Houyhnhnms

As someone who interacts with people wearing legal wigs on a semi-regular basis, it is very interesting to see the origins of wig wearing in the UK and the reduction in size over time. I love to see these sort of historical fashions; it shows both that people over time are very similar to us, but also, at least cosmetically, very different.

I think this is key. When Amazon becomes widely known as untrustworthy, then it will fail and fail quickly. There is already a _lot_ of counterfeiting on Amazon, and a lot of people avoid it for anything safety critical or areas where it is most prevalent. If that becomes more widely known and widely practiced, it would make a dent. Small places naturally verify their stock. Amazon doesn't.

I think Google's problem is that they aren't moral enough. They have no dedication to an ideal of actually caring about people or empathy, or any number of other things. They are greedy, mechanistic, and arrogant. Moral people aren't like that. They don't even uphold American values of liberty, free market, or freedom of speech. If they _were_ moral, a lot of those things would be solved.

> not only can we show that anti-vax beliefs are wrong

But can you? The CDC was supposed to publish reports every 2 years on child vaccinations, since 1986, in 2018 it came out that they never had. An independent peer-reviewed study found that the health of unvaccinated children was better than those of vaccinated [1][2]. For freedom of speech, you could argue that the studies are wrong, but you could argue that _any_ study is wrong, that's science and healthy skepticism. But then we would need to do more studies, something the CDC doesn't appear to want to do. Opposition spurs us on to find out more, to study more; science dies in unopposed silence.

The main point is-- sometimes we assume things that we really _don't_ know. We assume the evidence is all there for our side and there is none for the other side. The truth is usually more nuanced, both sides are partially right and partially wrong. The danger is attempting to silence others, even when we haven't looked at _their_ evidence. What we should do is let all sides speak, find the nuances and fuse together what is wrong. If all sides are allowed to fairly argue in the public, then there is no shame when someone is eventually found to be wrong. Otherwise we risk becoming little dictators by silencing those we "know to be wrong", but later find out that we deceived both ourselves and others, and did it by force and coercion.

We then become morally liable for the harm we have done, because we have arrogantly silenced what is true.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8674 [2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050312120925344

That's a good point; I read Tolkien in early teens, then read Earthsea in my 20s, so that would make a difference

Honestly, the Earthsea books were decent, but I didn't think they were anywhere near Tolkien. Tolkien gives you the feeling that there is an entire world waiting just around the corner. Earthsea feels like a shell that you are exploring. Like it doesn't really exist, it just appears when you show up, almost a hollow feeling where the characters don't really exist but are paper cutouts. I read all 3 and enjoyed them, but just not as good as some others and I thought the world was a bit lacking.