Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

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Lets choose the conspiracy theory videos then. Conspiracy theory is just a term used to dismiss unpopular thoughts. We should be able to talk about the lab leak hypothesis. We should be able to talk about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Discussing ivermectin as a covid treatment will get you banned from Facebook, but Oxford is studying it [0] and nations such as India [1] and Egypt approved it as part of their official protocol. Now, that's not to say that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments--but the fact that you can be deplatformed for even discussing a treatment that has been administered to millions of people is really absurd. We can't expect Facebook or Youtube to understand medicine and decide which medicines are ok for us to talk about; more generally, we can't trust corporations to be the arbiters of reality.

[0] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-...

As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals. There is no compelling reason that uneducated citizens with no medical expertise need to discuss them. I personally know several medical professionals that were aghast at the "discussion" around hydroxychloroquine.

Also worth noting hiding behind "just discussing" something is a slippery slope in its own right. There's a long history of people claiming to be "just asking questions" when they're transparently using "discussion" as a means to spread fringe ideology.

This is actually a great point that I'd never considered.

Its completely true based on my FB or twitter feed where you can find thousands of people who couldn't pass a GED test arguing a bout science that they don't understand.

What a dystopian future you’re painting. Even “discussing” becomes “promoting fringe ideology”. Only “experts” can have these forbidden conversations.

Yikes. I can only imagine how little progress we would have made as a civilization with an a approach like that.

Nah. There are many cases where the medical consensus was wildly wrong and outsiders were correct.

Limiting fat and protein in favor of carbs in one’s diet is a good example. This bad advice lead to an obesity epidemic that has killed millions of people.

If you can find evidence that the consensus was reversed by uneducated outsiders going with their "gut feelings" rather than published scientific study, you would have a point here.

As it stands, I am very skeptical that you could find any such evidence.

The way to change consensus is evidence-based advocacy by experts, not idle speculation by the domain-uneducated.

I think you have your order of operations wrongs. The discussion happens, "gut feelings" are had, and then it is science.

Without the discussion many of the topis scientist study and figure out the truth would never have happened.

We need the conversations and even controversy help decide where we spend the resource of what scientist study.

edit: gatekeeping

You may need gatekeepers to feel safe in life. Feel free to find a safe, walled garden for yourself. The rest of us live in reality, and recognize that organizations of human beings have always been subject to groupthink and have suppressed new and unpopular ideas. They are also prone to fads and fashion. In the 90s, the medical establishment claimed eggs were as dangerous as cigarettes. They insisted that avocados were unhealthy.

The funding to eventually overturn this bad science was suppressed at mainstream institutions and had to be obtained from the very outsiders you condemn. Phrenology and scientific racism were embraved by the experts for decades. Lucky for us, people didn't follow your advice then.

gatekeeping

>As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals

Notwithstanding the merits or lack thereof of your point, the videos about chloroquine and ivermectin that were banned WERE discussions by medical professionals. Have you seen them?

Isn't Oxford studying it and India and Egypt approving it mean that people are discussing Ivermectin? Whether we need to discuss Ivermectin on YouTube is a very different question than we need to discuss Ivermectin at all. Videos about Ivermectin often come with a lot of disinformation about the vaccine. If YouTube decides, "hey, I think all of this is going to cloud out information about a vaccine campaign that is proving increasingly effective", I don't think that's a bad move. That doesn't mean that Ivermectin is a subject discussed under only closed doors like Communism in the 50s though.

The censorship isn't limited to YouTube. Scholarly articles from large collaborations have been censored from peer-reviewed journals when they received too much public attention:

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/frontiers-removes...

> During review of the article in what the journal refers to as “the provisional acceptance phase,” Fenter says in the statement, members of Frontiers’s research integrity team identified “a series of strong, unsupported claims based on studies with insufficient statistical significance, and at times, without the use of control groups.”

The statement continues: “Further, the authors promoted their own specific ivermectin-based treatment which is inappropriate for a review article and against our editorial policies. In our view, this paper does not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution to the evaluation of ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19.”

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