> the WHO contradicted itself many times during the pandemic
Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0]
June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1]
0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac...
Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
Yeah, that was banished to the dark corners of Reddit until Jon Stewart said the obvious, and he was considered too big to censor.
I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc
A broken clock says the right time twice a day, that doesn’t mean much.
ps: I don’t support the bans but you argument seems flawed to me.
Yes.
> If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?
Obviously not. Like I pointed out to the other commenter, if you were to read the comment of mine you replied to, I have a whole paragraph discussing that. Not sure why you're asking again.
Like, we're getting pretty nuanced here pretty fast, it would be nice to discuss this against an actual example of how this was enforced rather than being upset about a hypothetical situation where we have no idea how it was enforced.
1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.
2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.
I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.
A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.
So in response.
It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.
People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
I disagree on numerous levels with this position, not just on ethical grounds, but also on empirical grounds. People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that.
> People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
According to whom? The stated policy makes no such distinction, it says anyone who contradicts WHO positions ought to be censored. There is no nuance, and how exactly is YouTube going to judge who belongs in each category? If they could reliably judge who was bullshitting, they wouldn't need the WHO policy to begin with. The policy is a "cover my ass" blanket so they don't have to deal with the nuance.
I mean how can you censor the WHO?
> WHO initially got wrong
But they don't got something wrong, they, as you put it, were "bullshitting", and it was obvious to any person with a three-digit IQ
Eh, ya kind of, but it seems more like the distinction between parallel and concurrent in this case. She doesn't appear to be wrong in that instance while at the same time the models might have indicated otherwise, being an apparent contradiction and apparently both true within the real scope of what could be said about it at that time.
FYI Taiwan is East Asia, not Southeast Asia. Perhaps you were thinking of Thailand.
Whether they did or not is almost irrelevant: information doesn't reach humans instantaneously, it takes time to propagate through channels with varying latency, it gets amplified/muted depending on media bias, people generally have things going on in life other than staying glued to new sources, etc.
If you take a cross sample you're guaranteed to observe contradictory "parallel" information even if the source is serially consistent.
It's 2020 and suddenly we need research about how well masks work, if at all and what is their exact benefit.
If you posted to YouTube that it is very rare for asymptomatics to spread the disease, would you be banned? What if you posted it on the 9th in the hours between checking their latest guidance and their guidance changing? What if you posted it on the 8th but failed to remove it by the 10th?
What if you disagreed with their guidance they gave on the 8th and posted something explaining your stance? Would you still get banned if your heresy went unnoticed by YouTube's censors until the 10th at which time it now aligns with WHO's new position? Banned not for spreading misinformation, but for daring to question the secular high priests?
It was a novel time and things were changing daily. Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die. I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
Quite likely the WHO directly or by proxy with members who are also part of bureaucracy and governments in member states.
There is no question the WHO loves censorship and take an authoritarian approach to their "authority".
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-world-health-organizatio...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/13/who-drops-cens...
If corporations start adopting policies that censor anything contradicting WHO, there would be a larger onus on a claim that they were not involved in that censorship action, in my opinion.
If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations, which is quite laughable to think but let's entertain the idea -- the WHO still should not have responded as it did with these knee jerk reactions, and also it should have been up to Google to ensure the did not use as their "source of truth" an organization that behaved in that way.
> It was a novel time
It wasn't really that novel since there have been centuries to study pandemics and transmissible diseases of all kinds, and there have even been many others of slightly less scale happen.
> and things were changing daily.
Things always change daily. Covid was not particularly "fast moving" at the time. It's not like new data was coming in that suddenly changed things day to day. It just progressed over the course of months and years. It appeared to be wild and fast moving and ever changing mainly because of the headless-chicken response from organizations like this.
> Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die.
People were very scared because of the fear campaign, and the imbecilic and contradictory responses from these organizations.
Not that it was nothing to be afraid of, but people should have calmly been given data and advice and that's it. Automobiles, heart attacks, and cancer kill lots of people too, and should be taken very seriously and measures taken to reduce risk but even so it would be stupid to start screaming about them and cause panic.
> I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
It's not having data that is the problem, it is jumping the gun with analysis and findings and recommendations based on that data, then having to retract it immediately and say the opposite.
We actually has the emails the Biden administration sent to Youtube, here is a quote they sent:
"we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House"
There are hundreds of such emails detailed in this report if you want to read what they sent to the different tech companies to make them so scared that they banned anything related to Covid: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...
They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)
Not they believed it wasn't airborne.
Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.
That it was fact.
In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.