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Flat earth conspiracies has not poisoned any well. When Mythbusters tested some of the theories we also gained as society a bit by showing the scientific process in the face of conspiracy theories.

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?

What if the President of the United States suddenly started supporting flat earthers?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Thanks for the reply. Do you honestly think this is the best way to reach mutual understanding? I'm not even sure what you're disagreeing with.

I am disagreeing with bullshit and my goal here isn’t mutual understanding but to call out bullshit for what it is.

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.

> Do you yourself believe Joe Biden won the election

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.

Good faith and bad faith environment is about trust. When that trust break down you either find methods to regain trust or discourse becomes impossible.

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.

> 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.

Firehosing also destroys trust. That’s its purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

Why does it bother you so much if somebody believes in flat earth? And why do you want to prevent them to discuss their silly theories? Are you so insecure in your own knowledge? A bunch of people believing in flat earth does not diminish our science in any way.

Beliefs inform actions. I believe the building I am in is not on fire and I am conducting myself accordingly. If I believed the building was on fire, my actions would be quite different. It is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst, to pretend that someone’s beliefs exist in some magic bubble that does not have any effect on the world around them. When people believed in witchcraft, real people were burned. Even before the pandemic, people that did not believe in the science supporting vaccinations led to real outbreaks of real disease that killed real people.

I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief. And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large. I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time. The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new. There are still many countries today which still practice such policies and I don't think you'd want to live in such places.

> And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large.

> 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.

If majority of humans acted upon majority of their beliefs, the humanity would have destroyed itself several times over. You cannot have good ideas without bad ones. How would you learn anything otherwise. I don't know what are you talking about then if not about censorship? Are you only asserting: bad people do bad things?

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.

The problem isn't that some people believe the Earth is flat. The problem is that it's no longer disqualifying.

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.

Believing that the Earth is flat is mostly harmless. Believing that vaccines cause autism, that covid is a hoax, etc is actively harmful to society and actually kills people (more often then not not the one who believe it in the first place).

The assertion

>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.