New law silences doctors and gives government a monopoly on scientific truth | Hacker News Reader

New law silences doctors and gives government a monopoly on scientific truth

pacificlegal.org

11 pointsdaVe23hu7 comments

Several platforms are hosted either partially or entirely in California and some of the headquarters may be in Cali. Does this mean some of the social platforms will have to adjust their machine learning to eradicate anything that deviates from a particular source of truth? What source of truth will all the platforms be required to learn from or will humans be manually fact-checking? Will the human fact checkers be licensed medical professionals?

Here is the bill [1] if anyone wishes to skip the article. It is at least nice to see that the bill appears to be written in easy to understand wording.

[1] - https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Curious to know what California doctors think of this. Is there broad pushback or is this generally seen as a good thing?

Is there still room for grey areas where multiple theories coexist or does this lead to local minima entrenchment of scientific theory?

The article is 99%-detail-free click-bait, so it's hard to tell what the real world implementation might look like. (Or put much trust in what they do say.)

- If it amounts to "You may not be licensed as an M.D. in California if you are also trumpeting "COVID vaccines magnetize children", "a quick injection of chlorine bleach will cure COVID", and other such crap? D'oh, YES. And maybe similar for any physicists claiming that gamma rays will give you super powers, lawyers selling "anyone can get away with murder" books, etc.

- If it's some idiot-leftie moral panic Truth Commission? I would not be a fan of that. But notice that we're talking about California. Especially with the state's grim budget situation, I would not count on any Truth Commission being all that high-functioning. Nor endowed with the resources needed to accomplish much.

and just like that Big Brother takes over Dr's free speech

California has always had problems with people practicing medicine without a license.

L. Ron Hubbard got driven out of California and went to Arizona and ultimately developed Scientology (alleged to be a religious practice) to supplant Dianetics (alleged to be a medical practice.) That way he had something to sell in countries where it is illegal to practice religion without a license as well as in places where it is illegal to practice medicine without a license.

FYI this is not about license. It is about silencing LICENSED professionals to speak about the Coof only with Govt approved language. I bet this goes to the SCOTUS and is overturned.

As ever, I propose that laws abridging freedoms first be applied to the politicians enacting them.

Any misinformation from the political class should be punished equally.

This law makes it not just illegal to be wrong, but illegal to be in disagreement with the orthodoxy.

I'm also disgusted by the arrogance that the only reason people could disagree is because of misinformation. They seem baffled that anyone might not agree with the "truth", and it must be because they are stupid and listen to misinformation, something they are too smart to fall for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com