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Comment by AlexTWithBeard | Hacker News Reader

> factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas

There are indeed some factual mistakes floating around, mostly around covid-is-just-a-flu and the-earth-is-flat discussions.

But usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.

Alas, there's no hard science in most of these issues. There is a bunch of plausible-looking speculations, philosophical theses and general thoughts. Pretty much like 17-th century physics, in 18-th century biology or 19-th century medicine were.

As for the ideas being harmful... What do we do with potentially harmful, yet factually correct statements, and does the same logic apply to beneficial, but factually wrong ones?

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I don't know, I genuinely don't have a good solution - I'm pretty sure "ban it" is not one.

But I think we need to recognise, when we try to address this stuff, that our current picture of speech online is suffering not just from deplatforming, but also domination of some narratives by high volumes of motivated bullshit.

> usually shit hits the fan in social issues of poverty, homelessness, abortion rights and such.

flat earth is .... well I wouldn't put it with the most harmful ideas. It's clearly very silly, and not a great thing to propagate, but so far flat earthers haven't taken their beliefs out on the road, so to speak. Antivax, now that's harmful. There are certainly all sorts of grey areas and I wouldn't want to suppress discussion of safety, of risks from emergency approval or whatever, but when you get to "The vaccine makes you infertile" and "The vaccine will kill everyone that gets it" and "The vaccine contains 5G chips that they are going to use to track you", and such views actually start to impact the uptake...

> and such views actually start to impact the uptake

I’m not sure that’s how the chain of causality works. We have 80s-style public health communication that isn’t effective today. People are looking for a reason to reject it. If not the 5G chip stuff, it’d be something else.

I think this just reinforces that the marketplace of ideas is a bust... personally. Because again, people aren't looking to evaluate rationally.

People are turned off by appeals to authority logical fallacies.

Trying to make them the only acceptable source of information is never going to sell.

I'm afraid that people are also turned off by facts that go against their preconceived notions, and people are predisposed to accept, with little question, authorities with whom they already identify.

In fact I'd go as far as saying your argument there is a logical fallacy, as I'm making no claim people should accept appeals to authority.

I don't think antivax conspiracy makes a lot of impact.

Current vaccination rate in the US is 55%.

This is comparable with the number of people who, for example, do a dental check-up at least once a year, which is 60%, although there's no dentists conspiracy theory, at least not such a popular one.

P.S. those downvoting, please feel free to, but I would highly appreciate a couple of lines on what's wrong with the message? Pure curiosity.

The difference is dentists in the US cost money (unless you have a job with dental insurance which many low-end jobs do not). People who don't go to dentists regularly probably can't afford it. The Covid-19 shot is free (at least in the US).

Agreed. I doubt that half the population thinks that the COVID vaccine is a conspiracy to kill them, render them infertile, or depopulate the earth.

I'm not vaccinated, and I don't believe those things. I do see the dentist every 6 months though.

Tribal politics is probably a better predictor than fringe theories.

I have a friend who's gone off the deep end in the past year (like so many others).

He freely admits that he doesn't believe the vaccine is bad, and might even be good. His sole reason for not taking it is, and I quote, "because they want me to." In other words, simple spite.

We're not talking about a teenager here, but a successful man in his 60's who is probably the single most well-read person I know.

You see no value in the instinct to resist conformity? All major social and scientific progress has been made by someone with that kind of mindset.

You could argue that it's misplaced in this case, but that's already a more charitable interpretation of anti-conformists that will serve you better than just saying they've "gone off the deep end".

For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater. Anti-vax misinformation during a pandemic is definitely in the same vein as yelling fire in a theater.

There are a few solutions. Don’t know that any of these are possible, but sometimes solutions only get found in a listing of possible solutions.

Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face.

Or massive platforms could find a way to be less massive. Ie “we’re just not going to host governmental agencies or politicians.” Also bracketing the scope of posts and information on social media.

Or who knows.

Edit-one observation I’ve had is the internet is best when tied with another source of truth. Ie you can generally try recipes from a website and tell whether it makes palatable food by just making and tasting it.

>For good reason we don’t accept people yelling “fire” in a movie theater.

This meme persists, because it sounds nice, but the phrase is from a Supreme Court case where they ruled you can't distribute anti-WWI-draft flyers. Not exactly the precedent to be invoked, here. It was overturned (in part) to define that criminal speech under the first amendment is only speech that is determined to incite imminent lawless activity.

>Any sourcing of the internet as a source of truth could be called into question on face.

Which is why banning "misinformation" is a terrible idea.

In a well-run theater yelling fire should lead to a prompt and orderly evacuation.

It's called fire drill.

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