a 0.0000347% chance. You would get 1 view per 2.8M views if YouTube deleted everything before that day, and killed recommendations entirely. I don't know how typical my usage patterns are, but I only search for probably 1 out of every 25 or 50 YouTube videos I watch. If that's a typical usage pattern, then you would actually get 1 view per 75M - 150M views. If everyone in the US logged on and watched a random video, you would get ~2-4 views.
It's all theoretical napkin math, but there is a staggering amount of data in the hands of Facebook, Google, et al. I do agree that actually removing the content is more significant, but the difference between removing the content and just making it so obscure that it's hard to see unless you're looking for it is basically the same. It's like if newspapers would agree to publish your stuff, but only if you encoded it as the first letter of each line of text. They have technically published your views, they've just made it hard enough to find that the only people who see it is people who already knew it was there.
I don't know what to suggest though. This is almost an inevitable outcome of collecting this amount of content; a lot of it is going to be relegated to some esoteric corner where no one ever sees it.
Sounds like we have an education problem then.
Censorship of a viewpoint and media that displays a giant FACT/FALSE in its headline amplifies exactly the problem you wish to solve.
If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
Another way to see this is that those with less education or influence are basically the new women. The argument against giving women the right to vote was basically based on the same viewpoint. They dont know about the world, so all they can do is harm if allowed to vote.
> If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
Not sure if you meant this as a rhetorical question, an ironic one, or a real suggestion about creating restrictions around who can vote.
Either way, "free speech is a thing of the past" is a bit all-or-nothing. It's always been a battle, never as good as we thought it was (such as the argument Noam Chomsky makes in 'Manufacturing Consent'), and always been tricky to figure out what to do when, and where.
But it's not a thing of the past.
It is not patronising to say that people are not all created with the same set of skills, beliefs, and values, and that some will engage with obvious bullshit. Many are not capable or interested in engaging with complex topics in a way that does not self-reinforce their pre-existing opinions. I have discussed this elsewhere[0].
When a group of people are motivated to exploit the weaknesses of others in order to get them to do things that are damaging to our democratic institutions, and they use misinformation to do it, it is unpleasant but not unreasonable to me to suggest that spreading lies through misinformation is as serious as suppressing truth through censorship and that they should both be treated equally seriously.
I don't. I also don't believe the people at companies like YouTube are any likely to be better than myself or the average person.
All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html
[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html (table of contents)
The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to.
> All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them.
This is precisely why no person can be expected to perform this role as a gatekeeper of truth.
Thanks for your links, I'm a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. With regard to [1], there's no reliable test to see where a person is on the psych spectrum, even heavy doses of introspection can lead to limited and imperfect insight, and its likely the case that the same person will move up and down on the psych spectrum depending on a variety of factors. Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.
This isn’t what I was hoping folks would take away from my comment.
Have you ever been too invested in some problem, or too upset by something, to see the truth of the situation? And when you ask someone else, who is not emotionally invested, they easily point out the way forward? That is the kind of phenomenon I am talking about.
Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.
I am not claiming that there is any single entity that is capable of being a gatekeeper of all truths. I am saying that there are people who are going to be less capable than others to evaluate the truthfulness of a specific idea. In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not), or an audience member who is strongly motivated to agree with that lie. And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.
> Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.
Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.
Yes I have. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a reliable test to identify whether a person is capable of rational thought on a given subject. This means that when we witness a dispute between people about an issue, we are unable to reliably and provably evaluate the disputants meta-level reasoning. This is complicated by the fact that evaluating someone's reasoning on the meta level is nearly always complicated by object-level concerns, including our own cognitive biases.
> Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.
Thats why its so harmful to put people in a position of being an information gatekeeper. You have no way of ensuring that your information is being filtered by a person who is emotionally detached. In fact, due to the potential for influencing other people, those positions are much more likely to be occupied by partisans who will then use it to advance their own perspective, often without even realizing it.
> In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not)
This is exactly the problem. There is no reason to suppose that a youtube moderator is non-partisan, a high rung thinker, or emotionally detached from the subject they are evaluating.
> And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.
Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.
> Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.
I feel exactly the same way. I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far, or perhaps Aumann's agreement theorem [0] is not applicable to this issue for some reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
The other way to frame this is that there is a reason to suppose that, at this point, someone uploading videos to YouTube claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud—which is all that YouTube are prohibiting here—is almost certainly not a high rung, emotionally detached thinker.
> Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.
No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective. There are no certainties when dealing with humans and we just have to roll with it using the best heuristics we can.
> I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far,
I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.
Believe me, I totally understand the potential for harm caused by powerful interests controlling a narrative—there’s a limitless number of examples to choose from, many of which have been targeted directly at people like me—but the harm that is happening right now is that other powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud and are encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.
In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy. It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.
I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content. I suspect YouTube would not need to ban this content at all if their algorithm hadn’t spent the last decade optimising for engagement over all else.
I'm not aware of that reason. Could you explain further?
> No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective.
I disagree, but I'm really saying that I'm unable to make that deduction. Perhaps if you shared your reasoning process I might agree.
> I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.
Almost certainly that is the case. I'm of the "sunshine is the best disinfectant" persuasion. When you tell people they aren't allowed to question the integrity of an election it is absolutely consistent with the interpretation that those questions might lead to unwanted answers. Its clearly consistent with other interpretations but the problem with closing down debate is that you lose the opportunity to compare those interpretations.
> powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud
If they have made it up, wouldn’t the best response be to ask them for evidence so everyone could see how the allegations were baseless?
> encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.
If you consider that partisans of the other side are also flooding social media with their own claims about the integrity of the election, it starts to look more like a healthy debate that needs to be hashed out rather than suppressed.
> In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy.
There has already been a considerable amount of damage. I don’t know how permanent it is, but allowing President-elect Biden to take office under this cloud of suspicion while suppressing the means by which the suspicion can be removed would be devastating to the perception of legitimacy of the government. The only hope for our democracy is to investigate these allegations and demonstrate that our election system is robust enough to handle the challenge of people asking questions about facts they interpret to suggest fraud or misconduct.
> It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.
Its not clear to everyone that these videos are garbage, yet suppressing them will prevent people from critically examining them while providing evidence that the other side has something to hide.
> I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content.
Platforms that do not prioritize engagement will retain fewer users than those that do. Sadly, this is the same process in effect all over the world as a result of late capitalism converting everything into attractive commodities. This is the same emergent process that creates addictive snack foods and Netflix. If youtube didn’t prioritize engagement then they would be replaced by a platform that did.
We need a word for flooding a space of discourse with so much noise that the truth is obscured and hidden.
It’s not censorship in that it’s removing speech, but it’s as effective in undermining free speech.
It’s obviously what is happening now.
I think the error in what you say is you assume both side are arguing in good faith.
But when one party doesn’t argue in good faith, it means they are saying things they don’t truly believe, or that they don’t respect or care about having a fair discourse.
Like how during the debates Donald Trump continuously attempted to talk over Biden, and essentially control the discourse via bullying.
Just making shit up in order to shut someone else down isn’t okay, and we need to figure out how to protect our traditional values of free speech while also combating when people attempt to destroy our freedom of speech by using this technique at a mass scale in our modern media environment.
Bullshit, because at this moment that comparison is a mountain vs a molehill.
0. Trumps lies about Covid and the pandemic crisis which have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans 1. The racist birther conspiracy. 2. The vast number of well-documented lies Trump told over the last few years. 3. The baseless lies about election fraud or whatever.
But you know all this. I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith and I think you’re full of shit. Because, after these last four years saying “bad actors on both sides” means that you’ve chosen to either obscure or deny reality.
What you’re doing is dangerous to democracy and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I’m not saying YouTube removing this content is the right move, but your logic only holds up in a fantasyland devoid of fact or context.
> Bullshit, because at this moment that comparison is a mountain vs a molehill.
Regardless, my point in replying to you was to assert that the existence of bad faith actors doesn't justify silencing good faith actors who seem to represent the same "side."
> But you know all this. I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith and I think you’re full of shit.
Then why did you reply to me? What value is there in engaging in some bad faith bullshitter on the internet? Don't you believe that I'm going to respond with more bad faith bullshit and further confuse anyone who isn't rational and detached enough to see the truth?
> Because, after these last four years saying “bad actors on both sides” means that you’ve chosen to either obscure or deny reality.
After all this you're not even able to see how there could be bad faith actors on both sides? You don't think that bad faith actors on your own side might harm your cause or detract from your message? Or you don't think they exist?
> What you’re doing is dangerous to democracy and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I get that you're passionate about this so can you explain this statement? If me sharing my opinion is so dangerous then why is it safer to let me vote? I'm genuinely curious how you can think that its good for the common person to cast a ballot but its bad for the common person to share their opinions on the integrity of the election.
> I’m not saying YouTube removing this content is the right move, but your logic only holds up in a fantasyland devoid of fact or context.
What's the error in my logic? Is trump uniquely bad so the normal rules don't apply, or is there something dangerous about the idea that people who decide whose opinions should be heard are potentially bad faith actors who could corrupt the discourse?
But as the case stands right now, Youtube isn't shutting down good faith actors on one side, but bad faith actors, who happen to be on one side.
There is no silencing of good faith actors, although I wholly agree in concept that it's a thin line to walk.
How are they determining bad faith in an objective, reliable, and verifiable way? The policy is to delete content that alleges that there was widespread fraud. That doesn't reference the sincerity or faith of the actor, but the object-level claims that are being made. It would seem that means they are deleting content they disagree with, regardless of whether it is put forth in good faith or not.
> There is no silencing of good faith actors
Can you support this statement? It seems like an article of faith to me. How would you know that all the videos that had been removed are put forth in bad faith?
> although I wholly agree in concept that it's a thin line to walk.
Does that mean you acknowledge the possibility of error in judgment with respect to this issue?
How many cases of fraud has there been in this election? 1? There has been 0 evidence of widespread fraud. The only possible way any argument could be made in good faith is if you have the naivete of a child. I'm not saying that as a value judgment, but as a matter of fact.
> > There is no silencing of good faith actors
> Can you support this statement? It seems like an article of faith to me. How would you know that all the videos that had been removed are put forth in bad faith?
I can not prove a negative, other than the absence of evidence of the contrary. Do you have any examples of good faith actors being silenced that we can discuss the merits of?
> Does that mean you acknowledge the possibility of error in judgment with respect to this issue?
Yes, but I have seen no evidence of this, so I reserve that hypothetical for when it happens.
I haven't the foggiest idea, I'm not a cop or political-type person.
> There has been 0 evidence of widespread fraud.
What kind of evidence would you expect to see?
> The only possible way any argument could be made in good faith is if you have the naivete of a child. I'm not saying that as a value judgment, but as a matter of fact.
How are you able to attest to that fact?
> I can not prove a negative, other than the absence of evidence of the contrary.
What evidence would you expect to see if YouTube had deleted a good faith video?
> Do you have any examples of good faith actors being silenced that we can discuss the merits of?
No because I'm not even sure how one would attest to the "good faith" of a video that is no longer on YouTube. Thats why I'm so puzzled at the certainty exhibited by people who seem determined that these videos and ideas are so dangerous that they should be suppressed. What kind of experiences and evidence would make someone so confident that they were right and they hadn't merely been misinformed?
> Yes, but I have seen no evidence of this, so I reserve that hypothetical for when it happens.
Wouldn't you want to have some evidence in support of your statement before you make sweeping claims? I'm trying to see how you can reconcile the part where you think these other people are bad because they make statements about reality without evidence, but you're fine with making statements about reality yourself without evidence.
That any person in the long chain of people required for the type of conspiracy suggested would slip up and leave any tangible trace, have a change of heart, leak something, or that hundreds of people noticing their names had been used to vote already when they tried to, or any number of other possible evidence.
> What evidence would you expect to see if YouTube had deleted a good faith video?
I don't expect any Youtube video to provide evidence to begin with, I expect it in court, where over 50 cases have failed to produce a single piece of evidence.
> Wouldn't you want to have some evidence in support of your statement before you make sweeping claims? I'm trying to see how you can reconcile the part where you think these other people are bad because they make statements about reality without evidence, but you're fine with making statements about reality yourself without evidence.
I make statements about the reality that santa and big foot don't exist because there's never been any evidence showing they do. I accept that this is not 100% certainty, but it's absolutely reliable enough to base reality around until further notice.
I'm opposing your suggestion that videos stating something very provable without any kind of evidence is the same thing as what I'm doing, and I've explained that stark difference.
> That any person in the long chain of people required for the type of conspiracy suggested would slip up and leave any tangible trace, have a change of heart, leak something, or any person that noticed their name had been used to vote already when they tried to, or any number of other possible evidence.
You haven't seen the videos [0] [1]? Interesting, did you look for them? Didn't the news report on them? Did you see the affidavits? [2] [3] [4]
Or do you just interpret all of that in a way that is consistent with your belief that these are all spurious allegations by bad faith actors?
> I don't expect any Youtube video to provide evidence to begin with, I expect it in court, where over 50 cases have failed to produce a single piece of evidence.
Surely you understand that sworn affidavits are evidence?
> I make statements about the reality that santa and big foot don't exist because there's never been any evidence showing they do.
You've never seen a video purportedly of Bigfoot? Or did you interpret it as a hoax because of your priors? You've never heard of Saint Nicholas? Or do you think that he never existed because someone told you outlandish stories about him and that colored your perception of the entire thing?
> I'm opposing your suggestion that videos stating something very provable without any kind of evidence is the same thing as what I'm doing, and I've explained that stark difference.
You're asserting that there isn't any evidence when you're actually ignorant of evidence and defending the decision of a major corporation to prevent their platform from being used to share evidence.
I'm not really keen to present evidence myself here because I think its clear that there is no such thing as evidence without interpretation, and most people (on both sides of the issue) have already decided to interpret everything in the way that justifies their biases. I'm also not convinced that there was enough fraud to change the outcome of the election (although the attorney general of Texas and 17 other states do seem to think so [5]). But there's so much purported evidence of fraud it was pretty easy to go get some links so I could disprove the notion that there hasn't been any presentation of evidence. There has been enough to raise questions about election integrity. Which is actually where these allegations of bad faith start to become really interesting because the same people saying there's no evidence are accusing people of bad faith for their arguments alleging fraud that refer to evidence. So humans being human, basically, which is why I'm actually much more interested in the epistemological and cognitive issues that arise in this case.
[0] https://apelbaum.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/cctv-suite-604-...
[1] https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2020/12/04/that-is-some-handof...
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.99598/...
[3] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.99598/...
[4] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.99598/...
[5] https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
What you're really saying is that there is election fraud and Biden's win is illegitimate. Which is just another way of saying, "I don't believe in democracy, I'm an authoritarian and I'm going to go out and undermine democracy because I want America to be an authoritarian state."
You should be banned from HN and I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. Otherwise HN is just enabling them.
You're full of shit and all this pseudo-philosophical pseudo-analytical pseudo-objective cant you're spewing is nonsense.
You're acting exactly like one of those crypto-racists who knows that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
I can't help it if five pieces of evidence lead you to that conclusion. But maybe now you can see why we think it is so important that people be allowed to make these allegations so they can be responded to, rather than suppressed and allowed to fester. If 5 pieces of evidence can suggest to you that the election was fraudulent and the President-elect is illegitimate, then can you imagine how much easier it is to persuade someone who isn't so firmly pro-Biden as yourself?
> Dude the courts looked at whatever "evidence" was presented and rejected it. Multiple times.
Actually a lot of those cases were dismissed for lack of standing. Evidence wasn't even presented.
> You should be banned from HN and I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
This is how echo chambers are formed.
> Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. Otherwise HN is just enabling them.
Its probably more dangerous to allow them to be suppressed if in fact they are untrue. Now if they are true and you're saying that's what makes them dangerous, then I can understand why you would want them suppressed.
> You're acting exactly like one of those crypto-racists who knows that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
So you don't even think its possible in theory to be concerned about election integrity unless its for partisan reasons? That would explain a lot.
> You're full of shit and all this pseudo-philosophical pseudo-analytical pseudo-objective cant you're spewing is nonsense.
> Now fuck off.
I think statements like this are unhelpful and I'd suggest you examine your own emotional state and see why you feel so hostile to people you don't even know.
What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.
Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations, and secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.
Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.
Indeed. Which is why I'm so interested in the evidence behind these claims that I keep hearing that there was no vote fraud, or at least not enough to change the election. Sadly, when asked for proof, these people who believe there was no vote fraud always walk it back: "I haven't seen any evidence." Well great, then maybe you're not in a position to make positive claims on the basis of a lack of evidence.
> There’s a reason US courts of law keep throwing out these claims of widespread fraud: because the claimants consistently fail to provide the widespread evidence to back their claims up.
Are you so sure you can read the mind of a judge? This whole discussion is about motivated reasoning and cognitive biases. When did we start assuming that judges were immune to political bias?
> What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.
I agree with that. Where is your evidence that none of them are judges or Google/YouTube employees?
> Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations
That would be like telling BLM activists to go tell the black criminals in their community to stop doing crimes that piss off the police. You're implying value judgments that aren't in evidence and lumping people together on the basis of your perceptions when those people may not even really have anything in common except being seen as enemies by the same group of people. People want to be heard. Its wrong to shut them down because some other people said some other ridiculous stuff that you think is basically the same thing because you're done listening.
> secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.
People are willing to listen, that's why its so important not to give them a platform. Surely you don't think that YouTube is suppressing videos because they don't like them when those videos aren't going to be watched by anyone?
> Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.
Part of fixing the alleged election fraud would be to present evidence to the public, including videos of that alleged fraud. And if those videos are being suppressed then part of fixing that would be to debate the propriety of suppressing viewpoints that you don't like.
[Sees what you did there]
Did we mention bad-faith arguments? Yes. Yes, we did.
A good example of a bad faith argument is repeatedly employing the motte-and-bailey fallacy by making positive claims, and then when asked to support those claims with evidence, shifting the burden of proof to your opponent by equivocating between statements of the form "there was no X" and "I haven't seen any evidence for X." People often do this unintentionally because they are confused about the difference between object-level claims and statements about the evidence for object-level claims. But one begins to suspect bad faith when this distinction is explained and then ignored, and the behavior repeated.
Of course there is no test for bad faith and people can be both confused as emotionally involved so they repeat themselves. Which may be the case here, I'm not a mind reader.
Are you simply implying the affidavits are all lying and want to cut short the ruling?
You really need to evaluate your news sources.
In Pennsylvania Rudy Giuliani said in court that there was no fraud when he was questioned in the slightest about his claim of widespread voter fraud.
“this is not a fraud case.”
Of course, they failed to provide evidence too, not even any of those affidavits.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/giuliani-pennsylvani...
So in a reasonable society with good discourse, we should be saying "wow, that looks serious, so many people claim they witnessed crimes." followed by "let's all do our best to get these infront of a court/judge, or get the government entities investigating it so they can be resolved/dismissed formally".
Instead, we get information suppression/dismissal on the part of Youtube and news outlets, and internet lawyers dismissing things because "it hasn't gone in front of a court yet". Come on man, let's solve this and either dismiss them fully or get them investigated. Otherwise we're just perpetuating "conspiracy theories" and then turning around and complaining about how half the population believes in conspiracy theories.
There have been dozens of cases submitted to various courts.
Those courts evaluated the evidence presented and dismissed the cases out of hand. What do you think the court does when it dismisses a case? Do you think it just randomly chooses cases to dismiss?
Don't pretend that hasn't happened. Don't conflate what is playing out in the media and what has happened in the court system.
Either way, I'm not going to stop arguing for reasonable discourse and getting to the bottom of things.
The "other guy" said this: Affidavits are not evidence until they're presented to a court. [emphasis mine]
There have been so many court cases tossed out (50+ if some accounts are to be believed, but that's just hearsay) , one of two things has to be happening:
1) The affidavits never made their way into court as evidence, likely because the plaintiff lawyers didn't want to put them forward as such, or
2) The affidavits were presented in court as evidence and got discounted because they're too weak as evidence
But the common thread appears to be that these "affidavits" don't stand up to any strong scrutiny, and amount to "random person alleges they saw fraud happen", which then quickly changes to "random person alleges they believe they saw fraud, but couldn't state for sure" when under penalty of perjury.
There are affidavits. They have not be submitted to courts. But this is not because Trump and friends have been prevented from doing so. Instead they have chosen not to submit this material. So cases have been tossed for lack of any factual evidence. These affidavits are reasonably declared "not evidence" because when offered the chance to get a court to look at them the legal team has instead skipped it.
There is a bucket load of evidence that shows election irregularities and failures of election staff to follow laws, but that does not mean there is enough evidence to prove the Trump campaign's allegations in court.
Also, a lot of the cases getting bounced are seeking emergency relief which often requires a higher standard of proof/evidence which is usually hard to come up with before discovery.
Also, even if the allegations are proven, there may not be a legal remedy that a court is willing to offer -- this can be grounds for early dismissal too. If you ask for something the court thinks it cannot offer, case dismissed no matter what the evidence is. Often if legal remedy is unavailable courts will point to the electoral process as the remedy.
Reporting about it on YouTube does not mean it will be decided on YouTube.
Furthermore, it’s “spreading baseless lies which also fire up people who are threatening to murder civil servants.”
I don’t know if YouTube deciding to censor itself on this is right or not, but, let’s not censor ourselves. If we are going to discuss this let’s discuss the whole truth of the matter.
A good example of this is flat earthers or anti vaxxers. They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on, yet they publish so much unscientific garbage as to be garnering support. It will LOOK like they are more credible because the shear amount of garbage they push will go unresponded to by the other side. Meanwhile, they'll just simply ignore the other half of the argument. They refuse to address those points while making a ton of their own.
It gets worse. There's starting to be major bubbles of misinformation forming. So broad that the arguments made are almost impossible for the other side to decode. A great example of this is something like the comet pizza Q anon conspiracy. If you don't know, it goes something like this "A pizzeria in DC was a central location in a pedophile ring which the Clinton's had deep connections to."
Where does a reasonable debate even begin with something like that? It's easy enough to show that "No, that's crazy" Heck, even minimal rational thought should be enough to debunk this garbage. Yet it still flows (so much so that someone decided to show up armed to demand the pizzeria release the kids[1])
Yet, when a debate comes up, all a Q anon follower would pretty much have to say something like "Yeah and I bet you like comet pizza as well". That sort of attack would be devastating in the eyes of those already tuned into Q anon crap yet would be completely reasonable for an outsider to be like "Yeah, I like their pizza".
These techniques are effective which is evidenced by how much misinformation flows throughout the internet. Giving equal time and access to both sides doesn't appear to be effective in combating this misinformation. There's got to be a better way.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689...
It's the same fallacy as with the "Russian Bots" election conspiracy. Just because you can create lots of content, doesn't mean you can make people watch it.
Nobody is “forced” to watch a YT video. But if these show up in searches, along with pseudo-scientific articles, pseudo-documentaries on all platforms and actively work on becoming viral, then there is a problem.
Maybe creating a lot of content does not imply that people will watch it, but the reality is that a lot of people do.
And by evidence I don't mean "hit pieces in traditional media that don't like the competition from social media".
Anti-vaxx movement was started by a bogus publication from a then reputable source. It was blown up by ease of information spread and exacerbated by the undermined confidence in traditional media. That much is known.
It takes basic knowledge of statistics to verify that those things are just random correlations, not causation (show that incidence of certain afflictions (like autism) is the same among vaccinated and non-vaccinated people). That is what the memes feed from. I don't think censoring would help much here, especially as most people know such stories personally. I don't know people directly, but I know people who know people who got sick after vaccination. I suspect many others do, too.
Granted, anecdotes spread especially well on Social Media. It works the other way round, too. Have you heard a story of somebody who almost died, or died, from Covid, despite being young and healthy? Such incidents are very rare, but since they get shared a lot, one such personal report may be shared by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. every one of them now feels like they "know" somebody who died from Covid despite of being young and healthy.
Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
No, they are clearly different. One encourages dangerous behaviour for yourself and more importantly others around you, the other does not. This is also there is not much talk about banning flat earth or moon landing conspiracies out of social media.
There was undeniable steep gradient towards extremism, how it worked on me in particular is irrelevant. It is a numbers game.
The propaganda by totalitarian states is an entirely different beasts, it reaches into all walks of life.
I'm more worried about the censorship leading to totalitarian states than extremist YouTube channels.
I'm not forced to open phishing emails but sometimes I do by accident or carelessness. I'm also not forced to open links someone close or not happen to send my way. I'm not forced to read weird facts-denying delusional rants on social media but sometimes I stumble upon it while scrolling around a main page.
Given the unlimited torrent of propaganda and manipulated content that we are exposed constantly and is designed precisely to control you to serve the manipulator's goals, what should we do?
Hell, just open a tab with any of the facts-denying extremist media channels that currently plague the US. Do you believe they are preaching to fishes, or that there are people exposed and manipulated by it?
This is just hand-wavy fearmongering about "mass psychology"
How exactly do you think antivaxers became antivaxers? They weren’t born like that, they were exposed to propaganda and eventually fell for it.
I know several wonderful, educated and otherwise reasonable people, who have fallen for antivaxing, antimask, covid-is-a-lie conspiracies. This includes two teachers in the public school system. The same people who are supposed to teach critical thinking to the next generation. Think about what that means for a moment.
Propaganda works. Stopping propaganda, highlighting “fake news”, debunking conspiracies, and teaching critical thinking is essential.
You are mixing things together that don't belong together. Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus. Anti-vaxxers are about tried and proven vaccines they don't trust.
I think as with other things (like religion), people get mostly "infected" by their peer group. Also there are certain aspects that make memes prevail, like fear and protectiveness of one's own children in the case of vaccines. It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
But they do belong together, don't they? I mean, they are all under attack by facts-denying militant groups fueled by anti-intellectual propaganda.
> Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus.
That's no excuse to intentionally deny facts and information already established on the disease. And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus.
> It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
This is not about youtube or twitter or sneaker net. This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation. The shit is the same even if you switch spoons.
No, that is just a strategy of defamation that you fell for. Basically the "Hitler was a vegetarian" argument against vegetarianism. In short, "a person of type x believes y" does not imply "everybody who believes y is a person of type x".
" And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus."
If you would watch more YouTube, you would be aware that it is not only "militant groups" who argue about aspects of Covid.
"This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation."
There are such people on all sides.
You absolutely can make people watch it, even side with it passionately to where they'll burn through their friends requiring loyalty to the information bubble. It's a matter of statistics, and directing the contents of the information bubble with reasonable effectiveness. It's a bit like nuclear fusion: sort of 'wait, these lumps of metal do THAT?!?'
Yes, in fact they do. And, yes, you can direct HUMANITY to whatever ends you like, including 'The USA should be torn to bits by civil war please, so it is no longer a rival superpower'. Plenty of people out there would find that useful, wouldn't even have to be exceptionally short-sighted. Mind you, it's still damn reckless even if it is not absolutely short-sighted.
> Where does a reasonable debate even begin with something like that?
Observe how your mind is drawn to the very most egregious examples of conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorists, and then expands that into your conceptualization of the whole. Also observe your sense of omniscience ("They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on...", demonstrating your perception that you've reviewed all the evidence and arguments from the community).
I believe that a reasonable debate first requires that all parties realize and acknowledge the illusory nature of consciousness, and in turn reality. But this seems to be an extremely unpopular idea, so we may be waiting a long time before we can have a reasonable debate.
With these things aside, the both sides mentality stops being applicable at a certain point. While one side can show you thousands of evidence that a certain cure does work, the other side shows one questionable example of it not working and it is enough for their believers. So as to answer the specific case with antivaxxers: I will not engage with such an argument because they in fact have no scientific leg to stand on automatically. For to have any meaningful debate, we would have to talk about a specific vaccine that may or may not be safe. If we have such a strong statement (in a mathematical sense) that ALL instance of something is a given property, is ought to not be true in a mathematical sense - and without understanding probabilities there is no point in arguing.
Agreed. However:
a) it is not necessary to accept these beliefs as epistemically flawless
b) it is possible (and useful) to be consciously aware that we have done this (as opposed to holding the perception that we know(!) these things)
> With these things aside, the both sides mentality stops being applicable at a certain point.
I'm not sure, so I will ask for clarification: do you believe I have asserted that both sides are equal, at the object level? I am pointing out their similarity at the abstract, neurological level, although perhaps that is lost in translation (but the more explicit one is, it seems the more offense is often taken)
> While one side can show you thousands of evidence that a certain cure does work, the other side shows one questionable example of it not working and it is enough for their believers
How confident are you that this belief is accurate? You realize that it is an intuitive belief, at least now that I point it out, right? (And I do not mean this in a snarky way, I mean it literally, and seriously, for reasons that may not be obvious).
> So as to answer the specific case with antivaxxers: I will not engage with such an argument because they in fact have no scientific leg to stand on automatically.
This suggests omniscience, on at least two levels. (I do not intend this in a snarky way either.)
> For to have any meaningful debate, we would have to talk about a specific vaccine that may or may not be safe.
There is no shortage of anti-vaxxers willing to have that conversation. Finding one that genuinely knows what they are talking about, that is another matter, but there are some very well read people among all the idiots.
> If we have such a strong statement (in a mathematical sense) that ALL instance of something is a given property, is ought to not be true in a mathematical sense - and without understanding probabilities [and epistemology] there is no point in arguing.
Does this apply to both sides of the disagreement? :)
I believe that a big part of the problem here (and the numerous other culture war arguments that are currently raging out of control) is that people tend to approach/discuss the issues from a strict object level perspective, and also that both parties tend to not be mindful that such discussions are fundamentally a neurological process, and therefore subject to all the flaws and fallacies inherent in any such undertaking (which seem to be heavily amplified in discussions that are indeterminate, and culture war based) [1].
I believe that if people really cared about optimizing outcomes on these issues as much as they proclaim/self-perceive that they do, they would be willing to take the steps that are necessary to do so, or at least consider the ideas. But alas, it seems to be a bit of an intractable, recursive/coordination problem. Maybe things will get better in 2021 - one should never give up hope!
[1] For example, if you go looking for it specifically, can you spot any omniscience (lack of self-awareness) in this thread (both in the noted anecdotes, as well as in the conversation itself)?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385833
You should read up on the Leicester Method.
I have no opinion one way or the other, but it seems to me, that rather than malleable minds being "influenced" by propaganda, it is a natural reaction to being "told" what to think.
Pro vaccine advocates, come across much the same as modern atheists, or rust users - vehemently proselytising their views, with little regard to the fears, concerns, or opinions of others. This naturally rubs people the wrong way, especially if one is predisposed to contrarianism.
Algorithmic sharing causes misinformation bubbles to grow in a way that has never before been seen.
Why do we need to ignore this effect and let it run its natural course? We know what happens. Flat earthers and anti vaxxers and now millions of illegal ballots.
They even explicitly allowed the discussion during the counting process and afterwards as court cases were brought forward.
So you’re saying that C.S. Lewis would have voted for Trump? ;)
This is clearly wrong. Greedy people are never satisfied. Look at our modern day robber barons, a mere handful with more money than hundreds of millions of people. Yet their wealth continues to grow.
But of course most Youtube hogwash content producers and their followers aren't in it for the love of truth or philosophy. Maybe some of the more naive are, and have been fooled to be puppets in Youtube's strings.
I no longer believe YouTube is more malicious than it is incompetent.
I’m ok with censoring that stuff.
Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.
This is especially what I'm sceptica about, as well as the banning of publications such as Mein Kampf.
It seems to me that the proportion of those that were first unconvinced, and then read such material and become convinced by it is negligibly small. Rather, most of the followers never actually read the publications and mostly got into it to feel part of a group as their friends were followers.
They're typically publications that were never read by either the proponents, nor the detractors who wish to ban it.
> Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.
There is very few news that is not fake — the addage of “All news is accurate, except that one article about that one field one happens to be a specialist in.” seldom fails to hit the mark.
That you need to specifically single out “Islamic terrorism”, opposed to simply keeping it about “terrorism” as a general concept also betrays a deal of specificity in your view, which is often the problem with censorship — that not all are censored æqual.
And most news isn't fake, luckily. All news is biased, true, but that doesn't mean it's fake. Which is a big difference. That the press isn't doing itself a lot of favours by being what it is today is also true.
Agreed - poor wording on my part above, i meant specifically islamic terrorist propaganda when i said fake news.
>> making it harder to access radical content is maiing id harder, but not impossible, to become radicalized
Agreed but harder is a good outcome. I'm fine with "better, but not perfect"
That population is every person ever born - no one was born believing in Anti-semitism or Nazism.
>> and then read such material
Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
>> and become convinced by it is negligibly small
The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
>> There is very few news that is not fake
Poor wording on my part, i meant specifically Islamic terrorist propaganda not fake news more generally.
No one is born tob believe in anything, however one typically has opinions on matters by the time that one is capable of reading.
>Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
And even there I feel the reading of material in print is negligible as a proximate cause to inspire that.
>The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
And most had never read Mein Kampf. They were members because their friends were — most Christians have of course also never read a Bible from cover to cover.
But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct? No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
>> most Christians have of course also never read a Bible
Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
By name perhaps, the same ideas will always live on under a different name.
> No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
The practices have lived on under a different name.
> Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
A pastor has also never read the entire Bible to them from cover to cover; most haven't the faintest idea of what is in there.
> Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
You will find that they tend to omit the passages that are considered controversial, and that would lead to the Bible's potential banning.
No they don’t. My point was we don’t actually know what the minoans believed. If it’s not written down it’s doomed.
>> The practices have lived on under a different name
They haven’t. That was the whole point. We don’t really know what practices they followed.
>> from cover to cover
Why does a written work have to be read from cover to cover in order to convey an idea?
If essential use was made of the written work even in part, your assertion that written works are not important is nullified.
If you don't know what they believed, then how would you know whether it lived on under a different name, or not?
Despite the extinction of their civilization and our inability to translate their language, we do know quite a bit about minoan religion through the study of artifacts and the accounts of their neighbors. Contemporaneously the Homeric epics were carried on in oral tradition for hundreds of years before the greeks wrote them down. And yet despite ready access to greek mythology you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it to be true. The absence of a text does not eliminate the idea it conveys, nor does conveying an idea lead automatically to its adoption.
No
Dr Jeremy B Rutter:
“ Since Linear A is as yet undeciphered, there is effectively no contemporary textual evidence regarding Minoan religion. Even if Linear A were deciphered, it is unlikely that much information regarding Minoan cult practices, much less Minoan religious ideology, would be forthcoming above and beyond the names of the divinities which the Minoans worshipped.”
— we know basically nothing of their religious practices except that we think they existed based on artifacts found and some reasonable hypothesis.
>> you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it
What does belief have to do with whether an idea can be communicated or not? It’s sufficient to be able to say the idea was XXX
What does belief have to do with a religion dying out? Everything!
Without writing, the greeks could get people to carry on their religion. With writing their religion died out. Clearly the spread of ideologies is not as simple as "writing spreads it and the absence of writing kills it."
Since you took the extra effort to exactly specify what exactly should be censored, under your definition, would you be OK with Anders Breivik's manifesto?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
It is also the problem -- when people want to use censorship as a tool to selectively ban some bad but leave other bad alone. Who decides which bad is bad, and which bad we should conveniently ignore?
That's an incorrect assumption on your part. As i said originally:
>> There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is ...
If we censor fake news, I am also in favor of censoring you.
That's all the Islamists are: a conservative religious group which believes in gun ownership and the use of violence. The difference between the people posting with gun+quran and the people posting with gun+bible is razor-thin.
You can label these materials as censorable because you, likely not a follower of islam, believe that material from islamic uploaders talking about a revolution and indoctrination do not belong on your platform.
yet here we are, with thousands of christian, america-first indoctrination videos, calling for an uprising against everything from vaccines to elections. IT IS THE SAME THING.
you do realize this is a "are we the baddies?" situation, no?
Case 1: Leaked Podesta emails and CNN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjDLcvOB1og
"It's illegal to possess these stolen documents. It's different for the media. So everything you're learning about this, you're learning from us."
Learning from us, get that?
Numerous legal scholars weighed in on that hot take, just one of the examples.
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/law-prof-smacks-down-cn...
Case 2: Washington Post calls ISIS Leader al-Baghdadi "austere religious scholar"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/washington-post-headline-abu-...
So here we are, being told by YouTube that sources calling the leader of the world's most vile and brutal organization an "austere religious scholar" and deliberately misinforming public about what they can and cannot read are called "credible and authoritative sources".
When your supposedly single reliable source of truth (the media) is so obviously and shamelessly biased, how can you not question the source of "truth" and those who suppress other viewpoints?
I'm reminded of a seemingly prescient quote from 1999's Alpha Centauri:
https://www.quotes.net/mquote/2347
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
Or the US involvement in civilian deaths in Yemen.
Your examples both got proper smack downs. My examples are still censored - you or i have never seen pictures of the conditions the kids are stored in (and if you think you have, double check its authenticity). Would be reporters for the Yemen are suppressed well before there’s any risk of them deciding to just skip mainstream media and post online instead. End result is an information vacuum and we can’t have an informed discussion because neither you nor i knows what’s actually happening.
It’s a private company platform, if you don’t like my policies go start another facebook or whatever.
> I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time.
“Beliefs mostly don’t effect the world…people are dead because of false beliefs” Which is it? What people believe mostly doesn’t matter, or people’s incorrect beliefs have been life or death matters often?
> I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief
You are acting on it by talking about it to other people. But good job picking a belief so low stakes that you can try to pretend that your beliefs that are literally your map of the world, don’t determine how you act in the world.
> The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new.
Neither I nor the parent comment talked about that. Just that what people believe is important and has real world ramifications. It isn’t being “insecure” in my science to worry about people that think physics isn’t real, or vaccines aren’t real, or that killing someone that doesn’t believe in their god is required, or people with certain skin colors are biologically predisposed to violence, or that there is a vast global conspiracy going back hundreds of years to trick people about the shape of the earth.
I don't know why, but it seems that of all the silly ideas out there, flat-earthers have a special place in the minds of some people here on HN, since they are brought up so many times.
If one person believes the Earth is flat, that's not an issue. The problem is that much of the country has organized itself into information bubbles. Those bubbles can be large enough to span entire congressional districts and even entire states. Those states elect representatives and senators. These days, the Senate and House can be split by a single vote on some issues. We live in a world where there's a very real possibility that a state will elect someone to office who believes things as wild as "the Earth is flat" and they will be the deciding voice on critical issues facing us today.
>True balance by taking account of both sides will include rebuttals of the sides against the other side.
isn't the same and giving both equal weight. With stuff like flat earth it's quite easy to rebut for example.
A corner stone in science, which goes far back in history, is trust. In order to understand anything we have to put trust in established facts, in experts and common understanding. Part of building science is building trust, and censorship has a strong negative impact on trust. If we go back to the analogy of poisoning the well of knowledge, censorship destroys people trust in the water itself.
To take an example of why this new Youtube policy might be problematic, could we still have a video about the risk in Postal voting? In the UK election in 1990, it was estimated that 50% of postal voting arriving from Ireland was fraudulent. Trust in the voting system was at an all time low. As a response the voting system was changed and identification became a requirement in order to vote. Trust in the election system went massively up, and suspicion of fraud went down. A decade later the UK government removed some parts of the requirements, but for Ireland the requirement still remain today. Should an opinion that the US could learn from the UK past experience with postal votes and voter trust be censored, or would it poison the ability to discern fact from fiction?
I think suddenly then they would be able to poison the well.
Science is a bad example because the process of science can be quantified. We can argue about it but basically can quantify what is or isn’t a valid scientific experiment.
This creates a “good faith” environment because everyone has to play by the same rules.
Outside of science this is harder to achieve. If one side argues in bad faith, they can just keep making shit up or doing things to undermine the discourse itself, like talk over someone else or bully them.
Freedom of speech kind of both depends on and is in conflict with culturally enforced norms and restrictions around who is able to say what when, and how loud.
Bear in mind that when our classic idea of free speech was developed, it was simply assumed by most that it would be white, propertied men doing the talking. Point being there are assumptions behind these conceptions with are important to consider.
Most of us don’t want white, properties dudes to be the only ones talking, but no one who cared about any form of democracy or equality would want to hang out in a town square where everyone is just yelling all the time and beating up other people so they can be the only one talking.
Restriction per se isn’t bad. It’s all about how it’s done, and why.
What we are seeing now is a shifting both of cultural norms and the infrastructure of our media environment which means that “free speech” no longer has some of the constraints and restrictions which enabled it to perform the truth-seeking function we desire it to.
The demarcation problem is essentially scientists disagreeing that we can sharply divide science from non-science.
The replication crisis is evidence that not all "science" is actually science.
> If one side argues in bad faith, they can just keep making shit up or doing things to undermine the discourse itself, like talk over someone else or bully them.
Silencing one side of a debate is also undermining the discourse.
> What we are seeing now is a shifting both of cultural norms and the infrastructure of our media environment which means that “free speech” no longer has some of the constraints and restrictions which enabled it to perform the truth-seeking function we desire it to.
Actually what we are seeing now is the democratization of free speech so that an oligarchic elite is no longer the only group who is able to make their voice heard. In this light it is unsurprising that the oligarchic elite wants restrictions on speech.
Exactly who do you think the major donors to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party are?
Do you actually believe these election-fraud lies were spontaneous, as opposed to something people were whipped into believing by a propaganda campaign funded by the wealthy?
Money in politics is a problem for both parties, not just Republicans, but, your argument is bullshit.
Case in point:
Do you yourself believe Joe Biden won the election, and that there was not any meaningful “election fraud” or whatever? Yes or no.
Anything other than a yes-or-no answer to my question is bullshit.
I refuse to answer on the principle that I don't submit to religious tests. You can call this bullshit if you like, you've said you're not here for mutual understanding and so I understand that you're not interested in my point of view.
> there was not any meaningful “election fraud” or whatever?
Of course there was meaningful election fraud. Any fraud is meaningful because it challenges the idea that free and fair elections are possible.
> Anything other than a yes-or-no answer to my question is bullshit.
Those were two questions, a yes-or-no answer wouldn't have even explained which one I was answering.
So what strategies works most effective in restoring trust? We can learn by looking at the effective ways people have done in the past to create the opposite, increase distrust and conflict. Assuming bad faith based on race and class is very effective in creating environments of distrust, both on internet forums and elsewhere. Preemptively exercise power in unpredictable way, and enforce unclear rules in an inconsistent and nontransparent way also works wonder to further conflicts. Displaying symbols of ideological values and focus on tribal differences can effectively increase conflict over multiple generations.
You can not censor people into trust, and thus censorship is not a tool to create a good faith environment. You can remove people from the discourse until only people who belong to the same tribe is left, where every single participant trust the others because of psudo-kinship. Free speech, along with concepts like human rights and liberty, is however centered around common rules being enforced consistently in order to create trust among people who would otherwise be mistrusting of each other. You let the other side talk in order to create a common trust that they will let you talk.
Oh they’ve been talking. We’ve all heard.
> Good faith and bad faith environment is about trust.
Not so. Someone acting in bad faith is by definition untrustworthy.
You seem to want to equivocate. I don’t know if YouTube choosing to censor this content is wise, but since the content is false, spreads disinformation on purpose, nutty, and dangerous to democracy and the lives of civil servants, I can understand why.
All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.
So that the students got harder to manipulate via false balance methods
The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself.
For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored.
Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.
I’m of the opinion that misinformation, while dangerous, is often incorrectly blamed for problems that are really caused by fundamental disagreements in morals and values.
But then they wouldn't fit in 2 and half sentences and we might actually have an attempt at a reasonable conversation rather then suspiciously starting from the conclusion one side wanted to start with.
> Science tells us what situation we are in and what consequences our actions are likely to have, but it does not tell us what to do. Science does not say you shouldn’t pee on high voltage lines, it says urine is an excellent conductor.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/09/follow-science-nons...
That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles.
Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ.
While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for.
Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker.
I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.
Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair.
The system you are referring to is called our discerning minds, and it is already in place. By removing any piece of an argument you are removing the ability of a discerning mind to make a sound judgement.
There's a reason why advertisements work, and it goes hand-in-hand on why ads are regulated.
Good question. Of course, there is no individual human mind capable of such a thing, and so why should such a mind be permitted to decide what the masses get to see?
Individually humans are quite helpless. That's why we build systems to are able allow us to cooperate and tackle problems that are bigger than any one of us.
The justice system, government, private enterprises, the media, etc. We should make sure that all of them are doing their job and weeding out the bad actors accordingly. We then give input to these systems to ensure that operate within their remit.
You're still talking about humans though, right? Does that system not count as part of "our discerning minds"? What is a jury if not a group of discerning minds?
To be clear, I agree that human systems are necessary (the justice system, military, etc), but when it comes to squelching speech I disagree with that approach. When real people have real concerns and those concerns are silenced by an opposing group, that is oppression plain and simple.
Is satire to be suppressed because it makes exagerrated or nonsensical claims? Where do we draw the line, and who gets to decide when satire crosses the line to become incendiary?
What would be the end goal of your proposed system that filters speech that you consider "noise"? To prevent a tyrant from taking power by spreading false information? The truth is that once we live in a society where free speech is suppressed then we are already living under a tyranny.
Deciding what to publish is itself a system to disseminate information.
Free press and free speech doesn't mean you can force other people to publish your speech. It just means that government is not allowed to suppress it.
>What would be the end goal of your proposed system that filters speech that you consider "noise"? To prevent a tyrant from taking power by spreading false information? The truth is that once we live in a society where free speech is suppressed then we are already living under a tyranny.
Don't use silly slippery slope arguments. The US already has limits on speech that directly cause harm to others.
That's a fair point. This has been an interesting exchange. I'm still not sure if we've actually been agreeing with eachother without realizing it (due to me misinterpreting your meaning), but I've enjoyed the discussion. It's helpful to talk about this sort of thing if for nothing else than to reaffirm our own positions. I appreciate that you came back to the conversation to continue the engagement over the course of nearly a week, like a long game of chess. Your argument did cause me to reassess my own positions in a few cases, and that alone made the exchange worthwhile.
Though admittedly, it might not be much worse than the current system (the interests of news orgs definitely diverge from yours).
But that's also why the condemnation of balance is misdirected. Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. It isn't choosing how to spend its own words in a newspaper with a finite number of pages or a news channel with a finite amount of airtime, it's choosing what other people can say in a medium with effectively unlimited carrying capacity.
It also has a big problem because the platform is simultaneously a medium for the dissemination of information to the public and a medium for the debate of nascent ideas.
Suppose that tomorrow we got a claim of widespread election fraud that could actually be substantiated, given a sufficient amount of crowdsourcing or collaboration between experts in different fields. Now they can't even discuss it because the effort to substantiate it involves putting forth a theory that hasn't been substantiated yet?
That's just mincing words. Facebook is very much a communications platform that determines what its users get to see. In that sense, Facebook exercises editorial control over its content, and to its users it makes no difference whether that control is automated or manual. Therefore it doesn't matter whether we classify Facebook as a "journalist", the damage done by Facebook's editorial control is the same.
It isn't. A journalist is choosing what they themselves say out of their own mouths. Anybody attributing everything that third party speakers say via Facebook as the official position of Facebook is false.
Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.
It was a suggestion to actually read articles from both sides.
Not read one article badly providing 1.25 sides.
Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated.
On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on.
Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine?
Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes?
There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different.
Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?
This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph.
The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.
Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? Yep.
(I means it's not technically zero evidence as there's evidence of most things, including flat eartherism, it's just tiny compared to the counterevidence or even the complexity penalty)
> Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? (emphasis mine)
There seems to be a caveat here. Could you clarify what you think the evidence did show of contact between the two parties?
(EDIT - unusual as it is on this topic I am trying to ask genuine questions and test my own assumptions here. I'm hoping I can learn something)
That wasn't my understanding and that's the reason I'm poking at this a bit. To see if I was mistaken and to what extent. The other replies seem to be confirming my feeling that "nothing" is at the very least an overstatement.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele...