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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

No, that is a complete overreaction. You can still call out "aliens did it" or other obvious nonsense.

Framing the dissenting opinion as equivalent to "aliens did it" is exactly the problem. When the opinion turns out correct are you going to continue making those categorization errors? What lead to that mistake in the first place?

> Framing the dissenting opinion as equivalent to "aliens did it" is exactly the problem.

You made a category error by somehow replacing "opinions which are obvious nonsense" with "any dissenting opinion whatsoever".

Nobody but you suggested that. The claim was that you cannot say anything at all about any "dissenting opinion" unless you are 100% sure you are correct. That is nonsense. You can obviously say something about some of them, while not being confident enough to rule out some others.

What do you do with opinions that you think are wrong? Do you place them all in an "obviously nonsense" category and slap a misinformation sticker on it so others are not tempted to look at it? Because that is what happened here. What do you do when it turns out some of those things were true? Do you continue to curate the world with willful blindness?

What part of "no, you don't" was so hard to understand?

I don't see where you said "no, you don't" so it's unclear what you mean here. Did you mean that labelling something as misinformation is unwise? Because then I agree with you.

Sure, you can call it out. But don't censor it. I want to see how crazy the people around me are.

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