curiousgeorgio

Science (and God) would disagree with you there, but I suppose you're entitled to your own opinion – wrong and barbaric as it may be.

Are you implying that fetuses don't exist, aren't physical, or that they just aren't human? Or alive?

The care argument is orthogonal to the topic of not killing fetuses. It's like saying we should all pitch in to help execute x minority of people because their families don't also have y and z benefits from the government. Would you say we can spend the public's money to end human life on grounds that we're not also giving enough money to mothers who by and large chose to create the child (you know, by being sexually irresponsible)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pe7jtFvMYA (Portlandia sketch)

Time will tell how much effect this has on inflation, but it's odd that so many of the people complaining about inflation insist that it must be related to anything but the increase in money supply.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL [1]

/s

[1] Keep in mind, the effects of these changes are often not felt in everyday prices for at least 1-2 years.

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Mark: I mean, well, how would you handle this if you were in my position?

Lex: It's very, very, very, very difficult. I would more speak about how difficult the choices are and be transparent about what the hell do you do with this? Ask the exact question you just asked me, but to the broader public. Like okay, yeah, you guys tell me what to do. So crowdsource it.

And then the other aspect is when you spoke really eloquently about the fact that there's this going back and forth, and now there's a feeling like you're censoring a little bit too much. I would try to be ahead of that feeling. I would now lean towards freedom of speech and say "we are not the ones that are going to define misinformation." Let it be a public debate.

Let the ideas stand. And I actually place the responsibility on the poor communication skills of scientists. They should be in the battlefield of ideas, and everybody who is spreading information against the vaccine - they should not be censored. They should be talked with, and you should show the data. You should have open discussion, as opposed to rolling your eyes and saying "I'm the expert. I know what I'm talking about." No, you need to convince people. It's a battle of ideas. So that's the whole point of freedom of speech. It's the way to defeat ideas - is with good ideas, with speech.

So the responsibility here falls on the poor communication skills of scientists. Thanks to social media (scientists are not communicators), they have the power to communicate. Some of the best stuff I've seen about COVID from doctors is on social media. It's a way to learn, to respond really quickly, to go faster than the peer review process. And so they just need to get way better at that communication. And also by better, I don't mean just convincing. I also mean speak with humility. Don't talk down to people. All those kinds of things.

And as a platform, I would step back a little bit, not all the way of course, because there's a lot of stuff that can cause real harm as we talked about, but you lean more towards freedom speech, because then people - from a brand perspective - wouldn't be blaming you for the other ills of society, which there are many. The institutions have flaws. The political divide, obviously - politicians have flaws, that's news. The media has flaws that they're all trying to work with. And because of the central place of Facebook in the world, all of those flaws somehow kind of propagate to Facebook, and you're sitting there, as Plato the philosopher, have to answer to some of the most difficult questions being asked of human civilization.

So I don't know, maybe this is an American answer though, to lean towards freedom of speech.

"Mars has life"

"We've found past life on mars"

"Rover finds past life on mars"

"Rover finds hints of past life on mars"

"Rover detects hints of past life on mars"

"Rover detects carbon signature that hints of past life on mars"

"Rover detects carbon signature that may hint of past life on mars"

Are you sure about that?

> Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution

I can't take this kind of article seriously. It presents a completely one-sided argument, and it's worded carefully so as to avoid outright statements of causality, but imply it nevertheless by pointing to a large number of weak correlations that together sound convincing. The overall conclusion was decided first, and the so-called evidence cherry picked to try and support it.

> aspartame has basically zero negative effects ...diet cola is much safer than real cola.

I won't argue that sugar isn't bad for you, but I don't think the science (and my own observation) agrees that diet cola - specifically aspartame - is "much safer" or somehow healthier. The linked WebMD page mentions this:

> The study found that consuming a low-calorie sweetener was not, by itself responsible for slowing metabolism. However, when combined with other carbohydrates, or fats, the consumption of the non-sucrose sweetener did lead to a significant drop in metabolic rate.

We don't generally ingest things in isolation, so you have to account for what an ingredient does in the context of an average diet accompanying the ingredient, and in that sense, aspartame absolutely does have significant negative effects. Those effects may or may not be worse than real sugar, but after the whole switch from "margarine is a healthier butter substitute" to "turns out margarine might be worse for you than butter" (and other similar upended dietary advice), I'm personally included to prefer sugar - in moderation - over sugar substitutes.

And that's another problem with sugar substitutes: claims that they have no negative effects encourage people to consume "diet" products in very high amounts - often more than the products they replace, so you're no longer comparing equal amounts of the substances. For me, drinking a sugary soda is an infrequent, deliberate decision - one I don't take lightly. There's a guilt that comes with it, but I think that's a good thing to make me think twice. But I also see people drinking diet soda all day, every day, thinking there are essentially no negative consequences (when there obviously are).

That's true of most of the "hard sciences" like physics and chemistry. Climatology, however, is unfortunately full of beliefs and incredibly lacking when it comes to theorems and facts. Part of that is just due to the inherent difficulty associated with making inferences about climate history using a relatively limited amount of data from modern, accurate instruments. Add to that some extremely biased incentives in the institutions and governments funding climate research, and you're no longer in the same ballpark as the other hard sciences.

I'm not saying it's all wrong or that the climate isn't changing (I think it is to some degree), but the one thing climatology has proven most convincingly over the years is that its prevailing predictions tend to be wrong – and not by an insignificant margin.

I agree with your point, though even if there is consensus on a topic, we should still be able to have open discussion without censorship.

If you assume consensus is infallible, you'll be wrong sometimes. If dissenting voices are silenced, it's even worse: you'll be wrong, and not know that you're wrong.

In the cases where consensus is right, you're only adding fuel to the conspiracy theories when you censor opposing views.

In summary: freedom of speech - even wrong and unpopular speech - is essential to our continual pursuit of truth. To pretend that our world is somehow different today (as if misinformation or wrong ideas didn't exist before the internet) is just ignorance. How many times does history have to show us where the road of censorship leads?

However, the type of spam I'm seeing recently is literally all the same video title, same channel name (maybe differing by a space or capitalization), same btc giveaway scam, etc. 90% is fake SpaceX streams. The streams stay online for hours before being shut down, and I know a lot of people are seeing them in their recommendations. It's not my fault for being interested in space, while also not wanting to see scam videos about Elon "giving away free crypto".

When I said it seems "like Google isn't even trying", I wasn't referring to all spam on the platform – just this very specific type.

Again, I know it would be worse if YT were really doing nothing. But these streams are getting more and more common (because I assume it's working to some extent for the scammers), and clearly YT isn't doing enough to stop them.

Here's the heuristic: if it's a live stream from a channel with relatively few subscribers and a name that very closely matches "SpaceX" or another high-profile channel name, the channel name was recently changed, and more than x number of people (with a solid history of reporting spam that was indeed later determined to be spam) have reported it as spam, you send it to a moderator to review and remove when appropriate. If the volume of videos matching those criteria is really too large for your moderation staff, then start looking at source IPs/locations of those that match the algorithmic part (I seriously doubt they're streaming over tor or coming from more than a small handful of locations), and tweak the parameters as necessary.

Really, with a little ML and the spam reports alone, they could shut these down 10x faster than they do now. I've reported a ton of them (and I know a lot of others have too), and I've never reported a video that didn't eventually end up being taken down. So have your model identify people like me and give our spam reports more weight. Respond in minutes rather than hours or days.

My point is, yes - YT is obviously already doing a lot to shut down spam, and it's probably 99.9999% effective. But the marginal amount that's making it through now could be dealt with fairly simply. I could never write an algorithm to be as effective as what they already have in place, but I could easily write one that's effective in dealing with this crap that's making it through. Would it be effective forever? Of course not, but it'd improve things significantly until it needs to be adjusted.

I've worked on moderation systems myself, and there's a difference between easy detection and hard detection. This is the easy kind. Legitimate content wouldn't get hurt in this case. It's painfully obvious and yet it goes on streaming for hours.

If you have first-hand knowledge that this is true, then I should inform you that this behavior is a bug in your system.

There's no conceivable way someone would want to see more of something they've flagged. And if you can't tell that kind of video from a legitimate SpaceX video I watch on occasion, then that's another issue.

I'm interested in such a wide range of topics that I prefer recommendations based on individual videos I've watched rather than specific creators/channels. I'm glad you don't get these in your feed, but based on others in this thread, it sounds like I'm not that unique in experiencing the issue.

> The scams seem super obvious

Exactly. That's why I can't fathom why YT keeps letting them through.

So, the solution is not to even try? How has that worked out for other platforms?

Correction: the video is still up, ID is "qoFPBms-7g4" Others currently broadcasting similar scams:

BbUnrpFd5do

5VOQXRrfibE

fVNbM8mKHUU

M5dBA-01K88

Even if spam detection didn't flag this stuff, their content ID system should be able to identify it as content stolen from other channels (with a fake tweet added at the top), then calling it "live".

I've dealt with similar issues in my own work (I run a platform with a lot of content posted daily and have multiple tiers of spam control in place). The spam I'm seeing on YouTube is not the difficult kind, yet they're doing nothing to deter it. That's my complaint.

I've probably reported hundreds of these, so at the very least, stop recommending videos with the exact same title, description and content to me. It's ridiculous.

Have we really forgotten the countless times this has played out in history, and where it leads?

Also: mods - if this article is flagged for being "too political", I urge you to reconsider this one. I don't care which administration did this, but I certainly feel like it represents a major historical point in the conversation around free speech.

Governments "can do this" because we're letting them get away with it. Plain and simple. The money is mostly irrelevant in the matter.

The fact that Twitter has an incentive to follow the law and preserve its own existence is beside the point.

The real problem is that governments think this kind of behavior is okay, and continue to do it. I don't care if a company decides to censor content on its platform, but if my government is telling them (and other platforms) what can and can't be said, I consider that a clear violation of free speech. This is a failure of government, not Twitter (or not only Twitter).

Twitter needs to publish a list of exactly who in the government is doing this, and we should hold those people responsible and replace them. The government works for us, remember?

If you tried to tell those people about particle counters or HEPA filters, you might as well tell them about cold fusion while you're at it. Sure, all the things mentioned might help, but for anyone with the means to follow the recommendations in this article (and with the ability to read an article), I can almost guarantee that air quality is not going to be a major factor in your life expectancy.

[1] With the exception of "Be careful about smoke when cooking."

A pile of colorful, air-filled items (mostly ads) that lures certain people into coming back because they have nothing better to do than dive into some filth. Adults aren't allowed (no conversations, content, or political views that management doesn't agree with - "it's safe because look, everything around you is squishy and we don't allow things with sharp edges"), and if you spend time there, you're probably going to leave smelling like excrement.

I understand that without symptoms like coughing or sneezing, the vector for spreading would be relatively limited, but I have to imagine it's still possible (even commonplace) for healthy individuals to effectively spread bacteria/viruses (even harmless ones).

If it is possible, what are the chances of that happening unintentionally? Would it be ethical to engineer a vaccine to intentionally do that?

I'm not trying to imply that's what's happening now - but I am curious.