I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook, just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government can do what it does because the people embolden them.
This is the proof that the religion of “I believe in science” is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
If it feels bad it may contain trace amounts of truth. If it feels bad all of the time for everyone, but puts food on all tables,regardless of beliefsystem,its actually science
I find "I believe in science" as delivered on social platforms and the mainstream media hysterical in the past few years. I mean, how do we even know if "science" is right without questioning? I can understand that people believe that they are on the right side of the history during the Covid era, for lockdowns, for the efficacy of the vaccines (For those who get angry, I took vaccines by the way, so it's not about my personal assessment here) and etc. But is it by default we are on the right side? Like Government "helped" people believe that Lysenkoism was on the right side of the history? Like people should not challenge social Darwinism or eugenics? Like Chinese people believed that the yield of rice patty could be 100x higher because a top JPL scientist said so and the government "helped" them understand? Like authorities challenged Darwin for his evolution theory? Like people would rather lock up Galileo because his heliocentric model was just plainly wrong? Like Ignaz Semmelweis was obvious crazy to propose the hand hygiene in hospitals? Like Wegener's continental drift was just batshit crazy theory? Like Bolzmann deserved to be shunned from the academic society for his outrageous statistical mechanics? Like those who believed in the existence of irrationals should be drowned by Pythagorean?
Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/... Jay was banned for merely retweeting a peer-reviewed paper that questions the efficacy of lockdown (maybe the last straw, I don't know). Some people in Twitter were apparently very righteous.
Censorship is something governments do. What you're discussing is a business decision Facebook made. They deemed it to be in the best interests of their shareholders not to amplify those peoples opinions. Zuck now regrets that decision, but it was still his decision.
Semantically, you're right of course, but only because linguistically self-censorship is counted as a type of censorship, despite it not depriving anyone of liberties.
For practical purposes though, the kind of censorship that we're concerned with in this conversation can't be done by anyone other than a government or a lunatic with a gun. Companies just don't have any authority over anyone except themselves. They can't deprive you of your ability to speak, only your ability to use their property to do so.
The article says they were "pressured", it doesn't seem to to say how that pressure was applied. To me, it reads as though compliance was not mandated, just requested. Without more info, I suppose it could be taken either way.
If Zuck has a real problem with that, he can sue (as per the SCOTUS ruling on standing vis-a-vis First Amendment protections against government coercion).
He isn't suing, and it's up to the rest of us to make our decisions based on how we feel about that.
Call it what you like, if you can't distinguish between doctors and quacks then you shouldn't be banning people you think are quacks because you aren't qualified to do so.
If i stand up a server and host a website, I get to decide who's allowed to use my server. I don't need to be "qualified", and who would decide what "qualified" means? Should the government be forcing me to host content I find objectionable?
Flat Earthers are legitimately questioning the science because no one has (or should have) the authority to arbitrate what is too stupid to question. Everything has tradeoffs and free speech has a lot of somewhat obvious downsides.
Too bad that you don't like what some other people say or write. That's what public discourse is, most things said will be things you don't agree with. And since you're neither God nor the Supreme Ruler, you don't have the right to silence anybody else.
Why are you so angry? Where did I say that flat earthers should be silenced?
You desperately need to remove yourself from communities of perpetual victimhood.
All I said was that they are not legitimately questioning the science, because they are not.
The one thing that is extremely interesting is that even the people who loudly shout for free speech do not themselves believe in it, as they constantly try to cancel all sorts of free speech and expression essentially constantly.
Very very few people believe in absolute free speech.
There “might” be a need to *selectively* censor people expressing illegitimate “science”. Especially when they knowingly do it knowingly.
What Facebook does though, is horrific. They are not just letting illegitimate science have a platform, they are actively and intentionally propping that shit up because it creates victimhood communities.
I'm not sure that this is a useful distinction. It starts to sound an awful lot like philosophy 101 "what is a p-zombie" horseshit... if both people are asking the same questions or using the same rhetoric, why would their internal, unknowable-without-telepathy intent make any difference whatsoever? If you do think there is an actual distinction, somehow, even then should you care? Because people who want to censor the speech will just label the skeptics as cranks anyway, and shut it down.
"Crank vs sincere skeptic" is fallacious, as it attacks the person and not the argument.
If they're both saying the same things, then it truly does not matter. The crank might accidentally arrive at the positive outcome, the sincere skeptic might mislead unintentionally.
You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
> You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
So you're one of the magical thinkers. That somehow the outcomes change due to internal states that no one can even determine, internal states which do not affect the physical world at all.
That the crank can actually change things just by thinking about it, like some kind of half-assed troll telekinesis. Wow. You've apparently got a few fans for your idiocy, they're downvoting away.
People cheer these things on because they are tired of the other view point and don’t care to question solidarity during a global pandemic.
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it.
If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
The good and bad of the internet is that everyone appears the same. You might be an expert in X and I should listen to you. And right next to you may be a troll or someone trying to sow discord who twists your legitimate opinion just a bit to influence me. How can I tell the difference?
I will never, ever forgive or forget the absolute amount of censorship and tolerance for punishing “wrongthink” during the lockdown years. Ever. It completely shattered my faith in the government and “Science”.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
I don't think saying any of that resulted in being banned because I saw it constantly.
Also you are still wrong about most of that. The vaccine is certainly safe and effective, masks definitely help, lockdowns definitely helped the overrun hospitals. Yes there were adverse effects in some of these policies unfortunately.
Doesn’t even matter if I’m right or wrong about it working. There was no assessment to if the costs outweighed the benefits. Ever. Because even if you are right does not make it okay to do any of what was done.
There were plenty of things besides a myopic fixation on one single problem to the exclusion of literally everything else.
It takes an extreme amount of privilege to look back and say we should have done any of that.
… it was unethical, immoral, authoritarian and plain evil. I don’t care if any of it “worked” because even if it did the costs vastly outweigh any of the “working” bit.
The fact it requires a lot of contortion to show any effect at all should give a reasonable person a concerned pause. Any idiot off the street should be able to clearly see the effects of masks and lockdowns without reading a bunch of statistics first. This is clearly not the case at all….
And again, doesn’t matter if “it worked” because “it worked” only holds true in the most myopic, sheltered, privileged world view possible. For any view that sees the world through a lens besides Covid, what we did was clearly insane.
