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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> Thank you, Linus for standing up to the wealth of misinformation out there and holding his ground.

Being a pompous ass might feel good, especially when you think you are (or you actually are) smarter than your opponent, but it won't sway anyone. In fact, it does quite the opposite. If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion -- explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.

Yelling at someone on a mailing list will undoubtedly push them further into their comfortable anti-vax bubble. Linus is absolutely wrong to behave this way, but then again, emotional intelligence isn't really his (or HN's for that matter) forte.

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Linus is not in the wrong here. You have an anti-vax spouting BS on the Linux Kernel dev list of all places. It's absolutely not the right venue for that. He could have just expelled the idiot from the list. He chose not to do that.

Some people will listen to (perceived) authority. Linus has a large following. It's fair to say that a non-zero number of individuals may be persuaded by his strong stance. I doubt the person that he was replying to will listen to anything, but if anyone else does, it's a win.

If someone is claiming that a person is "shedding" mRNA, the point of education is gone. It's ok if someone says they are unsure about this 'new' technology - you can then sit down with them calmly and explain how all of this works.

However, if they are just parroting anti-vax talking points, they should be shutdown and quick. They have long stopped listening to reason, and are on the "vaccines cause magnetism" territory. They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.

It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can. Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.

> They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses. It's not really up for debate. Don't like a particular vaccine? Try to get another one if you can.

Here we are again with the force and control. Shutting down “misinformation” means you must be able to define what “misinformation” is. We’ve made mistakes on this many times historically and we still have groups of people running around and saying “shut up and listen”. nothing will get accomplished like this.

> Don't try to prevent others from getting it based on superstition.

This I actually agree with.

I think you're making a mistake in assuming the Linux kernel maillist is a free speech, anything goes, zone it isn't.

Or am I inferring that any place that allows anybody to speak should be a “free speech zone”?

Anti-vax on LKML... I wish it's just dislike about DEC VAX.

> They are actively trying to spread even more misinformation. This should be contained just like we contain viruses.

This is the original definition of "meme" rooted in evolutionary biology. Disinfecting with liberal doses of reason, frequently, and vehemently is certainly warranted.

> If you're seriously trying to convince someone they're wrong, you need to be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion

I am doubtful someone spreading anti-vax nonsense can be convinced they’re wrong. (Emphasis on spreading, not just believing or questioning.)

What one can do is inhibit the spread of their misinformation. For that purpose, given the stakes, being direct to the point of roughness can be warranted.

He just screamed at them.

Getting angry is easy.

Persuasion is the hard part.

You would need to consult with the original poster to be certain of that. What Linus posted included important facts such as the large number of lives saved and the shared nature of viral immunity. You are reacting primarily to tone as if health in a social context is purely about good feelings.

When Linus starts out with "Please keep your insane" - the reader/original poster will enter a defensive mode.

Imagine that internal monologue - "Am I insane? I'm smart? I'm an analytic person. Why is he calling me insane? HE'S the insane one!"

Because Linus thinks this is a logical fight. But it's not.

Information is _not_ all that's needed to be persuaded. And if he really care about the vax effort, his efforts would be focused on pulling others over to the vax side, not drawing the line thicker by belittling comments.

> When Linus starts out with "Please keep your insane" - the reader/original poster will enter a defensive mode

You're assuming the goal is convincing the original poster. Given that goal, you are correct.

The counterargument: OP doesn't matter. Their effect on third parties is key. Reasonably engaging with OP validates their thinking. (Which, to reiterate, is nonsense.) Yes– calm, patient rhetoric has a higher chance of succeeding with them. But it's also likely to leave bystanders neutral or open to OP's arguments. Excoriating OP guarantees they'll hate you. But it increases the chance that third parties get the message.

You're a good soul. You care about OP. We're...well, we're bastards. To us, OP is beyond saving. What matters is the people around her. The people on the internet, who might passively read her drivel and believe it and skip vaccination. There are more of them than there are her, and they–unlike her–didn't choose to be in their position.

> We're...well, we're bastards. To us, OP is beyond saving. What matters is the people around her.

Upvoting wasn't enough. Linus reaction is perfect. Even if it was just driven by emotions I completely understand it.

The OP will post elsewhere. He gets virtual high fives from his crew and done nothing for the movement.

Why would you assume belittling and yelling would silence the OP?

It only stands to redirect the effort. They may stop posting on the list, but Linus has done none of the hard work of persuasion, so they will post elsewhere.

Again, he does the movement zero favors. All the privilege in the world to bring someone over, and he pisses it away.

Why would linuses response discourage third party interest?

He just belittled. An abusive response. Hes smart but at the same time emotionally inept.

The kind of guy who can’t determine whether he’s moving the line forward or back.

He’s sad. He’d have zero placement in sales, therapy, or anywhere else where persuasion takes place.

While this person is probably beyond help, it effectively stopped him (and others) from writing more nonsense on LKML.

I think this was the best result we could achieve.

What other options does Linus have by your logic, then?

1) remove the person's comments 2) let the person's comments stand unchallenged 3) engage in a lengthy, potentially endless discussion with this person who is highly unlikely to change their mind

None of these seem like great options.

Linus probably recognizes that he has virtually zero chance of persuading this person's opinion. He probably also recognizes that a reader who comes across these outlandish claims unchallenged may get the wrong impression that these views are somehow being embraced by the community. As such he is absolutely correct in briefly explaining that the vaccines are safe and effective.

And being a pompous ass is kinda Linus' thing. :shrug:

> Social IQ isn't really HN's forte.

Rude and uncalled for, even after your edit.

Patient discussion is ineffective on people who are acting in bad faith. It is counterproductive.

There is no debate to be had. No one is genuinely trying to learn anything here.

By giving con artists and dangerous vaccine conspiracies a space, you legitimize their line of questionning.

LKML is not a place to send anti-vax emails or to be "just asking questions". Deplatforming works.

> Rude and uncalled for, even after your edit.

I was just correcting the term in the edit, but I agree I'm being a bit inflammatory.

> Deplatforming works.

No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.

> No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.

What do you mean by "works"? Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit the spread of a message. Whether or not that's good or bad is a separate question. Do you think Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube? Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter? Big platforms give those with followings an opportunity to reach even more people.

> Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit the spread of a message.

Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit free speech and control the narrative. There fixed that for you.

> Alex Jones has just as big of a viewership as when he was on Youtube?

Alex Jones got his youtube viewership from his radio show, he’s still quite active. All this did was prove those that believed him that he’s correct. It will still spread as it did before youtube.

> Are there just as many people who know what Trump was talking about last week, now that he's gone from Twitter?

And how many people you think are upset by this? Do you think that the left can just shut someone like Trump off from the every platform and everything’s just gonna be hunky dory? This one action alone is one of the major contributing factors to this anti vax movement. The left blew the divide up.

> Deplatforming seems to work if it's goal is to simply limit free speech

You're still perfectly free to spew your crazy, you just don't get to stand on my lawn to do so.

Good, old-fashioned conservative value that. You have never had a right to use someone else's infrastructure like this, and hopefully never will, as that is a scary precedent that doesn't respect the rights of creators and owners of such platforms.

So by mentioning conservative value you assume I’m on the right? I don’t agree that someone should be able to give some people a megaphone, but not others.

If it’s my megaphone I’ll do what I like with it, particularly if what you want to do with it is likely to incite violence or spread (for example) dangerous health misinformation during a pandemic.

You seem to be repeating the current right wing grievances. If you’re not on the right then... ok.

> If it’s my megaphone I’ll do what I like with it, particularly if what you want to do with it is likely to incite violence or spread (for example) dangerous health misinformation during a pandemic.

Got it, so if we don’t agree with how something is used we shut it down. Republicans attempted this before with bakeries, so I guess this means it’s ok now?

And the inciting violence thing, you realize that’s a left belief yes?

If it’s my thing and I don’t agree with how you’re using it - 100%. Particularly if you’re (for instance) spreading medical misinformation during a pandemic.

Not sure what your point even is here any more.

The content being spread should not matter. Humans are not so perfect they’re never wrong. There was even an article recently about youtube removing content of MDs and PhDs doing research on COVID treatments. Yet they were removed for not fitting the mainstream ideas. So when you’re doing new research how do you discern the difference between misinformation and new information when you’re literally on the edge of what’s known? This implies the person doing the removal of content knows more than the SME. Do you see the problem? Not to mention historically it doesn’t work out well for those “burning books”

> No it doesn't. The entire history of Western Liberalism—since the Magna Carta onwards—teaches us that censorship is quite literally never the answer.

There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless. Censorship is a trivial problem to overcome in the modern world contrary to the last century’s vision, one can’t really hide anything on the internet. The censored information itself will be available in some way. What is much more effective in preventing information flow is the other direction, obfuscation or overloading of information.

A great example of it is an older Russian voting fraud, where video footage leaked of a man repeatedly throwing in ballots. It got quickly shared over Twitter with the name of the town in hashtags — there was no chance of censoring that. The solution was to spam twitter with unrelated bullshit with #NameOfTown, effectively putting out the flame.

And unfortunately bullshit like antivaxx, anti-climatechange, and political campaigns do use this technique very effectively to counter the usually more complex scientific arguments. People prefer taking only a few logical steps instead of the whole “we create the replica of parts of the virus by injecting the …”. Unfortunately I don’t know what would be a solution to this. Perhaps better education..

> There is basically almost no precedent to todays problem of misinformation spread, so historical examples are near useless.

I’m sorry but what?!?

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

The only difference these days is everybody has a printing press. So what you’re advocating for is removing someone’s first amendment right.

Per your own link, the earliest use of this technique is ~1920, so bringing up the Magna Carta is not too generous. And it is naive to state that the only difference is everyone having a printing press — there are emergent qualities and we have only begun to discover what this new way of communication means on a global scale.

Well I didn’t bring up the Magna Carta.

And you’re wrong again, there’s even a story in the Bible about the tower of babel. Same exact thing. When humans, all humans, can communicate easily and quickly it’s dangerous.

How is tower of Babel relevant? It’s about why do we speak different languages. How is anything done in the previous tens of thousands of years similar to ordering a bunch of bots to say what I want? When could an arbitrary algorithm decide what is seen by whom, completely opaque to almost everyone? Yeah sure the Church censored some shit. But that’s not at all similar to youtube/facebook’s algorithm and it’s dishonest to say so.

Man that really got you riled up didn’t it?

It’s relevant because the reason the languages were confounded was for the exact same problem we have today. Too many people with a megaphone. Too easy to spread information, good or bad.

Please point to where I’ve mentioned either facebook or youtube. No idea where this is coming from.

If anything, social media and the modern world have show us repeatedly that the marketplace of ideas is a fallacy.

This is a good point. Such comments (Linus') are much more for preaching to the choir than to try and change people's minds.

One thing I'd add (or hypothesize anyway) is that in these kind of debates, I don't believe the crux of the disagreement is a misunderstanding of the technical points of why it works. It's more a natural reaction to people being told they have to do something, that causes an adverse reaction in many people (for clarity, being told causes the reaction, I'm not talking about the vaccine). So people end up pushing back, which includes aggressively and sometimes even ridiculously questioning the underlying facts.

The same holds for climate change for example. People get caught, often untenably, in the minutia of the technical arguments, when it has much more to do imo with a debate over wealth redistribution or rolling back standard of living. Decoupling the political aspects about what we should do as a response, from the scientific aspects of cause and effect would go a long way. The problem though would be in that case, politicians would lose the "science tells us" rhetorical device, and actually have to have an adult conversation with their constituents about how we move forward

It's not Linus job to give anti-vax people a platform on a kernel mailing list. It's his job to nip it in the bud and let them know why he will cut them from the list if they keep up the garbage antivax rhetoric.

I agreed with you until the last paragraph, where it seems to me like you just fell into the trap you were warning us about. Not sure if that was your intention, but that's what it looks like.

The first part is definitely true though. Calling somebody an idiot is probably one of the worst ways to get them to agree with you, even if they are spouting idiocy. I won't pretend I have a solution to anti-vax beliefs, but simply calling them stupid won't make them disappear.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. (Greys Law.)

At this point in the pandemic, people really ought to know better, it's assumed they are bad actors. knowing that, It's hard to "be kind, be patient, and have a calm, productive discussion."

Actually, deplatforming, shaming trolls, and shifting the Overton window back probably works [0]

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...

Yes, and don't forget about gaslighting that this isn't actually happening.

Maybe so, but I've observed that attitude to be far more prevalent on the anti-vax side than the pro-science side. You don't really see people who advocate for the vaccine calling anyone who disagrees "sheeple," "NPCs," etc., nor do they whine about downvotes or "being silenced," or misattribute moderation to first amendment violations.

> You don't really see people who advocate for the vaccine calling anyone who disagrees "sheeple," "NPCs," etc

No, the rough equivalents are "anti-vaxxer" or "crazy," there's even an "insane" right at the top of the Torvalds email. And they don't tend to complain about being silenced because that's a treatment they are often advocating for others and rarely if ever see applied to themselves.

Not all vaccines are the same, so pro science and anti vaxx are not always opposed.

I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe.

And let's not forget that pharma co's have tried very hard to make vaccines mandatory, to the point of bribing academics and officials, forming unaccountable PR groups, and in the not so distant past they've done truly horrific and inhuman things.

After the lab-leak theory has gained traction recently, after being told for a year by Lancet and politicians and academics that it was "impossible", I would have thought that the idea of there being some "pro-science" monolith would have lost ground.

> I am pro science, but science doesn't claim that all vaccines are safe

Indeed. But science does claim that Pfizer, Moderna, etc COVID-vaccines are safe and you are un-scientific if you claim otherwise. They went through proper trials, and were accepted independently* by many countries.

* not completely independently I’m sure, but my point is that even if you don’t trust your country at all, several other ones decided univocally that it is safe

Claims != science. Any company is free to make any claim they want, and they can offer proof in the form of trials. These trials help us form opinions on the safety of a product, however, the long-term safety profile of novel innovations takes time to verify and trials can be manipulated in many subtle ways.

The FDA and other bodies dictate what kind of testing and certification must happen before allowing the sale of such products. And in very rare cases will offer emergency approval that bypasses quite a lot of the trialing or cut short the standards that must be met.

To claim any treatment is safe and that any skepticism prior to long-term trials is unscientific... flies in the face of all reason.

Did we learn anything from: cigarrettes, Fen-Phen, Valdecoxib (Bextra), Pemoline (Cylert), Bromfenac (Duract), Levamisole (Ergamisol), Rofecoxib (Vioxx), Isotretinoin (Accutane), and many many more.

All of these products were FDA approved, a feat these vaccines are yet to achieve.

How can science claim they are safe when we haven't even had the chance to do tests for long-term effects yet?

The vaccine’s matter is in your body for a day at most. The immune system is known for quite some time, and the immunization do happen. In what way could someone develop a side effect long after the vaccine? Of course medicine is data based, not necessarily about mechanisms, but at a point Occam’s razor has to apply. And either way, we would have seen by now any side effect since it has been injected into many millions for quite some time now.

Long-term effects are just that: long-term. We can't know what long-term effects the vaccines have until they have been used for a long time, even if millions have had them.

If science believes they are proven safe so hard, then why did governments have to grant full legal indemnity to the pharma cos to get them?

> They went through proper trials...

No they haven't. They were approved for emergency use only. New vaccines usually take 6-7 years to complete clinical trials.

https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/

> New vaccines usually take 6-7 years to complete clinical trials

Not necessarily. The yearly updated flu shot doesn’t for example. This case is similar, the novel technique itself was in development for a decade now with different parts having been clinically tested.

So what is the right way to deal with people using a technical mailing list to spread misinformation about vaccines in the midst of a pandemic?

Kittens and sweet tea?

Have we watched the same Linus for the past few decades?

This is very tame, all things considered, and he does take the time to try and educate the individual on the matter. I for one appreciate him doing this.

He doesn’t need to because as he notes, the virus is waning because better people are getting the mRNA version, not just full blown covid which the non-vaccinated will be getting on random occasions many months or even years from now.

No he is shaming a person who needs shaming, they think they can project their BS without getting fact checked. It doesn't work like that, you are gonna have to have a thick skin if you want STEM people to listen to your anti-vax crap if that's the way you lean, that's life. Being an idiot isn't a protected group.

> explaining how traditional vaccines work, how mRNA works, how DNA works, and so on.

1) You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

2) Lots of people do not have the brain power to understand vaccines and they will simply follow the herd.

Part of the reason anti-vax gets such a boost is because it is considered an "acceptable" position to follow by "respectable" people like the "natural is the only good stuff" dipshits in Marin county (who regularly give us Measles and Pertussis outbreaks).

Yes, you can try to reason with individuals. However, you also need to make stupid positions socially unacceptable so that the part of the herd who don't have the capacity to understand don't go following people willing to lead them off a cliff.

He actually explain things in details after bashing him, so yeah,.. also it's Linus we're talking about, people used to his direct-and-borderline-rude style already anyway.

I agree that the ideal approach is talking like grown-up, educated people and not just shouting in face, but it also depends on who're you talking to and how firm their belief in something are, too. Some require a good beating with virtual baseball bat a few times for them to start listen.. :p

That person may or may not be s lost cause but in that particular forum, Linus has all the authority he needs. He might have made an antivaxxer an even stauncher antivaxxer but the message is received by hundreds of others. I absolutely agree that this tone isn’t how you persuade someone. It’s not how you’d talk in private. But that’s not what happens here. This is hopefully a net positive despite not persuading the poster he replied to.

I like just getting up and leaving without saying anything as soon as I realize someone's position on this, even if there is social obligations involved. It's a good way to send a signal without any real drama and these people are arrogant and grating to be around anyways

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