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> The potential costs of systemically removing correct but controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to scientific progress in general.

I fall pretty strongly on the side of combatting misinformation, but I disagree with outright removal of content. I think it should be flagged as misinformation, but left available. Put another way, I'm a fan of labelling, not censoring.

I want transparency. "Our misinformation bot rated this as a 90% chance of being misinformation because XYZ." I bet the only reason we can't have that is because the ML bots suck so much the tech industry is scared to implement any system that might be open to scrutiny or analysis. It's a bit ironic.

Marking is helpful. Removal is not.

Very much like spam: filters are good but not 100% good, so there must be a way to look at what the filter has rejected, and allow the reader to judge.

The mails that make it to your spambox are a pithy few compared to the mass of dropped mail. You'd be very unhappy with your spambox if the filters weren't so judgmental.

I haven't actually set up my mail server to move mail flagged as spam to a separate folder, and I've gotten roughly 4 spam emails in the year or so I've had this address. My mail server also doesn't drop anything unless it fails DMARC.

I've had to deal with Microsoft outright dropping everything from a domain (not on this server), so I do know it happens, I'm just not convinced it's necessary.

That may be because your address hasn't made it to the spammers yet. My address has been public for a while and not filtering meant deleting a few mails per hour. Even a Gmail-address I'm not using gets a good amount of spam, probably because other people have tried using it to sign up for accounts.

> I'm just not convinced it's necessary.

Well yes in some special cases dropping mails is not necessary. My mistake to assume your case is one of the common cases.

Yeah, because there’s less email spam now than there used to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam#Statistics_and_esti...

There is no such thing as a bot which can identify misinformation with 90% accuracy.

Google has some very advanced natural language processing technology. Try this Google search: "What year did Neil Armstrong land on Mars?"

Wow, unless you happen to know that the Sea of Tranquility is on the moon (seas on the moon, no way), then you are well on your way to believing that Armstrong is relaxing on a Martian beach....

Appreciate this perspective here. I'm against censorship, and am surprised how clear your "label not remove" concept is. I like it.

YouTube's ML bots flagged an episode of Michael Osterholm's podcast. If you're unfamiliar, that's a former COVID advisor to President Biden.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28003635 ("Ask HN: Googler/YTer Able to Help with CIDRAP's Dr Osterholm's YT Strike?")

Yeah the whole "censoring" stuff ratcheted up really fast. Kinda crazy.

It's scary.

Imagine the US five years from now, with Team Trump in charge of the censoring.

Banning Trump from Twitter...the pendulum will indeed swing the other way. How long do we have.

The clock is ticking on open source, decentralized solutions. Nothing else is relevant.

From what I remember, the Western expert opinion about wearing masks in public changed from "a weird East Asian habit" to "something that could be useful" around March 2020. The debate continued beyond that mostly because the issue had already been politicized. And because people who are used to prosperity are often unable to handle the uncertainty of living through a major change. Too many people prefer experts who don't change their minds over those who do.

I also remember experts expecting effective vaccines by the end of 2020 already in January or February 2020. The key scientific challenge in vaccines was never about developing them but about collecting sufficient evidence that the vaccines are effective enough and safe enough in diverse populations. And beyond that, getting the vaccines approved and distributed to billions of people before the pandemic is over were even bigger challenges.

One thing contrarians often miss is that science is fundamentally about building and changing the consensus. It's not about convincing yourself that you have discovered something new, but about trying to convince yourself that you are wrong. And failing to do that, trying to convince the relevant audience that you have in fact discovered something new. Believing in something is a matter of faith. Convincing a skeptical audience that is nonetheless open to new ideas is science.

> because we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most major tech platforms

Or, in other words, those platforms have banned science. It doesn't matter what exactly their dogma is, science can not happen there.

This may not be a problem, we don't need every single platform to support science. But it's not aligned with those platforms PR.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200731213626/https://old.reddi...

Here's a version with a lot fewer deleted comments. If anyone wants to see what 1984s memory hole looks like this is it. You know what you remember but are told you're insane for remembering.

Thank god for the internet archive, and other archival sites, the retroactive modification of articles on the 'papers of record' have been particularly egregious in the last 6 years.

> Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work" was considered misinformation

No, because that never happened. Maybe don’t spread misinformation yourself if you want to make a point.

Yes, he did. From [1]:

> "The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you."

> He added: "I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location."

> Fauci has previously been criticized for changing his position on masks. Early on in the pandemic, he advised against wearing face coverings, but that advice evolved over time.

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fauci-said-masks-not-reall...

To the first point, isn't this still true? Unless I missed something, N-95s/respirators are the only way to protect yourself, wearing the cloth/surgical masks is a way to prevent yourself, who may be asymptomatic, from spreading the disease and NOT to protect yourself from someone who you are in contact with who has it.

To the second point, if I am recalling correctly this was in part due to the fact that we were undergoing as massive supply shortage. I distinctly remember my roommates (healthcare workers) being told to keep their N-95s in a brown paper bag and to reuse it.

To the third point, everyone is a critic and everyone is bound to make mistakes in a rapidly evolving situation. Given the fact that front-line folks had to re-use (Read: already contaminated and unsafe for use) masks given the supply issues, I'm not so sure he was wrong in advising the general public to hold off.

>"The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most major tech platforms.

I think the keyword that, in my mind, justifies the censorship here is "on most major tech platforms". Nobody is banning the discussion of these ideas in academic journals or HN or other places where curious people can go to discuss things - it's just making sure unverified, potentially dangerous theories aren't spreading like wildfire amongst the general population who _aren't_ curious and will assume whatever they're reading is absolute truth.

That's such an arrogant, condescending statement. You're assuming that the general population is too stupid to be trusted with unfiltered information. But theories aren't dangerous. Actions are dangerous.

This is total BS. Theories are dangerous. If they weren't, nobody would ever care about them. They are dangerous because they can be inspiring, sometimes inspiring action. You can say you don't want to ban the theory, only the actions, and that's a legitimate position. It reduces you to post-facto behavior only, however (which may be just fine for you). Many societies and people within them over time have not been fine with that. What they've done about it varies, from draconian bans on theories and punishment for those advocating them, to much milder versions such as "you can no longer use the services of a private company to talk about your ideas".

The general population is not equipped with enough information or enough time to meaningfully distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit. Just yesterday, there was a post about a new long article/paper/publication by Stephen Wolfram, and the comments there made it clear that even among the academic community relevant to what he writes about, there's widespread disagreement about whether he's an egotistical empty vessel or the second coming of Einstein and Newton's lovechild (with a possible bias towards the former).

I'm all for elevating the agency and capabilities of "the general population", but pretending that a random discoverer of a video on self-use of CRISPR is going to be able to sensibly identify what may be of value and what may be dangerous is just incredibly naive.

And note: the problems do not arise with the general member of the public who decides to do their own deep dive after coming across an idea. If that was the universal response to encountering unfamiliar or controversial ideas, we might be in good shape. The problem is that most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do this, and so stuff just ends up floating around in their impressions of the world, unresolved, but perhaps casting doubt on stuff that is almost certainly true (or false).

> The general population is not equipped with enough information or enough time to meaningfully distinguish between bullshit and non-bullshit.

How certain are you that you're not part of that particular subset of the 'general population'?

I'm absolutely certain that I am part of the general population and share this characteristic.

[EDIT: because of the work I've done, there are a handful of areas where I think my BS detection abilities would exceed those of an average person. But that's likely true for the average person too. Overall though, we're all a lot less able to detect BS than we think. ]

A clear majority of people are more ready to reject things that are true than things that are false.

Roughly a third of the population believes in astrology and doesn't believe in global warming or evolution. A good proportion also believes that Democrats drink the blood of children.

Do any of these facts support your point?

I think social media has proven pretty conclusively that giving the general population unfiltered information and enabling everyone to promote whatever they want is in fact a terrible idea

How so? Social media only started being a societal problem after it became heavily filtered.

I believe that is not correct. Social media is fine in basic forms, such as Reddit/HN style forum threads, and Facebook's keeping-in-touch-with-old-friends and arranging events.

Mixing news into social media, sharing stories to Facebook, turned it from a coffee shop into a town square with a million soap boxes.

Bad actors then seized that format and used it to spread propaganda and disinformation.

That's not to say that the basic forms of social media were perfect, far from it. They're just as susceptible to manipulation. There's just something about Facebook's link to (mostly) real identities that elevates it to a hugely effective propaganda platform.

> Mixing news into social media, sharing stories to Facebook, turned it from a coffee shop into a town square with a million soap boxes.

That only happened after Facebook decided to editorialize everybody's main view. People were not even used to sharing news at that point, but it was the only thing that Facebook allowed to spread.

Anyway, I'm not sure about causality. But claiming that fake news spreading through a heavily editorialized medium is proof that people can not handle self selecting their information is a complete non-sequitur.

"That only happened after Facebook decided to editorialize everybody's main view. People were not even used to sharing news at that point, but it was the only thing that Facebook allowed to spread."

That's a great point, I hadn't considered that. Thank you!

>You're assuming that the general population is too stupid to be trusted with unfiltered information.

I'm saying that bombarding the general population with low-quality, dangerous information from sources that appear authoritative (what the tech giants are suppressing) is a bad idea. People take the information seriously and use it to cause harm to themselves and others.

There are a certain group of people that like to fuck around with conceptual arguments for the fun of it, but the public square is not the place for that kind of play.

>But theories aren't dangerous. Actions are dangerous.

Ideologies absolutely are dangerous. They've started wars, genocides, and cults. When does a theory stop being a theory and become an ideology?

> I think the keyword that, in my mind, justifies the censorship here is "on most major tech platforms". Nobody is banning the discussion of these ideas in academic journals or HN

I was banned on HN after questioning of QM and BB theories. 240 downvotes in one day, then ban.

You can't actually discuss anything on HN that goes against the moderator's petty ideologies (or yc's profit motive) without being censored. Turn on show dead and take a scroll through nearly any topic.

The irony is that many of the people who claim to be free-speech see nothing wrong with this platform blacklisting people who don't share in the groupthink.

I feel this is a dishonest take. I’ve seen the moderators leave up some pretty egregious violations of the site rules because it fostered good discussion, which seems to be at the heart of HN.

However, good discussion ultimately requires respect for one another, and it seems maybe that thinking is not bilateral in your case. I’d encourage you to introspect on why you may be finding resistance wherever you look.

I've had showdead on for months, mainly to read old Terry A. Davis posts. Generally the people I see are actual trolls.