YT demonetizes Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying channel
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At some point, enough of us viewers will decide that it is worth overcoming the network effects, and get used to some new platforms for content sharing.
There are plenty of things you won't see anymore on YouTube. A year or two ago, videos focused on guns were removed. Even machine shop channels talking about the machining of parts had those videos removed.
Our ability to discuss things like adults is under threat.
Our ability to discuss things like adults has been under threat for a shockingly long while now, and only been getting worse. This is partly due to such a large portion of society being unable to discuss things like adults without lapsing into political "Us vs Them"-ism nearly instantly.
On a related note; Why exactly is it that such a large portion of the discussion here tends toward actual adult conversation? Is it purely because of the specific type of crowd this platform attracts? Is there any lesson that could be learned by the larger platforms from this to improve their services in this regard?
I attribute it to a few things that work in synergy
1. The voting model, and structure of the site work well for the crowd that gathers here. Keeping spam away is automated enough to keep the signal to noise high.
2. Dang keeps us from doing stupid things consistently enough that we collectively have learned good manners.
3. We've all seen how quickly things can get swamped, to make us really appreciative of what we've got here, and more careful about doing stupid things.
4. Upvoting, etc. are paced such that you don't get access to a bit of power until you understand it. It's subtle enough but very effective.
5. The management is not driven to push "engagement" or "stickiness" by the need to sell advertising.
If you took the codebase and started again, I'm not sure it would work more than 5% of the time.
SCIENTISTS ARE NOT BEST ADJUDICATORS, BETTER HYPOTHESIZERS: Bret and Heather are scientists and as such are not necessarily of the best mental positioning to adjudicate facts. How so? Scientists should form hypotheses and argue for them. Scientists must as a group take on and argue for multiple hypotheses, vigorously. The data will decide who wins. It is quite appropriate that Bret and Heather have taken up hypotheses in regards to Ivermectin and in regard to possible damage from the vaccines. That doesn't make these views "the final word" or even "stated as factual". I think Bret and Heather would agree and I think they try to make clear that their opinions are hypotheses.
As an example, Bret had a guest on who argued that the number of deaths associated with vaccinations was off the charts. Bret didn't agree but didn't counter-argue. The information was highly misleading. Last episode (on Odysee) they brought up a paper studying Israel where via vaccinations for every 3 people saved, 2 are lost. They weren't at all critical of the author's credentials, nor did they even seem to have read the paper yet, which was quite flawed. Mallen Baker's latest video goes into that a little bit. Mallen Baker is IMHO a very good adjudicator of facts.
I have a lot of respect for Bret and Heather and I think what they are doing is important. But it is also easy to be confused by them and to "follow" their beliefs as if they were clearly correct, when they are actually quite speculative beliefs.
All that being said, everyone communicates on social media now and scientists need to communicate just like the rest of us. If YouTube doesn't want to be the conduit for open communications, some other platform will be.
It’s sad that as millions of people were dying, the two parties couldn’t agree on the simplest of things, but it is what it is.
When Neil Degrasse Tyson talks on YT, I consider that a combination of promotion and pedagogy. But that's not science. He's not engaging in scientific conversation with fellow colleagues. This is not an indictment on Dr. Tyson's expertise, but it is a criticism on confusing scientific discourse with mass media promotion.
Another difference I'd draw between any other scientific field is that astrophysics is largely orthogonal to matters of public health or finance. Likewise, a math crank is much less likely to cause damage than a doctor promoting a drug, or a finance expert promoting an investment.
Health and finance are very special fields, and they deserve to be treated so in the arena of mass media promotions.
You don't "decide" "where" science happens. It's not a question of rights. It demonstrably does not happen at your will or on the basis of your decision. It happens the way science happens, because that's what science is.
A scientist eating a sandwich is not doing science. A scientist talking on YouTube is not doing science. A scientist doing science is doing science. That's not my decision, it's the definition of science.
Again, this is not a decision I've made, but the actual definition of the things. I can't call a lollipop a frog and then get mad when it doesn't jump, or someone licks it. It is what it is.
As a scientist, I can definitively say this is false. Both these things happen over beers quite frequently.
To further
If science only happened in labs and journals, how did we ever get to the point where those things existed?
Edit: to pre-empt the likely rebuttal
Is it not obvious that some kinds of scientific and medical practice must always be severely gated in all modern societies because of its extreme and intimate relationship to public health and trust? And when we're talking about medicine or vaccines, we are talking about human research subjects. What would amateur empiricism in medicine and vaccination even mean here?
When you talk about the foundations of early medical science, you're not referring to Gray's Anatomy dig-up-the-bodies-in-the-graveyard style of original human research, right? You surely don't have a modern vision of amateur medical research with human subjects, right? In the historical context that stuff is breathtaking and pioneering. In the modern context that would be breathtaking for another reason.
Science communication, similarly, can start anywhere, but what you're describing has a very tenuous relationship with people talking on YouTube.
I'm all for people doing science having as much flexibility as they want, up to the point where what they're doing is no longer science. People forming ex post facto hypotheses based on carefully-chosen data, or bypassing any peer-review in favor of YouTube communication, that should raise serious alarms bells for anyone in the sciences.
But when it comes to potentially life-saving medicines or therapies, the standard should be a bit more rigorous than sixth-grade classroom experiments.
I mean, okay.
I listened to the episode "Doing science in an emergency" [0]. It's terrible. Lots of circular logic and self congratulation. It reminded me of reddit's "IAmVerySmart" sub.
I don't think anyone should be banned (he hasn't been), but this isn't a hill for anyone to die on. He seems to have fallen into a weird rabbit-hole where he fails to admit any possibility of error on his own part.
Ivermectin does seem to be a very poor candidate as a treatment for C19 [1]. People have been made very sick ODing on it. So maybe stop pushing it?
[0] https://podyssey.fm/podcast/itunes1471581521-Bret-Weinstein-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_drug_repurposing_rese...
Edit: the irony of being down voted by his supporters without anyone engaging is not lost on me.
There are also a few cases where your comment is misleading. You write that he isn't being banned, neglecting that his videos are being removed, his channel getting strikes, and his channel getting demonetized. YouTube is clearly censoring and suppressing his content and he is clearly on track to get banned. You say that some people have been made very sick ODing on Ivermectin, which is true, but only when they take massive amounts and is also true of the vast majority of drugs. Taking massive overdoses of anything is ill-advised. You write, again without explaining, that Ivermectin is a "very poor candidate as a treatment" - which is an odd claim to make given that Ivermectin is cheap, safe, and has at least some experimental data suggesting it may have uses. And, also, Ivermectin is being used in Latin America and India as a treatment currently. To sum that up as "a very poor candidate" strikes me as disingenuous.
Hope this help clarifies why at least one person is downvoting you.
They linked to the Wikipedia page. Which appears to say that the effect found "in vitro" is unobtainable unless you take a massive OD.
Useful drugs have an OD amount that is greater than the effective dose.
Supposedly larger scale tests are being done, so we'll see.
It's overdose or nothing.
Maybe low dose cyanide is the cure, but I won't recommend it till there IS evidence.
Is that just random, or are you specifically alluding to laetrile?
Describing the function of Ivermectin as a prophylactic as working in some "niche way" is also incorrect. A prophylactic is the opposite of a niche - it would be broadly useful to pretty much everyone. Describing Ivermectin in this way continues a pattern in your comments of being misleading and unfair towards the claims which you are discussing.
This unfair pattern is continued when you suggest the use of Ivermectin is being "laughed at". Some researchers don't think Ivermectin is promising, but nobody who is actually reading the research thinks the claims are laughable. As I mentioned before, throughout large parts of the world Ivermectin is in use and there are a number of scholarly articles supporting its use.
The most glaring example of his circular logic starts around 29min mark in the podcast I linked to (#83). He is discussing lab leak hypothesis and the logic is this:
* if we assume there was a lab leak, then that's good news: the means novel viruses in nature are much rarer than expected.
* based on that we should stop gain of function research because natural gain of function is much rarer than lab leaks from man made gain of function research
* since we now agree lab leaks are much more likely than natural novel viruses, it makes no sense to believe covid 19 was anything other than a lab leak.
He jumps from "IF it was a lab leak" to "the rot in our science society is so bad" in 1 sentence. His wife takes over and repeats the assumption that all science is totally corrupt (where did that come from?) and that we should believe its a lab leak because then we can just close all the labs and never have another zoonotic virus. Wtf, where did that come from?
See the problem?
I felt sorry for him over the Evergreen stuff. He was right to object. I don't think anyone should be banned from YouTube short of calls for violence (or CP). I also think YT have a terrible approach to the censorship they do (it's arbitrary, it's often wrong, it's unappealable etc).
Im just saying this isn't a hill worth dying on. He is not making much sense as far as I can see.
Fyi, I also replied on the other thread.
First, and most importantly, it seems that sometime over the past decade we transitioned from the belief that free and open discussion is more important than winning the argument. We now appear to rely on an entirely unnuanced framing where all discussions have maximum certainty, all harms are equal, and therefore silencing disagreement is always a valid and righteous (and even preferred) tactic.
Second, I listened to the first 10 minutes past the recommended point in the podcast, and heard the first two points made, but not the circular logic of the third point. It’s possible that occurs later, and I just haven’t listened far enough. As they have moved on to the “rot” portion, it seems that I should’ve heard the third point, but perhaps I’m just interpreting what they say more literally.
Maybe Ivermectin is useful, maybe not. We should be allowed to discuss the evidence without Google silencing us. That is the issue I'm most concerned with.
My focus on Weinstein and the supporting evidence for Ivermectin is to argue that these are not mad delusions getting censored. It's not a person selling snake oil. I wouldn't care if definite scams were suppressed. I think Weinstein is using real evidence and making a good faith argument and that kind of thing shouldn't be censored.
I don't understand what you mean by "this isn't a hill worth dying on". I'm not proposing that anyone kill themselves over this. There is no dying involved. I do think it is a bad practice on Google's part which is worth complaining about. I also think people should explore alternatives - I have been impressed by https://odysee.com/ for example. I also think it is important to acknowledge Google is suppressing free speech in a meaningful way. Censoring covid discussion is one example, Google's suppression of the Uyghur genocide is another.